October 4, 2007
From SATA-Peru-2007
Today we woke up and headed to a breakfast of croissants, yogurt and cheese. This caused a lot of excitement for many of us since there has been a general craving for croissants. After breakfast it was time for Spanish class. Most of our Spanish classes with Nilder are now spent working on conversational skills, which is great practice, especially since our topics range from immigration to global warming. After Spanish we headed to Manuel’s ethnoecology class in order to discuss Karl Zimmerer’s work, Changing Fortunes. The book contains a vast amount of information about the ecology of the Peruvian Andes and the Quechua culture. We discussed how this cultural geography combines anthropological, geographical, and ecological data, in order to explain the diversity of the ecology and culture of Peru.
After class and lunch, Shana, Leia, Darwin and I headed to the Molino or black market, while others in the groups went for runs. After being slightly overwhelmed by the masses of “stuff,” Leia and I were able to find sweatshirts and Shana was able to fill her hoop addiction, buying two pairs of gold hoops the size of her head. On the way back to our hotel we entertained our taxi driver with our Quechua songs, which was good practice for class. In class we continued with numbers and our conversational skills which are surprisingly progressing very well. We can now do present, present progressive and past tense.
After class some of the group headed to our friend Alberto’s restaurant for dinner and the rest returned to the hotel.
