Day 9

There’s some stuff I’ve written in my small note pad (that I bought from Museo Del Prado) that I keep in my purse and write stuff I want to remember. I want to update what I’ve written on there here:
I don’t know if I’ve already told you guys (I’m sure I have) but they are soo blunt and honest here. Especially my grammar teacher. I like her a lot. She reminds me of how Mommy would teach, kind of strict but still teaches you a lot and I feel like she wants me to learn. But she always is too blunt with the Chinese kids in our classes and she brought up Americans too. We were talking about their diet here and she said in the U.S.everyone’s fat and asked me if that was true and I said “Si es un problema pero es no un problema grande” and she said no it’s a huge problem and was telling the class that Americans needed to buy two seats because they were so fat and she said to the Chinese people that they were too skinny lol.
The homework has been pretty much the same as my earlier Spanish classes. My History and Culture class (that I love so far) doesn’t give any homework. He just talks non stop the whole class, doesn’t give you any notes but it’s so interesting to me, the history and politics, that I pay attention the whole time. In my Grammar class I’ve been getting more homework than other people in my groups but it’s good because I haven’t had grammar in so long. It’s a lot of handouts and exercises in the book. I asked her today for a handout of all the ways to conjugate because everyone else in my group got one from their class and I didn’t.
We get a 10 minute break between our 2 hour long grammar class and this girl Vicki (she’s from Taiwan but she went to school in America at Univ of Miami Ohio for 4 years and interned for Calvin Klein so she speaks really good English) took me to the coffee shop right next to the school. It’s like a restaurant but they’ll give you coffee to go so that’s nice since I don’t have time sometimes to fix the coffee at Lourdes’ house.
I don’t know if I told you about this but in my grammar class yesterday she brought up how to sound more native. She said “No te preocupas con los consonantes” (Don’t worry about the consonants) but focus on the vowels. The Spanish language only has one way to say all their vowels (a,e,I,o,u) but like in English we can say the letter a a lot of ways like in “ate” and “animal” and “aardvark” you’re saying you’re first a different in each of those words but not in Spanish. No one else was as interested as I was but of course it was like my phonetics class all over again so I was super interested and she kept going. She made everyone in the class play with their tongues and say it. So we said a with our mouths super wide and she went around and made sure everyone’s mouths looked good. The vowel I would be done with a really thin but long smile and o would be very exaggerated with your mouth puckering out. It was really cool cus I got to tell her how we say our vowels and our tongue placement for them in English.
*Another new word learned: Tabletas de Chocolate is a 6 pack of abs! Isn’t that funny? Because abs look like a chocolate bar.
*Another new word: Tener la cabeza a pajaros: Someone who gets very distracted and can’t focus, an airhead lol.
Okay so that was all the information I had in my notebook that I hadn’t put up yet. Now I can talk about today. People said that Thursday night was a big going out night so I wasn’t that surprised when I saw that not everyone was in class when I got there but then when it was 9:03 (we’re supposed to start at 9) and only 5 people including me were there I was VERY surprised. The teacher said a lot of them were on excursions but it’s weird because you can only miss 2 days and I’m glad ISA didn’t make us go to Portugal early and let us wait after class so we wouldn’t miss a day of classes. But it was helpful to only have 5 people in class because we all got individual help and got our questions answered so that was good.
We covered Probability/Sure statements like if something is a conditional statement and you’re not sure if its 100% true you’d use either the future tense, future perfect (with haber + infinitive) and if it’s a sure statement you’d use present or past tense.
In my history class we talked about the kings of Austria after the Reyes de Catolicos.
In my culture class we talked about Spain’s Constitution and some important laws. One law that everyone’s mixed on is the smoking law. They are going to ban smoking by December in public places and our teacher thinks it’s good cus he hates second hand smoke but obviously everyone in Spain doesn’t agree because they love smoking. During my break I went to the ISA office and I saw Andrew there (Mark’s room mate) and he said before he leaves he’d go to a mass with me because it’s daily cus I want to and so does he so hopefully we will.
After class we walked back home and Lourdes put our bags of food to go on our desk. There was a sub, 3 sandwiches, a banana, and a fruit for each of us. It was crazy. But we had time so we ate with her and her boyfriend Paco. he’s nice, he’s funny but he’s not used to speaking to foreign people you can tell because his accent is so thick like his lisp is thick and he mumbles his words together a lot but he’s nice. I went out last night for like an hour and he made a joke like can you walk the dog while you’re out? lol.
We met at this building called FonSeca, it’s a building where they hold like concerts and dance recitals for the university. I took my Dramamine and was about to be fully passed out but then after only like half an hour of being on the road, we made a stop at a rest stop with a cafeteria and a supermarket. The supermarket was really weird. They barely had any food, it was mostly candy and chocolate. One aisle was just for alcohol and they had 4 aisles of toys. One aisle was just for trinkets like fairies and little tea cup sets. It was so weird.
Then we got on the bus (on the bus they played Ice Age 3 but in Spanish and I could understand) and 2 ½ hours later we were in Portugal! Here we are here now! It’s pretty..a lot cooler because of the waters and I already saw a bridge with a gondola so I have have have to go on one and Emily said she’d go on it with me!
We’re going to meet right now to do a small tour of Portugal..it’s not as historic as Spain so I don’t see it being a long tour! I’ll update you on it as soon as I can!
Love and miss you!!!