Fin de semana

Among the many things I learned this weekend, I admit one of the most fulfilling pieces of information I learned was that Hakuna Matata's meaning doesn't change when translated. And so, with the soundtrack of the lion king stuck in my head, I survived a very crazy weekend.


Friday: Even though Friday is technically still a weekday, I feel it is too close to the weekend to be discounted and categorized as a lowly weekday. Friday's in Spain may be one of my favorite school days; here the school schedule goes accordingly to weekday. Fridays I started the day with two hours of P.E. We warmed up by doing some soccer drills and passing the ball with a partner, we then played some keep away with partners. It is actually one of the funniest things to sit back and compare the skill levels between boys and girls in soccer here. The boys are raised from the moment they are able to stand up to dribble with a soccer ball. The girls.... well they aren't raised to do anything that involves the rising of their pulse. After we had finished playing soccer we all walked across the street to the park to run laps. The coach would blow a whistle and we would run for six minutes and stop for one, and keep running in this manner until the end of class. The running groups were like so, athletic boys (the ones who are good at soccer), un-athletic boys (the ones who are not good at soccer), popular girls, and then two other girls in the class. Haha as you can probably just see from the running groups, their clique situation is so strong it decides what group you can run in. Anyhow, so their idea of running is very twisted... it’s essentially speed walking... in place. So when we started 'running' I ended up passing all of their little cliquey groups. This did not make any of the boys happy and it became a game so that whenever I got closer to them, they all formed a line and sped up so that there was no way I could pass them. This went on for quite a while and I kept trying to find ways to get pass them. I stopped trying when I tripped on a sprinkler and missed a pile of dog poop by a few centimeters. I only had two more periods for the rest of the day and those were tutorial and a free. In tutorial we spent the period watching Good Will Hunting in Spanish. For my free I went to the library with Maddie to work on some school work. Almost every free that we have together we share with three other boys. One of them we know rides a motorcycle to school and we call him Moto. The other we don't have a name for but he is part of the threesome. And the last we call golem. The first day that we saw them, Moto told golem that we thought he was cute thinking we could not understand them. When we objected and told him we understood he said he was only joking because his friend looks like golem from Lord of the Rings. Maddie and I thought this was the funniest thing we had ever heard and decided to keep the name Golem for this boy. On Friday in the library we kept catching Golem staring at us. It was not the kind of subtle glances that one might do to make sure that the person does not know they are staring... No, these were long stares that required 'Golem' to turn his body toward us in such a way we could not help but notice his staring. I am pretty surer he turned to look, at least, thirty times. If it's been two weeks, and people have to look thirty different times at the Americans, I wonder how long it will take them to get so used to us they don't need to look at all. Friday after school Silvia, Claudia, Maddie and I spent the night at the mall shopping! We were at the mall for only three and a half hours shopping and eating, not long at all... We said our goodbyes and went home afterwards...excited and anxious for our weekend at the pueblo


Saturday: We woke up at around 9 and got ready to leave for the pueblo by 10:30. The drive to the pueblo was very scenic and beautiful. I saw the countryside of Spain which was like driving through a world that was 400 years old. Unfortunately the drive was also very curvy and I suffered from a bit of car sickness when are car climbed over the Perini mountains, which were covered in snow! After an hour and thirty minutes we arrived at the adorably old fashioned town of Luesia. We live in a little house that looks like it could belong in the century when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ruled Spain. There was no heat, just a fireplace, and everything was made of stone. My weekend was a lot quieter than Maddie's, the next time we go there will be a party they said, and I spent a lot of my time inside. We met Claudia's best friends at the Pueblo two young girls, one our age and one the age younger. And we went to eat lunch in an old cow barn turned into a dining hall. That was when I first learned that in Luesia, when people want to smoke, they smoke. The barn soon was enveloped in fireplace, cigarette, and cigar smoke. We had a typical Luesia dish of ormigas, which are bread crumbs that have been fried on the stove. They were very good, and I was relieved that after a week of potatoes and greens for lunch everyday I could have something different. We drove up to the top of a snowy mountain after lunch to take picture in the freezing cold. That was pretty cool, although all of the stone faced hunters we passed on the way up, who had guns, were pretty unsettling... We went back home after lunch and Claudia, Lucia, her two friends and I watched TV. while the parents went out. I think I watched enough Spanish Jonas brothers TV. to last me a life time... I sat very awkwardly watching the tele because I didn't understand any of what they were saying. After about two hours of this awkward sitting and watching we went out to the bar for dinner. The bar was just a smoke haven, full of drunks and crazy twenty year olds. We had dinner and sat in the bar for two hours and a half. It was about twelve when we left the bar, by that time I had learned that couching obnoxiously does not have an affect on smokers in Spain, they continue to smoke. After leaving I thought we would be going home because it was so late, but no, we went to another bar for more drinks and smokes. There we sat for another hour and a half having drinks and inhaling smoke... such fun...I was very tired and in my head I was very cranky with myself, but I made sure to put on a smiling face and managed to stay awake until we finally were able to walk home. The house was still very cold when we got home so I slept with a heated pack of water in my bed.


Sunday: We got to sleep in a bit because of the previous night, so I got out of be on Sunday morning at about eleven. My throat was itching and I had a cough from all the smoke from the previous night. I couldn't stop imagining my lungs looking like the black sponges in all the lung cancer commercials. We packed up and got ready to head back home, or so I thought. We ended up side tracking at another pueblo, and hour north (FARTHER away from Zaragoza), to see the sights of a town just like Luesia. We had lunch there at a very posh restaurant, the lady at the table next to ours kept looking, and I just know that she was jealous of my Sacred Heart field hockey hat. I slept in the car on the way back to Zaragoza, but was very relieved to wake up in the at least somewhat aware smoke aware city. Claudia and I walked over to Silvia's house to talk to them about our weekend. We spent about an hour at Silvia's house talking and eating popcorn, we had only spent a day without seeing them and it felt like a week. We walked home and had cheese and tomato sandwiches for dinner talking about our weekend while quietly playing American hand games. I went to bed early because my throat hurt and just like that my weekend was over!

I apologize for not writing in a while; I will try a lot harder I promise! :]]
till later, Besicos para todos!
India