Y ya empiezan las clases...

at our school, originally uploaded by sammarin.

We started classes yesterday and already had an exam on the things we learned while traveling in Cusco and Machu Picchu, Lima, Puno and Lake Titicaca... fortunately I had studied with my beloved flash cards so it went well. It was a short day yesterday, and the normal classes started this morning at 8am.

I am enrolled in two classes:

El Cine y la Narrativa de España (Cinema and Narrative in Spain) - 20th century - and today we talked about the Spanish civil war. We had read Requiem por un Campesino Español and some chapters from ¿Qué fue la Guerra Civil? I have lots to learn about the war, to understand how Spain developed and influenced the rest of the world events in the 20th century. It is going to be an interesing class.

Also, Culturas de la América Latina (Cultures of Latin America) - an overview of Latin American cultures through studying adivinanzas (riddles). How fun! Different vocabulary for each country, different flora and fauna to which the riddles refer. In the second part of the class we will talk generally (very generally, very briefly, very superficially by necessity) about each country - from social, historical, literary perspectives.

I have a lot of reading to do in Spanish! So, off to a café I go...

whacked with a guinea pig

So in preparation for my studies in Peru this summer, I'm reading Along the Inca Road by Karin Muller. In the first chapter she visits a curandero who whacks her all over with a guinea pig to diagnose her ailments, and then she sees another medicine man who treats her by rubbing her all over with stinging nettles. Yowza.

I guess my experience of the book is similar to that of this Peace Corps Writers review, which states: "This is a book written by a tourist whose mission it was to write a book. I closed the book having learned little about The Inca Road or the people that now inhabit its environs. What I read was largely a travelogue filled with anecdotes of self inflicted adventure" (...though self inflicted adventure can sometimes be quite entertaining, it's true).

This review from Entertainment Weekly gave the book a "B" when it came out in 2000. (The notable part of that brief review, to me, is that seven years ago, the reviewer felt it necessary to put in parentheses what GPS stands for.)

Today seems like a good day to start a blog.

I was inspired last Friday by David Silver and Anne-Marie Deitering's presentations at the CCLI 2007 Spring Workshop to begin, no matter how small-scale, and to be consistent.

Today I created my 2007 summer reading list, which includes Rebecca Scott's first novel, Ghostwalk (Suspicious deaths! Alchemy! The plague!), I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Gödel! Escher! Bach!), and Colin Woodard's The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (Pirates!).

Next Thursday, my summer vacation begins, and these will be my first delicious reads.