This summer, 12 students and two faculty members are traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico to immerse themselves in the culture and language of Oaxaca, Mexico and develop their conversational fluency and understanding of daily life in Mexico by living with Oaxacan families and attending class at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez. Please enjoy this blog post from Gershom ’27 where he shares about the groups day of language learning, Oaxacan cooking, salsa dancing, and navigating local shops and storms.
It was a very eventful day, probably the most eventful of all the days! We started out with school as usual, which includes Spanish class from 9am to 12pm. I was in Spanish 3 last year, so I was in the respective level of learning. We reviewed our knowledge of antepresente and futuro tenses and eventually put them to the test by breaking down Spanish songs and translating them to English, even singing as a class a little bit on the way.
Then we had a task of finding the candy store with the Spanish 2 level class by asking locals for directions to the store in Spanish, which helped educate us a lot.
After classes was our cooking class, where, with the help of several professional chefs, we created some popular Oaxacan foods like quesadillas, rice, mole, and memelas! And to finish the lunch off, we made an excellent chocolate soup-like drink that tasted wonderfully. After parting ways with the talented Oaxacan chefs, we had a blast from the past with an advanced return to our salsa dancing class from Friday. In the class we put our old knowledge, along with some new knowledge, into play to show off some dancing skills that truly made us feel like we were one with the Oaxacan culture. Following this, we made an unexpected visit to a cake store and a 3-D print collection store, located side-by-side, while hiding from heavy rains and frightening thunderstorms. Once the storm passed, Jesse, Victor, and I returned to our house to share some good conversation with another student who is sharing our home while participating in a homestay program similar to ours. Our full household shared a wonderful dinner of tortas cooked by our amazing Señora Cristina. Our day was most definitely fulfilled, and we hope we can engage more in Oaxacan culture tomorrow during our participation in the printmaking workshop!
Thank you for listening, DA!
