it´s friday night again

At the end of every week, I am so amazed by how fast it flew by. Which really scares me...this is going to be over way too soon.

I stay pretty busy Monday through Thursday. Although I only work 16 hours a week at school, I actually spend about 25 there, thanks to a daily 30 minute ¨breakfast¨ at 11 a.m. and a two hour ¨descanso¨ between 1 and 3 in the afternoon. Every day after school, I have private english classes...which pay bank but are a huge pain in my ass. Compared to what I do at school (pretty much just show up)--the private lessons are much more taxing, as I have to actually plan enough lessons to fill up the whole hour or hour and a half. Two of my students are classmates of my cousin Alex--10 year old girls who are easy to please with games and treats. However, my other students are adults, and this gives me a lot of stress. I am pretty sure one of them is expecting miracles out of me--which is so ridiculous considering she was my first adult student, and thus my guinea pig. My rates are very low due to lack of experience, so I don´t know where she is getting this idea that her English will be perfect after three classes with me. Oh well, I do my best.

Today I spent most of the morning in bed reading Nueva Luna. I am so addicted! I decided to finally start writing down the new words that I look up as I read, so that I will actually remember them after finishing the sentence. So it´s taking me a much longer time to read the second of the series, but I think it will be worth it in the end. This afternoon I went with my neighbor friend Sergio to Madrid because he needed to buy a book for a class he is taking. We went to this amazing store, FNAC, near Sol--aka tourist central. FNAC is sort of like Borders, except a million times bigger and better, complete with a 5% discount on everything in the store, year round! Afterwards, we walked around a bit before needing to head back for my paddle lesson. Sergio educated me on quite a bit of history--like how many of the streets here are named for the city they lead to (good to know) and the history of the new years celebration that happens in Sol (wouldn´t youuuu like to know?! I have to save that for a new years post). On the train ride back we were talking about the Atocha terrorist attack, and it was really interesting to hear about it from another young person--how he was in high school, how with each class, a new teacher would come in with a new death count. Although such a tragedy, the people of Madrid were lucky in so many ways--as the attack was intended to kill many more than the 192 that it did. Sergio was explaining that there were only two college students who died that day--as the universities were having a demonstration and thus all students were advised to not attend classes that day. Wow.