Day 8: Ceviche, Centros Comerciales, y Conjugaciones

This morning, we went back to the regular school day routine: waking up at seven, enjoying a gourmet Josey breakfast, walking to school, and taking our four-hour spanish classes. This morning, though, instead of Josey flying solo, she was joined by her amiga mejor. Upon arriving at the school, we were given a brief tour and were introduced to our new classmate, Lisa, and new teacher, Jose Javiar (aka JJ aka Jota Jota). Lisa is from the Netherlands and was quite intimidating considering she already speaks English, Dutch, French, and Spanish quite well, but she was also very nice. JJ was also very friendly and nice, but Sutton was a little sad she never got to be blessed by Héctors presence. 

To start our class we watched a short video about a wishing well to practice our basic conjugations in present tense. This was mostly review and only had a few slip ups with irregular verbs. Once we were practiced enough in present tense, we moved on to Preterito Infinitivo. We started by watching a video about the daily routine of a man and the bad habits that grow and ultimately consume him. We also did a puzzle where we had to use alibis from victims to determine the liar. Then we assembled a word box to match the pronoun to the proper conjugation, and finally we wrote biographies about ourselves or famous people. Josey had already worked on this a little last week so did her own practice worksheets while Sutton and Lisa worked on some practices from the book. By the time we had finished, we were basically at the end of class so we just spent some time talking about the dramatic slapping moments from the Oscars and trying to remember what beach we had gone to yesterday. 

After our class for the morning we decided to reward ourselves by going out to lunch on Plaza de Francia. We enjoyed fresh mango smoothies, shrimp and fish ceviche and delicious patacones. After our bellies were full we tried to find a fun cultural experience that we could still do with the impending rain. 

What we came up with: Albrook mall - the biggest mall in Central America. We thought this might be a bit of an overstatement, but it wasn’t. The mall was humongous with basically anything you could imagine from movie theaters, to bowling alleys, to department stores, to Krispy Kreme donut shops. It was pretty overwhelming, but also fun to get to explore all the places and try to decipher each of the shops. After wandering through the mall for about an hour (and barely making it through one of the animal themed hallways) we decided to head back because we still needed to go to the grocery shop and it was getting late. 

After a quick run at a grocery store, where we finally found avocados and several other fruits and vegetables we had struggled to find thus far, we returned to the apartment. Much to our surprise, on our way home we spotted Kiki talking with Lisa in a school organized social hour. Sutton was excited to meet him, so we took a quick detour to say hello before heading back to cook dinner.