don't hate la playa, hate the game.

(our boat ride out to a private island in samana where we proceeded to snorkel and swim all day long in paradise.)

(are we liking the fly on the watermelon? super authentic looking. but seriously though, this meal. my 20-year-old self is super proud of my for eating that fish and loving it.)

(what you don't see in that water are millions of tiny supposedly harmless jellyfish that every time you put your head underwater, you can hear the crinkling electricity in your ears and mentally calm yourself down from an anxiety attack.)

so it's a pretty natural part of life for me now to not be able to fully speak unless it's in the baritone range since all i do is yell at tell little kids to sit down, stop flipping each other off, stop making inappropriate body gestures towards each other, and so on and so forth.

oh what, are these rebellious teenagers?

are these high school guys?

no, these are like six-year-old boys AND girls.

yes yes, their mothers love them well.

my sister franny (masters in musical theater) suggested i get a megaphone to save my voice haha. it definitely would take off the strain, buuut that echo in the lunchroom though (yes, i teach my students in the lunchroom. i think it's pretty fitting. maybe or maybe not am i friends with the lunch lady and anytime my students are insane, she comes over and goes ham on them in espanol. and i just sit and point and evil laugh!....i'm a good person. moving on.)

anyways, the other day we were doing a transition between classes (i'll get into that later, but karson takes my students to sarah for her to teach them and i take karson's kids from her to teach them) and these two kids jose gabriel and estaban were being horrible. like climbing all over the lunch tables and screaming. so i grab jose gabriel and, in perfect spanglish, yelled "mama aqui?! mama aqui?!" with my hand in a phone gesture to communicate "listen kid, imma call your mother and she's gonna come down here and kick your trash if you don't sit down and be quiet". anyways, he calmed down after that threat and a few minutes later we're all sitting down and i'm teaching my lesson and a lady comes into the lunchroom and jose gabriel sees her and yells "mama aqui! mama aqui!" and i am thinking "you've got to be shhh-ing me" hahaha like what are the odds that his mom just decides to randomly show up to the school? and jose gabriel's probably thinking "oh, she was just trying to tell me my mom was here and not trying to threaten my life and what a great teacher and i'm just going to be a good little angel boy forever".
LIES.

well i am a great teacher though.

it feels like hooooome to meeee

mango all day all dayyyy. tell me what's with hot dog eating competitions when there could be mango eating competitions?

hola amigos! yes, i'm a espanol fiend now.

i thought i'd show off our place in the DR since everybody i talk to from home asks if i'm living in a shack or if i have bed bugs. it definitely is much different than america in a lot of ways, but our place is surprisingly really nice. funny story: one time there was a huntsman spider in one of the apartments here (google it and you'll never sleep again. or watch the video on my facebook and pee your pants laughing) and all 23 of us were gathered around trying to catch it (when i say trying to catch it, i mean the only three boys were gathered around it trying to humanely catch it (stupidest thing, we need to be bazooka-ing that creaton!) while 20 girls were on chairs and watching because we couldn't look away), i was of course screaming and sarcastically joking about blowing up the house to be able to kill the spider and said "tell them we said thank you so much for the mansion but we had to burn it down" haha. spoiler alert: we finally did kill the spider and no it wasn't poisonous, but at the end of the day it's not something you ever want down your pants so KILL THE DANG THING YOU FREAKING TREE HUGGERS.

buckle up folks, here goes the tour:

front gate...don't you love those broken bottles on the fence to keep away any bad guys?

don't ask about those bags of corn flakes....i don't know why.

our backyard. some people try to climb the coconut trees like mulan. and those people are not michelle dastrup! i just climb those little baby ones so i can still say i touched the top of a coconut tree to my future husband. sucka will never know! shhhhhh

our mansion compared to our next door neighbor's house. it's almost rude and i kinda cringe waving at them when i'm up on the second floor and they're down on the ground. "ha ha hiiii, how's the ground today?" don't shoot me for that comment.

our kitchen. there's one in every apartment and there's four apartments total (three on the middle floor and one on the bottom).

everybody eats in our apartment because we have the best air flow. people will literally come take naps on the ground in the middle of the day haha.

our balcony. don't mind the bathing suits, we all about that dr beach lyfe out hurrr

funny story about the toilets, you can't flush toilet paper because the plumbing is bad here and the toilet will potentially randomly get clogged. it's actually not a funny story at all, it's an anxiety attack every time you go to the bathroom. so yeah, it's really awkward and it's just so much fun!!

