Today, I woke up bright and early for my second day of classes here in Peru. In my grammar class, we continued on from cuando and its contribution to sentence structure, and began to discuss the Préterito Imperfecto del Subjuntivo, or the past subjunctive. We learned how to conjugate it and began to go over the many uses for it. For me, learning and remembering the different scenarios isn't that difficult, and neither are the conjugations... when I have time. In the classroom setting, it is low pressure and the scenario is already set for us to have to use the past subjunctive. In conversation, out in the streets, it is tougher because you have to think on your feet. I try to talk to as many locals as I can, whether it's asking directions or whether it's just starting a friendly conversation.
In our culture class today we talked about the Caral civilization, which was the earliest known cultured (having tools, religion, agriculture, etc.) civilization in Peru. Caral was only discovered though in 1994, by a woman named Ruth Shady. Caral was a theocratic society that had a sustainable agricultural system that allowed them to control and farm the land, as well as systematically and efficiently hunt animals, specifically fish (they made the first fishing nets from cotton strings and pelican bones).
Ater class, we ate a quick lunch and headed to El Pueblo Libre to see the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru. This museum was awesome - it had a ton of visual exhibits displaying the pre-Incan Peruvians' way of life and we also got a guided tour that explained a lot of the lesser known facts about Peruvian history. For example, way back in the day, some Peruvian societies experimented with cranial surgery and cranial reshaping. There were recovered skulls that showed the results of these experiments: very strangely shaped skulls. I bought something from the gift shop, but in case my mom reads this before I get home, I won't say what it is ;)
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