Well it's a Sunday evening, I'm depressed because the three-day weekend is coming to an end, and I have yet to start any homework that is due Tuesday. Sometimes I hate myself for my love of procrastination. However that path has brought me here so I can write a little on the bloggy blog and then potentially being productive! I make no promises.
Well let's see...last time I believe I stopped right before diving into the crazy, so let's start there. The best part about the crazy is that crazy knows no age. That means surprises! Let's start with the youngin's and work our way up.
Last week, in first grade, I ended up having to teach the sound "H". It doesn't seem too hard but the thing is in Spanish the 'h' is always silent. They never actually make the "huh" sound. It's hard to type the sound but you know it, like hat, hello, hooker. Anyways, when Spaniards say h's, they usually ignore it or make it really gutteral...like they're trying to get snot out of their throats. So "hello" turns into *coughhack*ello. Anyways I always start pronunciation by asking what words they can think of that start with the letter. I ask, "what words start with H??" I got hello, hi, hat, hamburger, and then finally one of them eagerly raised her hand and said "HORE!!" My head kind of cocked like a pug because I was trying to figure out whether I should be appalled/proud that she knew the word whore, or the more probable alternative was figuring out what word she intended on saying...I looked at Isabel, the teacher, and she nodded her head knowingly and said "Horse." I said "OHHHHHHHHHHHHH....horSSSSSSSSSe. Yes! Horse....horSe..." What a stupid H, hahaha. That one cracked me up but the weird one came later when I was teaching the letter 'P' this way. I asked a different first grade class "what words start with P?" I got pookeen (pumpkin), purple, pink, penguin, Penny (the name of the Penguin), I taught them the word poodle, and finally one of the smarter kids yelled "poonk!!" Poonk? I asked how you spell it....P-...U-....N-....K. Poonk.
Ohhhhhhhh........punk.
WAIT. How the hell do you know the word punk?! "I see-ed it in Spongebob."
......hahahahah. Thanks Nickelodeon. Then all the kids wanted to know what a poonk was and that's one of those words you can't really describe, in English or in Spanish. So we moved on.
And I will too. Moving on to third grade. My favorite third grade class is the one with the hot teacher (once more, hot teacher who is married and now pregnant. Well his wife is...anyways he's awesome and soon might teach me how to juggle). They never cease to crack me up, and they never ever know they're being funny. This is the class that brought you "hide and sex" and "I love jew...wait, I no want say that." This time, however, they brought their A-game. We were playing "20 Questions" to practice the W-question words (who what when were why) as well as speaking in only English....which is really difficult for them. Anyways my rules were a bit different. First, we changed it to 10 Questions because I would never win if we had to reach twenty. Then, I made them tell the class if it was a person, place, or thing. After that the kids had to ask five questions and after asking five, they could begin to guess what the object is. This worked really well except when it came to people. One of their favorite questions was "What color is it?" How do you answer that if it's a person? They usually said "lots of colors" but my favorite was when I gave the little boy from Manchester the word "toes". For SOME reason the kids just cannot remember the word toes. They know fingers. But in Spanish, there isn't a word for toes. Instead, they call them "fingers of the feet". So everytime I give them the word toes, they want to say "fingers of the foot." Knowing he wouldn't do that, I thought it was a nice little challenge. So anyways, the question pops up. "What color is it?" And he said "peach". After the class fought for five minutes about what a peach is, the boy tried to explain in Spanish that in English people refer to skin-colored, usually, as peach. One of the little girls that gets really excited goes "OH! I know!! It's meat!!" We both looked at her like she was insane and she kept insisting "MEAT!! Jess, ees meat color! Ees dee color of dee meat!!" We both tried to explain no, it's skin. It's a part of the body, so it's skin-colored. She got really adamant and kind of testy yelling "jess! I know, ees meat!" That's when it hit me. The word for "flesh" in Spanish is "carne". "Carne" is also the word for meat. Therefore instead of saying flesh-colored, it came out meat-colored. The teacher was laughing so hard she almost cried, meanwhile I got a little nauseous thinking about meat-colored toes. Gross...anyways nobody guessed toes, so I won that round, and we had a really good laugh after class. Meat-colored. Ugh.
