Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Happy Birthday to Lindsay!

Today I got up at 8:45 and got ready and ate my normal breakfast (sin grapes). I wasn’t feeling super great this morning, but I made my lunch and left about 10 to meet Tammy in a bookstore to head to the museum and the church. I got there about 5 minutes before her so I browsed the shelves. They had the movie Hoodwinked! in Spanish. It was colder today than it has been for a while. By this I mean that it was about 40 degrees, so we weren’t actually freezing. Well, Tammy was, but she is always cold. Fani warned me that there was “muchísimo frío en la calle” (a lot of cold in the street), but it wasn’t really that cold.

We walked to the church and went inside. I had seen this church many times from the outside and it is a cool building with a big round dome on top. However, the inside was really beautiful and the ceiling was amazingly tall. There were people praying inside, so we just stayed inside the doors and looked for a few moments before heading out to search for the museum. Tammy didn’t know exactly where it was (she found out about this museum from her host mom) and all she knew was that the museum was in a house that is preserved from the colonial days and that the name of the museum sounds like “Recoleta,” but, obviously, it is not. We checked out two buildings before finding the museum. Unfortunately, the museum is closed on Monday and Tuesday!

We headed to a café to finish up our homework. It was kind of confusing and a lot of the exercises had multiple correct answers depending on your interpretation of the sentence. The woman who served us was the opposite of the woman in our favorite café. When I said that I didn’t want anything (I had eaten breakfast about an hour before), she practically yelled, “Nada?” in my ear. We sat by a door that did not close quickly and so every time someone went out or in, we got a nice cool breeze for about a minute before it shut. We left about noon to head to class.

During the first part of class, we corrected our homework and talked about the different words and customs that are used in relation to education here. One interesting tradition is that after students graduate from the university, often their family and friends throw eggs and flour on their heads. This doesn’t sound very enjoyable to me! Our profesora, Graciana, said that she did not tell any of her friends that she was graduating and that her family is not into egg-throwing, so she escaped this tradition. Apparently, students can graduate any month from the university instead of just in May, August, or December.

Before Graciana released us for lunch, she told us that our half hour would end at 2:32. That is pretty precise considering that we did not actually begin class again until 2:49! During lunch, I went downstairs to the cafeteria and sat with Tammy, Will, Kay, and Omar, but we didn’t really talk very much. After lunch, we had a competition in teams to see who could find the most verbs that go with certain prepositions. I think our team (Tammy, Will, and I) came in second which was pretty good considering all the other teams had 6 people. We listened to two songs by Julieta Venegas and filled in the blanks on worksheets with the lyrics. We had our “pausa” (break) and did some workbook exercises.

After class, Tammy and I went to look for a Christian bookstore. It was funny because we walked diagonally crossing the street whichever way we could. Our zigzag led us to the store and we found it after passing it on the wrong side of the street. We looked around for a long time. Tammy bought a daily devotional book in Spanish (it is really cool) and I bought “Los cinco lenguas del amor” (The Five Languages of Love) in Spanish, obviously. When we finally left, we went to McDonald’s. I am really a huge fan of McDonald’s ice cream! I had a waffle cone with dulce de leche and vanilla twist for 50 cents! Tammy had a sundae with dulce de leche on top. We sat there in McDonald’s and had a really good conversation for almost an hour and a half. My friend, Jenny, from last month’s class stopped by our table and talked to us for a while. Tammy and I talked more after she left and finally had to start walking since I am kind of supposed to be home by 8:30. We walked together until Tammy’s road (Juramento) and then we parted ways. I stopped at the supermercado to buy bread for tomorrow and it was warm! Yummy!

I jogged the last three blocks home because I was a little late (7 minutes, to be precise). I got home and Fani greeted me and got dinner ready. I put my stuff away and washed my hands. I had soup, a huge chicken patty (longer than the plate!) with a fried egg and ketchup, shredded carrots and more big cucumber (that was small), and the dulce de leche mousse stuff (it is not as good as it sounds). It was funny because I tried to tell Fani that Tammy and I had gone to McDonald´s, but I had a hard time getting this across because I cannot say the word "McDonald´s" with the correct accent. After attempting to pronounce it like they do here about 10 times, I gave up and said it the normal way. Fani repeated it and I got really excited because I thought she finally understood. However, her next question was, "What is that?" so I knew she did not understand, even though she said the word perfectly (the English way)! I finally was reduced to describing McDonald´s as the place her grandchildren always want to go where you eat hamburgers. She got it then and said, "Oh, McDonald´s" and it sounded just like I had been trying to pronounce it for the last five minutes! It was frustrating, but really funny at the same time.

Fani was waiting anxiously for her daughter to call because one of her granddaughters went on a field trip today and was supposed to return at 9. She had not heard from her at 9:15, so she called them and they were not back yet. Fani does not have a lot to do in her life and so she is very involved (through the telephone) in her daughters’ lives. This morning, we listened to the radio during breakfast to make sure that there was not an accident on the road that the bus would be taking for her granddaughter’s field trip! Fani calls both of her daughters several times a day for whatever reason she can think of. She calls most mornings to ask if the children went to school! Of course, they usually do!

Anyway, Fani went to her room after she cleaned up the dinner stuff and I got ready for bed and checked my email and wrote this blog. Now I am going to see about my homework (by “see about my homework,” I mean I will look at it and decide if I want to do it tonight or tomorrow), read for a little bit, and go to bed. Tomorrow, I am meeting Tammy in the ISA office at 10:45 to work on our presentation.

P.S. For all you AU people who might be worried that I miss hearing the garbage truck come at midnight or 1am, your fears can be put to rest because every night, I hear a garbage truck come about the same time!