Escuela!!

I bet some of you are a little disappointed that I didn't update you on my first day of school yesterday. Well, I have a really good excuse: the wifi was down. It was extra wretched (that ones for you, Mommy) because I really needed to use google translate to ask Claudia something, but instead I had to look up all 26 (yes, I counted) words in my pocket dictionary.

So that's the main reason. But also, I didn't really feel like blogging about it. I still don't, actually, but I will. It's not that it was bad or anything--it wasn't--just EXTREMELY exhausting. And long and stressful and overwhelming.

School works like this: I have one classroom and one class, and all the teachers switch around. I have no idea what the schedule is, but all my classmates seem to know who the next teacher is, so there must be one. Each class lasts a really long time, and after every class there's a break that lasts at least 10 minutes. School starts at 8:15, from 1 to 3 there is a break for lunch (lunch is super important here: usually everyone goes home to eat with their family--although we go to Abuela's house 'cause we live out in the country, and Abuela has an apartment within walking distance of the school--but sometimes you eat with your friends, and today I went to lunch with some girls from my class)and then more school until 6:15. Everyhinh seems really disorganized to me: there's no assigned seats but because there are no lockers, people leave things in the desks. In the last two days we haven't really had any work, which I was surprised by, because I had been warned multiple times how boring, tedious and hard Chilean school is. I found out that we've been takin it easy, because this weekend is the 18th, independence day, which is a BIG DEAL in Chile. September is the month of celebration, that's how important it is. So I'm not exactly sure how school will be once it gets back to normal.

Everybody in my class is really nice and friendly. There's about 3 or 4 kids who speak really good English, and the rest of them speak about as much english as I speak spanish. Since it's the first week and I'm new and foreign and blonde, I am extremely interesting, and it's really difficult because everyone wants me to do something different and I can't please everybody. So that's really tough.

The teachers are okay, I guess. The main teacher of my class is the English teacher, and she is super nice and speaks really good english, so that's really lucky. There's a couple of other nice teachers, but we can't really communicate, so. Most of them don't really acknowledge my existence, which is weird, but whatever.

At home, I still don't have much clue what's going on, but it's getting better, especially as I'm figuring out the daily routine. At school, I have absolutely no idea what's going on. It'll get better though.

Okay, well that's mostly it I think. Buenos noches!

-Grace