I started my new classes and my new internship this week - finally! I have a pretty odd schedule this half. Sometimes I have class 8-10am or 5-7pm or 4-6pm, but it's all good. I am taking two classes - Pre-colonial & Colonial Latin American Lit and a Service Learning class to accompany my internship at the school in Turi. My literature class has been interesting so far and we do fun things like go on little field trips and watch videos occasionally. 

This week was my first week teaching classes at the school in Turi - an area on the outskirts of Cuenca. It's basically right up the mountain from my house. As I've said a few times before, Latin America generally operates a little differently than the U.S. Some might call it inefficient, some might call it slower-paced, I just call it Latin American style. My first day, a teacher put me in a classroom of 30 7th graders, told me to teach them English for 2 hours, and left. By the way, they don't have books and I didn't have a lesson plan. However, I was able to wing it by practicing basic vocab and teaching them songs in English. The second graders were much more challenging because they were very poorly behaved. I ended up taking them outside and just playing for half the class. 

The second day, I found out that another English teacher/volunteer from the U.S. had been assigned to the same class as me, and the woman who is supposed to be coordinating all of this hasn't been to school at all this week. Latin American style. However, it looks like between us we have 6 classes to teach, so we can just split it up and make it work. It's going to be tiring work for me because I have to make up all my own lesson plans, find my own materials, and I'm there for 4 hours each day Tues/Wed/Thurs, but I am excited!

In other news, I went to my first Capoeira class last night. Capoeira is Brazilian fight dancing... we did some fighting/dancing with sticks in rhythm to the music, then a bunch of floor movement, which I don't really know how to describe so if you want, you can watch this video I found on youtube. (Obviously our class was NOT this advanced haha)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8xxgFpK-NM

And while I'm putting up youtube videos... here's one of a song called Danza Kuduro - it's SUPER popular here and I hear it playing all the time, and I love it =]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fjYYEhAffk