Things I'd want to roll my eyes at. That was one of the suggestions of what I should post. Since I've had a fairly uneventful day today and my brain is halfway to mush, I just might make that list. Here goes: dumb smart-alec comments sale prices that are higher than Aldi's regular prices for a comparable product a college student's insistence that they know a better way to change the world than anybody else children's having cell phones the singing fish (and it's SUCH an earworm!) people who know the words to the Ferret Song by heart (yes, that includes you, J) ten-year-olds with boyfriends and girlfriends hypocritical statements made by the same person in the same breath paisley skirts anything else paisley movies that make super-overstated claims about their own ingenuity or emotional power writers who make the mistake of equating correlation with causation lapdogs any animal in an outfit not worn on Christmas or Halloween, or possibly in a para...

Never figured out what this plant was back when I saw it everywhere in Central America. But tonight I found out what it was! It's a heliconia! Also known as a false bird-of-paradise, or a number of other things. Wow... this plant even has its own international society .

I’m doing a presentation on music from the Río de la Plata area on Monday. In preparation, I was looking for some good videos to illustrate the kinds of music I’ll be talking about. And I ran across this:

And I’m supposed to be at work tomorrow morning, 7:45. Why am I up? Oh right. I’m in college. I do silly things like this. To update: I got suckered into being lead singer for a class band at my college’s upcoming celebration of Latina culture. (I’d write Latino culture, but la cultura is a feminine noun.) I had to write a difficult article for my college newspaper’s website about the suicide of a student at my college. And I have enjoyed being back with some of my best friends at college. Just sayin’, I love singing in Spanish about as much as I love singing in English. I’m at the point (have been for a while, actually) where I can simply think the meaning behind the words without concentrating on what the words are saying. I know these songs well enough, and the language, that I can get beyond the mere words that convey the meaning. It’s fascinating.

Well, to simplify everything, life has been relatively busy these past couple weeks. It's not the sort of thing I would write about here, on my blog, though. It's academics and filling out forms and having miscellaneous meetings. It's talking to my friends most evenings and to my roomie late at night about everything and nothing. It's wondering what doors would think of being opened and shut all the time... if they could think. It's e-mailing a lot of people, hoping to get answers, and conducting a short interview to write a (long) article summarizing the work my campus has done to send financial aid to Haiti. And e-mailing more people about an article describing the plans for this semester's series of honors-program seminars. And taking lots of pictures for both articles. Which all culminated in getting one article on the front page and one on page 3 of this Friday's edition of the campus newspaper. It's also translating from Spanish to English ...

I have thought, before, that to translate a song would be a wonderful experience, even a way to worship God with my Spanish talent. And now I know. I've loved this song for years: And I thought to myself, this past Friday, that it would be a great song to translate into Spanish. So I made my best effort to produce a Spanish lyric faithful to both the original song and to the Biblical passage from whence the English song came; and in addition to that, I tried to make the lyric sound good, to sound like it was supposed to be that way originally (instead of being a translation clumsily fitted to the original tune). So, I looked up the verses in two different Spanish translations (the NVI and the RV-1995 ) to try to write the lyric as close to the Bible verse phrasing/words as possible. Then I wrote a version, and didn't like it at all. (I still have it, however, in my e-mail.) I re-wrote most of it as various ideas, words and phrases, came to me.... and here is what I ...

I decided this month that I'd do all my devotional Bible readings from my Spanish Bible. I figured, hey, I've been to Central America, I'm practically fluent, and I should be able to understand the Spanish translation quickly enough that I don't lose the meaning of the passages I'm reading. So I'm doing that. And boy, is it wonderful. Verses that I'd instantly recognize, even be able to recite, in English regain a freshness when I read them in Spanish. (Today's verses were from Romans 8:28-39, which of course includes the whole part about neither death nor life nor anything else being able to separate us from God's love.) Sometimes I also realize something completely new about a passage I've read before, simply because of little language differences (such as, I can tell the difference between a singular "you" and a plural "you" at a glance with Spanish). This is pretty awesome. It's like singing in Spanish, only better...

