Varied Miscellania, Part II

So I'm heading into my last two weeks of class. It's a bit wierd to be finishing up, but I'm also ready to get out and practice my Spanish more. I'm not speaking as well or as much as I'd like, so I think a change of scene to one that isn't so conducive or accomodating to learners might push me closer to speaking with greater ease and fluency. I've always been generally impatient with myself when things don't come easily, and I have to remind myself to keep at it and have more patience with my progress. After only having been here for two months, my ability to understand much of what I hear, and come up with what I want to say, even if it takes awhile, is pretty great, so I just have to keep that in mind.

Two things are going to help me, I think. The first is that I've decided to move. My homestay has been alright, but I've been unhappy with a couple things, the main one being that I rarely speak with them, which means I end up speaking almost no Spanish outside of class. I was talking with my teacher last week about it, and she said that her family has hosted students before, and from the way she described their relationship with the family, it seemed like a situation much more like what I'm looking for. So when I finish at the school I'll be moving in with her. She lives with her husband's family, and several of them are Spanish teachers, so hopefully, I'll get a lot of good practice and assistance there. I studied with her for five weeks, and we got along really well. I'm looking forward to feeling more at home, and less like a boarder.

The other way I'm expecting to practice more is when I start a volunteer position. I haven't decided exactly what that will be yet, but I have a few ideas. One is a clinic funded by the Quetzaltrekkers, the group I hiked up the volcano with. A friend of another student here works as an administrator there, and this week I'll hopefully be meeting with her to see about volunteering there. They see hundreds of walk-in patients daily, but what I'm really excited about is their traveling camping clinics. A group of people from the clinic will hike up to remote areas and camp out until they've seen all of the people in the community. Working with the patients and other doctors will not only give me a great opportunity to practice Spanish, especially medical Spanish, but also an incredible experience with public, community medicine. I am hopeful that that will work out.

A couple weeks ago, we went to a cultural center in the city to hear a conference on Mayan culture and history. There's a lot to be said and shared about that, but one of the more unique things we learned was a pretty fun Mayan math trick (nerdy, I know, but also pretty awesome). The Maya were pretty mathematically advanced, being one of the first cultures to use zero, and used their mathematical prowess in pretty incredible astronomical calculations. Unlike our number system, which is based around multiples of 10, the more significant numbers for them were 20 and 13. This trick is for multiplying 6x6 up to 9x9. I'll do my best to explain, and I'll use 7x8 as an example, because it's the one I can never remember. Using your left hand with your fingers spread, count to 7 lowering a finger until you have all your fingers down, and then raising a finger until you reach 7. At the end, you should have two fingers up and three fingers down. Do the same with your right hand up to 8, until have three fingers down and three fingers up. Add the number of fingers up, two on your left, and three on your right: 5. Multiply that number by ten: 50. Next multiply the number of fingers down on your left hand by the number down on your right: 2x3=6. Add that to the number you got from the fingers up, 50, and you get 56! They used 13 other significant joints (wrists, elbows, shoulders, etc) to do more advanced multiplication, but the man giving the lecture told us his teacher left for Mexico before he learned how to do that. I think the multiplication with fingers was pretty neat on its own, but I'm a self-admitted nerd, so I'm bound to be into that kind of thing.