Day 32

So technically, it´s Wednesday right now, but since I don´t want a huge post from the past six days, I´m pretending that it´s Sunday right now. This weekend was a good one. I´m finally starting to be let out of the house more often, and am therefor having a lot more fun. Friday was back to school day. Which is really strange, since I had been gone for so long, and then had to go back for only one day. A lot of kids didn´t go to school, because the school seems to have horrible contact with homes, and so no one knew they had school. I ended up missing school on Thursday, because I didn´t know. It was nice to get back to school, and not sit around the house all day by myself.. yet I still hate having to get up so early, to be out of the house by ten to seven. Classes were not all that entertaining, but what do you expect when teachers don´t expect anything out of you? I had spanish classes after school, and I´ve realized that they´re starting to get painful. The teacher doesn´t know how to explain anything to the students that don´t understand, and she speaks enlish the whole time. How am I supposed to learn from this? Oh well, I went to a friend´s house after the class with her and two kids from France, who spoke no english. This means: we had to speak in spanish, or else someone wouldn´t be able to understand. It was great, and possibly the most spanish I´ve spoken since I got here. We then went to a surprise birthday party for one of the exchange students, organized by her host mom. She was quite surprised, and we got to eat pizza and cake (ahhh such a birthday party!). There´s a tradition in Bolivia that on your birthday, you have to... stick your face in your cake. Most girls end up just wimping out, biting the edge of the cake. But Caity had a few kids guiding her face with their hands. She ended up going straight through the cake, to the table. Split the cake straight in half. And to top it off, it was an Autonomia cake, so she looked like a green and white striped bandit coming out of the cake. Saturday morning, I was RUDELY awakened by Celine Dion´s My Heart Will Go On. This is NOT something that you´d enjoy being woken up to. Not to mention Alan singing, very loudly, along to it. The morning was quite relaxed, and then I was off to Brodie´s house to work on a history project, and go to the ExpoCruz (aka la feria or fair). La feria is a huge commercial fair, where companies come to show of their products. It´s a huge plot of land in Santa Cruz, that just sits there to be used as advertisment for ten days a year. Pretty much everyone in the city goes, and you can´t go without running into people you know. Overall, it was quite a good day, being out and about. Today (Sunday) was my host parents 24th Anniversary. I woke up to a big lunch set up outside, with a few family members joining us, whom I had no clue who they were. We didn´t go to church, I´m assuming because this meal was all cooked at home and would take a while.. But I sure didn´t mind, especially after being out so late. The rest of the day was pretty relaxed. There was a soccer game in the evening, El Clasico. It´s a game that happens every once and a while between Blooming and Oriente, the two teams of Santa Cruz. Being in their home city, it was a HUGE game, where everyone was split up between cheering for the two teams. Everyone seems to be quite dedicated to their team though, and therefor causes a bit of rivalry with friends who don´t cheer for the same team. We (of course) cheered for Blooming, who (luckily) won the game 2-0!!! As soon as we got home from the game, we were back out of the house, going to another DeMolay meeting for Oliver. This one wasn´t as exciting, no robes or anything.. But they did have swords and daggers for something (who knows what). The meetings are mostly boring, with a lot of talking that I don´t really fully understand. I get when my hostdad talks about me though, since most of the room turns to look at me.. It´s awkward, since I´m usually caught offguard, staring off into space. I think the meetings would be really interesting, since I would like to learn about the background of DeMolay and the Free Masons themselves, but I need a bit more advanced spanish skills. We finally got home pretty late, and it´s off to bed for me!