Chinese New Year + School Routine

   Yesterday we went to my host family's friends house, the same ones that came over for dinner this past weekend. Ying(the Chinese girl they're hosting) cooked all the food and it was all chinese, not orange chicken with eggrolls chinese but really weird stuff. We had like these giant noodle things the size of your index finger, potatoes and peppers(too spicy for me to eat), dumplings, soup with fried eggs in it, and for dessert these rice balls with peanut sauce inside, I thought everything tasted good except for the pepper potatoes. My host brother didn't even try anything, he doesn't eat anything. It was a fun night.

They insisted that I take a napkin, and Ying wrote happy new year on it in Chinese with the date

   On another note I've definitely developed a routine here in Portugal, but I'm not bored yet and hopefully I won't get bored. I feel like my Portuguese is improving a lot and I'm speaking Portuguese more and more each day. I got a paper back in Portuguese class that was an activity I did on my first day two weeks ago, we had to take a song and turn it into a letter, I got 'suficiente menos' which is like getting a C-, I think it's a good accomplishment! It was my first day of school too, I got most of my points off for not putting my signature or dating it like a letter, and then I didn't really put any accents or "ç" "ã" "õ" correctly, but it's understandable and I'm proud that I got that grade. My class has a philosophy test on Friday and I'm going to take it, I don't have to but I want to just to see how I do. Also I have  Portuguese Literature test next week, my teacher is going to make a smaller, more easier one for me to do. In P.E. we're still working on choreographing that dance, we're doing awful we have an 8.5/20 right now as our grade, it's an F basically. As far as my teachers go, they're really strange for the most part. My philosophy teacher gets so mad and the other day she chucked an expo marker at a kid for talking. My History teacher still tells me and others to "fuck off" and talks about really weird things that he probably doesn't even know what he's saying, at least I hope not. My English teacher is very timid, most of the kids try to take advantage of her. My classmates are doing work that I would have done in 7th grade, so I have a completely different set of assignments (a lot more) at a much higher level so that I can meet the curriculum for my English class in the US.

This post is really unorganized but it doesn't matter. This weekend my host family is taking me to Gerês it's a region about an hour inland from Viana with lots of mountains, my host mom is from Gerês and her mother lives there. They had snow earlier this week so hopefully it's still there! I'll update at the end of the weekend and will put some pictures of Gerês up.