Quick Update

I had another AMAZING weekend, including 4 Rotary events, but only about 10 hours of sleep.

Friday.
The 18th of September was the 1 year anniversary of the Roteract Club of San Borja Sur. To celebrate, they arranged a outing to a pretty exclusive discoteca in Miraflores, right on the ocean. It was really pretty. All the exchange students and Roteract members got in free :) There was about 25 of us altogether. There's not much more to say, except that we danced until 2:30 in the morning.


Dance Floor at midnight.


Dance Floor at 2:30 am.


Saturday
We had more classes for Rotary. This week, we were supposed to start learning the Marinera, a traditional Peruvian Dance. However, the teacher didn't show up. Instead, a trio of students who go to the same school taught us how to do a traditional American Line Dance. Yeah. Country music... Fun. It was a bit ironic, since there are many students who aren't from the United States. It was amusing anyways. We had our Spanish lessons again. This time we got homework! We're supposed to read a book in Spanish and give a presentation. A 150 page long book from the 1900s. Eek.
After the lessons, I went over to another exchange student's (Geneva) house in Miraflores. From her house we walked to a little Market, where I bought 6 DVDs for 6 dollars, including Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (which is not going to be out in the states until December). This is very exciting to me. I love watching movies. Albeit, all of these are pirated, but who cares.
At 5, we had another Rotary obligation, which ended up being basically just a little reunion of all the intercambistas and about 5 other rotarians in a Papa Johns Pizza Place. The Pizza was awesome, better than the only time I had Papa Johns at home. So is the CocaCola. I swear it is sweeter here. Not that anyone drinks CocaCola. Inca Kola is much better (and only avaliable in Peru). It's kinda like Cream Soda.
After stuffing ourselves with Pizza (and memories of home), Geneva met up with our host sisters at a concert. It was like Battle of the Bands Peruvian Colegio edition. We got there in time to see the last 3 high school bands play, and then a popular band called "La Mente" play. It was amazing! Our sisters had gotten there really early, so we ended up right behind the barricades. Which was nice until some security guard came and stood right in front of me.
My host dad picked me and Daniela up t about 10:00 from Miraflores, and I assumed we would be going home. I was wrong. We went to another Peru Posible Political reunion thing... I'm still not entirely sure what. I guess there's going to be some vote soon, and one of their propositions in on the ballot.


La Mente Playing

Sunday
Yet another Rotary filled day.
Most of the exchangees met at Colegio Santa Rosa at 7:30 am to go to Ventanilla, Callo. Rotary had arranged for us to help at an orphanage and a medical clinic for the day.
First was the medical clinic. It is a clinic that is being sponsored by Opporation Emmanuel, which is based in Japan. It is one of the only hospitals in Ventanilla and for today, it was open free to the public. I got put in a room for "general medicine." I didn't get to help much, but I did get to do a couple little errands, like trying to find cotton to clean the thermometer. The lady I worked with was really nice. We're going to meet up for coffee some time. :) It was kinda awkward being in the room with the patients, since I couldn't really do much to help.
Here's a picture. I cut out the patients though.

After that we went to the orphanage, which was pretty much just around the corner. We were greeted by a nun and about 50 kids aged 2-18. The nun explained the mission of the orphanage and then told us to get to know the kids. The kids basically charged at us as soon as the nun gave the word. They all wanted to hug us and play with us. It was adorable. One of the kids really wanted to learn how to use my camera, so I let him and he took over 100 pictures. A lot of them were of his fingers... But it was still adorable! At the end, they all sand a song for us. :)


Con mucho amor,
Jacqui

Peru Posible!

First off, Hola to all of Senora Wagner's Spanish students who are reading this! I hope you enjoy reading this (if only to get out of playing those verb conjugation games for a bit :). More importantly, I hope I can help inspire at least one of you to think seriously about the wonderful prospects there are to be a foreign exchange student.

Saturday started normally. Rotary is sponsoring some Spanish lessons for all the exchange students. They're at a school about 5 minutes from my house. I got to take a taxi there all by myself! I'm probably a bit more proud of this than is normal, but I think it's cool. Everyone here uses the public transportation all the time. In a couple more weeks, I hope I'll understand the bus and combi system. The lesson were alright. The teacher is honestly a bit crazy and his use of English "slang" is frankly hilarious. My favorite was what he kept referring to as "the tree of language." There is the trunk which is the nouns, the branches which are the verbs, and the leaves that are the adjectives (or something like that). But the leaves that fall from the tree is "the money we will make next year when we return to the USA and teach Spanish." Yeah...

