Swedish Food and Salsa Dancing

What a great weekend :)

On Saturday night two Swedish girls , Therese and Helena, invited a group of exchange students (and some Mexicans) over to their house for a traditional Swedish dinner. They did all the work preparing it and serving it and it was delicious! There were 10 of us all together and we spent hours sitting around the table talking and laughing. (All of the guys there are engineering majors so they were trying to explain to the girls all the jokes they were telling that involved Calculus.) It was so nice to just hang out and spend time with the people I know best in Mexico. The only thing that bothered me was that I still wasn't able to contribute very much to the conversation. People were asking me why I was so quiet and it's because I'm still self-conscious about my Spanish. It's so strange for me to be more reserved because I normally share my opinions and contribute to conversations...oh well, it will be a personal goal for me in the coming months.

Afterwards, we all went salsa dancing! It was so much fun and, of course, I had about 213049835 awkward things happen to me. First, I danced with one of the guys who ate dinner with us. It was really hard to follow him and there were plenty of times that we were not with the music. I'm also somewhat surprised that I still have all my fingers because there were times that I thought he would rip them off while turning me! (I confess that I laughed the whole time but I don't think he knew why.) Then someone else asked me to dance (I didn't know him) but it turns out he was crazy so I made up some excuse to leave after two songs. Finally, I danced with some other guy I didn't know who was actually really good. The only thing that bothered me was that when he found out I was from the United States he started trying to speak to me in English. But, he couldn't really speak English and he kept saying ridiculous things until I told him that I understood Spanish. It kind of bothered me that he would assume that I couldn't understand because, after all, I am in his country. We danced until almost 5am (I was exhausted by the end of it!) but I had such a good time.

Now, however, academics are taking over for the week because I have to give a presentation on Wednesday (not nearly as much fun).