Wednesday 11/19/08

Today was yet again a day where there were not English classes. I came at an unfortunate time of the year where the English teachers are gone at a training every single Monday and Wednesday. I slept in (aka 7am) and worked out on the elliptical while watching Battle of the Sexes with my brother (basically today was exactly like Monday morning). After spending the morning making final touches on my three essays, Jose Manuel and I headed to the school around 11:30. After lunch since I didn’t have classes to teach, I offered to help Maria in the kitchen. I became the new dish washer and enjoyed my time with Maria and Jessica in the kitchen. Afterwards I headed to the internet café to send my 3 essays back to my school via e-mail (Technology these days!). When I came home I hung out with my brothers and Maria gave me my daily afternoon snack of pancakes (if my pancake consumption doesn’t show up in a daily entry it is simply because it has such a daily event that that I forget to add it in). Later in the afternoon I helped my middle brother, Andres, by teaching him to bake chocolate chip cookies and chocolate cake. He and his classmates will sell them tomorrow as part of a school project. Other than a minor burn on my middle finger (which became the joke of the night due to its placement) my cookies were a huge hit and the family was addicted. Before dinner we all got out our school notebooks and compared handwriting (I won!). This eventually led to tons of doodling and drawing, which we did until dinner. As usual, dinner was accompanied by amazing conversation and plenty of laughter (especially about our first impressions of one another and laughing about how much more comfortable we are now in comparison to that first day together). We played checkers (which entails a few different rules here) and eventually headed off to bed.