The Week That I'm Proud To Be American

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Unfortunately, no other country in the world seems to celebrate Halloween like the United States does, and none of the other Americans seem to celebrate Halloween as much as I do...this, however, did not stop me from wearing my purple wig and a neon blue striped jumpsuit to the AC Halloween party Friday night and an outfit painstakingly created entirely out of tinfoil to the AC Game Show on Saturday (our house's theme was Space Age - there was a REASON for the tinfoil, really). Luckily I had the presence of mind to have double layers of tinfoil, as the skirt bit ripped while I helped lead Morgannwg to win the dance portion of the show; someone's put a video on YouTube of me dancing with Simon under the caption 'crazy - you won't BELIEVE this'. It did incorporate lots of flipping, and I managed one split at the end of the song, another stroke of luck because there was no way I could have got up gracefully afterwards if the music had kept going. I also won us the singing portion, even though I realized slightly too late that I didn't actually know any of the words beyond the first line. however, since we couldn't eat or relay race as fast as Sunley house, and because they asked us this odd tiebreaker question about the advantages and disadvantages of growing mint next to cilantro in an herb garden (mint spreads really fast, and cilantro attracts snails. If only I'd known.), we lost. In a linguistically awkward but necessary segway, I did win in terms of my monthly grades, which I got from my tutor today. This month's grades are really a way of seeing how strict your teachers are, because we haven't really had enough work in any of my classes to truly determine a grade. Just like in the actual IB exam, we're graded out of 7 for our work and then a grade of A-F for effort (so a 7A is what all the second years pull all-nighters and go on sick list three times a week for). The lowest grade I got was a 6B, an entire point score higher than what teachers are meant to give you for the first month (a 5B means you're doing a good job, not really distinguishing yourself but doing well, i.e. exactly the observant wallflower you're expected to be for first term), which was obviously a really pleasant surprise. I'm even being gossipped about because I inexplicably got a 7A in music, a fact that Henrik shouted from the top of the watchtower when we went up there this morning during our free block. It's the highest point on the castle grounds, with the most stunning complete view of the castle and the Bristol Channel and yes, even England. The faculty doesn't exactly condone going up it, so they told us they'd blocked it up with cement; since I figured out the not-so-elaborate ruse the next day, I've started going up there when the complete lack of privacy here just gets to be a bit much. It's the perfect solution to my only complaint so far, besides the food; then again, problems here just seem to usually resolve themselves somehow.

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