Reflection on Blog: Tickets to Paradise!

In our Journey in Literature class, we focused on two different kind of journeys we experienced throughout our lives: the internal journey and the external journey. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the Journey Journal helped me a lot to know more about myself and keep discovering my internal journey. But my external journal is reflected in the blog we had to work on during the whole semester and helped us to find what identifies us a culture. Creating a blog was a new task for me. Of course, I have social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but this kind of account was a new experience and an interesting one. During the whole semester, we were assigned to wrote different kind of entries and post them in our respective blogs. At first, I didn't know anything about Blogger. "How I am even supposed to add gadgets to my blog? How I am even supposed to change the background? Or the font and size of the letter?" Well, my doubts about creating the blog were most like these ones. With the help of one of my friends and some practice, I learned how to work on my Blogger account.

I chose to name my blog "Tickets to Paradise" because it represents a way to escape and feel free to know more about ourselves and our external journey while being in a paradise such as a beach, a park, a rainforest, etc. During the semester, we discussed topics such as education, tourism, traveler, dreams, identity, stereotyping, othering, in-group, out-group, perspective, and location. Most of these themes were identified in the readings, novels, and movies we saw and analyzed during class. This blog was an effective tool to express our thoughts about such topics. Even though there are many posts, my favorite was "Tourist for a Day in Puerto Rico". I really enjoyed writing this entry because I had a lot of fun with my family while doing the activity of becoming a tourist for a day in my own country. In this task, I was able to had my "ticket to paradise" while visiting Boquerón Beach at the southwest of the island and I recommend it to everyone! I like that I was able to share my experience with everyone and received feedback from my colleagues. Overall I feel this helped my writing process and my critical analysis. Everyone should begin a blog in order to discover and know more about their external journey and feel more comfortable to express it and share ideas and opinions with the ones who read your entries.

Ten Reasons to Start a Blog

Reflection on Group Work: Fortunate Travelers!

At the beginning of our Journey in Literature class, we were assigned to work in a group. At first, I was hoping the professor let us chose the people we wanted to work with because I knew two people before we took this class, but the professor selected the groups we would have to work during the whole semester. The first day we had to work in the group we were really a bunch of strangers. We didn't know each other. That first approach was very formal. We told each other our names, we share our phone numbers and emails, and we also create a group message in Whatsapp to establish contact more easily. During this class, we also divide our roles in the group and selected a group name: Fortunate Travelers. Valeria and Liane were the note takers, Héctor and Antonio worked as the researchers, Manuel was the conflict solver and I act as the task manager of the group.

Meeting new people can be an interesting and enriching experience or an awful one. Since we did not know each other, I think we were very timid those first days of class. As time progressed, we started talking to each other more than the beginning of the course and we felt more comfortable sharing our thoughts and discussing our opinions. We are very different, but agree with a group opinion was never a big trouble for us. The first group project we had to present in front of class was about Jamaica Kincaid's novel "A Small Place". We search for information about the author, we looked out for quotes that supported our point of view, and  we wrote about the different themes on the reading. Finally, we made our oral presentation and we felt comfortable with it. Unfortunately, we did not felt very happy with the grade we received  from its analysis and I believe this experience helped us to join more as a group and worked more than we were already working to obtain a good grade in the next group project.

This is the poster we made for the oral
 presentation about Carl Jung's travel to North Africa.

The final oral presentation about Carl Jung is the highlight of our group work. We had the same purpose: obtain a better grade. We took it very seriously and we search for information about the author and quotes that support our argument. We decided to meet up during the weekend to make sure we do a great presentation. During the meeting, we finished our analysis on the different themes such as othering, in-group, out-group, location, identity, and perspective, and we also had the opportunity to prepare a poster to explain better the location theme. This experience helped us to grow as a group and know more about each other. We shared our opinions and we respected each other.

It has been an honor to work with you, guys! We all worked hard and I'm thankful with all of you. I had told meeting new people can be an interesting and enriching experience or an awful one. Well, the last thing I had to say is that meeting Valeria, Liane, Hector, Antonio and Manuel was an interesting and enriching experience! I had learned that group work are not always bad. We can gain a lot of knowledge from many of them.

Benefits of group work

Tourist for the Day in Puerto Rico

Which are the general steps to become a tourist in your homeland? First, you must wake up early. Second, you should prepare a backpack with snacks, towels, and additional clothes (in case you are thinking to go to the beach). Third, get up in the car and LET THE ADVENTURE BEGIN! (Don't forget to establish a budget!)

