Now remember, Fergus and Lee are from Europe (Ireland and Scotland), so I had no doubt they could hold their liquor well. See, they wanted to go someplace close to where they were staying so, if necessary, they could "stumble their way home." So we relocated to an area of San Diego called Hillcrest. Basically the equivalent of Broad Ripple in Indianapolis.
This is merely one of many occasions that I am grateful I do not drink alcohol. No need to worry about if I would be able to drive home or not. And then, have you ever been around people drinking where as the conversation gets more in depth, you start to wonder, would they be telling me this if they were sober? I'm not quite sure. Not to mention people definitely get more giddy as the drinks go down.
So I guess I'd better do some background info here. Our last day of class, I was the only one teaching. We had to choose a text we wanted to base our lesson on. I wanted to educate them about something American. I originally thought of the Gettysburg address, but Lee shot that down quickly. Said the english in there would be confusing and not very useful to the students. Okay, fine, I can accept that. So I went to plan B, Halloween.
I chose a simple text about Halloween describing what the holiday was and how it's celebrated in the United States. I then showed them a couple of youtube videos show kids bobbing for apples and trick or treating. Then I showed them some pictures of me dressing up the past several years. The last activity was they had to think up of a costume they wanted to dress up as and then go trick or treating. They "knocked" at my door and had to explain their costume to me so they could get some candy (which I had brought in).
The problem is, there were three guys there (who actually spoke English fairly well) that were refusing to participate. I was not going to let them get off easy, so I said if they were not going to come up with a costume, the rest of the class would come up with one for them. This one guy, Ali, I said, "Why don't we make him a fairy?" To this, I got a bunch of blank stares. So I said, "You know? Peter Pan? Tinkerbell?" More blank stares. Then this guy from Turkey, who looked up the word on his phone, says, "You mean a homosexual?" To which I said, "What dictionary are you looking at?"
Apparently it was urbandictionary.com, and I found out that day calling someone a "fairy" was another way of saying they were gay. I had never heard this in my life and when I asked Mom about it later she says she's known that for years. My classmates in the back were absolutely rolling with laughter. One of them said later what made it even more hilarious was it was blatantly obvious I had no idea about the alternative meaning of the word.
Back to the drinking scene. I got teased about that the rest of the night (the fairy story). Lee went on to tell me when he was having to grade me during lessons, it was difficult at times. He said he would be sitting there thinking in his head, "I don't know how that would work, but somehow with her personality, she is able to pull it off." Not quite sure what he meant by that.
Then he goes on to say (granted, this is after a few drinks), "Rachel, I can give you the most boring subject in the world and I know you would be able to make an interesting lesson out of it." So, is that a compliment? Not sure.
Either way, as the evening progressed, we covered all topics. Religion, relationships, politics, etc. I can honestly say I'm glad we did this after the course was done. If I had to go to class again on Monday, I'm just not sure I could look at my teachers the same way again.
I decided to head home once Lee's speech was getting slurred to where I couldn't understand him. European culture. It is what it is.
Next week and a half will be getting more preparations done to go. But in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy not worrying about school anymore.
Sasha, my english teacher friend from St. Petersburg, in front of Sea World
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