30th of June, 2014

Intern Shareef's Blog Day #5:

  Today was a very good day. In the morning I woke up and went to my first clase de español of the summer! It was a lot of fun and is with only 5 people so that is very nice, it was really interesting to see the difference between having many students in a class compared to very little and having a very good Mexican spanish teacher compared to having a spanish teacher whose first language is english and was born in the U.S and teaches out of a book. I learned today (pretty much) one unit/test back home in two hours today, which is very good because I really hope I will be able to speak spanish much better when I leave in august. After my spanish class all of the students went to orientation and we all introduced ourselves and said where we were from and an observation on Mexico so far. It was nice to getting to know everyone today. I met Amanda, Cindy, Jennifer, Jose, Kourtney, Sarah, Susan and Tania (don't worry it is only in alphabetical order not any other biased way.) After orientation my uncle took all of us down to the Zocalo to go visit the cathedrals. They were all very beautiful and the architectural designs were very precise, like how they are very symmetrical and detailed. The walls are detailed as well as the roofs. They are amazing and to think that some of these were made in the 1500's is really unbelievable seeing as though they did not have the same type of technology as us or even writing utensils, to blueprint a model of what it would look like. The art in the cathedrals are very spectacular as well. I really enjoyed going in and seeing all of the paintings of the virgin Mary, also all of the models of Christ on the cross. After the cathedrals we went to the MIRADOR TORRE LATINO which is currently the second tallest building in Mexico. It used to be the first but another building was built taller than it. The view was very beautiful. It was a very neat sight to see and I will not forget all the buildings you can see from the top. You could see most of Mexico City, especially the big Mexican flag that stands in the zocalo. After our trip up something like 48 stories we headed back to the campus.

 Around 6:00 after a few hours we headed to a language exchange to speak to the students who live in Mexico City. This was a very fun experience for me. I talked to a couple different people in spanglish and met a lot of new people as well as learning some new stuff about the immersion students. I asked a few of them how they became interested in psychology and I got some pretty different answers. For instance, since high school Kourtney always wanted to take a psychology course but never got the chance to fit it in her schedule, because her electives were always full, but when she got into college she really enjoyed it and decided to pursue it as a goal of hers. Jennifer had always wanted to study Psychology as a kid. She either wanted to do that or be a doctor but she felt like psychology was a much better fit for her. Tania started off wanting to do fashion when she first got into college but soon realized she didn't enjoy it as much as she thought she would. She remembered taking classes in high school and she was pretty good at it and she realized it was a suitable job for her.