Hello! So today we're going back a week, to the trip I had last wednesday, to Telemicro Canal 5; a television channal building thingymajig. Like all the best stories do, this one ends up with me making a fool of myself on international television. When I'm big and famous one day, my fans will look back on the video of this experience and have an absolute field day, the haters will be chuffed, I am sure. But what's done is done, and what shall be taken away from this experience is not how stupid I look dancing reggeaton, but that now at the very least the world knows the truth about how good the british are at dancing...but I'll get to that later.

After the first class of school and a (REALLY comfy) bus drive over, we were stood in the foyer of the tv building, and the foyer itself was amazingly nice; part of the cieling was all slanty at various angles and made of mirrors so it looked really cool, again, pictures when I can. We waited there for a bit, and everyone got extremely excited as various famous dominican presenters or comedians would walk through, and they would come over and say hi and get a picture with whoever wanted one. I,of course, had no idea who they were, but they were apparently very good so I took my friends words for it.

Once all that was done, we were taken through to a room full of small screens showing various angles/edits/etc. of various shows, and they explained to us how it all worked. I didn't understand it completely, but by now I've learned to get the jist of things so I had a fairly good idea of what they were on about. We watched part of the filming for a news show, and one thing I definitely did understand was the presenter giving a shout-out to Colegio Padres y Maestros, earning a cheer throughout what I have lovingly named, the screeny room. We went on like that for a bit looking at various rooms with various screens that did various things, like editing, sound and so on.

After being shown those rooms, we were taken into what looked like a studio that hadn't been used for a while, with various stages and sets around the room, and we were shown all the lighting and stuff and they basically just let everyone roam free, taking pictures of each other on the various small stages and just generally being excited teenagers (at least, *I* was being an excited teenager, I'm not sure why but the whole thing was getting me extremely hyper and exciteable. My friends were subjected to lots of bouncing Jasmine hugs).

From there we went on over to the radio area, and sat in on a few radio shows. One of them talked to a couple of the students on the show, and the other one showed us all about how the radio station actually worked in terms of the songs and the adverts and the sound and everything. It was really interesting to see what it was actually like inside a radio room, because obiously you only here what goes on in there normally, but it was slightl disappointing in that it was pretty much just a normal room, though I'm not really sure why I expected it to be otherwise.

Then comes the most interesting bit. We were taken down to be in the crowd of a tv show, 'De extremo a extremo' and it was really cool and awesome. We did loads of cheering and clapping and wooping etc. and watching the dancers on the show was insanely cool, I still don't understand how people here dance like they do! Then, the unspeakable happened. They started pulling a few students up on stage, when they chose the other exchange student I should have seen it coming that they would get me up there too, and that I would have been fine with, but then they made me dance. And they made me dance reggeaton. You don't even want to know what kind of dancing that is, but it involves a lot of skill when it comes to rythmn, butt and hips, not much of which I have. Safe to say I returned to my seat feeling like crawling into a hole somewhere and not coming out for a VERY long time...

After we watched some more of the show as the audience, we all piled off back to the bus and back to school, me being teased endlessly by my friends about my lack of dancing skill. All in all I think it was a really fun day, and despite my HUGE embarrassment I had a good time for most of it! That's just about all I have to say for now, I'll get you caught up on everything else that's going on soooon, the picture for today is me and Thitiwat, the other AFS student in my school, in the foyer of Telemicro Canal 5, because that's like the only picture of the day that I can get hold of. Until the next time!

-Jazzy x