Dinner Time!

What a week! Classes finally started so I've been much busier than I had been used to. Mondays and Wednesdays are packed with classes, so I'm always scrambling around. I got my first big assignment, a group presentation for my culture class. It has to be a 30 minute presentation on different parts of Spain (my group is doing Andalucia, Cataluna, and Madrid) and it counts as 25% of our final grade. We opted to present first, so the project is due Wednesday February 13. Yup, a week from when it was assigned. Very fun.

I'm also in a politics class which I despise. As if I didn't hate nor understand politics enough in English, it's even more miserable in Spanish. I have no desire to take that class, and even though it counts for absolutely nothing but credits, I am required to take it as part of the UNH Granada program. Mehh.

Friday afternoon I met with one of the host moms who organizes school volunteering. I went with her to a public high school in Granada that I will get to volunteer at. The school is bilingual, which means the classes are taught in English and Spanish. For example, sometimes a math class will be taught in English, and other times the teachers will use Spanish to explain concepts. It's very fascinating. I met a couple of the teachers and they are more than grateful to have me volunteer. Nicole and I will be volunteering in different classes from 8-11 Tuesday and Thursday mornings in various classes. Yikes! I have to get up earlier for that than my Monday/Wednesday class which starts at 8:30. Luckily, Javier has to drive by the school on his way to work at the same time in the morning, so he said he will take us. Anyway, I'm very excited to volunteer! All the students are very eager to learn and get better at English. The teachers told me that in the evenings they will try and set up small groups that I can talk to for an hour, separate from school, where I will get paid to talk to students in English for an hour. They call them conversation groups. It's pretty sweet! The teacher even gave me a small gift; I got a little bottle of olive oil, paper clips, red, white and blue connected to represent the USA flag, and white and green to represent the Spanish flag. It was adorable. She also gave Nicole and I 20 Euros just because. I didn't care about the money, I was more just excited that she appreciated our help that much! I start next week so I will see how that goes!

Our little helper

Nicole and I got to cook dinner for the family Friday night. They had friends over as well, so we had quite the audience. We cooked chicken pot pie (with a homemade crust) and mashed potatoes, something we considered American. Everyone really loved the food which was great! I was a little scared they wouldn't like it but all went well. They had never had mashed potatoes before and kept referring to them as pureed potatoes because they didn't understand the concept of mashing. Close enough though.

For dessert we made homemade chocolate chip cookies and chocolate covered strawberries. We served the cookies warm with melted chocolate drizzled over the tops. Needless to say, there are no more left. Overall it was a very successful night! I hope they let us do that again!

Dessert!

(Note: Finding ingredients at the grocery store was quite the process. First we had to translate all the ingredients from English to Spanish, and half the time they didn't exist here, or the family didn't understand what we were looking for. In the end everything worked out, we just left out a few ingredients and supplemented a few with similar items. Success!)