Spanish Class (the learning side of the trip)

Alright so I have been writing about everything that I have been doing in Merida over the first full week but I haven't been writing about one of the most important reasons that I am here.... SCHOOL!!!  Alright so here is the gist of what I have been up to on the learning end of this trip.  To start off when we got to school on the first day we all took a placement test and then they put us in our respective classes, which they already had assigned so I really wasn't sure what the test was for.  I got put into the advanced class, which I wasn't really expecting, and from there we started to learn.  The first class of the day is from 9-12 with a 20 minute break at 10 and this is a grammar class.  We don't speak any english in the class while we are learning, and our teacher speaks very little in general.  I think that this is really good though because one of my goals for this trip is to become fluent in Spanish and having it spoken to me all of the time is a very good way to learn it.  So anyways in our grammar class we obviously learn grammar, but we also talk all of the time, and play games like having to describe things on the board to a person that can't see the word, or pretending to be news casters and having to read the paper and then reporting on the news, and other things like that.  Just getting you used to using Spanish more frequently.  So this is pretty much what we do everyday in class and I really enjoy this class because I feel that I am learning a lot and using my spanish more properly.  Oh, on a side note, we have a test on wednesday in this class!!!!  Okay, at 12 we get a half hour break, which usually consists of walking to the bank or the corner store to buy something to eat because we get hungry and lunch isn't till like 2:30.  Then, at 12:30, we have culture class which is really fun.  In this class we also only speak spanish, but we go to places in the city and learn about the history, or the other day we went to "El museo de Canciones Yucateca" which is the museum of Yucatan songs, which was really cool because it told about the origin of the music and its influences and all of the different kinds.  We also learned to salsa in culture class on friday, which was fun but also really tiring.  Overall the culture class is a little more laid back than the grammar class but it is still just as fun and also helps us to understand the culture of where we are living at not just the language.

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My school, the front door