For me, commenting has been a huge part of this challenge and is a great way to connect with people. There are many things I have enjoyed about commenting but of course, if there positives, there are some negatives, and there are some things that are kind of irritating in terms of commenting. Overall though, I feel that commenting throughout this challenge has been very interesting.

There are great things about commenting. It is a good way to let people know what you think, to give people feedback, or to receive feedback. In short, commenting is a way of connecting. That is what I have enjoyed about commenting during this challenge. Connecting. Receiving feedback is a great way for me to know what people like or what I can improve. Sometimes people even write stories about their own experiences. It is amazing to hear what everyone has to say. The same goes for when I am commenting on someone else’s post. I love giving people feedback and telling them stories of my own. It is true that if I wanted I could write my stories in a post, but then it may not be relevant. Commenting directs what you want to say to one person, and it is almost like you are talking face to face.

Something I am not so keen on when it comes to commenting is replying to the comments when there are 10,000,000 of them! I love to hear stories, but sometimes when there are so many stories I just can’t read them all! I try to, but there are times where I can’t. I guess that is what I don’t like about commenting. That I sometimes don’t have the time to read all these amazing stories.

When I want to find an interesting post to read and comment on, I usually go to a friend and ask them to direct me to any good posts they have read. Usually, people have suggestions and that is what guides me to different posts. But, if no one has any ideas, I play “roulette”. I have only played it twice but roulette is a game I made to find a blog to comment on. All I do is go to the list of names of people in the challenge, scroll up and down for a few seconds, and then click. I get directed to a random blog and then I have something to read. How convenient!

In case you don’t know, I was one of the blogs on the comment list in the Week 7 post. Now that you know that, you can probably conclude that I got, I don’t know, 39,485,284,372 comments. But most were really good quality and followed the rules my “Commenting on My Blog” page, so I wanted to read them all. The majority had stories about other people’s experiences or told me something that I could fix, so they were really helpful! In short, I got tons of good quality comments on my posts, and I would like to thank the community for that. I guess without you guys, commenting would not be a thing!

Overall, I love comments and commenting. It is such a great way to talk and connect with others, and a great way to hear what others have to say to you. I can’t to see what other people are saying and what other stories people still have to tell!

I’m sure every school has at least one thing that we wish was different, or maybe it doesn’t have one thing that we want. Either way, nothing’s perfect, but I wonder what my version of a perfect school would be? But first, before I start comparing my perfect school to my real school, I guess I need to tell you about real school first.

I go to the International School of Dakar (ISD), which is in Senegal for those who don’t know. It’s a great school as well. It’s probably as close to perfect as it gets when we’re talking about school, but there are somethings I wish would change. We have four classes a day, each one eighty minutes. I have Social Studies, Math, Music, and Technology on one day, and Science, French, Language Arts (LA), and Physical Education (PE) on another. We alternate between those classes every day, so we never have the same class two days in a row. We’re also on this weird eight-day rotation schedule. It controls the order of our classes that day. We have the same classes every-other-day, but not in the same order. We have what is called “extended block” at the end of our second class on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Extended block is just an extra half-hour for us to work on school stuff of our choice. On Monday, instead of extended block, we have community meeting, and on Thursday we have advisory. We have a twenty-minute lunch break after extended block/community meeting/advisory. We also have ten-minute breaks between classes to get from one end of campus to the other. For lunch, you can bring your lunch, or there is a great place on campus called “Shady Shack” where you can order food.

I think that is all I can say about my school for now. But now I want to change some things and make it the perfect school!

First off, we need a longer lunch. Twenty minutes is not nearly enough and not healthy because we don’t have time to eat slowly! We have to scarf down our food. I’d rather they cut extended block short and gave us longer lunch. On days where there is advisory or community meeting, make the breaks between classes shorter, start advisory or community meeting sooner, end it sooner, longer lunch! Also, I am a hard-core ping-ponger, so it’d be great if they put in a ping-pong table. These are really my main wishes for this school, but here are a few unrealistic or unnecessary wishes to make school a dream.

1. No homework, cause like, who wants to do homework?
2. Start school at 9:30. I need to sleep.
3. Serve french fries on days other than Friday. Shady Shack only serves fries on Friday, but who doesn’t like fries?
4. Have a baobab tree on campus. Put like a latter or something on it. Let people climb on it. Maybe put a treehouse?
5. Put a Tarzan swing by the pool. It’s so much fun flying into a pool!

And that’s it! My dream school. Oh, and one more thing. When there are P.D days, the day becomes a half day. I think we should just not come to school. It is so inconvenient for parents to pick us up in the middle of the day when they have work!

As some of you may know, I spent my grade 7 year traveling around the world, and now that I’m a little bit older, I kind of want to know how I would interpret some of my most memorable experiences. I wonder if I compared my past thoughts to my present thoughts if they’d be any different. I’d like to tell you now about one of my funniest experiences (or what I now think is funny, I may have thought differently at the time). It is also one of my worst experiences, but now that I look back, it is hilarious. It is a story about my experiences in a hostel in Egypt. If you’d like to see how I wrote about this when it happened, check out my travel blog. The link is in my “About Me” page. This is how I think about it now.

We had just returned from Luxor, Egypt and now we’re staying at a hostel in Cairo. Right off the bat, I have to say that this place should not have been here. It should have been condemned by the government. To get to your room, you have to walk down this sketch hallway to a closet. Once you reached the closet, you had two options. You could take the stairs, that had a dip in every step and wires hanging over your head, or you get inside the closet. Why get into a closet? It was an elevator. No walls around it or anything! No safety precautions what-so-ever. Only a thin wire that pulls the closet up. You’re practically dangling there as you go up cause there is no support! Anyway, enough about the entrance. The really fun part is when we got to our room.

Our room was on the third floor and had a very musty smell. There were bars on the windows and the only source of light was a tiny lightbulb, dangling from the ceiling by a chain. The beds smelled weird, and I was scared to remove the sheets to see what might be growing under it. The pillows also smelled weird, and we found the reason why was there was mold growing on it! No wonder we slept on towels that night. There was a bathroom (thank goodness!), but it was smaller than the hanging closet we took to get up there! The shower only had cold water, and it was two feet by two feet! The toilette was right beside it, and I’m not even kidding when I say that it was so close, you could go to the bathroom and shower at the same time! Also, you may ask, how do I know the dimensions of the bathroom? Quite simple. I measured it, but you know somethings up when you can easily measure the bathroom with a footlong ruler. 

The worst part was there was a carpet in the middle of the room. It was bad enough that every time you took a step the floorboards would fluctuate and creak, but under the carpet, there were places there were no floorboards at all! You could see through the floor all the way to the first! No wonder I didn’t sleep easy that night. My bed was moldy and I was worried I’d fall asleep on the third floor and wake up on the first! I did survive though. Maybe because the floorboards held up, or maybe because God felt bad for me and decided he didn’t want me in his kingdom yet. I’m not sure, but either way, I’m still alive to tell the tale!

So that’s it. That is my interpretation of what happened that day. I need to compare it to my old post. Maybe I will post another later, but for now, that’s all! I’d also love to hear about your own bad yet funny experiences! If your willing to share, please tell me! I love when other people have stories to tell!