Third Day Done

Three days down, a ton to go!  Day three was definitely better than day two. :)

Something done in every class that I forgot to mention until now is the teacher greeting.  After the teacher walks in, all the kids stand up and say in a really slow, bored-sounding way, "Good morning Mrs. (or Mr.) Teacher," or whatever the teacher's actual name is.

"Goooo-ten Morrrrgen Herr Meyyyerrrr."  Like that.  I don't even remember which teacher Mr. Meyer is, but I know I said that at some point, so there must be a teacher named Mr. Meyer.


First period was English.  These kids have been taking English since third grade, and I was really impressed with how good they were!  The whole class was taught in English.  We were discussing 9/11, and I think some of the people actually knew more about it than some Americans.  These kids knew how to say Al Qaeda, for crying out loud! 

The English teacher is also the class teacher.  Sorry, that doesn't make any sense.  That's the literal translation of what it is in German.  She is pretty much the homeroom teacher, except there isn't a homeroom period.  So I guess they take a part of whichever class your class teacher teaches, in this case English, to do all the homeroomy-stuff.  Today we discussed what we wanted to do for a wandertag, or pretty much a class bonding day.  We voted on going rafting on the Rhein River.  I thought it was pretty cool that we just got to decide like that. :)

Before the English lesson started, the teacher began to say, "The kids might know more about you, but I don't..."  When I realized what she was going to say, I started frantically thinking nononopleasenoNO!, of course to no avail, because she finished with, "So why don't you tell us about yourself?"

Crap.

"Uhhhh...  Um....  I live in Park City, Utah...  It's in the mountains...  And I, uh...  Ski...  And play volleball...  And, uh, bike...  And I'm thirteen...  And, uh, yeah." <nervous laugh> Everyone was staring at me, probably judging me.  AWKWARD.

We also had a test today in English.  I decide just to try it, even though I hadn't studied any of the words.  I answered half of them.  Whoop whoop!  You're probably thinking, "Uh, Julia, this was an English test.  How could you just answer half of them?"  Well, we were given a numbered list of German words and had to translate them all to English.  I didn't know some of the German words, so I couldn't translate them.  And in my defense, the girl next to me answered even less.

Today I only have a mild case of Smurf Finger.   You might point out, after looking at the picture, that it is my index finger infected with Smurf Finger today, not my thumb.  As a matter of fact, it is my left index finger, and I am a rightie.  So how, exactly, did I get ink on my left index finger?  Well, my stabbing myself with my pen while trying to put the lid back on, of course.  Duh.

Molly, I hope you're reading this, because I'm putting this in for you: one girl, whenever she accomplishes something that wasn't expected for her to succeed at (such as catch a piece of candy that someone chucks across the room at her), turns to her friend and goes, "BOOM!"  It reminded me of you. :)

After English was French.  The French teacher is probably my favorite.  She's really nice and understands that they're ahead of me, so she gives me other things to do and kind of helps me out.  And yes, once again, I was completely overwhelmed by what they were doing, so I just stuck to my vocab-copying and blocked them out. :)

Then we got permission slips for a French field trip we're going on.  Guess where we're going?  Liege, Belgium!  Mwahahaha...  When in you're in Europe, where there are a whole lot of countries all near each other, you can have this attitude: if we're going on an all-day field trip, we might as well go to another country!  It's not until June 26th, but I'm still excited.  I'll just let the others do the talking. :)

 Cool, huh?  It's so... chilling, somehow.

During the 20-minute break, I followed Lisa to the library.  Apparently she loves to read as much as I do!  She couldn't find anything, but then I saw a book that I kind of recognized.  It was the German version of Matched!  It looks really different; I only recognized it by the person in the sphere.  If you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about.  If not, then you can ignore this paragraph. :)

After going to the library, we had music class.  We went to a separate building and watched some boys drop a soccer ball down three flights of stairs before the teacher came (he was late).  He smelled like cigarette smoke.  It was lovely.  Not.  Then we copied a page from a textbook (I didn't even know there was a music textbook!) about the mechanics of a piano. <stifle yawn>

Despite the mostly boring classes, I made a lot of progress with making friends today.  This happened mostly between classes.  More and more girls were talking to me, and I tried to talk more too.  One girl livedin America for eight years, and she's really nice.  Actually, I lot of people are really nice! :)

Well, that's my school day!  More later on my first day of volleyball! :O

The Sunflower Project: PROGRESS!  Tiny little green sprouts have appeared in three of the four pots.  Here is a picture of the biggest one:

Behold!  A Sprout!

German word of the day: Freunde.  Pronounced FROYN-duh.  Meaning: Friends :)