A Review, An Overview, A Preview, and A Worldview

Well everyone, after 36 hours of travel and far too many disgruntled airport employees and pampered Houstonian princesses, I've arrived safely in South Dakota. Thanks again to everyone for reading my blog, as a final send-off I've made some lists of, well, various things.

Things I will miss from Ecuador: warmth, $1 beers, llapingachos, my family, fresh fruit, the language, cheap travel, real mountains, my kids, historic buildings, sunshine, beaches, vanilla Konitos, Pingüino ice cream, plazas, fresh bread, music, my friends, Martha, Sarita, María, and Adriana (professors/program assistants), 25 cent public transportation, chochos, smells, futbol-mania, balconies, Pingüino ice cream (it deserves two), bus adventures, newness, soup, the G-Spot, Rafael Correa, indigenous remedies, open-air markets, the black market, tarantulas, year-round flowers, flexible schedules, Juan Car´s movies, South American Coca-Cola, protests, hope, familiarity, $3 movie theaters, flexible due dates, fresh juice, humitas, dozens of banana varieties, city life, chocolate milk

Things I won´t miss from Ecuador: bus exhaust, rain, child street workers, staring, creepy taxi drivers, Nestle instant coffee, racism/homophobia, buses packed to over-capacity, low doorways, barking dogs on roofs, El Jardín, reggeaton, sunburns, my electricuting shower, too-short blankets, dog poop on the sidewalks

Things I still want to do in Ecuador: learn Quichua, visit the Galápagos Islands, canoe in the Amazon, learn to cook, drive somewhere, bungee jump, see an erupting volcano (with lava, Tungarahua doesn´t count), scuba dive,

Things I´m looking forward to at home: peanut butter, space, exercise, real coffee, the language, my family, driving, Christmas, friends, my pets, coffee shops, consistently warm showers, reliable postal service, independence, extra-long twin size beds, snow, stars, good Indian food, Carleton, sharp cheddar cheese, the ability to use the bills the ATM gives you, skiing, macaroni and cheese

Foods I like (as in actually crave and search for on menus) now (mostly for Paula Ensz and Susan Langlee): tofu, tomatoes, avacado, hot salsa, onions, cucumbers, peppers, pineapple, spicy things, figs, shwarma (I know, who comes to Ecuador and eats shwarma?), cuy (guinea pig),

Foods I still really don´t like: mushrooms and mayonnaise

New names I go by: Nath (how Charo spells "Nate"), Nata (everyone), Natan (my boss), Net (Myriam and the kids in the street), Leche (Gabby), Milk (Gabby), Natita (Elizabeth when she wants something and Eli´s mom), and, as spelled phonetically in Spanish by my neighbor, Neith

Things I lost in Ecuador: timidity, weight, inhibitions, two scarves, idealism, direction

Words I might start using in English: chévere (cool, but better), chuchaqui (hangover), bacán (cool, again), chao (ciao, but how we spell it here), sigue no más (like, "go ahead" or "move along" or really anything you could possibly need to express verbally), a ver (used like, "look here")

Things I care less about now: my appearance, what other people think of me , personal comfort, promptness

Things I care more about now: education, Spanish fluency, GLBT rights, personal awareness, good ice cream (you laugh, but Pingüino´s up there twice), South American politics, economics, philosophy (Juan Car talks about it all the time), tranquility, and if possible, travel

My Last Day

Yesterday was the last day of my internship and although I was anticipating difficult goodbyes, the day completely surpassed my expectations. All day I was waiting and hoping for one of my kids to act completely immature, preferrably starting a fight or disrespecting me in any way, to make the departure a little bit easier. Instead I got 80 kids on their best behavior, hundreds of questions of when I will be coming back, requests to stay, and an afternoon-long party...the moral of which being that if you were interested in seeing a grown man cry last Friday around 4:30, Venezuela Street in Quito would have been a good place to look.

When I got to my internship, Julio was in a really really awful mood. When I asked him about it he wouldn´t talk to me and just said that he hadn´t slept well and was worried about his exams that day. When he was standing alone later that morning, my co-worker Elena told me to talk with him. Julio paused for a second before he looked up with teary eyes and said, "Por qué no puedes quedar con nosotros? (Why can´t you stay with us?)." This interaction was repeated several times throughout the day, most notably with Narcisa, Gaby, Gustavo, and Jesica. The difficult day culminated in a party for Dario´s, one of my co-workers, birthday and my departure. We had a three big cakes and treats of all kinds in addition to music performed by my boss and his music class and speeches by some of the kids. When they gave me some of their cards, I read the first one to find, "We wanted to give you a universe of stars but since we can´t, we gave you our smiles." After that I just stared firmly at the wall, waiting for it to be done. When I thought I´d escaped it all with a more or less dry face, I said goodbye to Myriam, my closest co-worker. We hugged and as we were both starting to tear up she whispered in my ear, "No nos olvides Net (Don´t forget us)." And thus commenced the falling apart of Nate.

Without care or fear of sounding cliché, these 4 months in Sol de Primavera have really been a life-changing experience for me. Working day after day with such inspiring kids and co-workers has had an enormous impact on me and today I felt completely lost (even though it was Saturday and I wouldn´t have been there anyway) knowing that quite possibly, but by no means for sure, I will never see them again.

Also, as I near the end of my blog (for this adventure anyway), I want to thank everyone from the US, Czech Republic, India, Ecuador, Egypt, Indonesia, Argentina, Poland, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, France, Jordan, Portugal, and Singapore who has been reading. Just to creep you out with the wonders of Google Analytics (a program that tracks from where people have visited the blog) a little bit more, thanks also to readers from South Dakota, Minnesota, Nevada, Missouri, Iowa, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Wisconsin, Alabama, Florida, and NewHampshire.

Coming on Tuesday: Tena and the last goodbyes

Fiestas, Baños, Zapatos

Alright everyone, the goal is to not go to bed until I have brought this blog into the present. I would give myself 15 minutes until I decide to abandon that goal and go to bed, but we´ll see...

Alright, so after our return from Cotocachi, we entered into the week of the fiestas de Quito. For the majority of the city, the week means bullfights, concerts, and drunken debauchery in the streets and the prospect of a week-long party went more or less the same for me in the months leading up to it. The only problem was that Dec. 6, the official date of the fiesta, celebrates the day the Spanish arrived in Quito. What isn´t usually discussed is that following their arrival, they proceeded to rape, plunder, and murder the already established Incan empire in the area. For that reason I´d been hearing from my family and from meetings with our kids in my internship that really, the fiestas de Quito weren´t something to be celebrated in the usual way. In that spirit, I spent most of my fiestas de Quito finishing my independent study project (which is entirely finished and turned in at this point, more later) and attending rock concerts at Quitu Raymi and Quitofest, both huge rock festivals fighting against the Spanish-centric history of the holiday. In one tiny aside, we also decided to get our shoes shined for the first time by the kids who have been asked us for 4 months. Rebecca´s shoes turned out really well, so when the girl told me that, yes, in fact she did know how to polish the suede on my shoes, I accepted the offer. After the very first stroke of her brush and the sight of my already stained shoes, she quickly beckoned over 4 of her shoe-shining comrades. Within seconds I had an army of shoe-shiners, all equally willing to water-stain and incorrectly color my shoes. They look awful right now, but don´t worry, I had to pay the most for them because it took so much powder and oil to ruin them.

The week passed more or less normally, with more activity, noise, and visitors in the city before we left for Baños on Friday. Baños is one of the places in Ecuador that people always ask, "Have you visited it yet?", so we´ve all felt pretty obligated to visit. Baños sits more or less on the transition between the Andes and the Amazon, with some famous thermal baths thrown in. Baños is also right next to the volcano Tungarahua which has destroyed the city several times in the past. Tungarahua is actually erupting right now, as we could see from the bus as we approached the town, but it was too cloudy while we were actually in Baños to see eruption or the lava during the night. We (Anna, Kristen, Danielle (a friend from Carleton volunteering in Ecuador for a month), and myself (Marge and her, our, friend Rebecca got there later that night)) got to Baños on Friday afternoon, checked into our hostel, and explored the city a bit. By some strange coincidence Friday night was fiestas de Baños (my 4th city fiesta) and we enjoyed some street dancing and canelazo drinking. The next morning Kristen, Danielle, and I left for a bike ride through the mountains with a very tentative goal of reaching Puyo, a town officially in the rainforest, out of the mountains, and 60 km away. The entire bike ride was fantastically beautiful and at one point I just had to decide that I´d taken enough pictures of picturesque waterfalls. When we´d reached the end of our bike renter-provided map much earlier than we were supposed to have arrived, we just decided to keep going until Puyo. Afterall, how sweet is it to be able to say you biked out of the Andes mountains into the Amazon rainforest. The trek was longer and much, much more uphill than we´d been told, but we arrived in Puyo around sunset, just in time to see the Andes looming above us far in the distance. Needless to say, we caught a bus back to Baños...60 km was definitely enough for me.

The next morning, while Anna, Margaret, and Rebecca got massages, Danielle, Kristen, and I decided to go bridge jumping. It was more or less like bungee jumping, only the cord didn´t bounce us back, we just fell for 150 feet (from the 300 ft bridge) until the rope caught us and we swung under the bridge. It was a really fantastic experience and I can´t wait to try real bungee jumping. I may or may not have punched myself in the face during the fall and blacked out, but unfortunately, the difference between blacking out and falling 150 feet is very minute, and I can´t really decide what happened. Nevertheless, we all enjoyed our falls and I got a full body massage as a reward afterward.

