The First Week of Spanish Classes

More characters, in order of appearance:

Yina - pronounced like "Gina." My Spanish teacher at ALPI. Super nice and only twenty years old.
Indira - Avy and Cricket's Spanish teacher. Also very nice and fairly young; I think she's twenty-six.
July - our instructor for our two-week teacher training course. Seems and looks much younger than he is; He regularly reminds us that he could be our father.

Experiencing my first apagone (power outage) at the moment. No fans, it's very exciting. And hot. Anyway...
After getting our phones situated at Orange, we had our first Spanish class on Monday the 5th. I'm really not a fan of the teaching method here at ALPI, but it'll have to do for the next few months. Basically, each class has a specific topic centered around a question and answer, for example:

A: ¿Cúal es la parte favorita de tu casa? (What is your favorite part of your house?)
B: Mi parte favorita es ___________. (My favorite part is _________.)

From there, the teacher holds up little pictures of rooms and you have to say or guess at what they are in Spanish. There's twenty or twenty-five notecards and with every one you go through, it's added to a list of vocabulary on the board. And that's pretty much it. You practice the vocab afterward, do little exercises, go and interview other students (Dominicans learning English) in the building using the same question and answer as you practiced in class. It doesn't sound so bad now that I'm writing about it, it's just not at all what I'm accustomed to.

During this first Spanish class, Cricket, Avy, and I were all together, but towards the end we had a little oral exam which was basically a test to see how much grammar you knew (if you could identify and use the subjunctive, future tense, por/para, etc. all fun grammar stuff). Avy and Cricket could pretty much answer none of Yina and Indira's questions while I could answer pretty much all of them. Not to toot my horn - Avy took French in high school and Cricket says he took two semesters of Spanish with a bad teacher. Anyway, that officially meant we would be separated into two classes, which was fine by me. The two of them ended up being in their own class, just them and Indira, and Yina is basically my private teacher since I'm the only one in the "class." I was a bit disappointed to find out there wouldn't be anyone else in my Spanish classes, but this is almost better. It takes off a lot of the pressure!

Our Spanish classes go from 9 to 11:30 in the morning, and our afternoon teacher training doesn't start till 2:00, so in theory we would take a concho home for lunch and then take another one back, but it's almost impossible to find a concho with three empty seats (at this point we're a little apprehensive to take them by separately) at midday when everyone else is also heading home for lunch, so we started the tradition of heading to a place called El Encanto a few blocks down from the language center. Basically it's like a Dominican Walmart with a cafeteria on the second floor (which we didn't discover for a few days) - you can buy anything there from machetes to diapers to a tea set. In other words, if what you're looking for isn't at El Encanto, you probably don't need it. Our first day there we didn't realize we could buy food upstairs so instead we bought some chips and headed across the street to Bon, the ice cream shop. Yes, my lunch was Garden Salsa flavored Sun Chips and chocolate ice cream. And it was delicious. (Although definitely not as delicious as whatever my host mom would've made, her cooking is always amazing!) We wandered back over to ALPI after "lunch" and waited for July ("Julie") to get there so we could start our teacher's training class. Eventually he arrived and we headed to the basement of ALPI (much cooler than the upper floors - there's no air conditioning anywhere in the building) where he told us about the methods we had just seen our own Spanish teachers doing a few hours before. Monday's class was only an hour rather than the usual hour and a half because July showed up late, but we were glad to be finally going home after an surprisingly exhausting day - all of us are still not used to the sun sucking the life out of us every day like this!

We attempted to take a concho home but failed miserably. Well, not miserably - we got on the right one, the A concho, it was just going the wrong direction. We ended up getting out at a place called Las Colinas Mall where Cricket and Avy ordered whole pizzas from Dominio's (no gracias) and we cooled off in the air conditioning while we figured out how we would get back home. In the end we decided that a taxi was the best option, since we had no idea where we were and were afraid to take another concho. In the end it worked out fine, but we found out we were a good twenty minutes' drive away from our apartments (or 350 pesos worth).

The rest of the week went along a bit more smoothly. We successfully took conchos to and from ALPI and discovered the cafeteria at El Encanto. We also had our first (and so far only) dance class on Tuesday. It was just Cricket, Avy, and I with Yina and Indira stumbling around the room and calling it merengue. I'm not sure when our next class is but personally I don't need it to be any time soon...

July also likes to tell us weird facts and stories about Dominican culture, like the ten rules all chauvinists in the Dominican Republic follow, including, I swear to God, "knock her up." It was interesting. July is not a chauvinist. He doesn't even wear a wedding ring because he thinks you shouldn't have to claim your spouse like that. Like most Dominicans I've met here so far, July likes to talk about his country and culture. Which is awesome, even if he does make it a little awkward occasionally.

Ok, this entry is running a little long now, I'll save the rest of this past week for tomorrow's post. Which I will actually do. ¡Hasta luego!