Bored

Sometimes inspirational or good titles don´t come to me, and frankly I´m writing a blog post because I´m bored and have nothing to do during my 2 hour break here at the elementary school. It sucks that I am here from 9am-2pm but only work 3 hours. Since it is a town away from Cartagena, I can´t go back during my 2 hour break. So I surf the web, make lesson plans, plan trips, and day dream basically. All the kids here have exams this week, so that´s what we´ve been doing in class. It´s interesting to see the wide variety of levels in the English language here, a lot of the Moroccan students are still learning Spanish. I think there is some obvious discrimination against those kids, because of their origin. Both from the students, and I have seen some subtle actions from the teachers. I´ve talked with the other auxiliar about it and a couple of the teachers. Why do us brown people always get the short end of the stick? Really, where did darker skin become the "bad" and white or lighter skin become the "good" or "superior"?  In the majority of countries and cultures world wide, society always seems to follow this. Does it have to do with the general idea of lightness associated with heaven and darkness associated with hell? Daylight is nice but nighttime is scary?? I don´t have answers, i´m just writing thoughts. Even if two people are "pure" whatever, Spanish, Thai, Moroccan, etc. the child who comes out lighter skinned with lighter hair, is preferred or praised more often than the child who is not. It seems to be in only some parts of the United States and other countries where tanning or tanned bodies is desired. But even still, a tanned body is different than a naturally brown body. In the Spanish language, i´m a morena, which I know is just whatever, and is common, but it literally means brown girl. Or when they say el negro/la negra, it´s weird! It´s one of those cultural differences, or more linguistic differences that has taken me more time to get use to. Maybe it´s the fact that I am directly referred to as la morena? Because it doesn´t bother me when people say eres morena, but more when they use it as my name. I have a name, bruh. Should I take it as a compliment? I don´t know! Or if people would say la chica negra instead of just la negra. I should re-take linguistics.

That was a long paragraph. All in all, I understand the differences. But these are things that have crossed my mind more than a couple times.

Finding a flight from Madrid to Morocco has been more difficult than we thought, they´re pricey, probably because it´s only one way. Not sure what we´ll end up doing. Berlin is coming up, 2 weeks-ish, and it´s going to be COLD. As in, below freezing cold...pertty sure I´m going to die. I can´t find it in me to buy a new jacket just for that, plus how would I fit it in my suitcase on my way back to the states. Might go snowboarding en La Sierra near Granada, if it´s affordable.

The english language...why do we have two ¨f¨s in affordable if we only pronounce one? Or two ¨r¨´s in preferred if we only pronounce one?!

I´m looking on Pinterest for recipes, I looked up ¨Thai peanut sauce¨ then realized my mom is Thai....so I just emailed her. I need to learn more recipes. I don´t know how she does it, goes to work all day then comes to cook the best meals ever at home, incredible.

I guess bringing towels to the gym here in Spain, or in Europe in general is a norm, and a requirment. So when the guy came up to my sweaty self asking where my towel was, pretty embarassing. I didn´t know! Definitely went home shortly after that. It´s a nice gym though, with good classes.

I found a good website for printable coloring pages for a variety of subjects from the alphabet to holidays to music, better for younger kids. The website is twistynoodle.com