La Escuela

For the first of many themed postings I thought I would write about la escuela (the school). This is the primary reason I came to Montañita, and (I presume) the secondary reason for Miguel´s (Mitchell´s new name) trip (his primary reason is the surfing).

As I mentioned before, we spend 4 hours a day in class at la escuela, broken into 2 hours of grammar and 2 hours of conversation. I have decided to add an extra 1 hour a day of one on one classes to practice more. (They only cost 9 dollars an hour!) As most of you would guess, I really really love learning Spanish and am really motivated to learn quickly because I am desperate to be able to talk to my family. There are always people popping into our house and asking me questions that I can´t understand or answer (more on these wonderful people later).

The school is owned by a gringo (white dude) who is quite the businessman. Although he brings a lot of business to the town (there are currently 30 students at the school) I don´t think he is especially well liked. I have heard that he is a difficult boss, and that he keeps most of the money he collects, as any very businessminded person might. The average wage here is only 1 dollar an hour. We had a barbeque at the school on Friday where we had tons of meat, chicken, shrimps, salad, potatos, rice, etc. The barbeque wasn´t actually at the school, but was at las cabañas which is kind of a hostel that the school owns. It is really nice, with private and shared cabañas around a common pool area.

The school itself is right on the beach. The first floor is the surf shop, where you can rent boards and get lessons. The second and third floors are the classrooms and the office. We also have some classes outside which is quite nice. When we have classes in the mornings they bring us warm bread and a milkshake kind of drink. These drinks are very popular in my house as well, and I think they are made of milk or milk powder, fresh fruit, and sugar in a blender.

Last week our class had 5 students in it...Miguel and me, an American girl who is 25, an English girl who is around 30, and a German guy who also works for McKinsey who is 27....a very fun group. I know that the German guy is not going to be in our class this week, but I think everyone else is. For my Spanish speaking friends, this week we learnt about 10000 verbs in the present tense (although didn´t learn to say "to go" until Friday which made conversations difficult), how to tell the time, about 1000 adjectives, all the posessive pronouns and stuff that we don´t even really know in English, colours, and a bunch of random words including "hangover" that come up in conversation regularly. We also learnt how to say "this" and "that" in both question and answer form, which is still confusing me, and the difference between "para" and "por". The difference between "ser" and "estoy" is something I want to master in my private classes this week.

Finally, some pictures for you of la escuela! I meant to take a picture of the front of la escuela today but ended up being to busy hiking / eating on the beach / going for a run / talking to little kids at my house that it was dark before I realized it.

This is our morning class in our 3rd floor classroom. The girl in the yellow is our professora, Ivonne. I don´t think we will have her again this week, but I liked her a lot. We took this picture with the camera´s timer so it is a bit strange looking. There is newspaper over the windows because they are doing a bit of construction outside:



Here is the view from the classroom (Other than the small garbage pile quite nice!!!) :



Here is Miguel and I with our afternoon instructor, Steffie. You can see my super cool boardshorts. (We surf right after this class) :