My project through the holidays went well; it was actually fun finding out how people celebrate different events here. One thing I found out was that not only is there a special cake for Christmas, but there's also a special cake at Easter. Must remember to try that when Easter rolls aro
und, all part of learning the culture right? One lady I interviewed couldn't celebrate birthdays as a child because her dad had died, which left no money for extras like birthdays and Christmas. When she was 6 she and her little sister began working for the school teacher, cleaning his house. They started work at 6am! Puts a bit of perspective on things eh. It was no surprise to find out that this lady loves baking today; she's got hundreds of cake recipes! She's one of the people I've met at the rest home, where a few of us go every week. We talk to them & help out with their activities, which is often baking cakes. Not much of a hardship! This week we made 1 apple pie & 1 with blackberries & apple. Ohh la la! It's fun talking to them and they're patient with our broken French :)Things got pretty serious this week: exams week. We had 8 again, but some were very short so don't feel too sorry for me! We had listening comprehension & production, written comprehension & production, a dicatation, a Biblical vocab test, reading aloud to the teacher, & the grammar test. I think most of us found the oral comprehension hard, it was pretty fast! For the oral production we had 10 mins to prepare for 1 topic, and the other 2 were spontaneous but we did the spontaneous ones first so it was a bit hard to remember what I'd prepared for the last one! We get our results back on Monday which is good cos I don't like waiting for things like that!
So I got my interviews done over the holidays for our assignment, but we haven't had to present them yet due to exams. That joy is delayed until next week. I've done mine on power point which will hopefully take the pressure of me a bit. As long as all the technology works! I found out some French Easter games. In one everybody rolls an egg down a hill and the surviving egg is the winner. Their egg apparently represents the stone that rolled away from the front of Jesus' tomb. But the one we're going to play in class is where contestants each have an egg which they have to throw up and catch. The first egg to break yields the loser. I'm not sure what the point is of the game but I reckon it'll stretch out my presentation to the desired 30 mins!
The lounge on our floor is looking great, thanks to some team work during the last few weeks getting it painted. Some of us have been selling snacks & stationery as a fund raiser to pay for the paint & the DVD player we got a while back. So it's a lot more cosy than when we arrived in September.
