¨Noone can make you feel inferior without your consent.¨ -Eleanor Roosevelt

Last week was one of the most difficult weeks of my life. To start, school was awful due to the constant antagonizing from my Lengua Castellena teacher. I would finish an assignment or an essay completely satisified, and he was there to remind me that it did not make any sense and that I would have to do it again. He also likes to use basic English when he talks to me and make jokes about how I ¨´understand´¨ things. 

This is a story worth reading, but mind you, 4 days ago, I would have become extremely emotional at the thought of anyone reading my blog being able to know this story. ´¨What happens in Spain, stays in Spain.¨

I´m not a big fan of P.E., and I did my highschool credit for it last year and was content that I had gotten it over with. Well, here everyone takes it every year. Luckily, the school is different and we have a different schedule everyday, so I only have to suffer through two days of it. Also, PE here seems to be more intense and the students take it more seriously. 

This is the part where I want to say that we were doing some extremely rigorous weight lifting or something impressive, but we had 15 minutes left and were playing tag. This kind of tag was the kind where you have to hold hands and run to touch someone who will then have to join the chain. Me being me, when my chain missed catching someone, I ran into a wall. I suppose that I could have fallen over but considered running into a wall was less embarrassing. I got myself back up and half of my front tooth was missing.... So now I was the strange American girl who ran into a wall and lost her tooth. 

There was also more problems due to the fact that on my school forms I only put the area code on the portion that asked for my parent´s telephone numbers. So my family picked me up, and they took me to the dentist where I was going to have to wait a week for another tooth. Luckily we tried another dentist as well and got one the same day. 

While we were waiting for the dentist, my host dad and I went and took a coffee at a nearby cafeteria. I made sure I was very careful not to open my mouth so nobody would stop and stare. Then, he and I had a conversation and it made me realize a lot. The ¨verguenza¨ is like embarrassment or being ashamed, and in Spanish, is something that you can have in social situations. He let me know that it did not matter what I looked like or what weird things I did in public or my friends or family did, that the next day, I could walk right into school with or without a tooth and not care what anybody thought. So when I finished my coffee, I was laughing and smiling and could later make jokes about not having a tooth. 

I think it especially made it better when I showed my friends from school(who aren´t in my class) the pictures of me without a tooth, and they laughed so hard at them and said ¨pobrecita.¨ The important part was that I could now laugh with them, at myself.