The girls are home from school already, a mere 12 minutes after it started! ha! Turns out there’s no school for the lower grades today. I had heard from a friend who has a kinder kid that school is cancelled frequently, and not just for holidays. And I got the impression that you don’t always know when it’s cancelled ahead of time.
So, this morning we all got gussied up (and 3 of us have been awake since the power went out at 4:30am and caused all kinds of beeping from our backup systems) and off we went to school. We entered in to the campus closest to our house, which meant we had to walk through the high school (blue shirts) section of the school. Four gringos walking through the school did not create any attention at all (note sarcasm!). It was comical because all the kids were milling about in the outdoor hallways and we had to walk right down the center of it all. Every single eyeball that had anything above 20/300 vision, was looking directly at us. It felt like the Oscars, and we were on the red carpet. The paparazzi were Panamanian high schoolers, with blue shirts on but no cameras.
Our first indication that something was wrong was that we saw not ONE child as we entered the K through 6th grade part of the school. No one. No white shirts, nope, nothing. I went to the office and spoke with the secretary and she said there was no class for them today. Ooooh K. Talk about anti-climatic. Clearly we didn’t get the memo about this day off.
She did confirm that school for Zoe gets out at 11:30 each day and Haley gets out at 1pm. I guess I don’t have to worry about what to do with my free time while they are at school! I’ll barely have time to work out (read: have coffee and look out the window) and take a shower before school is done. It’s like preschool all over again!
As mentioned earlier, we parked closest to our house and had to walk through the entire campus to get to our part of the school. When we tried to walk back the way we came, they had already locked the gate between the two parts of the school and so we had to walk all the way around the entire campus to get back to our car. Much sweat was spilled. We were some glistening gringos by the time we made it back to the car.
We did meet a mom and her two kiddos on the way. They had clearly been as uninformed as we were and we tried to tell her that the walk was a waste of time. But she clearly wasn’t going to take the word of some random gringa, so she kept walking to the school. She wasn’t glistening as much as we were, though. So maybe she just wanted the exercise anyway.
Stay tuned tomorrow for more pictures and hopefully a report on the full first day of school. For now, everyone is back in PJs and there is talk of another lazy day. I’m not a HUGE fan of all these lazy days but the thought of leaving the house is tiresome too. And the pool has suddenly become less popular with the girls since the crocodile sighting. Go figure.
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