Game Night!

This afternoon/evening, I just stayed home with my family because the weather was icky and cold today and Marta has been sick. She's feeling much better though. The three of them took a siesta this afternoon and I did my homework. One interesting thing about school here is that the profesoras require us to use pen. When we had our placement exams and were all sitting there with pencils out, they told us to get out pens to use because "pencils are for kids." Haha. It's fine except that I make quite a few mistakes when I'm trying to write things in Spanish, so I end up needing to scribble, which I don't like. It's making me get better at thinking before I write though. Then Marta came downstairs and wanted me to help her with her English homework. I love doing that. It's fun to see what she is learning and hear her try to say the words and read. She's pretty good at reading. It's also good for me, because explaining an English word in Spanish can be quite difficult. After that, Marta really wanted to teach me how to play a traditional Spanish game she has been talking about. It's called Tres en Raya, and is very similar to Tic-Tac-Toe, except it is a little more complex. You only have 3 pieces per person, and you set them all down on the board. Then you keep shifting/moving them around one at a time in an attempt to get three in a row of your own, and stop your opponent from doing it. It involves some good thinking and was really fun. I actually won the first time I did it! I was proud of that because trying to understand her directions was a little bit confusing at first. Here's a picture of what the game board looks like. I was going to attach a link to a site about the game, but the site was in Spanish so I did not think it would do you any good to read about it like that. :P

We played a few rounds of that, and then she got out another game called Tic Tac Baum. Her mom played with us too, because that game can have many players. It was just us girls because Jesús was at work. It's a Spanish board/card game type thing. You roll a die and it tells you what card to draw. There are 5 or 6 different cards, with different word-related tasks to do. Some have a category, like "Things you could buy at a kiosk" and then you have to think of a word that fits it. Others have 2 or 3 letters and you have to think of a word that starts/ends with it. Others have letters scrambled up and you have to make a word, etc. Then there is a little bomb-type thing that beeps when you are playing and you pass it around. Whoever has it when it explodes loses that round, and you keep track of how many times you get exploded. It's a pretty simple game, but in another language I wasn't sure how it would go. I actually did pretty well, and my host mom was very impressed at how quickly I could read the cards and then think of a word in response. I need to thank Alissa Zink for that I think. She is a wonderful person and we played the word game Ruzzle on our phones in Spanish while we were at UND this spring! It was crazy and super hard at first, but eventually we got better at seeing Spanish words in bunches of letters instead of naturally seeing English words. So thanks, girl! :)

Both games were really fun and we enjoyed playing them and spending time together. I learned a lot during the second game too, and my vocabulary here increases every day. It's also fun to be able to start joking back and forth with them and using a bit of sarcasm. It just makes the environment more relaxed, and it feels more like home when we aren't just speaking to each other by asking necessary questions or weird concrete questions just to make conversation. Being able to converse over what is on TV or what we are doing is so much better. I'm really glad I have a family who likes to do stuff with me and engage me in their activities. They are so nice and wonderful and I'm excited to spend more time with them and get to know more cultural things. Marta said she has more fun stuff she wants to play, so we'll see where that leads! That was enough brain stimulation for the night, so I'm off to bed! Hopefully it's nicer tomorrow, but I don't think it will be, because Jesús asked me tonight if I brought a jacket for winter. Ha!