Las Olimpiadas

Two hail storms in one day?

I must say that I am much better adapted to the rainy season than I was when I first got here last August. I don't exactly enjoy wading through puddles and walking as far away as possible from the curb to avoid getting splashed from cars and buses, but umbrella numero tres is holding it's own. It doesn't actually storm that much here... it's more of just a solid rain for about an hour and then it's done. But today it stormed so much that by the time I got home my pants were soaked halfway up my leg. It even hailed twice... during class I had to stop for ten minutes and then talk about granizado and tell everyone to calm down and that it's just thunder. Anyway, enough with the boring weather story.

Things are going really well actually. It is weird to think that after seven months of being here, I am finally in a comfortable routine. And it's also weird to think that I only have three months left. Time is oddly flying by whereas before, Christmas couldn't come fast enough. I truly lucked out with my job. The end of the first quarter was last week Friday and I was able to keep things organized enough to avoid high levels of stress. I even finished all my work two days early so I could travel outside the city for an extra long weekend. And no one failed English. Only one girl got an "acceptable" and that was because she didn't turn in her homework assignments. Ohhh senior slide.

A couple weeks ago the school I teach at celebrated "Olympics Day". It's a really big event, where each homeroom is assigned a sport, and they must come up with some sort of performance related to it, usually a dance. These girls have been practicing every single day, and for weeks while sitting in the teacher's room we could hear Katy Perry blaring from the courtyard. My classroom floor had become a sea of arts and crafts supplies two weeks prior to the event. So when the big day finally came, it was really exciting to see all the hard work that the girls had put in pay off. All parents were invited, and the band from the all-boy's school down the street came to play. (This especially was a big deal.) My favorite performance was chess, if you can call it a sport, but all the girls dressed up in black and white and reenacted a chess game while dancing to Pirates of the Caribbean music. I was quite impressed that eighth graders came up with that. Sadly, my camera ran out of battery right away and I was only able to take a few pictures.

This past Monday was a holiday so I took a nice six-day vacay in Bucaramanga and San Gil. I will write about it and post pictures soon, but for a preview check out Teresa's latest blog post. I came back refreshed and a little pink, but I'm still suffering from my massive bug bites I acquired while there. There is no possible way that those are from mosquitoes... they are ridiculous.

Side note: I always feel like when I take a break from blogging, my first post back is a tad anticlimactic. I'll work on that.

Mildly Offended

Um, Ouch?

Too make sure that any previous complaints were completely warranted, I scrolled through my archives for the months that I have been here. It's weird going back and reading old posts and realizing how much has changed since then. I noticed today walking home from work that sometimes I actually am gone from my house for 11 hours out of the day. But my work days aren't tiring like they used to be, and I know that the only reason I may be tired now is from lack of sleeping instead of a stressful job. I can't believe I actually worked there.

Then I started reading posts from before I even got here. I don't know exactly what I was expecting last summer but it is pretty interesting seeing things from the other side now.

And even further back were lovely recollections of my time spent at 438. The new place is becoming slowly reminiscent of my time spent there... there are always people around, the neighbors are always visiting, we make drinks and listen to music while getting ready, inappropriate comments are quite common, and so on. Of course it is only a slight comparison, but it's been good so far.

I don't really know where I'm going with this (it seems my lack of blogging has affected my writing skills) but mainly I just wanted to give a wtf to the rando that I will apparently never be friends with. If only my random comments were more like the ones my Indigo friend gets... (bahaha, it still makes me laugh)