To start of the day today, I was in the fifth grade room; or rather they came and visited me in the video room. First, María José explained the pictures of things hanging on the wall associated with Halloween (haunted house, pumpkin, vampire, etc…), then we watched the intro to The Nightmare Before Christmas—if you haven’t seen the movie, it has a “spooky” sequence about Halloween! That was followed by learning of the rude “Trick or treat” song and lastly, I read the story. It’s such a simple story, meant for like first graders…but I still made it as silly as possible! I had most of them laughing at my voices and actions!

The ten o’clock hour started my two hour break. I didn’t really know what to do, so I went and asked Teresa where the library was. She’s super nice, but doesn’t speak a word of English, so she was trying to explain where it was and all I really caught was “orange curtains” (which, there is no building with orange curtains, so apparently I didn’t even get that right :( ) I and stood outside and looked from side to side, trying to figure out where it was and Aurora and Alberto walked up. I asked them and Alberto was like “Why don’t you use the computer?” I took the laptop from the video room into the teacher’s lounge, intending to get online, but every time I tried to open the internet, it said there was a problem and needed to close (even though the signal was “muy bueno”…I didn’t understand) So…I ended up playing solitaire for an hour and a half. At some point, one of the teacher’s came in (I feel so bad—I’m so bad with names here!) and we started talking about Socu and then his paintings (he’s awesome! He has one of them set as his background on his computer and I thought it was a photo…it was so realistic!). He said that he’s going to visit the Louvre in Paris in December with two well known Spanish artists and he’s more excited to see these artists than to see the Louvre. He’s very nice!

After lunch, I had sixth and then fourth grades. I don’t know what sixth grade’s deal was, but they were so rowdy! Pilar got mad (sweet Pilar…I didn’t know she could yell, but wow, she did!) and so I didn’t get to teach them the song. Fourth grade came and I always feel bad for those classes (three sections—A, B and C) because Rocío’s always mean and short with them. I was reading them the story and another teacher came in quick to grab something and this girl turned around to see who it was (which people do all the time—we are curious by nature, you know?). It wasn’t like the girl said anything, she just quickly looked and Rocío interrupted my storytelling to yell (and I’m not exaggerating!) at her for not paying attention. Pretty sure she caused more of a ruckus than the girl did.

On my way home I stopped at the store to pick up some more fruit and bread. The fruit selection was not good—the tomatoes were either too small and puny or moldy (that’s disgusting, I don’t care who you are!) and I didn’t have much of a peach selection because while I was putting on a sanitary glove (which they have signs everywhere asking people to use them) these two old ladies descended (gloveless, mind you) onto the peach stand and took like 15 peaches each! So…not only were they picked over, but the ones that were left had old lady germs all over them! (Haha, just kidding! J) Oh well, I’ll go to the bigger grocery store, Mercadona, tomorrow since it’s near the school and I’m supposed to be done at eleven tomorrow!

Well, it’s a little before five o’clock y voy a echar una siesta!

Xoxo,

Court