This semester my Spanish class (301) is one night a week (Thursdays) for THREE hours. This is the dumbest invention in modern collegic education. Period.
I sit in that class and feel myself getting dumber each week. People — and most of my class is native speakers — have given up all semblance of trying to speak Spanish. Even the teacher spends half the time speaking English. By the time we get to the second half of class everyone is drained, not only because we've been in class for an hour but because most of us have either had a full day of work or a full day of classes. We are mentally AND physically exhausted. No single class should be three hours long, but most especially, night classes should not be three hours long.
The class make up is about two-thirds native speakers. Several were born and raised in their Spanish-speaking country of origin. The rest are children of immigrants who grew up speaking Spanish at home. One woman works as a Spanish-language notary public at a bank. It's extremely daunting to try and participate in the discussions when they are in Spanish because the teacher finishes our sentences for us if she feels we are taking too long and the native speakers often cut those of us who aren't off to voice their opinions in rapid-fire Spanish, leaving us sort of helpless to respond as we didn't understand half of what they said.
The non-native speakers are made up of a French elementary school teacher who took Spanish in high school but is back in school trying to be certified to teach it as well. (More money) Three professors at the university who are taking the class to learn Spanish (one is auditing). And two freshmen girls who have been taking Spanish since elementary school but seemed as lost as I do. And then there is me.
We got our first test back today and I made an 87. I now have two 87s in the class because it's the same grade she gave me on my first composition. I was fairly happy with that because I didn't study as hard as I should have, owing to the fact that I was, in fact, in Spain for the beginning of the semester, then my parents were here visiting for the week leading up to the test. I felt even better about the 87 when she said to us how disappointed she was in our grades overall because she had expected us to make As and Bs and instead we made Bs and Cs and even Ds and Fs. Two of the native speakers didn't even bother to read the directions and thus did an entire section of the test wrong (they put all the verbs in present tense instead of the past tenses) and so what did the professor do? She gave the tests BACK to them in class today and told them to redo it and hand it back in. What is that?! If anyone should have known what was going on, it should have been them. I wanted to be like, "Oye! give me my test back and let me redo mine too, so I can ALSO get a higher grade!"
Anyway, this is all to say, Spanish class sucks. And I hate the subjunctive tense.
Every last weekend in September in Saugerties, N.Y. the crazy Kiwanis Club there holds a garlic festival. At this garlic festival is every imaginable form of garlic creation there is (including just garlic). You can buy garlic infused olive oil, garlic dips, garlic mustard and garlic cheese. If this was all there was, you might shrug and say, so, sounds like a garlic festival. Why should we care. But no. There's more. 
