Woo-hooo!!!! Victory is mine!

            While the class waited in the kitchen for more people to show up, Mafer and Lore explained some things about quinceñeras: "There are a lot of things to plan for your quince años:.....dress, guest list.....mementos....floral arrangements.....godparents (one for practically every thing in the quinceñera, like toasts and flowers) etc." Just to tell you: they are in the process of planning their own quinceñeras so they know a lot about it. 

             Then came the actual presentations and those are more boring than worth mentioning, so I will go to the end of Spanish class, where we played "Basta." It is a really cool game where one person starts by saying A and then says the ABC's in his head and then another person says "Basta" whenever they feel like it (basta means stop, or enough). Then, everyone starts writing things down that start with that letter on a pre-made sheet with places to put things like: Name, Last Name, Place, Flower or Fruit, Animal and Object. You write down one word beginning with that letter for each category. For example, if the letter is P, I would write: Penelope, Peterson, Panama, Papaya, Pig, Plate (all in Spanish of course). The trick is, you have to do it as fast as you can because once someone finishes all of them, they start counting like this : basta uno, basta dos, basta tres..... After that, everyone stops writing to tally up points. For an answer that no one else has, you get 100 points, for every answer that two people have, you get 50 points and for every answer that three or more people have, each person gets 25 points. In the end, when we tallied up all the points from all the rounds, I got more than Lore!!
           After our snack, we had Griselda's dreaded class!!!!!!! She split us up into groups where we chose one person to be the mom and one the dad. The others were the kids. Then we had to write up everything we had to spend money on. The final outcome of these past few classes will be to compare our lives and homes to those in an indigenous community. In my group, I was with Lina (we made her be the mom), Diego (the only guy, he had to be the dad), Mafer, Ana and I (we were the daughters). Griselda left a half hour early (THANK GOD) because we "were no longer paying attention."
          Lore and I talked for a bit and then she told me that I was the best friend she had ever had. That made me feel really great and we gave each other a big hug.
          For all PE we practiced our "escolta." That was pretty boring so after school I was sort of in a bad mood. We left school to go to Soriana to buy some things and my mood did not improve. I was not excited to go to soccer practice so I was sort of sullen.
          At practice, the first part was fine; the second part was surprisingly great! Profe split up the younger kids and the older kids. That meant that Oscar and I (who were partners before) had been split up. Some more of the older kids had come back from working with another coach. Profe then told us that we had to get into partners. Thinking that there were no other partners left, I asked Profe if I could work with Oscar. He said that I had to work with this other guy. We started working and then he waited for me to catch up to him and asked me my name. I told him, and that was the end of the conversation for that point. Then, next time we had a moment, he asked me where I was from and I told him the country and the state. I finally had the courage to ask him his name; his name is Miguel. He asked me if it was hard to learn Spanish and when I told him sort of, Rodolfo (tall skinny kid with braces) heard and said, "She speaks English, is it hard for YOU to learn English?!" Miguel then decided to practice some English with me, so he said "How are you?" I replied "Good; how are you?" He didn't respond so I suppose he didn't understand.
           While we were scrimmaging (I was on Miguel's team) he said "good job" to something I did. Then, I stole the ball from a really good older kid and sort of hurt his shin in the process. I told him "perdon" and to my surprise, he said very amiably "No te preocupes (don't worry about it)."
            After Profe had talked to us about games, Miguel came over and kissed me on the cheek! He was the first person in soccer practice (not counting the coaches) that said good-bye to me like that. That made me very pleased because I have found a sort of friend (or at least someone who is very nice and talks to me) in soccer.
Good Night!