Day 50

Can't believe I'm already writing a post about Day 50! That is insane.

It was a regular school day morning as usual: breakfast at 8, first class at 8:30, and second class at 10:35. In Ethics, we were supposed to watch a movie (since it was Tuesday). However, our professor doesn't bring DVDs or anything to watch; he expects one of the students to be able to find the movie online on an illegal website. So we started to watch Midnight in Paris on some illegal movie site, but only got to see about 30 minutes before it crashed. After that, the Wi-Fi connection was so bad that we couldn't get anything else to work and ended up talking about random stuff like teaching. I honestly cannot tell you what we learn in that class (if anything).

LAC wasn't much better, as we spent the first half of the class going over the same material we learned last Wednesday. Our professor was doing that intentionally, too, so that was kind of weird. We finally started to discuss linguistics at the end of class, though.

Katie and I went to the grocery store to get some conditioner and snacks. After, we went down to the St. John's lounge on the first floor to eat our leftover pizza, but alas--it had been stolen. We weren't totally heartbroken about this, and I ended up eating an apple and some pringles instead.

At about 3:25, I headed down to the local Catholic elementary school to meet the class I'll be volunteering with every Tuesday for the first time. Since I got there about 15 minutes early, they were still in (I think) their science class, and that particular teacher definitely did not speak English. We tried our best to communicate while simultaneously trying to calm down 26 first graders. (Or actually, they might be second graders. They call themselves year 2, but I thought that was the equivalent to our first grade...but now I think I might be wrong about that. Whatever).

They all freaked out when they first saw me, screaming, "¡Qué bonita!" (more or less, "She's so pretty!") and giving me hugs. I'm already bad enough at communicating in Spanish as it is, so having ten little kids screaming various things in Spanish at me all at once was naturally very difficult for me. I did my best though, and kept telling them how bad my Spanish is, and they did try out some of the English words and phrases they know on me. And actually, I think they're going to help me relearn some Spanish, too, so that'll be good.

Finally, the English teacher came, which was helpful for me. Unfortunately, the kids were taking a test in their English class that day, so there wasn't a whole lot I could do. I did my best to answer any questions they had about the test, and helped collect them once they were finished, but I'm hoping next week I'll get to play a bigger role. After they finished, they each got to get crafty with a sheet of computer paper until 4:45 when they got to go home. I was super impressed with their drawings, fortune tellers, and little soccer fields. Two kids even gave me drawings to take home! I can't wait to go back.

This one shows their English teacher (brown hair) with me (blonde hair, apparently). Precious!

I treated myself to a yummy chocolate pastry on the walk back to the hostel (dinner was three hours away, don't judge) and then had a relatively chill evening. Dinner was pretty weak again, but it was whatever. At 9, Katie, Gina, Akira, and I went to Mercado Provenzal for some tinto de verano (it was Tuesday, after all). We were just chilling and chatting, having a good time. Akira and I complained about English professors and other English majors that we know. Around 10:15 or so, Katie and Akira left because they had things to do, but Gina and I hung around a little longer. We ended up making friends with this Spanish guy, Ricardo, who mostly used a translator on his phone to communicate with us. Again, though, we got some good Spanish practice in, so that was cool.

The highlight of my day, though, was definitely spending an hour with those kids. I really can't wait to see them again next week! And I'm already trying to come up with something I can bring to show/give them...