Not a lot of new stuff has been happening around here, things mostly stay the same. Reneé and I have started a Kids' Program at the church to teach the kids English and give them a chance to do some interacting with it and hear it from native speakers. We meet twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, and we sings songs, play games, and have some learning and interacting time were we cover a topic and give them a chance to do some talking. This last month we covered colors and shapes and now we're going to be moving on to numbers and the sounds of the alphabet since English has a wider range of vowel sounds and some different consonant combinations than Spanish does. We usually have about fifteen kids ranging from about six-years old to fifteen-years old and a full flush in-between, so keeping things creative and fun and understood and applicable can be a little challenging at times. Plus, things can be a little rowdy and out of hand, and with their little English and my little Spanish it's hard to communicate in such a way as to keep things disciplined and organized. But over all it's going pretty well and the kids seem to be enjoying it and learning English.
On Wednesday the 20th of February after the kids time I got to FaceTime with dad and Baruch a bit which was very fun to see their faces and hear their voices. Also, that night when I was talking some with my host mom, the subject of Thailand came up. Well it turns out that she took a trip there a while back and I've had a few friends/family go there too, so we had a bit of a chat about that and she showed me some pictures of some of her many different travels. Turns out she was quite the world traveler back in the day, and still a bit now.
The following Friday (22 of Feb.) I had been asked if I could teach the niece of one of my friends from church some waltz for her fifteenth birthday party coming up, the big, coming-of-age year for Hispanic girls. I said yes, assuming I would just be teaching some basic steps and turns so that this girl would be able to do some dance beyond swaying back-and-forth. Well, it turns out that I was teaching the girls whole group of friends—like a bride's wedding party but instead a birthday party for a birthday girl, if that makes sense. So there I was teaching about twelve Spanish teenager pairs how to dance, using a language I can barely communicate in on a basic level, let alone using dance terminology. It turned out acutally pretty good. I've given two lessons so far, but there is still a ways to go (rythm is still a little rough, they can't seem to get the ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three of the waltz' music) and I'm supposed to be choreographing a dance for the whole group...yeah, this is going to be interesting.
The next day, Saturday the 23, I went with some friends of my host mom to their son's badminton tournament for the afternoon. I watched badminton for about four and a half hours...it's not much of a spectator sport. It actually wasn't too boring, and it gave me a chance to have an outing and hang out with some different people. Afterwards we all went to a restaurant for dinner and had a typical spanish dish from Catalán called "calsot." It's grilled scallion that you dip in this special orange sauce, it was actually pretty good.
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| Yes, this is the official way you are supposed to eat it. |
On the following Monday, the 25th, I went with my host mom to do some touring of Madrid. We started by spending about three hours in the Reina Sofia art museum. It's one of three main art museums in Madrid and is the one with the more modern exhibitions and art. Honestly, I was a little bored by it, and quite a bit confuse, modern art is not something I have come to fully appreciate yet, not that I particularly think I ever will. I did get to see Picasso's Guernica, so that was cool.
After the museum we did some walking through the city. We saw this awesome living wall that was a very refreshing sight in the middle of the bustling city. We also saw "La Puerta de Alcala," a pretty arch in the middle of a busy round-about.
We then had lunch at a very fancy restaurant were all the food was little, miniature and pretty. Kind of ridiculous, but cute and fun at the same time.
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| The Glass Palace, very pretty. Unfortunately they didn't have it open at the time, they were setting up for a new exhibition. |
Some other fun pointers. I finally got around to showing my host family pictures of my real family, that was fun. Mom used to have this mini photo album that she would take around with her that had pictures of her seven boys and she called it her Brag Book. Yep, if there's something that's actually worth bragging about it's having a great family.
We finally got snow, it lasted a whole day and a half! And then we had rain for like three days straight, but hey, a little bit of home is always welcome, no matter how brief.
That brings you up to date as of now. Hope you enjoyed the actually somewhat short blog, you didn't have to spend your whole day wading through all my talk ;)
As usual, you can post things here to the blog in the comments or shoot me an email, which you can get from Hope, my Communications Girl Extraordinaire, by contacting her at constanceh.95@gmail.com. You can also get my snail-mail address from her if you so desire. For prayer updates contanct Mike at biblebeach@hotmail.com.
Many Loves and Misses to all of you,
Adios Amigos
~Asher Fickett~
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