First day of school!

Today was my first day of school! When I got there I was super nervous. My host mom introduced me to Nicol, a friend of the Ortega's, and she was really nice and she's in my grade so she showed me the way to my first class. I was cheerfully informed that she speaks english, and my only thought was noooooooo! At first Nicol only spoke english to me, but I told her I wanted to speak spanish, so thankfully, she started speaking some spanish. I almost feel weird about asking people who already speak english to speak spanish with me, because their english is usually much better than my spanish, so it takes a lot of patience on their part to try to communicate to me in spanish, but she was pretty cool about it.

Nicol showed me what my schedule would look like and I almost passed out from shock and horror. Everyone told me that school here would be really easy, but I'm thinking they were all wrong. My first class was diseno, or design. It was all a bunch of stuff about "data sources" and "dialog" and "input". The professor dictated the lesson and we all copied it down in our notebooks. Here this is a very typical classroom style because schools don't want to spend a lot of money on textbooks and materials. This is a nightmare for me because auditorily comprehending spanish is twice as difficult as reading it, but I was able to copy everything down with 95 percent accuracy, and then Nicol let me borrow her notes so I could copy the other 5 percent. However, I'll probably be spending a great deal of the afternoon trying to figure out what the heck any of it meant.

Next was Honduran History, but I just doodled because they were doing an exam that I wasn't required to take and then we had programming class. Programming class. I copied down everything on the board, but obviously, I don't have one iota of background knowledge about programming, let alone programming in spanish. The professor walked up to me and asked if I knew anything about programming. Nothing? Really? And then he stood there for a minute thinking, and then he gave me a look that basically said "you're screwed", turned to Nicol, and said, "You teach her". Nicol laughed and did a faceplant on her desk, and then turned around.
"You don't know anything about programming?"
"Uh, no."
"Nothing? Really? Uhh..."
"Uhhh"
"Uhhhh....well, first you...you have to...I don't know where to start."

But then, thankfully, our next class started. Our next class was Computer Repair, which I also know nothing about. Nothing. Really. I just sort of stood around until the professor handed me a metal clippy thingy and a wire, and showed me how to twist them together and then I stood around some more until some girls grabbed this burning stick thing and showed me how to weld something onto the clippy thingy and then they told me I was supposed to wrap the wire thingy around the pencil, and I have no idea what I was doing or why, but apparantly I did it well because somehow I ended up with a wire thingy that everybody was really impressed with. Uh, okay.

After Computer Repair, we had break. I was starving but had left my money in my bag in the classroom, which apparently they lock during break, so Nicol bought me a bag of chips and a juice and introduced me to some of her friends. We did cheek kisses (that's the thing here, no hand-shaking) and sat down in a circle and at first, everyone was really quiet and sullen-looking. I was thinking, is something wrong? Do I smell funny? Do they hate me? But then Nicol said "They don't want to talk to you because they are shy and they don't want to practice their English...even though they should!"

"Oh!" I exclaimed. "No, no, no! Speak spanish, I need to learn!" and then I started talking to them in spanish and they all smiled and started to talk and were surprised that I spoke so much. Apparantly they were shy because they thought they had to talk to me in English! Haha!
After that, Nicol spoke to me mostly in Spanish and told people we met that I understood spanish, thank the Lord.

After break, we had the class Tutoria. To be honest, I'm still not really sure what Tutoria is, but I think it's some sort of economy class. I almost gave myself an aneurism trying to figure out what was going on. Attending class in spanish is really frustrating: I would say that I speak spanish, but when I am sitting in a chair and listening to someone talk sixty miles an hour about a subject I know nothing about, I really have no idea what's happening. Even if I know most of the vocabulary and I would be able to copy the lesson onto a piece of paper, sometimes I just can't put the words together, I don't know the rhythm; the phrases. It's hard to explain-- it's like trying to watch a movie when you're starting it towards the end and the volume is turned way down low. So I want to learn as fast as possible because I hate being that person who walks in on a movie and goes "so what's happening again?"

Our last class was Philosophy. Philosophy! Oh, thank you, sweet Lord! Rousseau, Thoreau, Locke, Aristotle...reading! Speculating! This is something I understand. And we even had a worksheet! Visual aid, yesss. Everybody I've met here in Honduras loves Math, Science, and Computers, but me? I'm from America! We don't have practical classes in High School! I'm used to living in a place where it's completely acceptable-- if not, normal-- to blow off math and to love choir and art and literature, and to have some fluffy plan for the future like studying Literature and writing novels or becoming an actress. (Apparantly they don't even have literature majors in Honduras!) Obviously, Philosophy is going to be my favorite class.

I was informed that they have fewer computer-related classes in the tenth grade, and I thought about asking to switch, but then I found out that seniors (11th graders are seniors here) don't have to take PE. Woohoo! So yeah, I'm staying in the 11th grade.

After school Nicol took me to a "Pulperia" accross the street with some of her friends, and one of the guys bought a 2 liter pepsi bottle to share, but we didn't have cups so we poured it into plastic bags and drank out of them with straws. Haha! I was also given "Churros", which are not, in fact, dough sticks covered in cinnamon and sugar, but a sort of savory chip. Nicol's friends made a few hilarious attempts at English conversation (what's uuuuuuuup?) and I was relieved to find that they are shy about speaking and/or don't speak very much English. Maybe I will learn spanish after all!