Shake, Shake, Shake Your Tail

Last weekend was a long weekend or "puente" as they call it here in Spain. I decided to take a solo trip to Brussels and Amsterdam. I was busy the whole time and didn't really get lonely until the last day/night there. I think my favorite part of my trip was the day trip I took to Amsterdam. I got to visit the Anne Frank House, see Dam square/monument, wander the Jordaan neighborhood, and shop a bit. The weather was perfect and Amsterdam was such a cute city. I hope that in the future I can make another trip there for a longer period of time.
In Brussels, I got to do all of the things I wanted to do, which is the nice part about travelling alone. A lot of what I did was eat. I had most of the typical Belgian food including waffles, chocolate, mussels, fries, and kebabs. Kebabs are pretty much the same thing as a gyro. My favorite attraction was the chocolate museum. I got to learn a little bit about the history of chocolate, then see a demonstration on how pralines are made. My favorite part was the free samples :)

I also got to see all of the major attractions. I really liked the Magritte Museum, but I wish there would have been more of his artwork and less letters that were written to him in French or Dutch that I couldn't read. I saw the cathedral, Grand Palace, Palace of Justice and of course the Atomium. I think the Atomium is the coolest attraction that I have ever visited. It was built for the 1958 World Expo in Brussels. It is an iron atom, blown up 165 billion times. People can walk around inside of it and have a beautiful panoramic view from the top. It was very futuristic and I really enjoyed visiting.

Since we had the break last weekend, school was only 2 days this week for me. Wednesday I went in and taught sixth grade the different endings for regular verbs in the simple past tense. They had to fill out a chart deciding if the word ended in /d/ /Id/ or /t/. It really helped some of them because they have the tendency to say all of the words with an /Id/ ending sound. Now they can look back and the chart to help them better their pronunciation. 

Thursday was very exciting. I didn't actually have to go to school because we were going on a field trip to see a play in English with the 1st and 2nd graders. The play was in Los Remedios (my neighborhood), so I got to sleep in and just meet them at the place where it was. The play was about a dog, cat, donkey and rooster who form a band because their owner doesn't want them anymore. The biggest issue we had was that the play was in English, but Spaniards were acting and they had really bad accents. It was very hard to understand the play and many of the students left confused. Also, they seated us on the top balcony level, which normally would have been fine, but we booked the play last May. We have a student who is in a wheelchair and they would not let him sit downstairs, so one of the teachers had to carry him up the stairs so he could sit with us. I can even begin to imagine how he felt. It was really crappy of the company to book the only school with a student with a physical disability on the top floor. Also, none of the students could really see from the top floor because they were too little to see over the seats in front of them. I was nervous that one of them was going to fall over the balcony because of how they were jumping up out of their seats. The kids really liked the songs in the play though and the one "Shake Your Tail" has been stuck in my head all weekend...