Exam day! We started at 9 with the writing section and I was fairly confident with everything but accents and one of the listening sections. The verb section was way easier than I anticipated and the writing section is one I've written many times: "When I was a child...." I wrote about living in Nebraska and playing ténis since it was a vocab word and we did examples using all of the verb tenses. It made me miss playing tennis. I was done a little after 10 am and had to wait until 12:30 to do my oral exam with a partner. My partner was Duria and she is from China. We were still able to commincate fairly well even though the only language we had in common was Spanish. I was so nervous for the oral exam but Natalia said I have good pronunciation, vocabulary skills, and the ability to correct my mistakes, but since I'm soft-spoken it can be hard for me to put the right inflictions on words sometimes. One way to help is to watch comedies in Spanish, which is going to be a good excuse to watch t.v. and movies in Spanish.
When I got back to the casa Sandra's mom and brother were there so I got to met them and they asked a million questions about my time here and what Nebraska is like. It was hard to explain that Nebraska is in the middle of the country and that makes it a 24+ car ride to a beach. For lunch we had pumpkin soup which was amazing and then chicken breasts and fries. I think this is day 2 of eating my entire plateful of food. I didn't siesta today, instead I went to El Grecco museo.
I was supposed to meet Natalie at 4 but since the Jewish Quarter is very confusing and there are a million museums and a million places with "El Grecco" on it, we never did catch up with each other. I made it into the museo by myself and wandered around. I think my favorite part about a museum dedicated to one person is that there was a room dedicated to other people, like his students, attempting to replicate El Grecco's paintings. I also liked his map of Toledo since they had a modern map available from a similar location for comparison. After El Grecco, I wandered back through all of the streets to pick out presents and souvenirs. I got mistaken for German in a store. I'm okay with being identified as American but getting confused for German here and French in Madrid really confuses me.
On my way home I helped two very lost girls find their way in the Casco. They were from Guatemala and spoke no English, so I was forced to use Spanish. On the way one girl asked me how long I'd lived in Toledo, and when I answered 3 1/2 weeks her eyes got really big. Her friend then asked where I was from originally, when I answered the US, they didn't believe me and said I spoke fairly good Spanish for not being a native speaker. Excuse me as I apply for dual citizenship...
I came back to the casa and put everything away and then Lara and Sandra came home. Lara showed her mom a new way of applying makeup and so I got to attempt to learn the words for different types of makeup. It was definitely interesting. I ate dinner earlier than normal since we were finishing going to go out to celebrate the end of classes and exams. I had cheesy lasagna and bread. It was good but there was so much cheese! I also had plain yogurt that is really good with some fruit or sugar. This is just another example of what foods I discovered I liked while here. I've also gotten really good at cleaning my plate- quite literally! You use the bread crusts to get all of the goodness left on the plate.
I then headed to Zocodover and Enebro's. I drank a sangria as our table grew and grew. At the peak of people we had 19 people sitting around 5 or 6 tables. Sophie got a strawberry mojito and I tasted a sip of it; it was sweet and minty. After everyone had consumed all of their sangria/cerveza/mojito/other drinks we headed over to O'Brien's which is an Irish pub down the road a little ways. I wasn't quite sure what to get to drink since my usual drink in Toledo is sangria, but I ended up getting a Toledo Made cerveza called Domus. I'm not a huge fan of beer but it had enough spices to make it drinkable. After we finished at O'Brien's we walked back to Zocodover to make plans to either go to a discoteca or a park. Because it was too far to walk to the discoteca we decided to go to the park. I was easily amused by the gatos everywhere and we were all a little squirrelly. By the time we walked home it was about 3 am and I fell asleep almost instantly.
Love you all!
No comments:
Post a Comment