Occurrences

Today is Aksel's birthday. He is turning sixteen today. As I sit here typing this up, various family members are arriving for the party at six (it's five now).  As far as I can tell at the moment, birthday parties involve having a big meal with family. But more on that later.

This has been an interesting week, for sure. Sunday morning I did something that I'm sure would have happened sooner or later: I poured Keefir in my tee instead of milk. You see, the bags that they come in look exactly the same and when I went to grab a new bag of milk, I grabbed Keefir instead. I only realized my mistake when I saw that there were tube like streams of white stuff floating in my tee.

This has also been a week of weird schedule changes. On Tuesday, in addition to to taking the bus to school for the first time, our PE class also changed times to one block earlier because the rest of the classes' Estonian teacher wasn't there. We exchange students were hanging out in the library for three blocks because we had a free block, then  Estonian in the library, and then another free lesson before PE. It was nearly the end of the free lesson before PE, when a girl came in and told all of us that we had missed at least half of PE. When the four of us exchange girls got to the locker room, some girls we know we're exiting and told us that we had missed all of PE. Apparently someone had asked the teacher if we had been informed and the teacher said we had, but we never were.

Then the next day the five of us got to skip the first half of drama class because it was an assembly about summer vacation.

On Thursday, it was the first day of our English teacher's absence. Apparently there are no substitute teachers, so we were told what work we had to do before she returned on Tuesday and left to our own self-discipline for English class. Pretty much everyone showed up, but all but two of us left within ten minutes. When I finally left and went to the library, I found the rest of the class there, and some were doing the  work. We were also informed on Thursday that we didn't have to show up for the first two Physics classes on Friday.

Friday I had to take the bus to school on my own, and it arrived right after we pulled up to the bus stop. I had to quickly get out my wallet and get on, however I had a leaky travel mug of tee in one hand and the morning bus only takes cash, and not bus cards. Basically, I ended up dropping change everywhere, because my wallet doesn't have a coin pocket with Velcro or zipper and spilling at least half my tee over my jacket sleeve. Thankfully, a nice man in the front seat picked up the change I dropped and I managed to give the bus driver the right amount. As an extra bonus, when I walked from the bus stop to school it rained and washed off my jacket.

Friday evening, my host mother said that we might have a girl from Austria staying here as well. She is in Elva volunteering at the orphanage, but was getting lonely so she starting looking for a host family. She will be coming over tomorrow so we can all meet face to face and see how we'll get along. I hope she ends up staying, it will be great to have a teenage girl around. Who knows, I may even learn some German.