This week I not only finished my 24-page independent study project paper in Spanish along with an 8 page final in Spanish, but was actually content with both of them upon their completion. The completion of those looming projects was kind of a shock, leading to a "well, what do I do now?" crisis. Tonight we also cooked dinner for all of our families and had a great time. We made chili, enchiladas, salad, guacamole, various appetizers, and wine (the most crucial part of the dinner as it turns out) and everything was met with great success. We cooked/shopped all afternoon and despite some unnecessary stress for the last week, I had a great time drinking and cooking with everyone. After the dinner we received the shirts we designed to represent our term (you´ll see me wearing it plenty) and watched a quick CD of pictures from the program. Although the beginning of the end has been an ongoing process for a while now, tonight I actually had to say goodbye to important people from the program and my friends´families...I don´t think I like this "goodbye probably for forever" thing.

On a concluding note, and to be continued later, tomorrow is the last day of my internship. I´m more than a little worried about leaving my kids, even though this entire week has been something of an emotional rollercoaster as they alternate between hair-wrenchingly bad behavior and tear-inducing moments of incredible interactions. The low point definitely came today when, as I was saying goodbye to Julio for the day (I really need to describe Julio and his situation one-on-one, just because I can´t quite write it out yet) and he apparently had missed the memo that "Nata" was leaving tomorrow. Julio and I have become very much like brothers and when he asked if we were doing zancos next Monday and I had to explain that I wouldn´t be there next Monday, his surprise that I would be in the US on Monday absolutely broke my heart. If the walk home today was as difficult as it was, maybe tomorrow I´ll just take the bus.

I also put a ton of pictures on the site, so check that out. Juan Car was in charge of my camera tonight at the dinner so I´ll be posting all of those great pictures after I get back from Tena next Tuesday. See everyone soon!

Coming soon: Last day of the internship, Tena, and closing remarks

Cotocachi+Fiestas de Quito+Baños=you might want to take a seat

Alright, pay attention everyone, a blog post of this magnitude is what happens when you neglect to update during times of frenzy...

Last Thursday, the 29th, we left for our last class trip to Otavalo and Cotocachi. Otavalo is one of the top tourist testinations in Ecuador because of its huge artesanal market but Cotocachi is the name of the Cantón (county) and community around Otavalo. Although these communities embraced tourism earlier and now have a larger tourism infrastructure than most Ecuadorian towns, all of the tourism was extraordinarily-well integrated into the normal, daily life.

The first thing we did upon our arrival in Otavalo was to visit Jambi Huasi, a medical clinic that offers both traditional forms of medicine and the more modern, occidental medical practices. We talked with some of the healers, watched Martha, our program director, receive a medical diagnosis involving an egg and about a gallon of oil, and was spiritually cleaned by the "shaman" of the clinic. After that we visited an Andean instrument workshop and an alpaca workshop. Everyone in this community spoke Quichua, usually as a first language, and the incredibly ancient couple who ran the alpaca workshop told us in their best Spanish that they had been working on the same sides of their yarn-making machine for over 50 years...50 years working on the exact same side of the exact same machine, wow.

That afternoon we met our host families for the weekend. I stayed with Anna and Emma since there weren´t enough houses for each of us to stay independently. Our family was fantastic, María (the mother), Carlos (our dad), and Isabel (the 10-year-old daughter) were all very welcoming and tried to include us in the family as much as possible. Our first activity was to help with dinner, where María laughed in a very endearing way at every single thing we did. Cutting the tomatos? Not right. Making juice? Definitely wrong. We had a really fun time talking and learning some Quichua (most of which I´ve forgotten at this point).

The next day we visited la Asamblea de Unidad Cantonal de Cotacachi (Assembly for "County" Unity), a really important citizen-directed body in Cotacachi. We were only there for the opening ceremony, but it was interesting to see so much citizen participation. It was also cool that the entire proceedings were carried out in both Spanish and Quichua, something very rare even in Quichua-heavy areas like Cotacachi. After the assembly we headed to el Lago Cuicocha, a huge lake in the caldera of an ancient volcano. When the volcano exploded thousands of years ago, the mountain collapsed upon itself, created the lake. The volcano then erupted again, giving rise to the two islands in the middle. We took some pictures and took a boat ride around the islands before lunch...definitely the most important part of this day.

Although I´d eaten cuy (guinea pig) prior to this visit, I´d only ever eaten it as left-overs heated up in our microwave, never fresh and it´s it complete form. That all changed the day at Cuicocha when several of us ordered cuy for lunch. Cuy is actually a really good, really unique tasting meat. It was hard to eat because it´s served like chicken, so we had to peal the meat off the little guinea pig legs. Because the brain is traditionally eaten, I tried a little hoping there isn´t a guinea pig strain of mad-cow disease. Unfortunately, the restaurant was out of roasted cockroaches for dessert...

That night we had a dinner and dance/music performance with our families. The next morning we left the family (and Cuchari, the family dog) for the famous Otavalo market. Even after 4 months of Ecuadorian artesanal markets, Otavalo was an impressive/overwhelming experience. I think I managed to finish most of my Christmas shopping but it really was a little too much. When a town of 20,000 hosts the largest market in the country every Saturday, you know you´re in for something big. We shopped until we literally dropped and headed home to rest for fiestas de Quito.

Sorry I´m not doing very well on updating, with one week left here things are getting a little hectic and I just haven´t been able to find the time or interest to keep the blog updated. Right now I´m just too tired to catch up, so I´ll try very hard to bring you up to date with the fiestas de Quito and Baños tomorrow. Ciao!

Coming very, very soon: Fiestas de Quito, the inherent evil of fiestas de Quito, Baños, and the continuied ruination of my shoes

Rock concerts with Mom

Alright everyone, sorry I haven´t posted in several geological ages, but for the first time I´m going to use that famous study abroad excuse that I´ve just been too busy. With that in mind, I´m posted a couple quick stories before I leave for Baños in a half hour and then I´ll have a monstrous update on Sunday when I get back.

I´ll start with last Sunday when Charo and I went to what she described as "an indigenous women´s market in the park." This week is the fiesta de Quito and I was pretty sure that there was a large rock festival in the park she was talking about, but I also figured that she probably knew what was going on. So we climbed up to Parque Itchimbia and as we crested the hill, an field of thousands of moshing, black-clad Ecuadorian youth appeared before us. I started to think, "Uh oh Charo, what are you going to do now?" but before the thought could even form in my mind she was squealing, "¡Que lindo!" How could I have forgotten that Charo loves seeing anyone under 30 doing anything other than committing a crime? Not only did she love the amount of youth participation at the event but claimed to honestly enjoy the screaming metal...who is this woman?

That night when we got home we talked about Ecuadorian politics, as we often do, and both got a little teary as we talked about her hope for her country and the future of the Ecuadorian people. As I´ve mentioned, Ecuador is in a process of rewriting the constitution right now and the Asamblea Constituyente (the body charged with writing said constitution) was inaugarated last week. The assembly will be held in Montechristi, a small town in Manabí where one of the country´s greatest heroes, Eloy Alfaro, was born. Besides this pretty sweet symbolism, the placement also follows through on Correa´s promises of decentralization and political inclusion. So, Sunday was the inagauration and Correa gave his speech in front of Alfaro´s newly constructed tomb. He based his speech off a letter from one of Alfaro´s captains, telling his general, "don´t worry, everything is ok, we´re upholding everything you worked for." Imagine the power of that! Charo and I both agreed that the US could use a leader as charismatic and uplifting as Correa.

One final little story from the week, Juan Carlos called me son...which affected me much more than I would have thought. "Hijo" is kind of a general term of endearment but he never uses it like that and called me the other night saying, "son, we´re meeting in the house in 30 minutes." Nothing big or special, but I definitely feel as though this was like, my last step to being accepted and integrated into my family.

And with that I leave you to head to Baños. I´ll catch everyone up on everything when I get back on Sunday. Hope you´re all doing well, I´ll be back in a week and a half!

Coming soon: Cotocachi, Baños, more stories from fiestas de Quito, the impending termination of my program, and the ruination of my shoes

And Now, More Thoughts from the Equator

1. Does anyone remember pogs (anyone who went to middle school between 1995 and 2000 should be nodding their heads)? Because for whatever reason, they´re huge here right now. Most of my kids bring them out at least once throughout the day and I always see kids playing them in the street. I remember having a vague notion that they were ridiculous when I cared about them, but watching it now from the other side all I can do is scratch my head that the phenomenon continues.

2. As any of my female friends here can tell you, Ecuador is still more or less a bastion of machismo despite improvements in recent years. Men shout and whistle from windows, the sidewalk, and passing vehicles regardless of whether women have male companions or not (not that they should need them). I´ve been amazed at how quickly and passively these traits are picked up by boys too. I´m constantly scolding my boys (ages 10-16) for whistling at passing girls or smacking their lips disgustingly. So far none of them seem to understand why this is a problem but more than any other lesson, this is the one I want to get through to them.

3. Quito is unofficially divided into distinct economic districts. This applies to food markets, the touristy center, business center, and usual divisions that might immediately come to mind but extends to much more specific areas of the city. For example, every day on my walk to my internship I walk up a street completely lined with shoe stores, including an enormous open-air market entirely devoted to the sale of footwear. I also live in the middle of the construction/home improvement area (oddly located around the Basílica), there is also a string of personal hygeine product stores on my way to work, and a couple weeks ago as I was leaving the bus station I stumbled upon three extremely militant army surplus stores, all in a row. The funny thing about all of these similar stores sharing such a small space is that it doesn´t really seem to affect how prices are set. You would think that increased competition would result in lower prices or at least an equalizing of prices (or so my highly developed, largely intuitive knowledge of economics tells me) but prices very widely for the same products in stores right next to each other...very curious...

