First day of Spanish school our professor Cristobal was unable to refrain and took an hour our of lesson to process events in the newspaper indicating that Fidel Castro admitted that his form of socialist government did not work for Cuba. Cristobal's excitement was hopeful of a domino effect changing popular opinion and eventually Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa.
Throughout our two weeks, our professor went on to discuss his views on the political system in Ecuador, his fear of Correa (emotional/angry machismo, fiscal irresponsibility by giving handouts to the poor, imprisoning dissenters, etc.) the constitution (20 different constitutions since 1830, with the newest constitution being in 2008), FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia w/ lots of activity on the Ecuadorian border and how he would prefer his daughter and son to be murdered rather than kidnapped by this group), taxation, importance of local markets, etc. We welcomed the political and cultural discussion which was a highlight of our two weeks studying.
We did also learn some Spanish. So far we've been able to get by in our travels with basic conversational travel Spanish. Through the exercises completed in class and our homework we have some great resources for us to continue to memorize vocab and the foundations for verbs and sentence structure.
As tends to be the case for me, a dear part of our Spanish school experience was the people we met and shared time with. The first day there was confusion because there were two couples named "Matt & Anna" the other from England with whom we shared fun times and continued to travel south with crossing the Peruvian border, Phillip a great German, Natalie from UK without luggage for over a week and with whom we celebrated her 30th birthday, Nana from Denmark, Erin the Australian psychiatrist, Marcus & Marion from Germany, lively Morton and Anna Leica from Norway to name a few.
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