El Día de Peatón

I forgot to say earlier, yesterday was El Día de Peatón, which means Pedestrian Day, so no cars are allowed on the streets and everyone goes out riding bikes and walking around the city and it was SO nice! I think the hardest part of adjusting to this city has been that drivers never let you cross so you have to sprint across literally every street. So yesterday was a nice relief (although it only happens once a year so I'm sad it's already gone) and I went with Lucia and her friends biking around the city. It was nice to be able to see some of the neighborhoods without the stress of heavy traffic and crazy drivers. It reminded me of when they close down Memorial Drive to traffic on Sundays in the summer, and almost made me homesick...almost.

The first Quechua class was great; it's just me and the other two students from our program, so it's essentially like having a private tutor, which is great because I've been asking a lot of questions. I'm surprised to say that the linguistics class I took actually helped me a lot because of the international phonetic alphabet and the way the language is constructed (it's an agglutinative language so you add parts onto words to change "house" into "to my house" and things like that). I can't wait to go again tomorrow.

And now I can say: q'aya kama!