4. If you´re waiting for a bus in the 4-6 in the afternoon range, especially going south, you´d better be prepared for a very close encounter with approximately 100 of your Ecuadorian comrades. When the bus rumbles up, you can tell immediately how full it is by the amount of bulge in the doors. Regardless of the density of the crowd, everyone on the bus stop pushes in, resulting in this ridiculous situation in which everyone is absolutely mashed together, like potatoes. The buses to the south are more crowded because (I think) the south is the traditionally poorer part of the city and I´m sure that there are more workers from the south in the commercial part of the city who don´t own cars. As a result, when you´re waiting for your hot, smelly, and crowded southbound bus you have to watch almost empty buses pass by heading north.

5. For my independent study project, as I´ve mentioned, I´m looking at how the process of mestization in indigenous youth is reinforced by their experience in school. I thought it might be helpful to visit some of the parents and see what they thought about their childrens´schools and their participation in them. I tried to organize some visits through Sol and some other schools and nothing really would work out, so I just decided to right to the source: the markets. Last Saturday I visited two big markets in Quito where I was planning on interviewing some of the indigenous women about their feelings on education. I´d already been told by Martha, the program director, to clearly and quickly explain myself to anyone I might interview just because they would assume that I´m there on behalf of the government or something else that could be trying to get them in trouble. So I approached three different women and explained who I was, what I was doing, and that by all means, anything they told me would only be used for my paper. The first women started out speaking to me in perfect Spanish, but after the first question of the interview switched to Quichua and pretended like she didn´t understand. The next woman told me that "yes, she had children in the school system here," but when I asked if I could ask a couple quick questions, she corrected herself and said, "Oh, well actually, I don´t have kids." The next woman did the exact same thing. So maybe parents visits aren´t really necessary for this paper after all...

Translating is Hard

So tonight instead of spending the evening doing my homework, which I really should have done, I stayed up and talked with Juan Car instead. He was asking me to translate some words of his favorite Ben Harper song, "Just Another Lonely Day" because he wants to use it for a short movie he has in mind. I only needed to translate a few of the words because he speaks pretty good English and it´s a simple song, but we went through several of our favorite lyrical songs. We brainstormed about the movie (about a retired American couple visiting Ecuador and just going through their touristic motions, listen to the song and image it...fantastic) while listening to the song and actually acted out in the living room how we thought it should be and what scenes should be included.

The song changed to a live Ben Harper song in which fans were screaming enthusiastically and so we started imitating them instead. We were yelling (in a whisper because Juan Carlos is sleeping) about how much we loved Ben Harper and the usual things rowdy fans yell at concerts, when Juan Car imitates taking off his bra and yells "I´m throwing you my breasts!"

Now although I know for a fact that I make very similar mistranslations every day, I fell on the floor laughing. I explained that he probably meant "bra" instead of "breast" and after a little more laughter we continued with our movie planning. Next on our list, finding out how to get movie rights for a Ben Harper song...

Cultural Immerson #1298: The Mullet

So although my hair´s been longer than I usually like it for a couple weeks now, I´ve been assured by JuanCar and Juan Carlos (both of whom have hair past their shoulders) that my hair has been a perfectly acceptable, almost too short length. I finally decided this past weekend that enough was enough and that regardless of the outcome, I needed a haircut. I went to a place recommended by a friend and $2, 15 minutes, and several questionable sighs from the barber later I was mullet-clad. I haven´t decided yet whether to cut it off or just embrace my new style as a cultural adaptation...probably the former...

I´ve felt my time quickly slipping away here for a couple weeks now, but today it really hit. Although my kids were kind of punks today for some reason, they are all starting to ask, "When are you going back to the United States?" and I don´t think in a "Can´t you just leave already?" way. I´m usually pretty skeptical when people come back from study abroad or a summer experience gushing about their fantastic kids and their amazing time but I´m afraid I´m in danger of becoming one of those people myself. I´m not going to pretend that my kids are angels or that I´ve enjoyed every minute of my internship, but several of my kids have quickly worked their ways into my heart. I´m getting ready to leave my internship and several aspects are starting to wear on me, but at the same time, I´m going to miss Narsisa´s hug in the morning, Julio´s beaming smile, Sergio´s chess challenges, Gustavo´s gripping handshakes, Ricky´s swearing, Jesica´s questions, Jaqueline´s criticisms, Gabriela´s nicknames and English, and maybe even Hector´s constant nagging about stilts.

Today was also a difficult day in that I ran into Paúl, a kid from Sol who had to leave because he was too direspectful and got in too many fights. I was walking up to the park with my boys on stilts (they can climb stairs now) when we saw Paúl and his brothers playing. When Paúl was in Sol he was my biggest problem and left me frustrated with his disrespect and violence every day. Today when I saw him I was with his group of zancos and it was a real shock to see what exactly it´s like for these kids outside of our foundation. In Sol the kids get 2 meals a day, plenty of activities and always have to practice good hygeine. When I saw Paúl today, he was just playing on the street on a Tuesday morning and obviously hadn´t washed his face or hands in days. Even though he was my biggest problem a few weeks ago, today he ran up to me and asked about things in Sol and if people had been asking about him. I was really taken aback by his eagerness, especially since he was my "llorón" (whiner) when he was actually attending Sol. Seeing him again really made me appreciate, if not what I´m doing here, the pretty incredible work of which I´m a tiny part.

This weekend is probably my last "free" weekend in Quito and I´ll probably spend most of it writing my independent study project. I haven´t really had the motivation I might have hoped for in the project, but I´ve become really interested and am excited to write the paper. So little time for everything...but what else is new?

Still coming soon: Sumo, Thanksgiving, and Quitu Raymi

Some Guano

OK everyone, sorry I haven´t posted in quite some time...lately I have been overtaken by a wave of blog lethargy, this changes now (after some prodding from 4 continents).

I now impart to you another segment of the eternal battle over my eating habits with my host mom...in dialogue...

Charo: So do you want me to make you something for dinner?
Nate: No, that´s ok, I´m just going to make a ham sandwich, I´m not very hungry.
Charo: No omelette? I could heat up some soup?
Nate: No, I´m really ok.
Charo: Ok, I´ll just make you some fried bananas and heat up some rice...
Oh well, I guess it´s nice that someone´s looking out for me...I guess.

Does anyone know that Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine about New York cab drivers (this serves a purpose, I promise)? In said routine he talks about how cab drivers can be driving 50 mph backwards the wrong way up a one-way bridge and instead of feeling fear you just laugh and think, "Well, I wouldn´t do that in my car." Although this sketch comes to my mind often here, never was it more pertinent than this weekend when (after realizing the road had been washed out) we were part of a huge line of vehicles snaking up a windy side road from Juan Carlos´university to return to Riobamba (I´ll explain later). The woman driving had a splitting headache and we couldn´t stop to change drivers but she was still passing semi-trucks on jack-knife turns with a hundred meter ravine on the inside of the curve. I´m sure that at several points (probably the ones where we were 3 abreast on a road built for 1) we had a tire over the edge but we were laughing the whole time and at no point did I even clench my fists (which I do in the US riding with anyone in the calmest conditions).

Alright, back to the beginning. On Sunday night I got back from a whirlwind weekend in which I travelled four hours north of Quito for Thursday and Friday and four hours south Saturday and today (four hours doesn´t sound very substantial by US measurement but I easily traversed half the length of the country and visited three distinct climate/culture zones). Thursday morning we left early for our second program outing to Mascarilla in Chota Valley. These visits are for a class called "Democracy and Social Change" and we´ve been spending a lot of time talking about the roles and experiences of minorities in Ecuador. We visited Mascarilla to look at an Afro-Ecuadorian community and specifically a women´s cooperative that has culturally and economically revitalized the town. It was an interesting visit and I think everyone had a good time, but the trip left everyone a little uncomfortable with the concept of ethnotourism.

Immediately when we arrived in Mascarilla we headed to a preschool where we served as living, breathing jungle gym equipment for a couple of hours. When we got there the kids sang a few songs for us and then came our turn to entertain them. We sang a few songs and then played Duck, Duck, Goose (or Pato, Pato, Ganzo), which was met with huge success. I´m used to working with older kids here so I´d kind of forgotten all of the songs and games...now if they´d started punching each other in the face or had wanted to learn to walk on stilts, that would have been a different story. After the preschool we took an afternoon-long tour of the cooperative and visited various workshops, including those of shampoo/lotion, jewelry, pottery, and card-making. It seemed like a pretty cool organization but again, I´m not quite sure what I think about the commercialization of culture, which I´ve experienced a lot here.

That night before dinner we were treated to a dance performance and tried to learn a little bit ourselves. Anyone who knows me won´t be surprised to know that within 5 minutes I was dancing with a bottle balanced on my head with the best of them...most of the town turned out to watch us struggle (what better way to pass an evening?) and it was almost refreshing to have the oggling-tables turned. The next morning we made clay masks (mine was an angry Frenchman, but not really purposefully) and visited the town store where the cooperative sells their various products.

We then drove back to Quito, went out, got home late, and I left for Riobamba at 7:00 the next morning. The Riobamba trip really reminded me how much I love travelling alone. I was going to meet Juan Carlos but it was fun to get lost and ask around and only have to worry about myself, I really enjoyed it. Anyway, when I got there I hopped on another bus to la Laguna de Colta and Santiago de Quito. Santiago de Quito was the original capital of Ecuador (it´s seriously about 15 houses now) and is home to La Balbanera, the first Catholic church in Ecuador. Juan Carlos teaches at Jatun Yachai Wasi ("wasi" is one of three Quichua words I know...ahem, "wasi"=house, "yaku"=water, and "sisa"=flower), a university next to Laguna de Colta that teaches traditional Andean knowledge in areas such as agriculture, medicine, and construction. I visited with some of the students for a while, chatted with the llamas, and sat in the cold and read while Juan Carlos held class.

