Yel Kaye – Travel Blog, Writing and Photography

One of the things I love most about Spanish school, traveling and not attending formal education anymore is that it allows me to actually enjoy learning for the sake of learning again. This is absolutely, completely wonderful. Yes, right now I’m getting up every morning and attending five hours of one-on-one Spanish tutoring (becoming fluent in Spanish is a major goal of mine.) Yes, I’m assigned homework every night. But really, there are not consequences to what I am doing. No expectations, no pressure. I can actually learn at my own pace and savour the process.

In general, the same can be said for travel. When I feel like learning something, I learn it, and I therefore enjoy it.

Last summer at language school in Xela I skipped a lot of activities to concentrate on my Spanish. But this year I’m in Central America for an unspecified amount of time, so I can do the Spanish thing at a more leisurely pace. That means I am going to attend more conferences or workshops in town so I can learn about other stuff.

I went to my first today. Usually, once a week my Spanish School (Celas Maya) puts on an optional two-hour workshop on a subject relating to Guatemala.

Today, the subject was the Mayan system of counting.

When I was a kid I used to always wonder why we used the number 10 as the basis of our counting system. Could there just as easily be a system where 8 is the base number, or 12?

As it turns out, the Mayans use the number 20. As well, while our arabic number system has 10 symbols (ie 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0) the Mayans only have three: a dot, a bar and something that kind of looks like a bean.

I’m not going to begin to try to explain how the counting system works. I can write numbers using their symbols now, but being able to explain it would perhaps make my brain explode. If you are really interested, read this or this.

But look! This is my age, 26:

And this is the year I was born, 1983:

Wild.

Oh, by the way, the guy giving the workshop said that in the Mayan number system, “zero” doesn’t mean “nothing.” Instead, it means “the beginning of something.”