Weeks 12 and 13: Confusion, Tricks, or Treats

If you've been following my blog for a while, you may remember my describing something which falls from the sky that isn't really rain, but also isn't really snow. Well, whatever it's called, it happened again this morning while I was walking to school, but this time it was at least a little bit closer to snow. It doesn't collect on the ground in piles as snow would, but rather in small puddles as rain would. It does, however, collect in little frozen piles on fallen leaves in a manner that is more similar to snow than to rain.* I know it isn't snow, not really, but having grown up in a relatively warm part of the world where school would be closed (or at least the beginning of the day delayed by two hours) at even the slightest hint of snow in the air, any sort of weather that resembles snow is yet somewhat fascinating to me. I realize that a few months from now snow may become a rather commonplace thing and I will get used to it and it will become less of a thing of wonder to me, but for now, it is still fascinating to me.

Apart from the weather, another difference between where I am from and here is the use of the Metric System. In school, I have been taught about and how to use the Metric System for many years and have even used it many times in various mathematics and science exercises. That being said, I don't fully comprehend everything about the metric system and that has been made clear over the past week or so. Last Thursday, for instance, in my chemistry class, I spent about 40 minutes reworking the same problem in attempt to get to the right answer before we figured out that my errors weren't in the math of how to solve that type of problem, but in my converting milliliters to liters, etc. thus making my answer about 100 000 times bigger that it should have been. I think though, now, that I may understand better, and hope in the future to be able to do math without so much struggle over comprehension of basic metric units.

Last Friday was Halloween. Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays; the costumes, treats, and parties being something to look forward to each year. Halloween is not really celebrated here traditionally. Over the past ten years or so, I've been told, some Halloween things have crept into stores and things, but as nothing much more than in a commercial way, and it still isn't really celebrated. For instance, I heard someone saying something to do with Halloween celebrations on Friday "even though it isn't the actual day of Halloween". I didn't interrupt and correct the person, I am much too shy to do that, but it made me realize that not much is known about what Halloween really is. During the day on Friday, I told the children (with my host mom translating) about Halloween, including about trick-or-treating, and they then went "trick-or-treating" inside our house. Also, in the spirit of the season, I carved a Jack-O-Lantern and made some of my family's traditional Halloween foods in an attempt to share a part of my culture with my host family.




*Some people consider discussions of the weather an indicator of whether or not someone is a boring person. I don't agree with this ideology. I find discussions of the weather interesting and I assure you, I am not a boring person. Probably.