Tornado Tuesday

            While walking over to the BLUU to meet Rosa at our usual spot, I received a text message from her saying, “Hey, are you coming?” I was pretty sure I wasn’t late. We planned to meet at 1:00 and it was 12:59. Thinking that was a little odd, I simply responded yes as I walked through the doorway. Now I knew why she texted me. The bottom floor of the BLUU was swarming with people. It was as if all of Market Square had been pushed into the Union Grounds area downstairs. Rosa came up to me with a big smile on her face. “The tornado alarm went off.”

            “What?” I confusedly responded. Apparently the alarm had just gone off in Market Square and everyone was told to evacuate because of a tornado in a nearby area. I started laughing. I’ve never experienced a tornado- guess that might change. Within five minutes, we were told we could return to Market Square or go about our way. We decided to head upstairs to the food. To Rosa’s luck, they simply let her in for free, assuming she had been inside when the evacuation occurred. There’s no such thing as a free lunch… well there kind of was for Rosa today. Once we had settled in, we immediately started talking about the tornado. It was on all the screens. We both were excited. Neither of us had experienced a tornado before. We talked of how we hoped it would come a little closer. Of course I didn’t want it to cause damage, I just wanted to be able to say, yeah, a tornado came through my school. Pretty legit.

           

            We decided to take a break from tornado talk, and exchange our experiences over Spring Break. I told Rosa how I went to Disneyland three times, went to the beach, and saw a couple of movies. Of all the things I did, Rosa was most concerned with how much time I spent with my parents. She wanted to make sure that I did enough things with them. I feel like I did. Quite a contrast from when your friends ask what you did. They usually don’t want to hear about playing games with the family and having lunch with your grandma. Those were Rosa’s primary concerns. While her Los Angeles trip didn’t work out, she said she still had fun here in the fort. Most of her daytime was spent with her uncle, cooking and cleaning. That didn’t sound fun to me, but she was really happy to tell me about it. During the night, she would go out with her friends. She said while it wasn’t super exciting, it was nice to get a break from school. We needed that break.

            In terms of learning English, Rosa continues to maintain a steady diet of movies. She said that it is her most common assignment in her classes. That sounded pretty cool to me at first, but the more I think about it, the more I realize how boring that could get, but I’m not really a big movie person. Rosa loves movies, so I’m glad that that media proves to be so helpful to her learning. I bet watching films helps her not only learn the language, but pick up slang, or at least familiarize her to common phrases that would make little sense if taken literally.

            Probably most exciting, Rosa will hopefully be a student at TCU in the fall. She is to be admitted as a freshman, but she missed the deadline for turning in her paperwork. I hope the admissions office will let it slide so she won’t have to wait another semester.