Day 29

I had a pretty good day today. It might have been my best day so far. Maggie didn't, though. She had a horrible day. So, last night, as I said before, we went out to dinner with Karina and Daniel. It was, as always, fun to hang out with them. I hadn't taken enough of a nap, though, so I was falling asleep at the table when we were wrapping up at midnight. I had an early morning, too, because it's a Tuesday, so I was exhausted getting up. Hungrier than usual, too, for some reason. Well, anyway, language was first. The topic was hands. The various uses of the word "hand". After class was the usual school assembly. I could actually parse a few of the words the speaker said; this week is the week of the woman, if you didn't know. Math was next. More about regular old lines. I used my first break to go to the bathroom. One thing about the bathroom I forgot to mention (I was too caught up in the lack of toilet paper) is that the flusher is a string to pull coming down from a basin of water on the ceiling. I've never seen something like that before. But I wont spend my post talking about toilets. My third class of the day was history. The teacher came over to me and asked me if I understood the sheet she passed out. I told her more or less. Then she told the whole class that I was very good at Spanish and had made very few mistakes in the what I had turned in to her already. I was beaming at the end of this. I didn't know teachers ever said positive things.

The teachers, on an unrelated note, are called professors in my school, which, like in the US where "professor" is shortened to "prof", the students shorten to "profe". At first I thought they were saying, "prophet", as if they were asking Jesus himself whether "elección" has one C or two. Another interesting thing I've been meaning to tell you is the seating arrangement. We each chose our seats on the first day, and though I think we can change, no one does. I noticed last week that the front was entirely boys and the back was entirely girls, almost opposite of what it would be in the US, and then later I noticed that the sides are all boys and the center has girls. As it turns out, when I got a good look of the room, the boy/girl divide is a neat curve: the front and sides are all boys and the center and back all girls. Not a single student was sitting on the opposite side of this line. Not even me. Now back to my day. My last class was (shudder) culture. I tried to work on the activity, but of course there were things I didn't understand. I managed to finish the activity, though, and when I turned it in, the teacher actually smiled at me. Full on smile. Not a grimace. I left school in high spirits. Hot (I am wearing a long sleeve shirt and a lab coat in a Miami summer sun), tired (I had only gotten 5 and a half hours of sleep), and hungry (I was feeling faint in history and only a little better after I ate two granola bars), but great. I have too much homework, either. Oh, that reminds me, I should talk about Maggie's day.

While I was up walking on air, she was down in the dumps. She had spent hours and hours answering questions about computers for her computation class. Her teacher looked at her work today and said, "you need to redo this in pen". She was also chastised for the size of her drawings and the fact that she didn't use the backs of her paper. She was called out for her hours of work more than the people who didn't do the work. So, she had to redo her entire project tonight. Our cleaning lady came today. I felt a little awkward sitting on the couch while someone was cleaning our house for us. Apparently Mom and Dad did too, so we went to the mall and ate stir fry (a meal that was, shockingly, before nine and consisting of more than just meat). I really am craving peanut butter. I don't know how people here live without it. Of course, they do have dulce de leche here, and I'm not quite sure how I ever lived without that before.

One more thing before I go to bed (this was a short post for me!): ito. The suffix -ito in Spanish is used to make things smaller. For example "perro" means "dog", and "perrito" means "little dog". "Un momento" means "one moment", and "un momentito" means "just a sec" or "a jiffy". I already knew this when I came here. What I didn't know was that Argentines love this suffix. Everything but a St. Bernard is a "perrito", and every momento is -ito unless it will actually take a while. Some words are rarely used without -ito. I kinda like this. It makes everything seem cuter here.