I tried to play “light as a feather, stiff as a board” in my hogar the other day. We were playing those kinds of sensory games where your body magically does something your mind doesn’t tell it too (like when you press your arms up against a door frame for a minute and when you walk away your arms levitate). As I as for a volunteer for my game, Sheila gladly laid down on the grown to be my “stiff as a board” tester. A small group gathered as I “cut” her upon, “removed” her insides and “filled” her with bricks and sand. I clearly forgot part of the trick though because when I told her to sit up, she did it with great ease. Oops. The group dispersed (back to pressing their arms against the door frame), while a few kids continued to beg me to cut them up. I told them it didn’t work, but they didn’t care. I attempted the “light as a feather” on Franliseiny, filling her head with feathers when she exclaimed, “Tezra you’re magic!” I hadn’t done anything differently so I was curious why it had worked, but then she told me, “my head was so heavy that time!” … no, that’s not what feathers are supposed to do.

Michael Jackson has also been all of the rage recently (well really since his death… though gaining popularity with every passing week). The preschoolers were singing “Beat It” before class on Thursday and my kids in hogar have choreographed a number of dances to his greatest hits. Most of them can lip-sync “Man in the Mirror” with such accuracy that I wonder why they don’t get better grades in their English classes. And I walk out of hogar every night still humming “Thriller” (it’s played on repeat between 7 and 8).

Most of the cultural differences have completely worn off by now, but for some reason the cows still make me smile every time we cross paths. I find it incredibly quaint that I can run into cows and horses nonchalantly chomping on the grass on my way to and from work. And other times they scare me as they lumber down the path in the darkness heading my way. But really they just make me laugh when I look up from email and see the herd pass.

And I have enjoyed rural life more than I was expecting. Some of the volunteers go crazy if they don’t make it into the city once or twice a week, but I never find myself becoming as anxious as they do. They keep telling me that they are “city people” and since living in a city has been my next destination, I kind of wonder if I might not like it as much as I hope. But there are times that I do miss my bike or being able to sit in coffee shops or the convenience that restaurants and grocery stores right down the street provide… so perhaps it is a matter of adapting to my surroundings.

And then there is the quaintness of living on a farm. Actually I shouldn’t say quaint since I don’t do any of the actual farm work (and if I did, the I’m sure that is not the adjective I would use to describe it). But the other day when I urgently needed to make a cake and we found ourselves out of eggs, the grocery store was not my destination. I went to the kitchen, but they told me they too were out of eggs. So I walked on over to the farm, ready to pull the eggs out from the hens (half wondering if it would totally freak me out and half excited for the experience) … but they had already done the egg picking that day. So the woman on the farm just traded my empty egg carton for a full one and I was on my way.