inca kola, my neighborhood, and MATH!

Mmmmmmm! I just finished a delightful lunch of estofado de pollo (that is, chicken stew). The big meal of the day is eaten in the early afternoon here. I had class in the morning, now I am home for lunch, and I will return to school in a few hours for another class. With lunch, I drank inca kola, which is a popular kind of pop here. It's really good! (Lauren, I will bring some back for you!) Since lunch is usually a large meal, dinner, in the evening, is pretty light. Tita tells me that, becuase of the altitude, it is not good to eat a lot in the evening. And for breakfast every morning I eat bread with chicken paste. I haven't quite decided what I think about that yet.

I live in Urbanizacion Santa Cecilia. It's a cute little neighborhood--I love it! The enterances are gated, and there are guards that are always walking around and blowing this little horn/whistle thing. I asked Andrea why they do that... and she didn't know. That's just how it is!

This is where I live! My room is on the third floor. Most of the houses in Arequipa are walled in like mine. On the other side of the wall, there is a little garden and then the house!



This is my street! See the yellow gate at the end of the street? That's the enterance to Urbanizacion Santa Cecilia.



And right across the street from us is a park! And this is the park!

Yesterday I had my first class that was NOT with my Calvin classmates. I'm taking Algebra Lineal y Geometria Analitica (Linear Algebra and Analitic Geometry!). It is a course for first year engineering students, and I signed up for it, knowing that it's a first year class, hoping that that would mean that I already know the math content and can simply concentrate on learning it in Spanish. Today we met for the second time, and it was so much fun to be in a math class again!! We did Gaussian Elimination today (that is a way to solve systems of linear equations with three or more variables)!

One more thing. Bathrooms. The bathrooms in the university have toilet paper, but not in the stalls. There is a toilet paper dispenser when you enter the bathroom, by the sink. People who go to the bathroom get toilet paper BEFORE entering a stall. I need to not forget that.