The next day I walked around Riobamba looking for the party celebrating the city´s independence day (I told you, every day you can find a different one) but only encountered closed museums, full churches, and quiet parks it being Sunday and all. It was a really pretty though and from anywhere in the city you can see snow-capped volcanoes and the volcano Chimborazo (the point farthest from the center of the earth because the planet bulges a little at the middle). I then found another bus to visit the town of Guano, touted by many as the friendliest town in Ecuador. Guano is also known for a long history of rug-making. I found the store recommended by my guidebook and talked with the owner for about an hour. He´s a fourth-generation rug maker (he emphasized several times that everything is made by hand) but none of his sons are interested in taking over the business. As with many industries in Ecuador, when the country underwent dollarization, the process by which Ecuador adopted the American dollar, rug-makers couldn´t afford to stay open. Guano, which was once home to more than 80 different rug-making workshops, now only supports about 15. Needless to say, I bought a rug.

That night we drove back to Quito in time to start another week. This week I really have to start my independent study project and start organizing interviews and school visits. It´s also really hit me lately how little time I have left here. Two more normal weeks, a half week before another class trip, a week vacation, and my last week...my kids are already starting to ask when I´m leaving (and not in a "can you just leave already?" kind of way) and although some things are starting to wear on me or frustrate me here, it will definitely be hard to leave. With that, I´ll try to post again within a sooner time frame! I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving and I´ll see most of you in less than 5 weeks!

Coming Soon: Sumo (a friend from Carleton) comes to visit, and taking into account my lack of blogging expediency, Thanksgiving

How I Became a Sea Cucumber Poacher

Well devoted readers, after a third of Ecuador, 10 buses, 2 beaches, a resemblance of a tan (or more appropriately, a migration of tan lines), a full-body suit of mosquito bites, tidal pool fishing, hiking, fiestaing, eating/drinking/sleeping in general, and a little baby puke, I have returned to Quito and an internet connection capable of accomodating blog updates. Today I concluded a 10 day vacation with a 10 hour bus ride (love the symmetry) from Cuenca back to Quito. The whole day on the bus I felt really excited to be returning to Quito, even though the vacation was great and I could have stayed longer. I´ve been referring to Quito as ¨home¨for months but after my longest stint away from the city, I really started to miss my family, apartment, bed, internship, kids, and familiarity. It was a nice realization to stumble upon.

I also just realized that I began my blog-hiatus about a week before I actually left for vacation...woops. The only real event worth notice during that week was a trip with my co-workers back to Mindo. Originally I thought we were going with a group of our kids but when I got there I realized it was just a volunteer/employee outing. It was pretty fun (it´s hard to make a natural waterslide with a 10 foot drop at the end unfun) but it was definitely different than I was expecting. For starters, I spent the whole day with my bosses, who I adore, but who grilled me on what I thought of the foundation and what suggestions I had. It was fun to hang out with the other volunteers without the kids but they spoke in French a lot of the time. All in all it was a worthwhile trip but not as exciting as I´d hoped. I posted some pictures of the trip (and the vacation) along with some pictures from stilts 2 Wednesdays ago.

Now back to the vacation...last Friday night I left Quito again for the beach town of Canoa with five other people on my program (Anna, Kristin, Emma, Jon, and Kiersten). The stay was more or less the same as last time only with better weather. We ate our breakfasts at the same little restaurant (which had the best pancakes I´ve ever eaten) and actually stayed in the same hostel (although the cornucopia of hammocks had been removed, grumbles all around). Other than that, Canoa consisted entirely of beach time, shrimp ceviche (a cold, seafood soup/my favorite Ecuadorian food), and more Pilsener (Ecuadorian beer). On the topic of Ecuadorian beer, there are two main labels, Brahma and Pilsener. Pilsener is more common but Brahma is better and the last time we visited Canoa Brahma was practically flowing in the streets. This visit however there was no Brahma to be found. When I asked for Brahma from a vender on the beach, she actually went to far as to say, "What do you think we are, Quito?"...quite baffling. After a beach bonfire and an extremely enjoyable time, leaving Canoa ended up a little more complicated than intended or was necessary...

We had bus tickets for 8:00 in the morning, which shouldn´t have been too difficult to make, but we had trouble finding our bus/boat to the bus station in Bahía a half hour away and arrived 10 minutes late. We then bought our second ticket for an hour later and as we were eating breakfast by the road a bus pulled by and the man yelled at us, "Jipijapa?! Ven, rapido, rapido!" It wasn´t quite the time on our tickets yet but we were going to Jipijapa (pronounced "hippy hoppa," the name is really the only fun thing about the town) and having suffered under a sporadic Ecuadorian bus schedule before, we didn´t question. When we showed the man our tickets a good hour into the trip, he told us we had tickets for a different bus company. Although I yelled at him for a good 10 minutes that he was the one who told us to get on the bus, he insisted it wasn´t his fault (which it wasn´t, not entirely anyway) and we bought our 3rd round of tickets to Jipijapa.

The trip went smoothly after that and we arrived in Montañita that afternoon. Montañita is one of the best beaches in Ecuador (it´s actually home to an international surfing competition in March) but also one of the more touristy. Unfortunately, neither of these descriptions ended up affecting us much because it rained the two days we were there. This didn´t entirely stop us from having a good time and we enjoyed the rainy beach and the cool tidal pools. One morning Anna and I were walking down the beach and ran into a bunch of people walking around in the tidal pools. After inquiring we learned they were hunting for oysters, squid, octupi, and most interestingly, sea cucumbers. I have a vague notion that sea cucumber hunting is illegal, but the two men assured us that it´s legal one day a month (this being that day) so we joined in. We spent about a half hour lifting up mossy rocks to reveal the fat sea cucumbers (or, pepinos del mar) underneath. They were really disgusting and enthusiastically employed their only means of self-defense: squirting water out of both ends. The sea cucumber trade is actually really interesting. They aren´t really eaten in South America, but are caught in Ecuador, shipped to Peru for processing, and finally sent to China and Southeast Asia where they are considered a delicacy. I´m pretty sure I learned this in a documentary about the awful/incredibly illegal trade in shark fins (also caught off Ecuador and sent to China for shark fin soup) and I seem to recall the sea cucumber trade being portrayed in the same light...oh well...

The big waves of Montañita come from a rocky point that juts out at the end of the beach. I was feeling adventurous and started around the point to see what was on the other side. The tide was coming up and I felt a little like that guy in every Baywatch episode who ventures out onto the rocks only to be swept into the sea (there is no Ecuadorian David Hasselhoff by the way) but when I got around the point I found that the entire rock was covered in fresh flower petals and little candle altars. I´m not sure who put them there or why and didn´t take my camera because I was fairly certain I would fall into the ocean, but it was an impressive sight.

After two days of rainy lounging in Montañita, we left for the last leg of the trip in Cuenca. Cuenca is the third largest city in Ecuador (we stopped at the bus station in Guayaquil, the largest city, and live in Quito, #2) and the hometown of our director and professor, Martha.

An update on what´s happening RIGHT NOW: We´re watching a ridiculous Latin American reality dance competition (they play the couples´national anthem before they dance so we´ve been laughing for about a half hour now) and Juan Carlos is salsaing around the living room. He´s been really sick for a week and everytime he wants to eat something, Charo takes it away and scolds him. He responds by sneaking food from my plate and moping. Today´s the first day he´s felt better so we´re all cheering on the dancing. Back to the trip...

Every Ecuadorian city has their own Independence Day fiesta (you could probably hit a different 4th of July-style party every week, pretty cool) and we made sure to be in Cuenca for their fiesta. We´d been to a town fiesta in a smaller town before and the big city version was much more subdued and cosmopolitan. In Guapalo we lit things on fire, drank in the streets, and danced in the plaza. In Cuenca, professionals lit things on fire, business types went to clubs, and we went to bed. Cuenca was a really beautiful city though, we spent one day just visiting churches and napping on the bank of the river that bisects the city. Cuenca seemed much more cosmopolitan to us than Quito and at several points it felt more like Europe than South America. There were trees blooming purple flowers all over the city and the weather was more or less perfect.

The second day in Cuenca we went to a national park an hour away called Parque Nacional Cajas. The park was full of enormous rock formations and glacial lakes. It was really beautiful and it was fun to be away from civilization for a while. We hiked around for about 4 hours and headed back to Cuenca.

Yesterday morning we boarded our tenth and last bus and returned to Quito. Prior to this bus we´d been taking night buses to save time but a day bus was a great way to see the country. After this trip I can tell you with complete confidence that every inch of Ecuador is amazingly beautiful. Our 10 hour ride flew by as we passed indigenous villages, colonial cities, mountains covered in farming terraces, and more snow-capped volcanoes (including Cotopaxi, the world´s tallest active volcano) than you could hope for. I´ll definitely be returning to several of the places we passed. One downside of the trip was when the little girl I was holding on my lap (buses are always filled to overcapacity) threw up. Luckily she aimed for the aisle and we had a bag ready but monitoring the possibility of future throwup helped keep me awake for a few hours.

I posted some more pictures, I was kind of picture lazy on this trip but I think other people took some good ones. My friend who I´ve been counting on for a CD of really good pictures later had her camera stolen in the bus station (huge bummer, but the first theft on the program). Sorry I hadn´t written in so long, I feel pretty rejuvinated after my vacation so hopefully I´ll get back in the groove of things. Hope everyone´s well!

Coming soon: Chota

Where do the umbrellas come from?

And now, some things I think about in my day:

1. Somehow, whenever it starts to rain, the streets are rapidly inundated with umbrella venders. I have no idea how these women do it as they´re selling other dry-weather goods when it isn´t raining and carry everything with them for their day. Several of them work quite a way from their homes so either they´re storing these umbrellas somewhere or they conjure them out of thin air. Either way, I´m keeping my eye on these umbrella venders...something fishy is going on here.

