*That is a good thing :)
Day at School: School ended for me on the 1st of December (officially on the 15th, but the exchange students ended earlier for reasons previously explained). I will soon by attending the culinary school, Esdit, from 8:00am-1:00pm each Monday, and in the coming weeks as more courses are made available, I will attend those. I am also looking to attend classes at a language school.
Problems: I'm kind of in a "half-way" point right now - school, Christmas, and New-Years Eve ended so recently, and I'll soon be starting up again at cooking school. So, not really any problems.
How's your Rotary Club? Good as ever! However, I have been unable to attend it quite so frequently due to the holidays and past trips.
What were the Holidays like?
There is an unfortunate lack of genuine disparity between the holidays in Northern America and Southern America (and, most likely, most of the world) due to Americanization. So, everyone's got their fake pine tree with presents underneath, we see Santa costumes everywhere (when I was in the Peruvian jungle, in the city of Tarapoto, there were a bunch of Santas on motorcycles with produce-carts attached to the front [to make a "sleigh"] circling the main square for the entire month of December. Quite comical!) and "snowflakes" on frosted glass windows. What's really funny is that most Peruvians haven't even seen snow with their own eyes!
However, there is still some differences: there is Christmas bread here (called Panetón), which is really interesting, in both shape and flavour, which is popular all year round, but especially so at Christmas - they have special Christmas panetones. Also, while we are accustomed to having a nice meal on Christmas Eve and going to bed early in order to get up early, and the big day and the big meal is on Christmas day - it's almost as if the two days are switched here. Dinner is eaten at around 11pm - 12am, with a gradual crescendo of exploding firecrackers (people purchase loads and loads of firecrackers [some even fireworks] and are supposed to light them off at 12:00am, but do it before and after for hours). At midnight, it sounds like a war with exploding bombs. Sometimes people say "Happy New Years!" soon after midnight (which confused me seeing as how it was December 25th). It's almost like they want to have Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's eve and New Years Day all at the same time!
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