The University

Universidad del Mar, my new home. Or it feels like that anyway, since I spend and will spend a lot of time there. It's a beautiful campus, its position in the jungle maintained daily by a team of groundskeepers, who can be seen trimming, cutting, sweeping, painting, and hacking with machetes in a truly Sisyphean effort to keep the bushes, shrubs and trees from overwhelming the buildings completely. Amongst the flora, our fauna consists of black and white iguanas, assorted smaller lizards, giant hornets, innumerable spiders, rumors of scorpions (haven't seen any myself), ants in the billions, and birds, who are mostly seen as flashes of color and movement in the foliage. The buildings themselves are mostly made of thick stone and concrete, whitewashed or painted a pleasant orangey color, with terracotta tiled roofs. The paths are an oddly-patterned concrete, gouged in lines to resemble cobblestones, which at first I assumed had some practical purpose for drainage, but after splashing through many puddles during the first rain, I abandoned that theory and have decided it's purely decorative, because it's not exactly easy to walk on.
The classrooms have high ceilings and louvered windows that we never close, cooled only by two fans whose effective reach is straight down in a three-foot radius. The teachers stand on a low cement stage before the whiteboards, which, while it may make it easier for the students to see, does seem a little strange when you're the one standing there. In a perfect example of the university's rigidity, the student's desks are bolted to the floor in narrow rows, making it difficult to move around and monitor conversations and discussions. For all of that, my students are (mostly) interested and attentive, energetic and inquisitive, which is all a teacher can really ask. We are still getting to know one another, after a week and a half, though a few have already distinguished themselves, either by their preparedness and interest, or, in one notable case, severe truculence (but what can you do?).
Most of the teachers in the Centro de Idiomas have their offices in a pleasantly curved building, but mine is in the computer building next door, one of the few on campus that has air-conditioning. At the moment, I have it to myself; I will share it with Angela, our lone Aussie, whose paperwork has not been fully processed yet and will hopefully begin next week. There's a lot of us: a handful of English, a few Canadians, five or six Americans, a cadre of French teachers and one Chinese teacher who, for unknown reasons, is the only one who lives on campus. It's a good group, generally lively and playful, and conversations take place in a mix of Spanish, English, and French, with the occasional phrase in Chinese.
The university's administration has honed its bureaucracy to a dull, implacable edge. There is a form for everything, incomprehensible and contradictory instructions for becoming a fully legitimate employee, unnecessary journeys (in this age of information technology) to various offices to present the same documents, delays for signatures and signatures for delays, and proctors who prowl the grounds in hopes of catching us outside our classrooms or in the act of negligently leaving a fan or light on somewhere. But, I am assured, if you keep your head down, nod and smile, the situation is no more than a minor irritation, and as I have only one more trip to make (registering at the hospital for medical insurance) much of the stress and frustration of the last couple of weeks is behind me for good.
All in all, there's a feeling of relaxing around the campus as we settle into the new year. The girl in the library who makes copies no longer seems on the verge of tears all the time (all students need literally hundreds pages of copies of workbooks and texts for their classes), the shuffling of students from this class to that has died down, routines are becoming established, even the lizards seem to scuttle more slowly across the paths. There may be more shoes ready to drop somewhere, but for now, todo bien.