2. Several of the streets here are one-way, especially in the tiny, built-for-horses streets of Old Quito around my house. This in itself doesn´t present a problem, but the direction of the one-way seems to change sporadically. I´ll be walking down a one way street, sure that I´m facing the oncoming traffic, only to have a bus come up on me from behind and blow me aside. It also seems like the one-wayness may change from day today. Everyday on my way to my internship I´m absolutely positive about the direction of traffic, only to be proven wrong once again. Que misterioso...

3. Continuing with transportation, as I walk to my internship I often practice how I´m going to argue with my next taxi driver about prices. When the family went out to dinner the other night, the starting price for Charo was $2 (a full dollar below my cheapest ride) and she bargained down to $1.50! Although I really don´t mind paying the extra dollar or so, I consider it part of my integration process and a step toward "fitting in." With that in mind, I´m going to demand $2 when I go out this weekend and see what happens...most likely I´ll just be stuck in the rain without a taxi...

4. I realize that my Spanish is hardly flawless, but in most of my daily interactions I´m pretty confident that I´m putting together a convincing combination of vocabulary and grammar. However, whenever I go to the bank or a restaurant, people often completely misunderstand what I´m saying regardless of whether I´m expressing my needs clearly or not. For example, when I went to the bank the other day for change ($20 bills are completely useless) I asked (in perfect, clearly enunciated Spanish) for 2 tens, 3 fives, and 5 ones in exchange for the 2 twenties I´d just gotten from the ATM. The man looked at me and asked, "4 tens?", which is about as far from my order as he could have been. We then progressed to "2 tens and 4 fives?", finally arriving at the correct order after I yelled what I wanted for the third time. I guess we´ll just have to deal with it.

5. I´ve also been wondering if 5 boys in Sol de Primavera think about anything other than stilts...ever. The first thing they say to me in the morning (even before "buenos dias", because respectful greetings are really important in the foundation) is "When are we doing zancos?!" regardless of whether it´s their turn or not (which they all keep track of meticulously). This continues for about 20 minutes, during which I´m saying, "We´re not going to talk about stilts right now, no, seriously, not now, I don´t care, do you have lots of homework today?, no, you don´t have stilts today, no, we´re not talking about this, stop" I hear the same thing all day from these 5 boys...these kids need a hobby.

6. Speaking of my kids and hobbies, I´ve been teaching several kids how to play chess (a few already knew and Sergio is really really good) and we play other games all the time. The problem is that if I look away from the game for a second, which I always do to keep track of the other 15 kids in the room, the game is suddenly, miraculously shifted to the advantage of my opponent. When I explain to them that just because my Spanish isn´t perfect, it doesn´t mean that I´m stupid and that I´m completely aware of their cheating, they admit to cheating and after a quick reprimand continue with the game. This wouldn´t be so bad but the cheating is ssooo rampant, with the same kids playing the same games cheating the same way! I´m going to continue my crusade against this but so far haven´t gotten through to them why they can´t cheat in general, not only in the specific case...

Also, an update of what´s happening RIGHT NOW! I´ve been watching the Ecuador/Brasil fútbol game with Charo and JuanCar and Charo reminds me sssooo much of my mom with sports (although you´ve gotten better over the years, I know Mom). She cheers when anyone scores a goal (even though the score right now is 5-0 Brasil) and has mentioned several times how she doesn´t like Ecuador´s uniforms, preferring Brasil´s bright yellow. Also, whenever we finish eating Charo says, "Time for the dishwashing minga!" The minga is the traditional indigenous system of reciprocity and means communal work in general but for us it means that Charo washes, I dry, and JuanCar puts away. This is pretty much what every family does but it´s way cooler here because it´s called a minga...

Fruit Truck Holiday

Worry not friends, although I very seriously considered never leaving the ideal surf town of Canoa ever ever again (seriously), I have returned to the real world...but only begrudgingly. Of course, in Quito right now it´s raining and the temperature is hovering right around 45 F...if anyone has a suggestion as to why I should be here as opposed to napping in a hammock in a cabaña on the Pacific...let me know.

We left for Canoa (a little surfing town 30 minutes north of Bahía de Caraquez, home of my host mother) last Thursday night at around 11:30 in the night. Needless to say, the bus ride was painful. As I´ve repeatedly learned, the Ecuadorian infrastructure wasn´t built for people over 5´8" and my 7 hour bus ride served as a great reminder. It was pretty amazing that we dropped almost two miles in 7 hours and arrived at the ocean right at sunrise. Our bus dropped us off in Bahía and we took the ferryish boats to San Vicente (the ugly cousin of Bahía after it was destroyed by El Niño) and hopped on a bus to Canoa.

After looking around for a little bit we found an amazing hostel a few blocks from the beach called Hostal Posada de Daniel (check out the pictures, it really was pretty sweet). Everyone quickly settled into one of the many hammocks around the hostel for a mid-morning nap. The nap attempts were hampered by some kind of school parade that marched around our block for about 2 hours...very bizarre. After a quick nap we found a restaurant that Kristin´s guide book guarenteed would have amazing pancakes. We definitely weren´t disappointed and ate breakfast there all three days (they also had a cat that looked exactly like my cat Duke from home, check out the picture Lauren, you´ll freak out).

We finally found our way to the beach in the afternoon and settled into our oceanside routine. Although the weather wasn´t typical good-beach-weather, it was almost perfect for what we were looking for. In the morning it was usually pretty raining and chilly so we didn´t feel bad sleeping in, playing pool, and generally lounging (preferrably in hammocks). After brunch it would start to clear up so that by the time we got to the beach it would be pretty warm with partly cloudy skies. The beach was also more or less perfect; not crowded at all but with a sufficient number of people, very long and clean, and with warm Pacific water and impressive waves.

The only other distinct part of the weekend (seriously, 3 days of just beach, hammocks, and beer) was when Anna and I, after struggling to find a bus back to Canoa after we went ATM-hunting in Bahía, hopped in the back of a fruit vender´s truck and ate watermelon with his son, Marcelo for the whole ride. The man wouldn´t let us pay but we bought two delicious watermelon from him instead. We took another fruit truck when we left Canoa and got really good oranges out of that trip.

This week has been pretty standard: internship, homework, class, hanging out with friends/family, internship again. My relationship with my internship has been pretty up and down lately. One day I´ll feel completely useless, frustrated, and entirely lacking in anything resembling Spanish skills. The very next day however, the kids will listen to me and tell me about their families, my Spanish will be practically flawless, and I feel completely content. I guess as long as sides stay balanced (with an increasing shift to the positive) I´m doing ok. This week we´re also supposed to start on our independent study projects so I´ll keep you updated on the progress. Hope everyone´s well!

Coming Soon: taking my kids to Mindo

A Tour of the Senses

And now, a preview of the senses experienced in a day in Ecuador which I´ve been compiling the past couple days:

Smell (my favorite): The first smell that comes to mind is the continual presence of bus exhaust. I usually get several facefulls on my walk to work and some days the smog above the city hovers menacingly, obscuring views of the neighboring volcanoes. At the same time however, when the smog clears, you can pick up baking bread, garbage, strong business-man type cologne, and the intense spring smell that comes up every afternoon. Now that it´s cold I also smell wood-burning stoves that remind me of my old piano teacher´s house. Walking down the street every restaurant has some distinctly tasty smelling food that has more than once lured me inside. The soap in my family´s house is also a pretty important smell, I know that one of my grandmas had the exact same-smelling soap at some point. I think my favorite though is the vender who sells roasted almonds (known as caca de perro, or dog poop here) on my walk to work.

Sight: Obviously this is probably the most diverse but even the different kinds of light in a day surprise me. In the morning I´m awoken by the piercingly bright sunlight at 6:30 peaking over the building across the street. The sun usually stays pretty bright, spring-style, until about noon when things start to cloud over. For the rest of the afternoon it´s pretty dark, around 5 even darker than it is at night. Night is never too dark because the city glows with light pollution reflecting off the low clouds. My favorite part of the day (light-speaking anyway) is around 4:30 when I´m walking home and some days the clouds are just lifting and El Panecillo and southern Quito are flooded in golden light. In these moments I can also see Cotopaxi rising above the clouds in the distance and the whole thing makes me think that the fighting kids I just left maybe aren´t so bad.

In addition to the light (because there isn´t really anywhere else to put this image in my blog), one of the most memorable sights for me is the elderly blind couple I see walking on my way to my internship every morning. They never beg or try to sell anything, but the old man has a cane and guides the woman through the morning bustle. They´re always talking to each other quietly in Spanish and maybe before I leave I´ll try to stop and talk with them.

Taste: So far I´ve absolutely loved the food here. I´ve even eaten mushrooms, my least favorite, and enjoy delicious vegetables at every meal. Rice is a staple that I eat with almost every meal, but I also really like the Andean grains maní, chote, and quinua. In addition to the new fruits and dozens of banana varieties, I´ve also added a alot of soy sauce to my diet as my family uses it as the main seasoning for rice and meat. My family doesn´t eat very much meat but I´ve definitely learned to appreciate good tofu here. There are also ice cream stores on every block so I´ve been sampling guanamana, pistachio, and coconut ice creams. One taste I´ve slowly become accustomed to (accustomed to, not "a fan of") is the Nestle instant coffee. Although Ecuador has a pretty big coffee industry, most is exported...leaving me to my sour powder.

Sound: The sound that comes immediately to mind is the yell of "Nata!" from my kids which is used throughout the day regardless of whether "Nata" is actually needed or not. The yell can especially be heard when I don´t understand something (in which case "Nata" is used exasperatedly) or during stilt-walking lessons (when it is used in desperation and alarm). Other sounds include the barking of the street dogs, the neverending car horns (seriously, I think drivers just get bored or use their horns as some kind of weird mood ring), and the yells of the street venders, which used to get louder as I walked by but most venders have learned that I´m not going to stop. I´m also often woken up in the morning by my host dad playing a) his guitar or b) my favorite playlists on my ipod, which he´s started to really like. My favorite sound though, as always, has to be the rain that sometimes wakes me up...nothing beats that.

