INDIANS' CULTURAL DAY

Yesterday I spent most of the morning preparing my suitcase because we are going to travel to Yellowstone on Sunday and we will stay there for 2 days. As it is really far from Spokane, the first day we will stay in Idaho Falls before arriving to Yellowstone National Park. Although we travel only for five days, I packed much more clothes due to the fact that we don’t know what the weather will be. I brought some shorts, but I also picked up some sweaters, pants and my raincoat in case there was a storm.  After having lunch Sandra and I watched a TV show, but then Chema said to Sandra than she had to tidy up her bedroom before we leaved so I decided to help her. Her bedroom was a complete mess so it took us all the afternoon to clean it up. We finished in time to have dinner and after these we went to the Idaho casino to watch a cultural presentation about the Indians’ life. In order to let everyone know more about them they showed us some typical dances but I didn’t like them due to the mistakes they made because they didn’t know all the movements of the dance. I was a little bit bored after watching the presentation, not because it wasn’t interesting, it could be, but because I’m not interested in traditional dances at all, even if they are “los Charros”. We accidently stole some cake. It was for people with birthdays in July, but we didn’t know, and we saw it was free and took some. We had 45 minutes driving to arrive to Spokane so we decided to leave immediately when they finished their last dance. Instead of going straight to home, we passed through a shop to buy an ice cream that we ate in the car. To conclude this day we went to bed.

EASTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Yesterday I didn’t need to get up early in the morning because I didn’t have to work, so I had breakfast quietly and then I tidied my room and did the washing up. I also decided to write a little bit of the blog and looked up some connectors on the Internet to learn them to improve my writing. When it was time to have lunch, we prepared the lunch for Samuel and we brought it to him, because he had to work in the pool until 9 pm. Furthermore we decided to go to the grocery store to buy some steak, corn and peppers for the dinner and after all that we went back home to have dinner. When Sandra arrived home after her job, we drove to Cheney, to see the college where Chema teaches. It was really huge and modern; they had computers and digital boards in most of the classes. He showed me the gym and they have an ice rink and a rock climbing wall, I loved it.  We walked around the campus as well and we visited the library but it was the thing that less impressed me because I had seen before larger libraries. When we had seen almost everything we went to the Indian Casino to look around before going back to have dinner. While we were inside Chema walked the dog as we had brought him with us because he had to have his nails cut and we had to buy him a new harness because his previous one was broken. That day we ate the steak and as a dessert brownie with vanilla ice cream. Instead going to bed we decided to complete the puzzle due to the fact that on Sunday we will travel to Yellowstone and we had to finish it before we leave. While we were finishing with the puzzle we were also watching a movie that was recorded in Spokane, and Diane told me where are the places that appeared in each scene. We watched two movies the first one was about wrestling and the second one about autistic people.

LAST DAY CRIME SCENE CAMP

Yesterday it was the last day in the Crime Scene Camp, and the most important one because the children would discover who is the murder. As we hadn’t finished the chromatography the previous day, we finished it and we asked them to write a document with their conclusions. But it wasn’t as easy as it seems to be because they had to explain to who each evidence belonged, and if they chose one of the suspect as the murder why they discarded the other ones. The guilty was Bo but only three groups of nine discovered the correct answer the rest of them said that it was Erin his brother. After we congratulated the winning teams it was time to have lunch, and we had to prepare the expositions of the activities the children had made during this two weeks to show it to their parents that would come as it was the last day of the camp. We also gave them some diplomas and we will send them some badges that we had printed in a 3D printer with their detective names. I realized that it would be interesting to have a document that certified that I had been volunteering two weeks in that camp, to put it in my CV, so I asked the headmaster if she could give one to me, and she said that they will give me a letter the next week when I’ll go to the robotics camp. After this long and busy morning I came back home to have lunch. That afternoon everybody had a lot of things to do, Sandra had soccer practice, Chema and Diane had a memorial funeral of a friend so I stayed at home with Samuel watching a movie, reading a book and completing the puzzle, then when they came back we had dinner and we watched to the news, because it had been another fire here where a little girl had died. After all we went to bed.

