End of classes, curse of the Inca, ALBA summit

This is from yesterday, but just before I posted it, the power went out, and I have hardly been home since then! I’ll be living in a rural village outside Cochabamba for the next week so I won’t be writing until at least next weekend (apparently there are still places in the world that don’t have high speed internet—who knew?) so once again, mom and dad, don’t worry!

Today, I am blessed with the treat of a free hour of daytime without rushing through lunch or running to class. It's been a while, and it's really nice. I had my Quechua final this morning and for once, the time they allotted was an overestimate and the exam only took about an hour, although we had anticipated over two hours. So after discovering yet another new route home (I'll explain later), I'm basking in the Cocha sunlight and taking advantage of electricity and downtime in preparation for our trip to the campo (rural village) this coming week.

Last weekend was a disaster for my health. Soon after arriving at my house, I had a bout of the ever so pleasant "Montezuma's Revenge," complete with a touch of the Curse of the Inca, a name I've come up with for the specific series of symptoms that come along with food-borne illness in Bolivia. Luckily I have a bathroom immediately adjacent to my room, and for your sake I will leave you with no more detail than that. Lessons learned? First of all, chorizo from a street vendor, a chicken salad sandwich, an entire bag of fine chocolates, and a dinner of costillitas and poroto (pork ribs and beans) don't treat the gringo stomach very well. The other valuable piece of information I learned was that you can go to the pharmacy and buy yourself an anti-emetic and the pharmacist will give you an injection in your right butt cheek, and the vomiting will cease soon after. Cool, huh? I also have a mini stash of anti-emetic pills (although I'm not sure how much good an oral medicine does when you're puking constantly). Ya pues, enough of that.

This week was the last week of formal classes, meaning the days that I will have to wake up before 8:00 from now on are (hopefully) few! It also meant that I had a large assignment to complete pretty much every night. I can't remember if I wrote about this already but I interviewed a children's author before I went to Potosí, which was really cool and extremely encouraging, and I had to write a report about that this week. It's crazy to think we're about halfway through already. The end of classes means the beginning of the independent study project. I had to write a preliminary proposal for my project this week and I realized how much I really don't know yet, and how much work I'm going to have to do. I found out that public schools go on summer break in a couple of weeks, so all classroom observation that I planned on doing during the official ISP period (the month of November) I actually have to do as soon as possible. It's stressful but I'm hoping it will keep me on track with the project, since I really can't procrastinate at all. I'm observing in a kindergarten class this afternoon! I've chatted with a lot of children since arriving here, but I haven’t really been around a large group of kids interacting with each other yet. I’m really excited, but also a little nervous. If there’s one thing this semester is teaching me, it’s how to have serious social skills.

As for the ALBA summit, remember the Día del Peatón I wrote about when I first got here? Well, apparently they liked it so much that they decided to institute it again in my neighborhood and surrounding area. Okay, so it’s actually just that they closed all the roads around the hotel near my house to protect our dear Hugo Chavez (who is staying a block from my house!) from terrorists or something. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose is, but it’s really frustrating because I haven’t been able to get a taxi to bring me to my house in a few days, and they’ve rerouted all of the public transit in a completely illogical fashion so that I have had to learn several new routes to my classes. I’m going to be a Cochabamba public transit expert by the end of the summit. Anyway, the ALBA cumbre is essentially a summit of important leftist Latin American leaders. I can’t believe it’s happening right here in this city! I literally haven’t had a free moment to see if there is anything going on that is open to the public but it seems like everything is closed off with pretty high security, so I’m going to assume that the best view I’m going to get during this thing is a line of police dressed in riot gear (yeah, seriously, that’s what I walked home past this morning).

Now I’m off to grab lunch before my first classroom observation! Uj ratu kama!