Feeling: Usually I have a feeling of dull ache in my head from bumping against the ceiling of the bus and the doorways of Sol. Also there is the pervasive feeling of moistness (that´s right, I used it, my most loathed of words) and chill now that we´ve entered the winter/wet season. Usually my shoes don´t have time to dry out between outings so I try to rotate between my two pairs. Finally, one of my favorite feelings is the warm, wooly feel of my blankets when I finally get to bed after a long day.

I´ve tried to remember these things as I´ve come across them lately but I know there are a couple important sensory tales that I´ve forgotten. Maybe there will be a Tour II in the future!

A Walk in the Rainforest

Tonight as I was preparing my humble dinner of carne vegetal (tofu) and arroz (rice), Charo sensed an opportunity to continue her eternal crusade to fatten me up. As I cooked she asked if I would like some lettuce and added tomatos, onions, and olives when I said yes. When I went to the bathroom she added fried madura (one of the many banana types) to the stove and put out a plate of lima beans and roasted corn (a popular snack). When I returned and joked about my gigantic dinner she said, "I bought ham for you today too." As I write she´s trying to convince me that I need dessert...

This past Thursday I had a little change in my internship when I manned a booth in an artisan´s fair for Sol. Sol had a booth selling orange juice and bread goods and another three tables with things from the jewelry, woodworking, and sewing workshops in the organization. After the 6th level in Sol de Primavera the kids move into one of the different trade shops where they learn the skills they will need for their internships and jobs when they leave the foundation. The things they make in class (including clothes and dolls in the sewing shop, domino sets and wooden bicycles in the woodworking shop, and necklaces and rings in the silversmith) they take to various fairs and markets around the city. The money sometimes goes back directly to the kids but most goes into a fund in the organization that buys the kids shoes and school supplies. I had two of the kids with me at the fair (Luis and Susana) but it wasn´t a very busy day. When I left at 4 (after arriving at 8), our only customers had been my friends and host mom...

Although I´m always a delicate shade of pink here in Quito (owing to little atmospheric buffer between my Irish face and the sun) but after a weekend hiking in the rainforest my pink has acquired a somewhat more severe glow. Friday morning everyone on my program left for Mindo, a tropical paradise only 3 hours north of the city. On the way there we stopped at a Pululahua, a town in the center of a volcanic crater and the ruins of a ceremonial center of the Yumba at Tulipe.

The area just north of Quito is really arid and just kind of ugly in general but as we drove north the mountains slowly turned more and more tropical. It was a really beautiful drive with waterfalls ocassionally appearing amongst the trees and clouds rolling quickly down the vallies and across the road. After bouncing along a tiny country road for a half hour we arrived at Puchijal nature preserve, where we would stay the night. The main lodge and our cabin were right in the middle of the cloud forest, it was absolutely amazing.

We went on a hike to a waterfall first thing and although Andrew gets to do stuff like this every day, a walk in rainforest was a welcome change for those of us living in the city. The hike was beautiful, it was raining of course but everything was so fantastic no one cared. As we went along our guide would stop every few minutes to point out a tree that produced antibiotic sap or to pick up a leaf half-masticated by a bear. I didn´t bring my camera on this hike but at some point I´ll get waterfall pictures from someone. The waterfalls weren´t very big but they made for a great hike and a satisfying end to the walk. The waterfalls were also home to the gallo de peña (or cock of the rock as my guidebook so eloquently translated it) which we got a chance to see. When we got back we wanted to go for another hike so we scaled one of the mountains next to the lodge.

That night was Anna´s birthday so we taught the guides some of our American drinking/card games and they taught us some of their own. It was a hilarious time, at the end of the night everyone had red hands from an Ecuadorian slapping game...way fun. I also got up at 5:00 the next morning for an early hike with two other students. This time we hiked to a river where we braved a swim in the freezing water and saw puma droppings on the way back.

After that we left the preserve to check out a butterfly garden and to watertube down a river. We ended the day with a trout lunch in an orchid/hummingbird garden. All in all an amazing experience and everyone had a great time.

I actually started this post quite a while ago but only got around to finishing it tonight, the 10th. I also posted some new pictures (at http://picasaweb.google.com/aventurasdenate for people who requested the link again) so you should check it out. Hope everyone´s well.

Coming soon: A weekend at the beach and starting my independent study project

The President and the Party

It constantly amazes me how quickly time is passing here, when I read past blog entries (even those from this past Saturday) I have to take a minute to remember I´ve only been here 5 weeks...absolutely insane. I especially have to remind myself of this when I see American or German tourists trying to navigate the city or haggle in a market. I´m still in the stage where I chastise myself after I think, "amateurs"...but only after.

This weekend marked the passing of the elections (and by extension, the prohibition). It was a really cool day, the president was driving around the city with a huge caravan of candidates from his party and every time he went up my street Charo would run out onto the balcony and scream her support. Juan Carlos laughed but rolled his eyes. Speaking of the president, my family and I went out to lunch on Saturday morning and as we were walking to the bus my host-sister Lucila yelled, "Mami, el presidente!" Sure enough, President Correa was coming out of a restaurant talking to a reporter (I like to think he was talking about why Happy Panda was his favorite Chinese restaurant but it was more likely about the elections). It was seriously only Correa´s family, my family, and this reporter on street. Charo of course ran over to him and jumped up and down behind the reporter´s camera, all the while yelling, "Get the camera! Get the camera!"...Correa is much more of a rockstar for Charo than a political figure. Correa gave Charo a hug and remembered her from a function a couple weeks ago. I was about 8 feet away from the president the day before elections...amazing. As the president drove away the reporter filmed our family waving enthusiastically, we didn´t know the station but apparently I was on Ecuadorian national news.

Anyway, as I´ve mentioned, voting is obligatory in Ecuador so the country more or less came to a complete halt on Sunday. I went with my brother to vote in the Valle de los Chillos, where my family lived for several years. The streets were full of people walked to the polls and on the way Juan Car ran into 4 of his best friends, Quito really is a small town of 2 million. The voting process itself was intense: two ballots the size of table cloths, hundreds upon hundreds of candidates with their pictures, and soldiers with machine guns at every polling entrance. At the end of the day, President Correa´s Lista 35 Pais party was handed a very clear majority in the asemblea. The offical results won´t be announced for 15-20 days but this means that when Ecuadorians return to the polls in 6 months they will be voting to ratify a much more liberal, economically/socially/environmentally progressive constitution. Very exciting.

After voting my brother and I met up with Paula, his girlfriend, and went out to lunch and to a market. I´m not even going to say anything about the market because the pictures speak for themselves ssooo well, but it was really fun seeing where Juan Car and Paula grew up, we went to their favorite ice cream place and Paula´s new, beautiful house (w/ a trampoline, I was so pleased).

--You should also probably know that as I´ve been writing this I´ve been making dinner and dancing around my living room while listening to the Almost Famous soundtrack. This in itself is hardly noteworthy, but as I was dancing I happened to look out the window and my neighbor across the street waved and smiled. Apparently the whole family was watching me dance as a kind of dinner theater--

Last night we had a birthday party for my host dad and had a great dinner with all of the family and our neighbors, Nury and 4-year-old Eric. Eric is extremely precocious and had everyone laughing/scolding all night long. I´ve also been teaching Charo how to use Skype to talk to her daughter in Texas and at one point she was talking to Rosie on the computer, answering her cellphone in the other ear, and playing music on my ipod. The family loved it and took several pictures, any time Charo handles technology is a momentous one. Afterward we watched a short film Juan Car is submitting to a film festival here in Quito...very very cool.

My internship continues to go well, since his first smile yesterday, Julio has been a relative joy ("absolute" is pushing it quite a bit). Through the combination of teaching him how to ride a bike and walk stilts in two days, he´s become my best friend. He´s still in a fight every 30 minutes, but they´re easier to break up and he doesn´t walk away cursing at me in his mumbling Spanish. Today was a pretty rewarding one (rewarding definitely implies difficulties, only difficulties overcome). I had stilts lessons and tutoring all morning and then in the afternoon I went with Myriam to play with the little kids in El Placer. There were lots of kids there and one mentally handicapped man who I´ve seen begging in Plaza Grande. It was a really interesting/difficult afternoon because we were teaching 6-year-olds and a 30-year-old how to play the game Memory at the same time. On the walk home the air was unusually clear and I could see the whole city unfolding to the south and Cotopaxi looming in the distance...quite the way to end the day.

Also, check out the newly posted pictures...more coming soon. Love to all.

Coming soon: Mindo, Feria de Artesenias with my kids, and Anna´s birthday

"Why couldn´t I have been named Bob or Jose?" and Zancos

So after two weeks in my internship, my kids´largest problem seems to be not that they have an American volunteer, or that they have a 6´4" volunteer, or even that they have a volunteer with mediocre Spanish. No, by far the largest hurdle so far has been having a volunteer named ¨Nate¨. The first day I tried to make my name Spanish-friendly and introduced myself as "Naughtawn (which has been successful in the past), but I was apparently misunderstood and my names at Sol de Primavera range from Nata, to Nat, to Natalie (because there´s a girl named "Natalie" there who goes by Natal). The result of this madness is that the kids love yelling my name at all times, both because "nata" is a word for a milk drink here and because they know they can absolutely massacre my name and I´ll respond. Fortunately I work with a French volunteer named Maud, so I´m not alone in my name-insecurities.

