oh, life!

Well, the beach day was really fun. The only problem was that my camera ran out of battery. Sometimes I get frustrated when I want to capture something in a photo, but I just can't. Sometimes it's because I don't have my camera; other times it's because I'm in the back of a bus or a taxi and just can't pull my camera out. Still other times it's just because I simply cannot capture what I'm seeing. In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Lena is a painter and in one part of the first book, she is painting scenes of a beautiful town in Greece. The author talks about how Lena just wants to put all the beauty she's seeing onto her canvas, but it's not humanly possible. So she concludes that sometimes she just has to see it...sometimes she just has to take in the beauty with her mind and love the fact that she's there seeing it, even if she can't capture it. Sometimes that's how I feel while I'm here. Some of the most beautiful or significant things I've seen so far just couldn't be captured on a camera. But that's okay! How great it is that I've had the chance to see them, even if I might never see them again.

Tonight at about 2 a.m. my group and I are flying to Máncora, Peru. We'll be there until Saturday. It's our unofficial spring break. We weren't actually supposed to have a spring break, but we finagled our way into getting one. We just had to switch a few classes around, and voila! We're spending a week on the northern coast! I'm so excited! I love Lima, but it is so wonderful to get out of the city and experience what else this country has to offer.

My Spanish continues to improve every day. Sometimes I feel like I wasn't really studying Spanish until I got here. Even though I've taken Spanish classes for 6 years, nothing compares to this kind of a language experience. I really, truly want to live in a Latin American country again. The perfectionist in me wants to conquer this Spanish thing. I know that the only way to really learn is to practice, and the only way to really practice is to be immersed in the language. I have discovered this passion in myself for learning in this way. It's hard to describe. And I guess I felt that I needed to write about this because I know there will come a time when I'm home again and I push Spanish aside, trying to convince myself that it's not that important. But it is important. It's become something I really want to pursue.

This past winter, I decided to drop the "Education" part of my Music Education major. In the fall, as I was applying to study in Peru, I finally decided to consider a Spanish major, solely for the reason that I will only have two more Spanish classes to take after I return home to compete the major. Let me tell you, these two decisions were perhaps two of the best decisions I've ever made. I've always been passionate about music (and don't get me wrong, I still am!) but I always figured I should study music because I'm good at it. Somehow, in the past two months, this opportunity has showed me that I'm passionate about a lot of things. Music makes me come alive. But so do traveling and meeting people and loving people...and a lot of other things. And I think that's a gift. I have no idea what I'm going to do after I graduate, but to me, that is SO exciting.

Sorry this was such a rambling post...

Before I left, I got a lot of comments like, "You're going to grow and learn so much!" or "I hope this is a great experience for you!" or "This semester is going to change your life." At the time, they all seemed so cliche. But I'm half-way done, and I can't even begin to tell you what a difference this semester has made to me.