Keeping this steps in mind, I decided to go with my family to the southwest of the island. We wake up early today and we prepare the stuff we need for the trip (snacks such as Frito Lay's bags, beverages, and homemade sandwiches and backpacks with clothes, towels, shoes, etc.). We get up in our car and took the Road #2 until Road #100 to finally arrived to Cabo Rojo. We ate "pastelillos de queso, pastelillos de chapín and alcapurrias" at a kiosk near the roadside. They were delicious. We continued our trip until we arrived to Playa Sucia, but we can't get off the car because it was full and my mom didn't want to park the car too far from it. Nonetheless, we saw the Cabo Rojo's salt flats best known in Spanish as "las salinas".

Therefore, we decided to go to Boquerón beach and we had a great time together. The day was awesome, the weather was perfect, and we were really satisfied. After we set up our spot in the beach, we stayed a couple of hours in the water. The sun was at its peak, the water was good, and the sand was very hot. While I was in the water, I had the opportunity to analyze the environment which it was very calm and clean. The beach is a great natural scenery in which we can search for answers to our internal journey while we are having fun with our external journey. Keeping in mind that we had to pretend we were tourists, we felt a little bit out-grouped by the other Puerto Ricans at the beach, but we also felt in-grouped when we saw a couple of American tourists near us. I can't elaborate more on this topic because we didn't have the opportunity to talked with the locals nor the other tourists. My perspective toward the Puerto Ricans didn't changed at all because I had already seen that kind of exclusion or out-group by the locals to the tourists. Probably, the reason could be because of the English language.

Every adventure comes to an end... We decide to leave the beach around 5:00 p.m. We got up again in our car and finally went back to our home. I must say that being a tourist for a day is one of the best experiences I ever had in my life. We have to be thankful for all the wonderful places we have in our island. Sometimes we, as locals, do not appreciate all the marvelous places Puerto Rico offers to everyone and we need to be a tourist for a day to enjoy it.

Road #2

Near Cabo Rojo

Only a few minutes to Playa Sucia 

On our way to Playa Sucia

Part of the Cabo Rojo's salt flats

Having fun at Boquerón beach with my siblings

Boquerón beach
Time to say good bye... 

Official Web Page of the Municipality of Cabo Rojo

Reflection to a Conference: "Supernovae Reveal An Accelerating Universe"

I had the opportunity to assist to Adam Riess' public conference last Monday. It took place in the Amphitheater 1 at the General Studies building. The conference was titled: "Supernovas: Dark Matter? Dark Energy? The Surprising History of the Expanding Universe". Adam Riess is Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the John Hopkins University and a Senior member of the Science Staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute, both in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Riess is a renowned astrophysicist who won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2006 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. Why? Riess' study led to the discovery of an accelerating Universe.  

"The Universe is not just expanding, but actually accelerating and accelerating." His research involves the study of the cosmological framework with the supernovae or exploding stars. Riess indicated three reasons trying (because they really don't know) to explain why the Universe is accelerating now. The reasons are the following: vacuum energy, dynamical dark energy, and modified gravity. Riess started his research in 1998 when he discovered accelerating expansion and dark energy, and confirmed this with more distant supernovae from Hubble Space Telescope.

An important fact that caught my attention was that the Universe is actually 13.4 billion year old. I didn't know this fact before. Another fact that I liked was the percentage distribution of what is the Universe composed. The components of the Universe with their respective percentages are: planets (0.05%), stars (0.5%), dark matter (25%), gas (4%), and dark energy (70%). In general terms, I liked the conference and how he interact with us (his public). He gave an interesting talk and it was never monotonous. I found funny that he told: "How do we really know our Universe is expanding? We checked!" It made me laugh!

The Rum Diary

The film The Rum Diary is based on a book written by Hunter S. Thompson. The movie was directed by Bruce Robinson and was filmed in Puerto Rico. American actor Johnny Depp  interpreted an American journalist called Paul Kemp who hasn't been successful in the United States and started working for the San Juan Star newspaper in our island during the 1960s. 

The Rum Diary is similar to the Jamaica Kincaid's novel A Small Place. Jamaica Kincaid attacked the tourists in a way the reader can assume the tourist's role and felt offended by her writing. Paul Kemp arrived to Puerto Rico without any knowledge about the island. Kincaid said about this: "A tourist is an ugly human being." And why not? At first, he didn't know anything about our culture, the Puerto Rican lifestyle or even the economic status. He was an outsider who was hired to write about horoscopes until he faced the reality of Puerto Rico and started caring about the problems in the island after relating with Sala. Kemp became more interested in the situations of the island: poverty, alcoholism, ignorance, etc. 

