Nearly a week

well, it´s almost been a week- a great week.
at midnight on friday i met up with a bunch of other rotary kids and we took the bus from Catamarca to Córdoba, arriving at six in the morning. of course, i didn´t sleep at all and had to go though all the Rotary standards of lecturing about how i can´t use drugs and have boyfriends and whatnot. but that´s ok because we had a good time at night, we had a dance, but it was weird or "different" because it was a costume party. i was a ladybug. :) the cool difference from rotary in the states and rotary here is that in the states we could only dance until midnight or so, but here it went to 2:30 and that was still early... i didn´t sleep that night much, my bed was like a rock and my pillow like a brick- but in the morning i was awake because there was no hot water for the showers. auctually, the shower didn´t exsist much either. imagine a bathroom without a shower, now put a showerhead and knobs on the walls, a drain on the floor, and a squeegie. that was it. Sunday we did more rotary meetings about such and such and left around four.

we took the bus from Carlos Paz (sorry, the hotel was in Carlos Paz (close to córdoba)) to Córdoba with some older "used to be exchange students". we ditched our stuff at one of the guy´s appartment and headed out in the big city. we walked like half an hour looking for a mcdonalds that turned out to be closed. so instead we went to a mall, which surprisingly is not very different from anything in the states (except that their fast food is empenadas and strange sandwiches) so some friends and i walked around until we were bored and convinced the older guys to take us out into the city. so we did. it was so cool. the arcitecture (despite the enormous amount of graffiti) was spanish colonial and very pretty. we saw a fountain show, then continued to something to the equivalent of a flea market. there were tons of people but it was still a good time.

we caught the bus around midnight and returned to Catamarca at about 5:30 am. I came off the bus with a sore throat, and it´s only gotten worse. I went to the doctor today and it turns out i can´t go to school tomorrow. (yes!)

now school is something else that is definately not what im used to. i´m going to Instituto Belgrano, supposed to be the best school in Catamarca, and today was my first day. First, there are only 3 years for highschool (i´m in second) and you don´t change classrooms all day, the teachers rotate, oh and there are no books. When i first came into the classroom everybody was sitting on the desks or talking and doing whatever, so naturally i thought it was some sort of recess, but oh no. it was "culture" class. so i asked where the teacher was and she was sitting at a desk talking to a group of students. then the bell rang, all of us went out of the class room and down the stairs to a small kiosk in the school ( i think it´s pretty cool ) and hung out for the real recess. when we returned to class i came in and sat down but the thing is that you´re supposed to stand next to your desk until the teacher says you can sit, oops. i felt like an idiot. but it´s ok because i missed that class, me and two other exchange students were asked to do an interview with a seventh grader doing a school progect about the environment, so he asked us how our country informs the people about global warming (or as he said, global heating) and whatnot, i was really impressed with this kid, he was super smart. we stayed there for about an hour and a half , missing tons of class time. but when we did return to class, it was literature class which i think the teacher spent more time shhh-ing the students and only read through one paragraph. it´s definately "different" from Conserve School.