78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



¿Hablas ingles?
2005-05-23   1:14 p.m.

¡Buenas tardes!

Yep, that's about the extent of my Spanish. Except, of course, for all the slang/curse words I picked up while teaching at an inner-city high school in Newark, NJ. It's always a good idea to figure out what your students are shouting at you, no matter the language. And weren't they impressed when I could shout back. Props must be given to my Spanish-speaking pals for helping me assemble a slew of insulting and condescending yet acceptable phrases (I was the teacher, after all) as a line of defense. But I can't imagine that "I'm going to call your mother and tell her you said that to me" is going to help my husband and I get around Peru and Bolivia.

I'm trying really hard to learn, cause French and Italian ain't gonna help me there, and neither is Steve's Hungarian. You'd think with four languages between us, one of them would be Spanish, but alas, no. No tengo ninguna idea. But...Está bien. I will learn.

Ok now I'm just showing off.

Being a continual student of foreign languages because of my travels and work in Grad school, I've made some interesting observations about differences in construction and phrasing; these last few months that I've spent trying to learn Spanish have been no exception. There's a certain politeness and respect embedded in the syntax of Spanish - and French and Italian, for that matter - that we just don't have in English. At times it's simply the ordering of words that can change an emotional charge: "Por favor, Silencio," I heard a student say to her classmates last month. The language becomes less of an imperative, less of a command than it would be in English, just because of sequencing.

There are tons more examples that I just can't articulate right now because my brain is so overloaded with them, but it would be an interesting study to compile - maybe sometime soon I will do so. I just chuckle to myself whenever I stumble across an instance or example of that extra attempt in the syntax of Foreign languages to be respectful where there is no English equivalent. We all know the British can be...well, British - and I am admittedly taking digs at my own peeps here - but why the language developed lacking these little but significant inclusions makes me really curious. It is always cold and wet where the language developed, isn't it?

I'm particularly concerned about having a strong, solid and working knowledge of a few phrases in Spanish for our trip - essentially those that revolve around "will you please take me to" and "will you please stop at". This
is because while Steve and I happily accepted the offer to volunteer at Picaflor Research Center on the outskirts of Puerto Maldonado, we didn't exactly realize what a project it would be just to get there.

Officially, the center is in (or around) Tambopata - which, as far as I can tell, is an off-shoot of the Rio Madre de Dios. (Isn't "Mother of God" the best name for a river? It can be spiritual and contemplative, indicating the river's serenity, or an exclamation of fear/shock: "MOTHER OF GOD!!", if the river is at all scary. I hope it's a little of both. tee hee!) There is NO road access to the station, and the closest town, Puerto Maldonado, is hardly a swinging, cosmopolitan big city. As far as I can gather, it's closer to a little out-post town that serves as a jumping off point for fishing, gold mining, and tourist/research expeditions into the Rain Forest. The only way to get to the center from Puerto Maldonado is by boat - a trip that can take anywhere from 5-8 hours, depending on the, ahem, quality of the vehicle in which you are traveling. And just in case you, as I did, are thinking the center must have its own boats that it uses to transport volunteers, scientists, and students - it doesn't.

Hence the espanol necessito: "Is there room in your fishing boat for us? We need to get to a remote Jungle lodge and research center. Oh, and can you make a fifteen minute stop at the La Torre Puesto de Control so that we can show the INRENA officials that we have, in fact, purchased National Park entry tickets and are not trying to sneak in to smuggle/look for/supply drugs? Thank you!"

Scary, a bit. No? Yes. But there's no one I trust more than Steve, particularly in situations like this one. I must admit that I'm excited about the idea - just getting there will be an exciting challenge in itself, and I can imagine that when we finally see the center (oh, did I mention that once off the boat we need to go a few km on foot through the Jungle to get there?), we'll feel as accomplished and important as Lewis and Clark or Columbus. Just without the genocide.

As for what we'll be doing when we actually get there - I'm still not clear on that. Most likely, part of our ten days will be spent cataloging flora and/or fauna (yay! Macaws and Toucans!); the other parts are up to the scientists who run the place. Dr. Hanna told us she needs people to maintain and clear trails, and to repair buildings, but I also let her know that I have extensive knowledge of how the whole grant process works, so that if she needed any administrative work done, I'd be happy to help. I knew my otherwise not-useful-in-the-real-world career as an academic would come in handy someday!

The rest we're still sort of lazily planning - we're fixed to be at Picaflor from late July to early August. In and around there? Cuzco, Lima, Trujillo, Puno, Arequipa, a Machu Picchu hike, a Lake Titicaca kayak trip, a day or three to relax in Pisac - not in that particular order. We're still debating that first week and last week - go up to Iquitos, located fantastically close to the Colombian border (which may be just a bit too much excitement for yours truly)? Or into Bolivia to see what crossing borders in South America might be like? It would be nice to have something to compare to Africa in that department.

In the meantime, I'm reading tons of guidebooks and looking through pages and pages of resources on the web. My mom jokingly dubbed this my new "mini-career" yesterday, since I've been doing similar things for her and another friend of mine who also have trips coming up. My mom, I'm thrilled to say, is going to England to sing with a choral group she sang with last summer. Our Mother's Day gift to her was her plane fare, which seemed to make her so happy that she could only cry. This made me start crying as well, since I'm so happy that she is finally traveling and doing something for herself, and since I felt so dern proud that I'm at a comfortable enough place financially to drop a few hundred dollars on a family member as a gift, but that's another story for another entry entirely. My mom will eventually be meeting her group in Canterbury, where they'll lodge, explore, rehearse and eventually perform, but we sent her a few days early to see London and settle into Canterbury before the bustle of the group starts. I found a place for her to stay in London right outside of Victoria Station, and thanks to the connections I've maintained through Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree, I got a decent price. Well, decent for London, considering the dollar has been in the crapper lately.

I really have enjoyed helping her out this way, as I have also enjoyed helping another friend figure out the potential for a trip to Ireland in the coming months. It almost feels like a mini-career; there's so much to internet research regarding travel that hours can fly by without notice. This is also one more reason why I heart my job: there's enough time off and gaps in between my responsibilities and needed presence that I can write, plan, do laundry, and be silly with my friends on school night without having to worry about what's due, what's expected, or when I have to get up.

My weeks have slowed down considerably, since finals and end-of-the-semester meetings are over, but since I can't quite resist working, I've been doing consulting work here and there for various academic and publishing institutions. It pays well, which is sort of a double edged sword. It's nice to watch the money pile up, but it's painful to realize how long you'd have to teach to make the money you do consulting. Seems backwards, doesn't it? Ah well, the summer session will start soon enough, and I have the perfect number of students (11) to work with in another Women's Studies course.

We wound up celebrating my birthday all week last week. It started with that silly Burlesque show that a group of us went to in Brooklyn on Monday night. Thomas was playing there, which was incentive enough for most of us, but when I reminded everyone it was nearly my birthday and that this would be a good way to celebrate, people had a hard time finding reasons to back out, even though it was a Monday night and Brooklyn's a bit far. I was happy to see Bruno looking really happy, happy to dance around with my friends at Galapagos, and happy that Michael kept insisting that I wasn't turning 27, but 25 for the third year in a row. Love that logic.

On my actual birthday, I had an amazing dinner with Steve, who really knows how to make a girl feel special and loved, and then this past weekend we had a bbq in my and my friend Andrew's honor (since Andrew's b day is a few days before mine). We had a few spritzes, but managed to play some fierce bocce ball games and dance on the deck until about 1 am. Great cake, yummy food, really fun people, and good music. Pictures will come as soon as I have the energy to fix them up.

Tengo que ir ahora!

xox