La Vida Cotidiana [or daily life]

I was looking through some of the past readings for the class and was really impressed by the reading about field notes and I really liked the picture that the author portrayed of the actual field studies. He had spent most of his life doing field research in countries other than his own, and I liked the idea of daily life that he spoke about in his article.

I wonder how my actual daily experiences will be once I am in Mexico. How much time will I be spending with the people? How much time will be spent doing homework, especially taking field notes?

I really liked the system that he had for note taking, the jottings, diary, time-log, and field notes proper. It reminded me of my mission, especially when he talked about the time-log where he would plan what he wanted to do for the day and then what he ended up accomplishing. In a sense, I believe that my daily life in Mexico will be a lot like my mission.

Just like my mission I will be planning nightly for the following day, during which I will be trying to meet with people and have discussions/ask questions with them. I will need to be keeping a personal journal (diary), time-log (planner) and giving a report at the end of my experience.

I feel that my mission experience has prepared me a great deal for what lies ahead (if I only had a dollar for every time I said this, I could retire on Tuesday coming). But there is one aspect that is definitely going to be different and quite a challenge for me: I will be learning another language.

With this challenge comes a whole other wave of questions which I will have to consider in another post, maybe I won't even know the answers to some of these until I am in the field. These questions include: What language tools should I bring with me to the field? Which should I bring with my on my daily excursions? What is the best way to study the language while at "home"? Should I take another Spanish class while I am in the field? What note taking and other remembering methods can I use while out of my living quarters? And what do I do if I simply can't understand someone?

I hope to be able to answer some of these soon, and some later, and when I do I will let you know.