Today has been full of fun and excitement.  Learning about a place and its people through different amazing forms of art is one of my favorite ways to gain understanding of the place I am visiting.  Today went way above and beyond my expectations.

We began the day with a workshop on Culture taught by Anne.  She brought a poem from a very famous poet from the DR: Pedro Mir and had students read it in both Spanish and English which was a nice surprise.

Marcos had a surprise for us when we walked into Piro’s workshop – our first stop.  There were puppets placed around the room and they were moving ever so slightly.

After we were all in there he began talking about the furniture making aspects of the space and then all of a sudden music started playing and the puppets came to live and started dancing!  Some people had a feeling and some people screamed.  But it was all really fun.

Then Miguel, Jag, and Ricardo tried on the puppets and learned how to make them move as well.      The students were so sweet to show us the moves without the puppets on and we learned a lot.

At the museum we learned a lot about a famous artist: Candido Bido.  He was quite interesting as he used textiles, oil, acrylic, ink and sculpture in his work.

This is Christopher, our guide after our tour.  He told us the 5 things that his work is known for is that he always used blue and orange in his works, regardless of the medium, the eyes and ears were missing, the sun is always in the image, using dots of repetition and lastly, he outlines his subjects in the black line to emphasize his subject.

Christopher took us upstairs to the dance studio and we learned some amazing moves from Anny and Christopher both!  The music was really fun and mostly really fast esp. when we learned Merengue.  Bachata was a bit easier and slower and really great.

We ended the night with the program seminar for English class and a great nightly meeting.

Tomorrow we are very excited for our Family Exchange.