The next class was just as good. I figured we wouldn't really have anything exciting happen because we were just reading a story and little paragraphs about food around the world. One story was about a boy named Chen from Japan who eats noodles with chopsticks. The first bridge we had to cross was the word "noodles" because they have never heard of that before and usually just call it "spaghetti". Every student that tried to pronounce it stumbled and screwed it up, which was hilarious to me. "Chen eats his no-dles...no-odles...noddles..." basically every which way except noodles. Then I asked the class "what does Chen use to eat his noodles? A fork?" Nobody knew the answer but Eva, the teacher, leaned over to the kid who is a bit slow and whispered the answer to him so he could participate. He eagerly raised his hand and I happily called on him...that silence when nobody knows the answer is super embarrassing. That's when he yelled "Chopdicks!!" .....aaaaaaaand fail.
I guess since things are always so crazy at school, I never write about the whole cultural learning thing that is supposed to enrich study abroad experience...I sometimes I complain about things that annoy me that Spaniards do, but that's not exactly discussing cultural differences. I also haven't travelled much, because I'm too exhausted and somewhat poor (saving my money for future purposes, being an adult haha) but I've had cultural diversity forced on me in various ways. First of all, nothing says adaptation like dating somebody from somewhere completely different than you. Valentine's Day was not the first clash of cultures for me & the boy from Peru. I didn't think it'd be that big of a deal, and it isn't, but I'm definitely learning a lot, for better or worse. For example, I've been trying to cook more lately and have been discovering wonderful recipes that I'm really good at making (which is absoultely shocking if you knew how little I know about food in general). It's also hard because you have to make EVERYTHING from scratch here, because there aren't many choices at the grocery stores. If there are things like that, they're expensive as hell because they're considered "foreign". There is no "throw in a can of soup"...you have to MAKE the soup first. Thus far I have made terayaki stirfry, quesadillas, chilli, salsa, and recently chicken broccoli alfredo & chicken noodle soup. I feel SO accomplished. Anyways I have cooked for Walter a couple of times now (I'm morally opposed to this concept but I think my roommates are sick of me shoving my recipes at them) and it's always had interesting results. First, I just made chicken. He was very appreciative and promised me that next time, or soon, he'd make me dinner. I asked about typical Peruvian food because honestly I can't think of any food I've heard comes from Peru. I kind of assumed it'd be like Mexico...you know, south of the border kinda deal...tacos, burritos, rice. The whole shebang. Let me rephrase. I **hoped** it would be like Mexico. He mentioned a lot of ricey things, with a lot of fish that was not cooked (but not sushi apparently), and also rabbit. Indian rabbit. Atleast that is what I translated...I made a not-so pretty face when he said rabbit, because to me rabbits are little floppy-eared pets, not food. He didn't realize my gross face meant "that's gross" and thought I didn't understand rabbit, so he says "you know...Bugs Bunny? Looney Tunes. Rabbeet?" I know, I know, rabbit. Ugh. So I tried not to be too judgey...that didn't necessarily work...but we moved on. He told me he'd research some food because he doesn't quite remember how to cook it and we'd do that soon. After he left I was filling my roommates in on the date and one of them said, "ooh I love Peruvian food. Is he going to cook you guinea pig??"
Um, no. Shut up....don't even joke about crap like that.
He did not even MENTION guinea pig. I told her the weirdest thing he talked about was rabbit, that was apparently really popular, but...no guinea pig. I forget how the realization came about, but basically we Googled it and Indian rabbit IS the Spanish translation for guinea pig. It's not a rabbit. IT IS NOT BUGS BUNNY. That is TOTALLY different. I think I spent an entire week in mourning and thoroughly disgusted because....well, duh, GUINEA PIGS ARE PETS, NOT FOOD. Not to help the situation, my roommate Katie thought it'd be cute to throw out there "hey one of the little girls I give private lessons to has a guinea pig...want me to grab it so he can use it to make you dinner?" NO. Pets are friends, not food.
Anyways, I've been super lucky because he's been really busy and therefore putting off the whimsical dinner date when he tries to feed me furry little rodent pets and I have to explain myself and my Western cultural differences. Other fun things I've stumbled upon is that a.) he thinks that chicken noodle soup is Mexican and b.) cats have 7 lives in Spanish. I'm not sure how a language difference changes the wive's tale but...he's convinced he proved it to me because we found a song on Youtube that sings about it. 7 vidas tiene un gato. I'm surprised he doesn't want to cook that for dinner too. Okay that wasn't fair.
I've also learned a lot about Germans this past weekend. I've learned that they are total assholes. Ugh, it's getting late. I think I'll go do some minor homework now and leave that story for the next time.
Tootles, amigos!
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