Friday, March 6, 2009

This was the last day of classes in Los Chillos and the last day overall of Spanish class with Alberto. I don’t think I’ve written much about him, but we loved him. My Spanish class is high intermediate with five people. We haven’t talked about grammar hardly at all since the second week since we can always convince him to play charades or pictionary instead. We say we hijacked the class. We call ourselves Los Tigres Chéveres (the cool tigers, not nearly as fun in English), and there’s a lot long name involving mountains and nearby cities. Alberto is kind of like a little boy even though he’s in his forties; he giggles all the time and has a really goofy smile and can’t control us at all. Sometimes he does these really long pauses and we think he’s trying to get us back on topic but really he’s taking us even further away with some random opinion. Our class is very different from everyone else’s and I really haven’t learned very much, but we do speak in Spanish all the time so that helps. As a goodbye thanks present to Alberto we rewrote Te Recuerdo Amanda in his honor. (Te Recuerdo Amanda is a song by Victor Jara, who was a new-style folky singer in the seventies in Chile, and it’s our class’s theme song. Jara got killed in the Pinochet coup.)

Our workshop classes all prepared presentations for the last day. Elias is our workshop teacher and the boss of the Spanish/workshop teachers. He wanted us to act out this poem about the huasipungo system during the colonial period. It’s way more serious than anything the other groups were doing. I’m the Spanish guy and at one point I cut off Jessie the indigenous man’s balls with a knife. I also whip her. Everybody but Cecilia dies in the mines. The lowest level class’s presentation was soooo funny, they sang songs they wrote about the debt crisis and the colonial period and other things to the tune of other songs, like the Beach Boys.

After class a few of us went to Crepes & Waffles in the mall for ice cream. I got caramel and mora, so good. Then internet café and home for lunch.

Tonight we had our goodbye party for Los Chillos. All of our families went and we had dinner and dancing, pretty fun. It’s hilarious watching the gringos dance with the latinos, we look ridiculous, almost all of us.