Lunch... yum

The food at my school is absolutely disgusting. I have an hour and a half for lunch and my host parents will give me the equivalent of a school lunch ticket in money so I can go out and buy my lunch, but still, day after day, I eat at school- because my friends eat there, and I'd be a complete loser to go out and eat lunch by myself. This is the average lunchtime experience for me:

As soon as class ends I follow a few girls down to their lockers and then outside where they sit and smoke for a few minutes, then we get in line for lunch. The line is really a mass of people smushed into the side of the school by a iron barracade/fence thing. If we're lucky they spot someone they know and we either work our way up to them in line from the back or jump over the fence (its not very tall). Then we wait forever. 20 minutes, a half an hour, longer. When we finally get to the front of the throng we hold out our tickets to the guy standing at the front and he lets us into the lunchroom- where we wait for another ten minutes until we getup to the point where we can grab trays,utensils and bread. Bread is the one unlimited thing. I try to take at least two peices in case the food is disgusting. Then we get to appetizers. There is a range of appetizers- often I grab a bowl of lettuce, but there are also little platters with chunks of egg, tomatoes, and lettuce on them. Sometimes they have little plates of Salami and pickels. There is pretty much always this weird dish I don't understand. It sits on a peice of lettuce and looks like a slice of bread. The crust (?) is on three side and the center is a chunk of pink. I'm not sure if its meat or not. The final side is sealed off with what looks like clear Jello. Its gross, I haven't eaten it, but I know it is. Then we move on to the next set of shelves where we select our dairy product. There is always yogurt (I'm happy when they have Danone, the other brand, Le Petit Laitier is bad) and often chunks of cheese, sometimes they have little packs of Laughing Cow cheese to spread on the slices of bread. The next shelves are dessert. There are apples and oranges and some sort of cake or pasterie- it varies by day, sometimes there is also flan and pudding. Then we hit the lunch ladies with the main course. There are always two parts of the main course 1)a vegetable, pasta, or rice and 2)the meat/fish/unknown. I usually can't tell what the vegetable is. Its somtimes a big pile of green glop. I have never been able to tell what the meat is, ever. Usually the French girls I ask don't know either. I heard that one day there was French fries, but I got out of school early that day. So usually for lunch I eat bread, yogurt, lettuce, an apple, and a little bit (if its a good day) of the entrée. Its good they give us so many starters or I would starve.

I had my first test today. It was in Spanish and came as a complete shock to me. Apparently she had told us earlier that week, but I apparently didn't hear her/understand. Spanish is difficult for me- they are a few years ahead of me and it is all Spanish to French, no English involved.Its also Castillian Spanish, not the Latin American Spanish I've been taught. In class I sit with the Mexican girls who help me tons, but they couldn't exactly help me on the test. Luckily the teacher noticed my panic and explained that she wasn't going to grade mine, I just should try and do it for practice. I can't even explain my relief. The first part was translating French sentences to Spanish. I translated them all to English easially (I can read most French now well enough to get a (very) basic understanding, and these were easy) but I didn't know all the Spanish vocab to translate them into that, so I just did what I could. The second half had this picture we had been discussing in class and told us to write a response describing and analyzing it. I managed two sentences. One saying it was a grandmother washing her dishes after her birthday party and the other saying that the author was using black humor. Thank God this dosen't count.