Lay Fun

Nothing exciting happened on the micros today..what a bummer, huh?!  This will be the last week of my Spanish Intensive class and for some reason we spent a lot of time today talking about dogs.  What brought this topic of conversation up was the fact that many of us have seen stray dogs, but not only stray dogs, but stray dogs with sweaters.  So we asked about this strange occurance.  Apparently dogs wear sweaters a lot here because obviously it's chilly so owners try to keep them warm.  My professor, however, didn't really have an explanation for the sweater-wearing stray dogs though.  But, this topic did spark the conversation of a native dog called the Peruvian hairless dog.  The dogs don't have any hair (hence the name) so many of them have sweaters, but they are in fact native dogs to Peru.  Google them if you would like to see images, I have yet to see one in person.

This topic then lead to the topic of a hero dog that lives here in Peru.  This Rottweiler is named Lay Fun and in 2006 he was protecting a parking lot that he was trained to watch and a theif broke in and the dog killed him.  Lay Fun was condemned to death for this, but rather than being put to sleep, he became a police dog.  Now he is an old dog and lawfully he should be put to sleep now.  Although this doesn't seem like big news, it is actually national news here in Peru and it is a major current event.  Many Peruvians see Lay Fun as a hero and they don't want him to be killed.  It is actually a quite interesting story and it made Spanish class more eventful.  :)

After class we had an intercultural workshop that touched on culture shock as well as being open to the beliefs and values of the Peruvian culture.  We also talked about ways to get the most out of this experience.  It was interesting and pretty helpful and I hope that I keep those lessons with me as this study abroad experience continues.