This week I´ve really started to bond with some of the kids and figure out how to work with the more difficult ones. I gave my first stilt-walking (zancos) lessons and the kids seemed to decide that if they could entrust their lives with me, I was worthy of their good graces in all areas of the program. This week saw another momentous occasion when Julio (the biggest trouble-maker who always speaks in a whiny voice so I can never understand him and who I had never seen smile or laugh) finally smiled at me and gave me a big double-high-five after we went for a bike ride. I´m still not sure what I´m supposed to do there exactly and maybe 4 months of playing chess and breaking up fights is what´s needed but I feel like I should have a project with a tangible result for my time here. The kids see a stream of volunteers going through the foundation and while I´m sure that we all help in our own ways, I need to find a way to contribute something longer lasting. This week I also need to turn in my proposal for my independent study project. I´m planning on studying how different forms of education in the city (public, private, Catholic, indigenous) affect identification as "indigenous" and what the indigenous community wants from their education system (be it complete integration or cultural autonomy). I have a sneaking suspicion this topic is a little ambitious for my time here but I´ll try my best. The project culminates with a paper and oral presentation, I´m going to try and write the 20-page paper in Spanish but we´ll see how that goes...

This week I also met my host-dad for the first time as he has been away on business in Bolivia for a month. He´s a really, really interesting man and it´s been fun getting to know him the past few days. He´s really into indigenous culture, speaks Quichua fluently, and works with a global organization that works to preserve the indigenous lifestyle and agriculture. Despite being a little intimidated sometimes, I´ve bonded with him over teasing Charo and I feel comfortable around him already.

This week my program went on a little field trip to a community in southern Quito that is working on creating a society based on indigenous communal societies (and communism a little bit too). They have their own schools which have gardens which feed the parents who constructed the schools and other self-sustaining elements. It was pretty interesting and ended up being a beautiful, rainy day walking through reclaimed parks and school grounds.

This week was also the last week before the assembly elections held tomorrow. The outcome of the election will very seriously determine the future direction of the country as this assembly will be charged with writing a new national constitution. The city has been absolutely covered with political slogans, campaign fiestas, and propaganda for the whole month. There have been tons of political demonstrations and when I got home on Wednesday (the last day of campaigning), I could turn 360 degrees in the plaza and see a continuous sea of political supporters and candidates. The sheer numbers of the election are mind-boggling: there are 26 national parties, each with 24 candidates for the national assembly and each voter votes for 24 candidates. The ballot also includes the provincial assemblies(of which there are 14 seats in Pichincha) and a few other positions. It´s anticipated that it will take each person at least 8 minutes to vote. Also voting is obligatory in Ecuador, meaning that if you don´t vote you pay a fine and (according to some of my sources) could have trouble getting loans/leaving the country. Because of the obligatory vote (I guess), it was illegal to sell or consume alcohol in all of Ecuador from Friday to Sunday, apparently with the idea that sober voters are better voters. Entire parts of the city are closed as a result (namely La Mariscal, the tourist center and home to most good bars and dance clubs) and I´ve heard several disgruntled tourists complaining about the lack of nightlife this weekend. All in all, it´s been an absolutely insane week politically-speaking. I´m planning on posting tomorrow with all of the exciting events of the day and with some pictures. ¡Hasta mañana!

Coming tomorrow: THE ELECTIONS, meeting President Correa, and my brother-in-law

My routine in the middle of the world

This week I started to settle into my routine of life in Quito. I have class Monday and Wednesday afternoons and have my internship every morning and all day on Tuesday. I eat lunch at home with Charo or our cook, Myriam, who chastises me if I eat too much/too little and talks for the entire meal (maids and cooks are much more common in Ecuador than in the US, most middle class families have someone who comes a couple times a week). After class I usually take a nap or do something athletic and do homework and hang out with my family/friends at night.

This week marked the beginning of my internship here and it has been a week of drastic highs and lows. Because after leaving Friday afternoon the lows are the most readily available memories, I´ll start there. The lows have included taking broken glass away from babies (long story), breaking up the fights between Edison, Julio, and Ricky, and generally not knowing what I´m supposed to be doing or what I have to contribute to the organization. The highs include taking the older kids for a bike ride, the hugs I get from Narcissa and Gustavo every morning, and the hiking invitation I got from my co-workers for next weekend. I work with 2 Swiss and 1 French volunteer along with the amazing Ecuadorian employees. My organization works with kids in the poorest barrios to get them off the street and into a safe space. We provide tutoring for their homework and also work on art projects and just play games with the kids. I spent most of this week playing chess with Ernesto and memory with Narcissa while occasionally helping kids with their homework. For the older kids the foundation offers classes in baking, sewing, woodworking, and jewelry design with the idea that when they are old enough to leave, they go with employable skills. I also am going to be teaching the kids how to juggle and walk on stilts because they can make more money on the street with a talent than they can through simple begging. Although I´ve never walked on stilts, my director assured me that since I practically already do I shouldn´t have a problem...we´ll see about that. The internship is going to be a very trying and educational experience, so far I´m still really excited on my walk to work every morning.

This week my family has been pretty busy: my brother has been finishing up a commerical for Mazda, my host dad has been driving 3 days to return from Bolivia, and my mom just got back from 2 days in Tulcán, on the border between Ecuador and Columbia. She brought back these traditional corn cookies which are so delicious, I ate about 7 the night she got back. To those of you who are laughing and saying, "He didn´t eat 7"...stop laughing. I continue to love the family situation: Charo and I talk politics and human rights at every meal and JuanCar has a great movie selection (being a film-maker probably helps) that we´ve been working through. My host dad, Juan Carlos, was supposed to return on Wednesday but took a detour through Cuzco, Peru and will get back tonight around 1. Everyday my host mom tells me, ¨He´ll be here tomorrow¨but my friends and I have started to suspect he´s been photoshopped into the family pictures...I´m excited to meet him.

This week in between classes and my internship I went rock climbing (which I´m trying to do a couple times a week) and have been checking out the various markets and neighborhoods around the city. For the moment I´ve abandoned my running goal, rationalizing that since everywhere I go I´m walking up hill...I don´t actually need to. This week I´ve also taken the time with friends on the program (Anna, Emma, Eli, and Kristin for Erik) to find our favorite bar and hamburger place. This weekend we went to Mitad del Mundo (the middle of the world) an hour north of Quito. It´s really just the equator but it has turned into a full-scale, circus-style, Disney World-esque tourist attraction. The highlight is a huge tower with a globe on top and the line of the equator running through the whole complex. We took our requisite ¨straddling the hemispheres¨pictures and took the bus back home. Last night I went to a ridiculous modern dance performance with Anna and later checked out a cool tapas bar. Today we took a bicycle tour of colonial Quito which was originally scheduled for the first week but had to be postponed until today. It was fun but by now all of us had visited the churches and plazas so we didn´t really feel like being tourists. I also walk past most of the sites on my way to my internship every morning so it was a little redundant, but it was fun to do it on bikes.

I added some pictures on the picture site, there aren´t very many so I need to get in the habit of taking more. I´ll work on it. Thanks for the comments and I hope everyone is doing well!

Coming soon: host dad (if he really exists), hiking with co-workers or Peguche, and Quito Sur (southern Quito)

Fútbol with llamas

Well it´s been a week since I last posted and I have to use my schedule of activities as a reference for what I´ve been up to...yesterday seems a lifetime ago and when I think I´ve only been here two weeks I get a little dizzy. In an attempt to supply information promised several posts ago, I´m going to try to summarize a week in a couple short paragraphs...here we go...

This week began with our first actual seminar, led by the amazingly-intelligent and rapidly-speaking María. I´m really excited for everything about this class, we´re going to be looking at social change in Ecuador and studying the different social movements occuring today. Tuesday night we had conversation tables with a couple English classes in the Catholic University. It was a really fun experience and I think I´m going out with some of the students later this week. Wednesday we visited El Panecillo (a hill on the southern end of the city and home to an enormous statue of the Virgen de Quito) and the City Museum. On Thursday we took the Teleflórico (a big cablecar) up Volcán Pinchincha and hiked around the volcano and enjoyed the amazing views of the city. We could even see Cotopaxi 50 kilometers to the south. I also checked out a rock climbing facility with some friends and I´m excited to improve during my stay here.

This past Saturday we had a picnic in Parque Metropolitano with all of the host families and students. It was a really fun time and it was amazing how easily you could pair students with their families. We played games of charades and soccer (battling off the llamas in the park) and got to know each other´s families.

OK, now, today I had my interview for my intership today (definitely the most important component of my program). Originally I was going to be teaching in a school for indigenous families who recently moved to the city but there was some kind of problem there and they couldn´t take an intern. Martha, my program director, then told me about another larger and more formal indigenous school. That was the plan for a couple days before we found out that the school wouldn´t really have anything for me to do. So then we arrived at my third and final internship: Sol de Primavera (Sun of Spring). This organization works with children who work in the streets and live in one of the poorer barrios of the city. The organization gives them a safe space and provides meals, school, and healthcare to the students free of charge. I have yet to determine how the program is funded but I´m excited to work there. I´ll be teaching and organizing activities in the mornings and then will be part of a community outreach team in the afternoon. They said I´m also free to design and implement my own projects in the program so I´m excited to learn more about it. It´s about a 30 minute walk from my house and I start tomorrow...I´ll let you know.

In just two weeks I feel incredibly comfortable with my family and life in Quito in general. I´ve learned that although the city has several streets named for important dates, if you try to organize them chronologically you´ll be a mess. I´ve learned that you fit in better if you look kind of angry while waiting for the bus but smile at people when you get on. I´ve learned that (as my host mom warned me) if I start a conversation with our maid/cook Myriam (whom I adore) she will never ever stop talking. Most importantly I´ve learned that I can feign understanding frighteningly well but also that I´m not as well informed as I thought I was.