CINEMA DAY

Yesterday in the morning, all the kids were looking at their evidences to find out who was the murder, they compared the footprints of the crime scene with the samples. They did the same with fingerprints, the apple bites and the handwriting. They also had the opportunity to interrogate the suspect to finding out more information; it was really interesting to listen the questions that they asked. They were really good ones. After listening to what the suspects had to say, they could decide which one had a motive to kill. The last activity we did was the chromatography of the crime scene’s pens to see which pen was the one with which the murder wrote the letter to the victim. We only had time to do the one with the alcohol. When I arrived home I had lunch, like everyday, and then I decided to fix up the blog because the previous one was giving us problems, as we couldn’t read it. When I finally finished it was already the time to have dinner and we decided to go to the cinema after it with a friend. The film that we saw was inside out and it was a Disney movie, which characters are Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and disgust that are the feelings that a girl called Riley feels. The movie started when Riley had to move to San Francisco and everything was different for her, but the problem started when Joy and Sadness were lost inside a maze and they couldn’t help Riley to be happy or sad, she was angry all the time and she was losing all her most important memories and with them all her personality, so she made a radical decision to run away home alone, but if she escaped she would never be happy again… It was a really good film, it was sad but I really enjoyed it. When it finished it was 9 and here that means time to go to bed, so we came back home and we went to bed to be ready to the next day of work.

GOLF DAY

Yesterday was a really funny day in the camp, because the children had to collect all the evidence from the crime scene that we had prepared the day before. Everybody was very excited, because they had been studying al the different techniques to put them into action now. If you looked at them, they acted like real forensics, taking notes and pictures, walking carefully trough the crime scene to not contaminate it. While one of the teams was recording evidences to solve the crime, the rest of the children had to wait for their turn, they looked in the microscope at some plants and hairs. We also played a game that is called deception, in which you have four people, one of them lies and the rest answer the true to some questions that we asked them to figured out who is the liar. That game gave us the opportunity to explain them, which are the signals to discover if the suspect isn’t telling the truth. At the end of the morning everyone had all the information about the crime that they need and it was time to come back home. Chema picked me up and when we arrived I had lunch and then we decided to do a puzzle. We spent all afternoon until lunch completing it; we didn’t finish because it is a puzzle of 1000 pieces but we did a lot of parts of it. After dinner Sandra had soccer practice and Chema and I went to play golf. I really enjoyed it, because the course was really easy as all the fairways were very straight. Nonetheless I didn’t play very well. When there wasn’t any sun left we returned home, and after taking a shower I went to bed, because I was tired.

COOKIES DAY

Yesterday I went to work early in the morning. We finished the chromatography activity that took us almost all the morning and we built the crime scene. We painted the fingerprints into the caps, we drew the shoe pattern, we splattered some blood, we drew the outline of a body, which was mine because it was the smaller one… When we finished the crime scene and the activity with the kids was finished we decided to play memory game with them and they loved it. At this time it was lunchtime, so we stopped everything. The teachers decided to drive to Taco bell, a “Mexican” fast food restaurant to pick up her food, and then they came back to finish the camp day. We talked to the police officer of the school if he didn’t mind to talk to the children about what the police do in a crime scene, and if he could tell them what they would have to do in the crime scene that we had prepared for them. He acted really well and he pretended that everything was real, he also explain everything in a very easy way so everybody could understand him, even me. At 1:15 Diane picked me up and we passed trough the grocery store before we went home to have lunch. In the afternoon I wrote the blog and then Sarah came over to make some cookies. First she had to complete a Spanish test for see the level that she has, so Sandra decided that while she was doing that she would correct my blog. When we all finished, we went for a walk and we found a wheelchair that hadn’t an owner so we brought it home and we cleaned it, then we decided to returned it to the park in case some one would came back for it. After having dinner, we cooked the cookies and of course we ate some of them, they were delicious. It was late when we finished so when Sarah went back to her house, we went to bed.

PAULA

LAKE DAY

Yesterday we woke up late, because we were tired because of the trip from Seattle. We were invited to go to a cabin in the Marshall Lake, and we decided to go to spend the afternoon. After eating a Sandwich, we drove to Idaho, where the cabin was. When we arrived after driving in a terrible route, we discovered a wood house in the middle of a hill. It was beautiful but it had 150 stairs to go from the house to the lake. Can you imagine going up and down all the time? Is it a house for relaxing or for working out? It hadn’t plumming so living there for a week would be as camping but with walls. In spite of my criticisms we had a good time there. Sandra and I decided to go kayak and then we went into a paddleboat but it was weird because we couldn’t go straight, only in circles. I didn’t swim because it wasn’t very hot but the dog did, and he was really happy. We also enjoyed the afternoon. Now I have the experience of being in a cabin. When we came back we went to buy a pizza for dinner. It was a special pizza because you can make your own one. We could see all the ingredients, and choose the ones that we wanted to put into our pizza. After having dinner we hung out with a friend. We walked around the neighborhood and went into the park of the elementary school that is near our house. After that we watched 50 first dates, a sad movie, that is about a girl that lost her short memory in a car accident, and she thinks that every day is the same one, and her boyfriend has to make her fall in love with her each day. When it finished we went to bed.

PAULA