I had just about half an hour between lunch and going to work, so I decided not to trek through the snow to make an almost-pointless visit to my apartment. So I'm sitting here in the library figuring out how to busy myself until it comes time to go to work. Spanish class today was kinda fun; we discussed the ideal man or woman in groups, basically in the context of who you'd marry, so in our little groups we had to make lists of each. I joined a gal friend of mine who'd been to Central America with me this fall, and a lady in our class who's a native Colombian. (I still haven't figured out why she's taking Conversational Spanish if she's already a native speaker!) We had fun in our group, especially since the Colombian lady is quite chistoso (jokester) while at the same time very smart and mature. (She's married and has mutiple children, so she'd better be mature!) After that little exercise, we all wrote on eraseable boards as our maestra listed...

One week on campus (mostly), and things have been crazy. If you've been reading my other blog (the link to which is by request), you know I've tried out and gotten a part in a one-act comedy to be performed the first weekend in February. That's in addition to a class on Spanish conversation, and on top of preparation to write the prospectus and annotated bibliography for my senior honors project (this beginning stuff needs to be done by the end of the month). Plus, I've helped tutor a young ESL student who's struggling in math, and watched a million episodes of Touched by an Angel a couple nights ago, and have also been getting caught up with the yearbook (I'll be assistant editor). Oh and I've been working, but that's a given. I absolutely love the honors project preparation. I'll be helping to plan and launch my college's new website for the college newspaper & broadcasting programs! I also love Spanish class, except that today we tal...

No, that does not imply I intend to forswear the act of shopping for the rest of my life. I went into downtown today, for the last time before I leave this beautiful Central American country. I bought several gifts for my host family, some T-shirts for myself, something for my mom (which I intend to give as an early Christmas present as soon as I get home, because I'm too excited to wait longer), and a little bag so I can have a pocket even when my skirts/dresses have none. We got lost in the Central Market several times... you couldn't imagine how crowded and confusing that place is! It's the size of a small Wal-Mart but with a ton of little vendor shops inside, crammed wall-to-wall, and filled with every little thing imaginable. Half the stores sell food, the other half things (I'd say "chunches" but you wouldn't understand that). The aisleways are barely big enough to allow two people to pass through, and are not regular in the least (except that most o...

The title should convey all the information I need to share--but the emotion and exhilaration behind it is impossible to put into words. :) I got sunburned on my legs, though, which hardly ever happens and kinda stings. Also, I discovered a fascinating word from an obscure language a few days ago. Apparently lost-in-translation can get pretty bad sometimes. In addition, I will be meeting a movie star tomorrow (hopefully). The main actor in this year's hit film in this Central American country is best friends with my professor's son, and since half my class went to see the movie, he'll come visit us and we'll get to practice speaking Spanish with him. Should be fun.

I just found a Spanish (as in from Madrid) group that I really like. They were together in the seventies. Oh well. They have an awesome version of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer" though!

One of the things I've grown to like while living here is coffee. If you ever knew how much I hated the smell, taste, or thought of coffee before coming here, you would understand how marvelous that is. Now, I still dislike black coffee, but put a bunch of milk and sugar in a cup of coffee and I will drink the whole thing. Fortunately my host mamá somehow makes the coffee exactly how I like it! I still haven't quite figured out what she does to it, but I've managed to approximate the taste when I've had to make my own. Tomorrow afternoon we U.S. students are hosting a little coffee party (cafecito) for our host mamás and I'm looking forward to that. We'll be serving small sandwiches (sánguches in Spanish!) and brownies in addition to the coffee.

So odd. Today, the third person in my group of students today revealed she didn't realize I had siblings. If she had thought about it, she may have realized it, since she had seen her when we met at the airport to leave the States, and I had said she was my sis. Once before, I was hanging out/prepping for a presentation with a couple other students in my group, and for some reason I mentioned my sister (or maybe my brother) and they, too, told me they had thought I was an only child. Now, we've been studying the differences between "warm" and "cold" cultures in one of our classes--one difference being the emphasis on relationships that warm cultures (like here in Central America) have, versus the emphasis on doing things or getting work done that cold cultures (like that of the United States) have. It occurred to me that this sort of thing would never have happened in a cold culture. I couldn't have been in a group of twelve students for six weeks withou...