I got home from the lessons just before lunch, which was some fantastic Ceviche (a fish appetizer typical of Peru) and Papa Reyena (also traditional Peruvian, consists of stir-fried chicken/onion/tomato rolled inside mashed potatoes and then deepfried). During lunch, my host parents asked me if I wanted to go somewhere with them. I agreed, although I really had no idea what it was. All I understood from the explanation they gave me was "Partido" (which means game- and apparently political Party), "expresidente Alejandro Toledo," and "15 anos" (15 years). I am now pretty used to not understanding things, so I just sort of went along with it.

We left about an hour later, and drove for about 20 minutes to a more rural district of Lima. We pulled into something resembling a farm. The first thing my host dad pointed out to me was a bull fighting ring, so we stood around and watched that for a bit. I found out my camera has this really cool setting that allows it to take 2 pictures every second, and so I took a ton! It was an "artistic" showing, so the torero did not kill the bull, simply tried to make it charge impressively at the red fabric thing. The bull wasn't very enthusiastic, until it's final charge towards the exit. It was so enthusiastic then because it saw an opening that lead out of its enclosure and into the parking lot. Yeah. Thats right. The bull escaped. It just sort of ran around the parking lot for a while. It was quite exhilarating for those of us not being chased. They caught it after a couple of minutes, and nobody got hurt.



After that, I finally figured out the real reason we were all there. It was a political rally-like thing. It was the 15th anniversary of the Peru Posible political party, and ex-president and founder of the party, Alejandro Toledo was going to speak.

Since I'm not sure how many of you are up on Peruvian Politics, let me summarize what I know about this party (which still isn't very much). It tends to be more Central or Liberal with a greater focus on the rural areas of Peru. It was founded in 1994 by Alejandro Toledo, who became president in 2001 for a 5 year term. As president, he worked to improve the living standards in rural Peru, which are often overlooked because so much of the population lives in either Lima or Arequipa. Overall, he helped to stabilize Peru after the Internal crisis it had in the 80's and 90's and was widely supported.

There was a stage nicely set up nicely under a tent overlooking the bullfighting arena, however, the slight problem was that the organization forgot to set up any chairs facing the stage. I mention this because I found it funny. A lot of events like this are really lacking in what I would consider organization. It wasn't a horrible problem to fix, everyone just had to go grab a chair from the dining area that had been set up.

The ex-president arrived late. When he finally did arrive, he was greeted by a long, long, long standing ovation. He proceeded to give an hour long speech that was interrupted many, many times by times by chants of "Toledo 2011!" (the next presidential election year) or "Viva Peru Posible" or other similar chants. The crowd was all really lively. Everyone got involved in the shouting, even me! I couldn't tell you much of what he said in his speech, more due to the fact that I am not knowledgeable enough about the recent history of Peru and couldn't understand many of the references made. He was a great speaker, and the parts I understood seemed to be good.

After his speech (and another long, standing ovation), we all sang happy 15th birthday to the Peru Posible Political Party. The ex-president was then shuffled off the stage by some guards, and a band took the stage. They started playing music, and about 70% of the crowd stayed around and danced and drank. My host family and I didn't stay very long, but long enough for them to convince me to "dance" with them for a song or two.

Here are a couple more pictures.

Alejandro Toledo Speaking


The crowd (a mere fraction! I sat pretty much smack dab in the middle)


Ciao,
~ Jacqui

Journaling

I brought a 100 page journal with me to Peru. 100 pages. Guess how long it lasted? 31 days.
I had expected I would need to buy a couple more while I was here, but I did not realize I would need one so soon. I finished y first journal on the 28th of August, but I only had the chance to buy a new one on the 5th of September. This meant for an entire week I was without anything to write in, so I went back to typing everything.
I've sine went through and transcribed everything I typed into my new journal, but it is all still here on my computer. So, I've decided to share a bit of my everyday activity. Hope I'm not to boring. I've added a few notes as well.

