Learning more than just Spanish

Started my second set of classes this week (new teacher: Leo) and we learned the past tense. Yippeee! Although it was novel to speak and think only about present and future, it's been darn inconvenient when trying to answer complex questions such as "how was your day?" and "what did you eat for dinner?"

In the afternoon today, Samanta (my tutor) showed me photos of various famous people and then asked me to talk about them, what they've done, etc., to practice making sentences and speaking in the past tense. One of the photos was of Nelson Mandela and one was of Paris Hilton. I had a lot to say about Mandela (of course) and I didn't even recognize Paris Hilton. Samanta said that her students by and large fall into two categories: those who can talk about Mandela and those who can talk about Paris Hilton. Then we talked about how she thought it was strange and sad that everyone in Chile recognizes Paris Hilton and know a lot about her -- even though neither of us could answer the question: "What have been her significant achievements?" I decided that it was simply being able to get her name so well known without having done much of anything.

Then we fell back into talking about culture, politics and poetry. I love my afternoon classes. I'm going to have the most esoteric Spanish...