Miercoles (Wednesday) y Milagros

The view outside the window of Tino's house in Huancayo.

It's been raining a lot lately in Huancayo, which makes the roads muddy.  Even so, it still seems pretty dusty.  Most of the rain comes at night.  It was raining pretty hard just now.  The rain doesn't stop people from shooting off fireworks though.  It seems to be a regular event to hear the loud pops of fireworks.  I'm not sure if it is year-round or just leftover from the New Year's celebrations.  Leslie, my Spanish teacher, says that New Year's is a really important day here.

This morning Lauren and I had to go to the school at Concepcion by ourselves because Tino had to take care of some paperwork for the school.  We knew we would get there okay, but we were a little unsure of getting home.  Tino gave us a little map of where to catch a taxi in Concepcion and where to have the taxi drop us off.

Today in the class with younger students, they were pretty well-behaved because they wanted to do an exercise I had them do yesterday for the first time.  They kept asking me if we were going to do the same thing.  I had written down seven verbs, one for each student, and had them repeat the verb and then tell me what it was in Spanish and then act out the action.  They are all so cute.  They were a little shy to sing by themselves, but when I had them do it all together, they all sang the same song.  I think I like the exercise as much of them.

The little girl whose picture I posted is Milagros.  When I asked her what her name was the first day, I repeated it as only Milagro.  She made sure I knew it was Milagros.  I thought it was amusing because she's not just a miracle, but more than one.  She is pretty well-behaved and pretty smart, although a lot of times she tries to see what other people are saying before she says anything.  Unfortunately she's not smiling in the picture, but she's always smiling in class.

Milagros, one of the younger students in my class at the school in Concepcion.

When I went upstairs to teach the older class, Wendy, one of Lauren's students, was still upstairs.  Her eyes lit up and she came running to me and said, "Teacher!"  She gave me a big kiss.  She is the cutest little girl I have ever seen.  I've been thinking about packing her in my suitcase to take her home with me.

Our older class was sleepy today.  They all looked like they were about to fall asleep although they were all still following the lesson.  I tried the same exercise with the verbs as I had done with the younger kids and they all looked like they were too cool to do it.  I guess we'll have to try something else.

Lauren and I walked to where Tino had told us to go to find a taxi.  There was only one and people were getting in just as we were coming up to it.  Thankfully we remembered where we had caught the taxi the first day with Tino and went there.  We made it back without a hitch and I got to practice some Spanish with people other than Tino, Mari, and Leslie.

After lunch I had my Spanish lesson.  She liked the story I had written and we talked more and I did more exercises.  I'm getting better at it!  Little by little.

I worked on creating a button in Photoshop for the webpage this afternoon.  It's going to be slow going, but hopefully I'll be able to get the hang of it pretty soon.

I'm exhausted.  The garbage truck woke me up at 6:45 this morning with it's funny music.  I'm going to finish my homework and go to sleep!  Sleep well everyone!