Saturday 29 August 2009
I really did not realize I could run out of journal pages so fast. All 100 pages in my first journal are filled. I think theres an average of about 150 words per page, so that is over 15,000 for
Today there was a Rotary meeting at Colegio Santa Rosa at 10. Most the exchangees were there at 10, give or take a couple of minutes. However, the Rotarians decided to hold an hour long meeting before hand for just them. So we all just sat around and talked for an hour. It really is nice talking with the other students. There is so much less pressure when you know they don't know that much more of the language than you do.
The meeting was basically the same as the last one (we had an "Orientation" on the 8th of August). They went through all the rules again. This time, they just stopped and asked us more often if we understood everything. We then had to sign a paper agreeing to the rules. Only after that did we talk about something actually interesting- the trips that are planned. In early November we're going to Cuzco and Puno! Yay!
After lunch, I went with Carlos and Luciana to a soccer gam. Carlos is on a team that is made up of fathers of students at Santa Maria Eufrasia (my high school). The school was really nice. For some reason, there was some sort of mini-zoo in it. I kinda took a whole ton of pictures of some parrots, turtles and rabbits. They were cute.
Luciana's friend Ariana also came to the soccer game along with her mum and little brother. While Luciana played with her classmate, I talked with her mom. She (Sylvia) was very nice. I was the first exchange student she ever meet! She kept saying that she'd like to see Wisconsin. She said she had a friend who went there. It was really nice to talk to her and I understood almost everything she said. She also said that I had pretty good Spanish. Compliments like that make me really happy. I need to remember to email Senora Wagner sometime soon!

Thursday 3 September, 2009
Nobody bothered to wake me up this morning, and for a bit I hoped that we were just not going to school. Unfortunately, we did, just super late, which is not at all unusual for us. I understood most of what happened in Verbal Reasoning, because I thought it was homework already assigned, so I had read it through half a dozen times. Biology was just a practice for the song contest tomorrow. We went down to the theater and practiced and everything. Now I can't get the darn song (Yo te Voy Amar by N'sync) out of my head. We got to leave early today, at 1:00 because we had the Quinaria (Rosary) tonight. My host mom came and picked me up, and we jumped on Pepa's & Lila's mobilidad to get home. When we got home at about 1:30, we ate and then just sat around in the kitchen talking until Daniela and Luciana got home at 4:00. We talked about our mutual love of desserts and chocolate and looked at a bunch of recipes. I think I'm going to make Pizza tomorrow and that we're going to make some kind of dessert every Friday. Sounds yummy to me!
The Quinaria was not what I expected it to be. First off, it was not actually mandatory like I thought; only about 75% of the class showed up. We did the whole enter the church in two line, bow and donate some food that we practiced before. Then we (or at least I, others got up and recited somethings) sat and listened to them say the lords prayer at least a dozen times.

Friday 4 September, 2009
I've come to the realization that Fridays at my school are pointless. We did make it on time to school for the first time this semester! That was exciting. Formacion ran long for some reason (we had to sing a lot of songs to practice for next week?). So, we returned to the class late and Boris was already there. We just told him to leave because we had to work on Junior Achievement. So that's what we did for the first 4 class hours of school. (My classmates had a Junior Achievement class where they had to create a business. My class made purses our of jean material and cool little metal stars.) They're going to a University to sell them tomorrow and Sunday.
Then at 11 was the song competition. (Part of this 2 week long ceremony our school holds to worship the Virgin Mary when she was a baby. I still don't understand why her babiness is such a big deal, but whatever.) We won 2nd place after 3rd grade (of secondary school), Daniela's (my host sister) class. I really had no idea how we did because I was stuck in the middle of the back row holding a giant poster board of Nina Maria with Andrea and Lucia (the other 2 tall people in my class. I'm only taller than them by like 2 inches:). After the competition, everyone in my class was leaving to go set up their stand at the University. But nobody told me. Luckily, my host mom was at the school, so I got to go home early and sleep.
I had my first adventure making pizza today. It went better than I thought it would. I had no idea how hot the water for the yeast mixture was, but it was alright. The dough didn't raise too much, but it still made one good sized crust. Unfortunately, by the time it was ready none of us were really hungry. It was good anyways. My host sisters and I watched Twilight. I have to say, I like the movie better in Spanish.