my little moosey is back! everybody, this is one of my roommates macie and she sleeps above me and she is just the best. she also loves to braid my hair soooooo i'm in love with her. i like to whisper sweet nothings to her from the bottom bunk (i don't do that....).

the funny thing about our place is is that when amaryllis (our program director...and i have no idea if that's how you spell her name) picked us all up from the airport on our first day, she told us we were going to be living in a VERY poor place. and then we start driving and there's all these tin shacks and practically emaciated people sitting on the road and i'm thinking "holy crap, that's gonna be me soon!". and then we pull up to our place and it's literally a mansion compared to these other places! i was shocked at how nice it was and honestly feel a little bad because our neighbors literally live in cement block houses. so we're very lucky! i can't even imagine taking a bus full of the dominicans back to utah and driving them through the nice houses in alpine or highland. i say it all the time, but i'm sure a lot of them don't even know what they're missing! and i mean that as in they wouldn't even be able to imagine anything different than living in their cement houses, sitting on the street all day everyday, bathing their kids in a bucket on the porch, and taking crazy motor taxis everywhere. it's just interesting to think about how we're all just randomly placed in different situations/environments when we're born and that there are very real pros and cons to either being privileged with everything you could ever want or scrimping and barely getting by. 

and in other news, yesterday in sunday school at church, i had a laughing fit because we were reading in the bible in juan chapter something (i pay attention) and i realized it was the book of john. juan=john hahaha, still gets me!

stay in la escuela, kids!

stake conference on our first sunday out here. raise your hand if you literally understood nothing they said! one guy after was like "did you hear that part they said about church history?" and i just gave him a blank stare...

so apparently this is a hamburger in the dominican republic....i mean it was still good and i definitely still ate it, but lemme tell ya, that was not a hamburger. also, don't even get me started on the spaghetti down here.

the kids at lunchtime literally swarm us and yell "aqui! aqui!" and point at their table for us to sit there even though we're not allowed to.

my hair's real pretty, you don't have to tell me.

most of the other teachers in my group during one of our breaks! always in the shade.

i like to play this game with the kids where i take out my camera and say things like "say cheese! say i love ice cream! say michelle is the best! say michelle is so pretty!" and laugh so hard because they have no idea they're being brainwashed MUA HA HA.

we taught these girls those school girl clapping games and they braided my hair in return. a fair trade indeed.

so you know those times when you're like "oh yeah, i'm so good with kids! i've babysat and taught piano a ton! i'll probably be a great teacher! they'll love me and listen to everything i'm saying and not climb all over me! :):):):):):):)" and then you go to your first day of teaching english in a foreign country and the teaching gods point at you and pee laughing as the kids are stealing your tickets/playdough/blocks, trying to braid/pull your hair, and are sleeping on the ground. all while you're teaching (read: maintaining) (read: attempting to maintain). sooooooo yeah, i'm kind of a great teacher :) 

seriously though, my first day of teaching was actual insanity! we taught first graders (they wear red shirts...remember that) for the first two hours which went okay besides the fact that i had to physically drag a huge (i'm talkin grande, people) stubborn kid off the ground because he wouldn't get up. then we had lunch with all the kids at the school where i proceeded to be an awful person and smile at them while i imagined handing over the keys of the school to el diablo since that seems to be these kids' master anyways. the second two hours of teaching were with the kindergarteners, who managed to win the award for master deceivers because they were so docile when we got them from their classes since they had just woken up from a nap. psyyyych michelle, they're actually crazy cucharachas that literally climb all over you and throw your teaching objects everywhere and make you want to start digging to china (which would probably take this geographically-challenged girl a loooooong ace time). by the end of it all, i was so ready to yell "dueces, psychos!" and run, not walk to the beach (whiiich i basically did anyways after all was said and done). 

in the kids defense, it's their first time getting english lessons ever and they don't really know what's going on. and i feel like discipline in their school is not as big of a deal as it is in the united states. or china, i'm guessing. and the teaching went muuuch better the second day (mostly because i got second graders (blue shirts) that time). besides the kindergarteners though, because those kids are just straight from satan's mistress. everybody just pray that one of these days i'll be able to tame them!