Wednesday and Thursday

These two days are a blur in my notes and mixed all together, so I decided to create a single post about some of the events that stood out for me.

First, the we solved the internet access and were finally able to work. I love cataloging!! It is very detailed and there are a clear set of rules to follow. When I get to the bibles it's a little more challenging. It was felt like solving a giant puzzle and there was such a sense of accomplishment when you finished each record. Everyone seemed to work well together, answering each other's questions and making recommendations when needed. Cataloging the German books was a unique challenge since most of them were not in OCLC, but it was a good opportunity to learn something besides copy cataloging.

On one of the days Sarah, Emme, and I went for a walk to find the "supermarket." After giving up we ended up in this little restaurant for lunch. Since it was a little more off the tourist path we had no idea what were ordering, and it somehow felt much more authentic than any other other restaurants. We laughed at their version of ketchup and had a wonderful time.

Wednesday night, most of us went to watch the presidential debate at a local restaurant. I did a similar thing in Thailand years ago. For some reason, watching debates in another country with a group of Americans that travel and have international experiences is always rewarding and feels very patriotic! It, of course, helped that I agreed with most of the people in the room.

Thursday, Julie and I took a taxi to the supermarket. It was very big and felt very American. In many ways it was sad to walk the aisles since you could see how much of our culture has infiltrated theirs. After buying pizza and drinks we headed back to the house. It was wonderful to have the entire group over, including some of the library employees.

Unfortunately, I had homework for another class. In retrospect it would have been better to finish everything for the other classes. When we had down time I wanted to be out exploring or talking to classmates, not reading or doing homework.

We finally start working!

Tuesday morning we arrived at the library ready to start working. After dividing into two groups of four, our group went to train with Kathleen. She had created a wonderful "cheat sheet" that told us exactly what fields and subfields the library needed. The training went well, but we had to be patient as each of us took a turn creating the new record. Soon we were ready to get started on our own.

Within minutes we found that a desire to get started doesn't always mean much. I spent most of the afternoon moving from one corner to another trying to get any internet access. When I finally did get access, there was nowhere to plug in the laptop! Even once we were sort of settled, the internet access was so sporadic that it often meant starting over two or three times to finish one record.

Argh! Today was a lesson, not just on being in another country and working with the tools you have, but having a great deal of patience. I'm sure this will happen in real libraries, but at least I would have other ideas of projects to work on. Here, it wasn't my own library so it was very frustrating since I really wanted to be helping them and didn't know what I could do.