Day 5, First Day of Class

Cortes' Palace

Well, today was another long day, but not quite so crazy. Classes started up so that is putting us into more of a routine and taking up blocks of time. The house is much quieter! Everyone is a little overwhelmed. It’s hard to go from our days of exploring in such a pretty sunny city to doing real work all day (well I guess we haven’t’ really found out what real work is and can’t complain. Anyway, it’s like coming back from vacation but still being in the same place! I’m sure we’ll all get into the swing of it soon enough.)

We had out first class session this morning. The class is called “Mexican History, Culture and Cosmovision.” For all those that don’t know what cosmovision is, like I didn’t, it’s the way one looks at the world. Broad enough topic for you? I have no idea how we are suppose to cover all that in I think 10 weeks. We have two 2-hr class sessions a week and 2 excursions or speakers. We have two teaches. The main one is Antonio, who seems great so far. The other’s name is Stephanie and she is really nice in a sort of comforting, mothering way also. There’s something about her voice. Then there’s also Chris, the TA. There’s eleven of us students, so it’s nice and small and even from that we break into 3 groups for discussion sometimes. We just talked about the concept of history a little today.

It was really interesting and engaging. I found myself using a lot of things I have done in classes last semester too, especially Carib. Women’s lit and Lit Theory (which was really more like life theory). It’s great to be able to make use of that stuff in a completely different context and have something to say. It made me want to take the other class which I’m not signed up for right now so I decided I’m going to audit it. It’s a small group so I feel like I’ll get left out of a lot and feel lost if I don’t take the class. All I have to do is go to class, but I think I’ll do some of the reading also though. I won’t have to do the work work though.

The rest of the day we just had some sort of workshops about how we think about things, especially about thought processes and then about community building. They try really hard to make this a really healthy, safe space and I think it is really working. We got to talk about a lot of things that people were worried about which made me feel much better. We’re just all starting to really understand each other better.

Then Betsy, the Katie who doesn’t live with me, and I went downtown and ran around for a while. We got back just in time for a speaker that talked to us about the Mexican political system. It was all really interesting and I didn’t know much about it before so was trying really hard to concentrate despite it being confusing and a long session.

Then dinner… lots of good conversation after dinner. We’ve already had so many great conversations that I’ve learned so much from.

Then… lots of homework… and… now I am SO ready for bed.

Ah… finally a short blog huh? Sorry they’ve been so long, just a lot to say. I think they’ll start getting shorter now.