September 4, 2007
From SATA-Peru-2007
I was going to start this post with a philosophical Spanish quote, but I don´t know any. Also, I tend not to say much, but I usually have a lot on my mind, so basically this post is going to be a little long winded.
Today was our second day of classes. Leia and I decided to switch to another Spanish class that was one level higher than the one we were in yesterday. Yesterday our Professor, Nilder, gave an overview of what would be discussed in the class (Intermediate I), and they were all things we covered in previous Spanish classes. It was a nice review, but not much of a challenge. However, today´s class (Intermediate II) frustrated me! We were going over when to use the imperfect versus the preterite forms of verbs. Why can´t you say what you did in the past and let that be it? Ah, life and its complexities.
Our second and final class was our ethnohistory class taught by none other ´Profesor Papacito´ known to most students and faculty members simply as Professor Lizarralde. We went over the objectives of the class. The objectives: Seeing Things From Other Angles; Understand the Position of the Less Priveleged; Learn How to Give Back Substantially. I like how we all have different academic and social backgrounds but we all benefit tremendously, not just from the class, but the entire SATA Peru program, and hopefully this will be both a learning and growing process for us all. We also learned today in class that we´ll be stars of our own reality show for a whole month while at the Manu Learning Center! I don´t know all the details, but I do hope we get stylists and acting coaches. Although we´re not going to be on any of the major TV stations, we still want to give a good show! So we ended a bit early since that was our first ethnohistory class. We had about an hour and a half before lunch (1:00) in which I did absolutely nothing. Lunch was great as usual. Every day for lunch and dinner, we get a bowl of soup before the main dish. Today´s soup was quite tasty. Our main dish today was fish and veggies. Delicioso! (Dora anyone?)
After we returned to the hotel, I decided to do a little exploration on my own. A few others headed off on a hike, in which they ended up meeting some little girls and playing games with them. And on Thursday, hopefully a bigger group of us will return and play again with the little girls. I wanted to head back to the Artesans´ Market that we visited on Sunday. After a little ´detour´ aka going way down the wrong street and particularly not reading the street signs, I gained some sense of direction and headed in the right direction. The first vendor I met at the Market was this giggly little person, who I couldn´t figure out if she was a short woman or simply a young girl. She turned out to be a very persistent girl of 11 years. I thought that the older vendors were persistent, but the younger ones are WELL trained. Although I didn´t buy anything from her, I think we´re ´amigas´
And now it´s dinner time. We are going to eat dinner and I´ll get started on my homework and possibly some hair braiding afterwards. Ciao or should that be Adios?
