2023
Week 5 in Cartagena
The fifth and final week of the trip was spent in Cartagena. The students from UB traveled with us to Cartagena and stayed in the same hotel as us for a few days. The first day we got Tex-Mex for lunch and did some shopping. We later went to the grocery store and...
Week 4 in Palenque
Week 4 had the same routine as week 3, and I finished with my last 13 participants, bringing the total number to 53. During this week we visited the high school where the e=were teachings Lengua Palenquera classes. We attended Bernardino's class on Tuesday,...
Week 3 in Palenque
The third week of the trip was in Palenque. We met our host family and got settled in before it started to rain, which I did not know at the time would be a common occurrence. Soon after students from the University at Buffalo arrived, and would be staying with us...
Week 5 in Cartagena
To say I am grateful for this program is an understatement. I will never forget this experience and I owe Dr. Carol Miller a big thanks for recommending the Palenque location to me. I've developed my conversational and academic Spanish vocabulary in ways I could have...
Week 4 in Palenque
Running Participants continues to run smoothly, besides thunderstorms and noises from the outside. It has been such an experience to do fieldwork in this setting. It has taken collaboration, guidance from my advisor and problem solving. Since we already had around 40...
Week 3 – Palenque
When we arrived in Palenque, I was definitely shocked... At Penn State, we always have running water, air conditioned buildings and all the luxury. Palenque has its own kind of luxury that did take some getting used to. The water was only on every 3 or so days, so for...
2nd Week in Medellin
To start the second week in Medellin, we went to the University of Antioquia and attended the class of a professor in the linguistics department that we had met during the previous visit. In the class, we earned about a program called AntConc, which is a corpus...
Week 2 in Medellín
Monday we were invited by a Linguistics professor at the University of Antioquia to participate in a class he teaches about how to build a corpus. I have only ever looked at a corpus a few times so I was very excited to participate. It was a little tough to follow...
First Weekend in Medellín
We had quite an eventful weekend. On Friday, our driver Hernando, who is a close family friend of Marianne invited us over to meet his son and have some food cooked by his wife. The food was amazing and they fed us very well. We had pasta with a sauce similar to...
First Weekend in Medellin
The first weekend in Colombia began on Friday where we had lunch with the family of our driver, who is friends with Pr. Dieck. We had chicken alfredo and a soup with potatoes. We got to talk to his family and learned his son attends the University of Antioquia,...
Week 1 in Medellín!
Our first full day, Tuesday, we contacted Professor Marianne Dieck at the University of Antioquia and made plans for Wednesday to get coffee and attend her class. After we made plans, we explored a little bit around our Airbnb and checked out a local grocery store. We...
Week 1 in Medellin
I am halfway through my first week of PIRE. After two days of flying we arrived at our first destination, the mountainous city of Medellin, Colombia. During the first day we did some exploring of our local area, the Poblado, and went shopping at a local Market,...