Buenos
Aires is not only a city filled with Latin American culture, but also a town
with its heritage originating from Europe.
Evidence of this can be seen in the food, the way people dress, and buildings
modeled after French architecture. But one
country’s heritage that stands out over the rest is Italy. For this reason, why not learn Italian?
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We are always this
behaved in class... |
A small
group consisting of Paul Bases, Andrew Schmiege, Lucas Fricke, and your
wonderful blogger Nate Solofra decided to do just that. Instead of taking Spanish, we decided learning
a new language would help us understand again what it is like to start another
language and how to better teach languages to others with little or no
experience.
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| Casa de Borges |
After
classes, we went as a group on a tour of the barrio Palermo. Here we saw first-hand what the area of Palermo
consists and ended the tour by seeing where Jorge Luís Borges (famous
Argentinian author) lived during his lifetime in Buenos Aires.
Ci vediamo domani!
-Nathan
Solofra
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| MLC Immersion group in Palermo. |
Borges has an amazing international reputation. Cool that you were at his house!
ReplyDeleteA favorite passage from Borges' little story "On Exactitude in Science"
". . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
[Philosopher Jean Baudrillard has used Borges' concept, flipped around (only the map remains, not the reality underneath) to describe the hyperreality of images in contemporary American culture.]