birthday party

Joy Prior
Professor Cherry
Interactive Activity
I went to a Birthday Party for my friend Liz’s dad. It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed myself a lot. There were several things that I noticed first time, food, language, music, and how patient everyone was.
The birthday party was suppose to start at seven, but no one could come at seven and so the party got pushed back to starting at nine. Liz and I wanted to go and see a concert so we left at about eight to go to our concert, and planed to get back in time for desert and leftovers. When we got back to Liz’s house at ten almost ten thirty that party had not even started yet. People were still arriving after we had, and they had not even started bringing out the dinner food. We made it on time for every thing.
There was a lot of good food. I mean a lot of food with a lot of flavor. It was all unique flavors to, none of this easily package stuff that you buy at the store. I had never tasted some of the flavor combination that were in the food. We had something that they called pollo loco, salad, fruit salad, rice, beans, and this stuffed homemade hot pocket. I can not remember the name of the last thing that we ate, but it was really good. It was full of meat and black beans with even some hard boiled egg in there. My favorite was probably the beans. They were really flavorful. Like I said before it was not the type of flavor that you get from a little premixed package at Wal-mart, but this stuff was really unique and good. The beans were in a runny sauce and they were small and light brown.
Speaking Spanish with a lot of native speakers was actually really embarrassing for me. I know that I have a horrible accent, and that most the time I sound like a five year old when I try to form a sentence. Everyone was really patient with me, and most of them just expected me to speak English. I spent most of my time listening, and I was surprised with how much I could understand. A lot of what they were speaking in was past tense and I was so happy that I had learned that in class. They told funny stories and laughed at each others jokes and memories.
When we first went to the party there was Latino music playing. I have become more a costume to Latin Music playing when I hang out with Liz, and so I did not expect the music to change. Then during the party her mom put in some eighty music. Everyone was laughing and talking and they all wanted to hear some good old time music. I looked at the CD and I expected that the eighty music would be like translated into Spanish or something, but it was not. The music was good old fashion eighty music, it was probably the same CD my own mom plays at our house. It was really fun for me to hear that type of music at the party, and to see everyone laughing and singing along to it. The people there were good and singing along, but I was thinking about how ridiculous our Spanish class must look in the early morning singing along to the hymns and making up half of the words. It was fun to see how universal music is in all cultures.
Her mom told me that I should come over and practice speaking Spanish with her. She hugged me and told me that she would love to help me learn, because it would be so nice to speak with me in Spanish. I realized how all of the people there could speak both Spanish and English fluently. They were really patient with me attempting to speak Spanish, and I think that it has to do with the fact that most of them understood how difficult it is to learn a second language. When I speak Spanish I get all self conscious and think about how I am spluttering this beautiful language, but that night I realized that native speakers a usually just happy that you are trying to learn their language.