Acostumbrándome/Settling In

Hey everyone, I´m back again with a late post, sorry about that.

So, today started off fine when we went to school again for the second day. We realized that school actually doesn´t start until 8:30am instead of 8 so we got to sleep in a bit more and made the most of that. Today in class we talked about the development of the Andean Culture and how it may have arisen from many different sources. Theories range from a mother culture located in Mesoamerica (Mexico/Yucatan area), to cultures from the coast of Peru moving up the mountains, to an established culture in Ecuador diffusing both north and south and ending up in the Andes. It was all very interesting and I will be keeping my mind sharp on this topic so I can get some great information for when I go back home to share with my professors and such.

One especially interesting part of the lesson had to do with rituals of the Andean cultures that involved hallucinogenic plants and tactics, as administered by priests and shamans, to keep the common people in check. This method allowed the government to not have to keep an army or military up and running to quell peace, but rather to utilize the religion to keep things orderly and safe. We even found out our professor participated in such a ceremony a few years ago as part of his research!

After class we went to the cheap restaurant up the street again and sampled the fare for the second day in a row. It was still fun and we left there on our way to la avenida el sol to go shopping again at the shops full of artesanías or handicrafts from the local campesinos in the area. Here are a few photos of what we found:







I have had a great time shopping so far but I´m ready to get going on some trips I suppose. Tonight we had dinner at a pizza/italian restaurant, which was a treat for many, as you can see:







The evening closed out with me participating in a research study by Kelly Lovejoy, our assistant director as seen in the above picture, through a short interview that was recorded to help her with her study of pragmatics of second language acquisition. It did, however, remind me that I have to get moving quickly on my quechua research which will begin next week :( No bother, I will be ready.

Lastly, we played Scrabble which we assumed to be Spanish but turned out to be Catalán so we had some interesting shocks trying to get going. All we had to do though was take out the ç pieces and we were all set. Just for the record, I won with 130...

Have a good night everyone, hope to hear back from anyone who has a spare time to comment!