Forget ghost stories, now THAT is scary!
This past Saturday, AFS had a booth at a fair in Madrid for different youth organizations. All of the exchange students in my Madrid chapter were required to work together with the students of their home countries, and put together a poster and typical meal from their place. The objective was for all of us to share our culture while experiencing this new one. Comming here, you're reminded that not only are you learning something new, but your host family, and everyone around you is gaining something from you, and your culture, as well.
The only students from the US in my chapter are Mariah, Simon, and I. It was quickly decided that Mariah and I would get together and do everything because Simon lives in a far away mountain village. Being the well organized people that we are, Mariah and I planned everything out really well and efficiently. Except for us that means we threw everything together the day of. I made the poster, Mariah the macaroni, and we took turns showering while screaming Spanish translations of basic US facts downstairs to eachother.
We eventually made it to the fair, all after getting lost and carrying around a huge pan of baked macaroni and a poster. The fair itself was pretty cool, there was pretty good live music, which was mostly reggae and and tribal-ish drums. Note: AFS students love to dance, play limbo, and eat macaroni with their hands. Some of us went out afterwards, then as usual, I spent the weekend at Mariah's house.
Leave it to Mariah and I to be the one's still celebrating our own holidays while living in Spain. On Sunday, we both carved a small pumpkin that Mariah had bought a few days before. She had to hide it in her room to be sure that her host parents wouldn't turn it into soup. Vegetable cream soup is one of the most common meals here, and can be made from almost anything. We also plan on getting out host families together and making them Thanksgiving dinner. Some may call us ambitious, we call it hungry.
Happy Halloween!
Love, Chloe and Mariah
As anticipated, I am failing every class in school. That is, every class except for educacion fisica (PE). As I mentioned before, PE in Spain is scarily similar to what I imagine boot camp would be like. So, of course, instead of running the one mile like most schools, we run two! All you track and cross country people, stop scoffing, it doesn't come as easily for most of us. However, I did finish first out of all the girls in my class! Except that today a girl who was sick and needed to re-do it beat my time, but that's ok. Unfortunately, I can't even transfer my PE credit here back to the US because I already fulfilled all of them. Ironically, I completed my PE credit early last year because I dropped out of Spanish 2, which was probably not a good decision on my part given the current circumstances.
Yesterday, Monday, was my host brother's 14th birthday. We all ate dinner together, which was nice because that is not very common here. In my host family, usually just the kids eat together, and the parents eat later. I finally learned how to sing "Happy Birthday" in Spanish! It is actually almost simpler than in English, if that's even possible considering it is only a 3 word phrase sung over and over with a "Dear ___" thrown in.
Afterwards, I was getting ready to go to bed when my host dad called us downstairs. There is a show called Madrileños X el Mundo. A Madrileño is some one who is from Madrid, and the show is about Madrileños who have moved around the world. This partiular episode was all about people in....San Diego! It was so cool because they followed the featured people around all of these places that have been my home for my entire life (The SD Zoo, Balboa Park, Coronado, Old Town, etc.) and it was a great way to share it with my host family.
Love,
Chloe
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