Today was our first day of classes at Academia Hispano. The day started off cloudy, but not too cold. So I didn't layer up as completely as I did yesterday. After our traditional home breakfast of hot oatmeal, we headed off merrily to school. Took us less than 10 minutes to get there from our apartment--less time than it used to take us to reach the school from our homestay last August.
We were suprised to see a lot more students enrolled. People must have stopped worrying about swine flu, which was actually never a problem in San Miguel in any case. Instead of having 3 students in the class, we now have 11 students. But the students at our level are pretty good. Several of them speak better than we do. That means that we can also learn from them. And they are an interesting group of people. The majority of people are retirees, but there are some people who are still working full time and studying Spanish for their vacation. And there are a few younger people, too. Everyone in our class is from the United States, but from different parts of the country. One of the students is coincidentally from Palo Alto, but we never saw him before today.
Didn't exactly ace the placement exam. Not much of a surprise. I haven't take any additional Spanish classes since last summer and hadn't made any attempt to review my Spanish before coming back. Oh well. Maybe this time, I'll manage to keep it up.
It started raining right after we reached the school and hasn't stopped. Our teachers tell us that this rain is very unusual. It's not the rainy season. Unfortunately, San Miguel is not well prepared for rain. There is no central heating in the homes or in the other buildings. Our classrooms were so cold that everyone (teachers and students) kept their coats on throughout the morning. There were small kerosene space heaters in one corner of the classrooms and we tried to sit as close to the heaters as possible.
After grabbing a quick lunch at a tortilleria near the school, Micha and I took a taxi back to our apartment, lit the space heaters (ours are better/more modern than the ones as the school)and boiled the kettle to make tea. I threw my jeans in the small dryer for a while, because my cuffs were soaked. It feels so nice to have these extra little "luxuries"--the good space heaters and the dryer--that we wouldn't have had in a homestay. The trade-off is that we'll have to make more of an effort to find other opportunities outside of class to practice our Spanish.
We ate some pieces of the delicious Mexican cholate bar that I bought yesterday with our tea and lit some of the candles in the living room. So we feel very snug and comfortable even though it's raining outdoors. And we have renewed our excitement about learning Spanish. I think that we'll even brave the rain once again today to go to the Spanish literature class at 5 PM.
Got a surprise Skype call from my close friend, Jeanie, who wanted the latest update and asked about pictures. I did take a few pictures yesterday of the apartment grounds, but I forgot the cable to upload them from the camera to the computer. We didn't feel like wandering around in the rain to find a shop that sells cables. So I apologize to all of you for the delay. Maybe tomorrow.
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