Also in the course of writing this I´ve discovered that pictures take a long time, bordering on forever, to load on blogspot so I made a different album instead, sorry for the barrage of links...

http://picasaweb.google.com/aventurasdenate

Coming soon: first week of internship, the middle of the world, and my host father

Old men, children, and fiestas

This morning I went for my first run at 9500 feet (in a park above the city, if that´s even possible) and I am actually writing to you now from the after-life. Although I´m a reasonably fit 20-year-old I was passed by children and a man old enough that he didn´t have his dentures in on a Sunday morning. But my host mom goes to this park everyone Sunday morning for yoga so I think if I set myself the incredibly ambitious goal of running twice a week, maybe in a month I can beat that old man. Now...back to the beginning.

The past two days have been amazing and action-packed. I´ll start with Friday night, when I went out to a salsa bar with some friends from the program and our program assistant. It was a little disheartening that I was dancing next to a salsa instructor and a national champion (just looking at them broke every bone in my body), but we had a lot of fun nevertheless. I took social dance at Carleton, so I could almost keep up...Then yesterday morning my host mom and I went out to breakfast with her son-in-law Simeòn who is originally from Austin, Texas. Simeòn is a linguistic anthropologist on his way to Brazil, where he will be working with a project that is working on the first documentation of some indigenous language. We were also joined by another American family friend, Connie. She is also a linguistic anthropologist working with a tribe on the coast.

After breakfast Charo and I walked around Quito colonial...definitely the coolest part of the city so far. Charo very proudly told me that Quito has the largest colonial district in the world. There are tons of churchs and plazas along with several shops in the centuries-old buildings. We then went grocery shopping in a co-op type place that only buys directly from Ecuadorian farmers and ranchers.

That afternoon Charo took me to Casa de Matilde, a battered women´s shelter she founded and the first women´s shelter in all of Ecuador (by this point there is one other in Cuenca). The shelter was in the far south of Quito, traditionally in the poorer and more dangerous parts. In the past few years there have been attempts to unify Quito moderno and Quito colonial but the city is still largely segegrated geographically. Charo had a meeting there from 3-6 so I just played with all of the little kids and their puppies. It is definitely an interesting experience, you hear things from kids that adults are too polite to say. For example, in Ecuador race is accepted as a pretty clear indicator of class so when one of the little girls asked me, "Why are you so white?" another, older girl quickly answered, "Because he´s American stupid." As if I don´t have enough American guilt to begin with...

When we got back from Casa de Matilde I met some friends to go to a fiesta in Guapalo. Guapalo is like a suburb of Quito in the next valley over. The walk down was amazing, the valley was completely filled with fog so we could hear the party as we walked down and then the scene just unfolded in front of us. The fiesta was in honor of the Virgen of Guapalo (also the Virgen de Guadalupe) and was held in the central plaza of the town. There were at least 2,000 people packed in there and I don´t think I´ve ever laughed so hard for so long in my life. There were dancers in costumes as various as clowns, gorillas, babies, and a ninja. There were also people dressed as bulls with real horns who would run around and gore people. Most spectacularly though were the firework carts...in the middle of the crowd they were shooting off fireworks of the caliber that, in the United States, would require a viewer distance of about a kilometer. There were also little carts of sparkling fireworks that shot hot sparks into the crowd. We danced with Ecuadorian friends we met there, Juan Pablo and María, and a group of German volunteers for about 5 hours...all in all an amazing experience. Two days later my ears are still ringing a little bit.

After the fiesta some people went home but I went out for a couple drinks with two other people on my program. It was nice to just sit down in a bar after the crazy fiesta and just get to know each other a little bit. Believe it or not this actually leaves out a lot and although I was intending to post pictures, I over-estimated my Spanish and accidentally deleted the pictures off my camera when I meant to eject it from the computer (Steve, you were right). But they were only place pictures and I´m going to retake them all right now anyway.

Coming Soon: a change in internship, pictures (cross your fingers), and family things

Day 2!

When I decided to start a blog I was expecting to post new entries once a week or so, but there is so much going on in these first few weeks that I have to get these things down a little more quickly. I also have internet access in my family´s apartment which I hadn´t expected so that makes everything a little easier. This morning I woke up to the usual charming sounds of the city: the car alarm that seems to blast right outside my window 24/7, the kids walking to the school next to our building, a little dog barking somewhere, and the general hum of 2 million people living in the valley. This morning I had to register my visa and on the bus ride there I was feeling pretty confident in my abilities to navigate the city. I had afterall taken my bus route twice the day before (once alone) and I was trying my hardest to not look like it was my second day. This attempt was shattered when a little kid on the bus who had been staring at me for the entire ride looked up at his dad and said "Papi, ¡un gigante! (Dad, a giant!)" It was then I realized any attempt at "blending in" would probably require expensive surgery.

The visa registration was a completely nondescript experience except for the fact that I saw that bureaucracy is that same wherever you go. After that I did some cell phone research with another student and headed home for a quick nap before lunch. Lunch is the meal of the day in Ecuador and my experience so far is that´s its place among the meals of the day is much more significant than any in the US. Today my host mother had vegetable soup, arroz con pollo, ensaladita, pan dulce, delicious fried bananas, and this kind of cereal drink we have with every meal. Whenever she places something on the table Charo (my host mother) says, "this is good for your stomach." She has also quickly assumed her role of surragate mother in that she doesn´t offer me food but rather uses the mandato verb form and commands me to eat more. Also, when I told her this morning that I´d forgotten how to get hot water in the shower, she reminded me how but first told me that a cold shower is good for my health.

In the afternoon we went to the Museo del Banco Central where we got kind of a crash course in precolonial and colonial history. The museum was really interesting not only in the artifacts and interesting cultures presented but also in the comparison between the precolonial exhibit and the colonial exhibit. We always hear about the human sacrifices and shrunken heads of South American tribes (and they were certainly well represented in the museum) but the colonial exhibit was much more gruesome and violent. It was interesting that the exhibit with Christian imagery was making people queasy and uncomfortable with the blood and guts, not the shrunken heads like you might expect.

Tonight was the first dinner the family has eaten together since I arrived and we had a really good time. It was the first time I met Charo´s younger daughter, Lucilla, and watching Lucilla and Juan Car interact was hilarious. My Spanish is good enough that I can get in on the jokes sometimes but if I don´t understand they make me laugh anyway. After our delicious dinner we went and visited some of the neighbors, Nuri and her son Eric. Nuri is a city architect but is also helping organize a city-wide week without cars called Las Calles para La Gente. It sounds really interesting and we all bought t-shirts to support the cause. I´m excited to see what it will be like next week. I could definitely appreciate a couple fewer cars in the city, I´ve come so close to being hit by the cars and buses so many times that I´ve lost already count. The cars give you a courtesy honk but they show no sign of slowing regardless of the impending crash; it´s definitely been an adventure.

The definite highlight of the evening though was meeting Nuri`s 4-year-old son Eric. He was already up past his bedtime but he was so wound up and demanded that I read him one of his books in English before he went to bed. He introduced me to his stuffed dog and cat and showed me all of his toys declaring, "That´s mine! And this is mine! And this room is mine!" I promised to visit often and offered to babysit for Nuri.

After writing all of this I realized I didn´t include what I´d promised last time, I guess that will have to wait...

Still coming soon: my internship, Quito, the people on my program, and salsa dancing

Quito...finally

Well, after about 36 hours of travel and 24 hours later than I expected I have arrived in Quito. On Monday my flight to Houston was redirected to San Antonio because of bad weather. There I was treated to 3 hours of screaming babies and a lecture from my seat-mate on why South American natives need to be converted to Christianity. By the time we were finally able to leave San Antonio for Houston I had missed my flight to Quito. On the bright side however, I seem to be one of the few people who got a free hotel room and meal vouture (at least according to the people grumbling on the shuttle to the hotel). Because only one flight leaves from Houston to Quito a day, I ended up spending 24 hours in Houston. Although a day in Houston was annoying, it served as a very gentle transition into a Spanish-speaking country after I navigated my way through the airport and to my Hilton Garden Inn in Spanish. My host mother picked me up at the airport and was extremely friendly and very accomodating. She lives with her husband (who is in Bolivia for a month on business) in an apartment in the middle of Old Quito (Quito is split into Quito colonial and Quito moderno). They have three kids: their son lives in the next apartment over, their second oldest daughter lives across the street, and the oldest daughter lives in Austin with her husband but is coming to visit tomorrow. This morning I hopped on my bus for the very easy 10-minute ride to my school. The other students in my program are really cool (but it took us until the afternoon to really start talking to each other) and we spent the morning in a beautiful modern art museum. Gauging from the amount of participation in the afternoon session, I think my Spanish is about average for the program and I could understand most of the things our profesora said. This evening my group went to dinner in a nice restaurant in Quito moderno. My host brother picked me up with his girlfriend for the busride home and I´m excited to get to know him better. He originally went to college for chemistry but changed to film-making and is currently working on getting his first movie sold. We get along really well and after about an hour he was completely comfortable correcting all of my Spanish mistakes. Now I´m heading to bed since I have to register my visa tomorrow at 8:00 in the morning. I hope this finds everyone well! ¡Ciao!

Coming Soon: my internship, the other students in the program, and more details about Quito

Welcome to my Blog!

Hey friends and family! I don't leave for Ecuador until Monday but I wanted to get my first post out as something to welcome you to my blog! I've decided to log my experiences abroad here rather than send out a mass email. I'll post here on anything interesting I experience and I'll be able to post pictures here as well. I should have fairly regular internet access while I'm there so I don't really have any excuses not to post. Feel free to check in whenever you're interested in seeing what I'm up to. I would definitely still love personal emails or comments on my posts. I hope everyone has a great fall and I can't wait to tell you about everything when I get back!