Kemp changed throughout the movie. His transition can be defined with two scenes. The first was at the beginning of the movie. The taxi driver asked him something in Spanish and he replied he don't speak Spanish. This is a clear example of his outsider (tourist) view. The second scene is the one at the bowling alley. Kemp asked a tourist: "What you like most of Puerto Rico?"  The tourist replied: “The bowling alley and the casinos." Kemp asked him: "Have you seen a lot of the island?".  The tourist's  wife replied: “We never leave the hotel. It is not safe”.  His last question was: “But you are having fun, right? The woman replied: “Oh yeah, lots of fun! “. Here is Kincaid's voice: "The tourist is an ugly human being." After that, he wanted to write about the issues of Puerto Rico and he can be seen as an insider or partially insider (traveler). 

At the end of the movie, Kemp went back to the United States and became a successful writer. It is also a transition from an unsuccessful to a successful journey. It was a change of his perspective toward Puerto Rico and its locals. Kemp was able to understand the issue's location of the Puerto Ricans and sympathize with them in a good way.

"Teaching" and "Helping" by Jim Cooper

It was assigned to read two chapters from the book Down on the Island by Jim Cooper. In the first one, "Teaching", Cooper expresses his point of view about the syllabus for the English class he was teaching at the Colegio located in Mayagüez. He noticed how much difficult was for the students to learn English because most of them didn't know it very well and therefore they didn't understand the readings they had to do at first. After he visited some public schools, he also noticed some of the teachers were having trouble to speak English. Cooper proposed a syllabus which included strictly language courses to the freshman and short stories and novels to the sophomore students. He would loved to stated that the language program he set up solved the student's language problems, but it didn't at all.

In the second chapter, "Helping", Cooper expresses his point of view about a method implemented by the students from our island. This method consisted of 'helping throughout cheating'. How this can be possible? Puerto Ricans, as Jim Cooper demonstrated, are the most hospitable people in the world and they tend to do whatever they can in order to help others. Many of the students seek for an extra help in their classmates, but this attitude was not only in their everyday work but during the time they were taking exams too. However, students learn how they must behave in the school since they are kids at the primary levels. All I want to say with this statement is that students have been taught since their primary levels to be cooperative with each other.

"When I started asking students why they were looking at another student's paper during an exam, they replied with no embarrassment: because I don't know the answer, and maybe he does. If I asked the other student why he let him look at his paper, I got some such answer as: but I'm just trying to help him. He's my friend."

We all know that this kind of help is actually cheating, but the students didn't realize it. It is also worrying that Cooper stated teachers also promote the cheating attitude. I think we must do everything possible to earn our grade by our own effort; not at the expense of others. Students should help them, but in a good way working on cooperative teaching or learning, but they should not cheat. I'm against it.

Internal Journey: A Reflection on my Journey Journal

As part of our Journey in Literature class, it was assigned a special project that consisted in writing into a journal for eight weeks. At first, I felt scared because I'm not very good in English grammar and vocabulary and I was thinking about  how I was supposed to write in it having this kind of situation. The first reflection took place in the classroom and it was like a challenge for me. First, I must keep my hand moving during ten minutes, but it was  difficult because I had to translate all the thoughts in my mind to the English language and my hand started to hurt at the fifth minute, approximately. Second, to lose control and go for the jugular was a little hard because I think my thoughts weren't really interesting and crazy ones.

After the first week of writing on my journal, I started to feel more comfortable with my writing, but I know I have to continue improving  it. I had also talked about the difficult part of this experience, but I want to let you know the bearable part. The other instructions we had to followed on the journal were that we can't cross out, didn't worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and don't think nor get logical. These instructions were more easy for me because I didn't really worry about how I wrote any word or sentence during the ten minutes. I simply wrote whatever I thought at that moment and most of the times I didn't get logical. Most of my entries are sentences without any logical sense. I like it because it helped me to wrote more fast in a given time. This practice helped me to explore my internal journey after experienced my external journey. I also had the opportunity to wrote about my dreams after I woke up in the morning and I felt more comfortable because I remembered most part of my dreams. The journey journal is a reflection of my inner journey; a journey many people didn't know about and a one from which I had also learned about myself.

Another thing we had to do in our journal was three life compasses per week. These compasses helped me to have a better understanding of my everyday situations inviting me to think about my spiritual or natural, mental, emotional, and physical state. Life compasses were variable as the entries, but I have learned many things from each one of them.  This activity also helped me to being relaxed and satisfied when doing my daily's reflections. I'm looking  forward to keep discovering and working with my internal and external journey throughout my entire life.

Journal Writing: 5 Smart Reasons Why YOU Should Start doing it TODAY