Christmas Fiesta

Well, its hard to believe it's been nearly 2 months since Christmas. I guess the phrase better late than never is really important when blogging. So here goes, I'll try to fill you in on all the things that have been happening since I last blogged on December 20th.

On December 23rd, I went to my first of many Christmas Fiestas. We had a great party complete with Pinata. It was during the day at a beautiful garden hacienda with lots of sunshine....okay I just couldn't resist since I have heard how crazy the weather has been in BC. But as you can tell from the photo, I'm not lying. (by the way I have loved looking at all the photos from Vancouver with all the snow...so beautiful but I am glad not to have to comute to work in it after I heard how long it took some people.)

We drawn names about 2 weeks before Christmas so I knew we'd be exchanging presents but how it was done I had never seen before. With over 30 people there, there was a lot of gifts to open, so I was trying to catch as much Spanish as I could to determine how we give them to eachother. The first person got up and started talking about someone but I didn't know who he was talking about until I soon realized no one knew who he was talking about. Each person needed to get up and say all sorts of nice things about the person they were giving the gift to until the reciever realized that the giving was talking about them. Okay this is really sweet till I realized that meant I was going to need to do the same. My heart picked up a beat realizing I could barely understand what the people were saying beacuse as we do in English when people get excited they talk really, really fast and not in complete sentences. AHHH. So I tried to listen really hard but I must have thought of something else at exactly the time they were talking about me so when someone started to make their way over to me with a big smile I realized I had missed all the "great" things about me. :) But I was so happy when I opened my gift to find new shoes....I LOVE shoes! But then it hit me that I needed to get up and say sonething about someone I didn't know at all. So I played a bit of a clown and imitated all the facial expressions and body lanuguage that I had seen everyone else do and that got a good laugh so while they were laughing I said all the Spanish words like nice, sweet, blah, blah (okay I didn't really say blah, blah but I can't remember what I said or if it was correct Spanish anyway) and then I quickly made my way to the girl my gift was for. I got a big applause but to tell you the truth I am not sure if it was a pity applause or if maybe I had said a few things correctly???