Hehe. I just sent off the final draft of an article that will appear in my campus newspaper soon--the first of a series I'm writing about studying abroad here in Central America--along with some photos I took, including this adorable photo of my hermanita, Niñita. I'm all excited now... so even though I should be writing up a report on Haggai (Hageo en español), I'm not sure I'll get to that tonight... :P

Today I considered the possibility of switching over to writing in Spanish when I journal. I'm feeling like I know enough of Spanish--both the grammar and the vocabulary--that I could begin to do a decent job in that language. Maybe next month. I had an oral exam today for my class in conversation. This is the teacher that does really hard exams, and tells us to study everything in order to prepare for these exams. The exams are always oral, also--not a written word to them. (It is the class on "conversation," after all.) So I was... nervous, to say the least, and felt like telling her right off "Sé que voy a morir ahora." But I didn't; instead I smiled, said I was "muy bien" (in response to "¿Cómo estás?"), and gave it my best shot. I answered all the cultural-sayings questions quite well, remembered stuff about our literature-reading fairly well, was able to give an opinion about the Spanish-language movie we watched, and managed to u...

So, I've never seen "Life is Beautiful." Apparently it's an Italian film that got pretty popular recently. We watched it the last two days in our class about conversation. A few observations: 1. Having never seen the movie, I had no idea what it was about, so I had to just roll with it. I'm not used to that... usually I at least read the back of the movie case to get a general idea of the plot. I'm a framework kind of person--I like to have at least some idea of the big picture, in order to fit in the parts correctly. Watching a movie without knowing anything of the plot is... curious. 2. Watching a movie in Spanish is a whole 'nother story. For one thing, the Spanish is fast fast fast , and for another there aren't any subtitles, and for a third the words don't even match up with what the actors are really saying (since it was in Italian originally), so you really do have to rely solely on what you think you hear. And since I'm not quite that...

Wow! What a day I had. I can't even begin to tell all of it... basically what I did was just take pictures, posted them on Facebook, and put on some captions there. We took a field trip all over an area of the country I'm in today. We visited three Catholic churches. Early on in the field trip, at the first (and biggest) church, we had to ask locals what was so important about this church and what its history was. We asked one of the security guards there, and since the assignment was to ask two people, we went over and asked the gift shop clerks too. An older man behind us in line took a liking to us and talked to us a little bit after we had our questions answered by the clerks. To begin, he introduced himself to our group and... asked me if I was the teacher! I'm not sure how to take that. I'm assuming it was in recognition of superior Spanish pronunciation or some sort of confidence in having asked the first two questions? (I'm just guessing here!) Considering I...

Can't think of anything again. Except that I've lost twice at a local version of Monopoly and I'm not very good at it. Some of the sayings down here are downright hilarious. I'm having my Central American parents explain three to me every night, out of a list of thirty-five that I have from my teacher. A few of the most interesting.... "When frogs grow hair" "Longer (taller) than a milkman's whistle" "He who doesn't cry doesn't suck (get fed, like a baby)" "The monkey, though dressed in silk, is still a monkey" "Flies don't enter a closed mouth" I think the one about the frogs has to be my favorite. :P

It seems that Sunday night is usually a good night for writing something lengthy for my blog (and doing some other stuff, too). Anyhow. This week I've been really busy, or rather busier than before. Classes started this week, of course, so I've had homework . That involved asking my Central American dad about lots of peculiar sayings that are used here (like "when frogs grow hair," which is along the lines of "when pigs fly"). And going over present-tense verbs umpteen times in grammar class (kinda boring). And reading three chapters in an apparently rather famous book called "Pantalones largos." And writing a nine-minute speech in Spanish. Yeah! I was sooo proud of myself when I finished that thing! And all that was only for two of my classes. The third class, touching upon the culture and civilization of my host country, meets only on Fridays and is a pretty interactive, field-trip-based class. Which means it's awesome! We went downtown ...