"The bread eats Juan"

Classes have officially begun at La Catolica. Though the classes I attended have been interesting, I am technically not registered for any courses yet as I am a foreign student. Registration for us is not until tomorrow, and in order to get the classes that I want I will have to wake up before 5 and make my way to campus. Fortunately, the group of students that I am with have set up several small sleepovers at the houses of students who live within walking distance from La Catolica. I'm not going to get much sleep tonight.

On my list of possible classes I am looking at taking Quechua (the most widely spoken indigenous language in all of South America), Film, and Theater Analysis. The last class will be a lot of reading, but I am already familiar with most of the authors we will be covering, so it shouldn't be impossible for me. Naturally, all of these classes will be taught in Spanish.

Quechua is easily the most interesting class I am hoping to take. In the last class we discussed all of the suffixes that are used in the language and how changing the suffix that indicates the subject being acted upon to another word can change a relatively normal sentence like "Juan eats bread" into "The bread eats Juan".

I am also setting up my schedule so that I do not have class on Fridays. Most of the other students are doing the same which will make weekend traveling easier. This Friday, a group of us went down to the beach to hang out. It's still a little cold to swim in the Pacific at this time of year, but the fresh air was a nice change to the typical dustiness of the city.

We also went to Parque Kennedy (aka. The Cat Park), which is one of the most amazingly magical places in the entire city for me.

For those unfamiliar with Parque Kennedy, it is a church owned park that a while back took care of a few stray cats that hung around the area. Soon the population grew and now the church feeds and cares for a few hundred furry residents. The majority are very friendly and will approach park visitors and invade your lap whether you want them to or not. Cat lovers, this is the place to be in Lima.

I also discovered that the oven in my host family's kitchen is not broken. It's just that no one uses it. We'll have to see how my baking turns out.

My First Week Breakdown

This is coming out a little later than I anticipated, but today I was struck with a bad bout of traveler's sickness. I am feeling much better now, but needless to say, I wasn't in any condition to get things done today.

Anyways, most of you haven't heard anything from me since I posted about being stuck in the airport for an extra day due to bad weather. So I would like to give everyone a mini breakdown of what happened this week.

Last Thursday I set off to travel to Lima, planning on getting there the same day. Instead bad weather caused my first flight to be delayed by about 4 hours which meant I missed my connecting flight to Lima. I booked a cheep hotel room and spent the night in Huston.

Last Friday I finally left Huston to go to Lima, but when I got to my destination the airline had lost one of my suitcases. I finally got to the hotel we were supposed to be at for orientation, having missed the entirety of it, at around 1:30 that night.

Last Saturday we all finally got to meet our host families and I began to get settled in to my new home. I am the 20th exchange student they have hosted, so they were very accommodating. Also, my host brother, Rafael, is very into Pokemon and has an impressive collection. This is the first time that I have actually had something in common with a host sibling, so we get along very well.

Sunday was a free day for all of the students to get settled into our new lives.

Monday through Friday we went to the university to attend our introductory Spanish classes. There are two levels, and I was placed in the higher level class. Rafael showed me how to use public transportation around the city. The issue right now for Peru's public transportation is that everything is in the process of changing to become more standardized, but it still hasn't gotten there yet. But as long as I know what street I need to be on, I can figure it out. Also, I did finally get my missing luggage back, but my toothbrush and camera seem to have gone missing. Because it stayed in the airport overnight it is entirely likely that they were stolen. Though I am not too concerned because the camera was very old anyways.

Pictures will be coming soon.