The First Week And Some....

Monday, October 5^th:

Yesterday was the first day of school. My mom and I took the bus together to CIMAS and she dropped me off on her way to work. At school, we started the day with a lecture from a CIA agent from the US about safety. And now I understand that you have to be careful, but this guy was nuts. He told us that how even in the US, if he sees a bum at a stoplight he looks all around his car because he thinks someone is going to steal his things from the backseat while he is looking at the bum. Paranoid much?

After that we got a lecture with the ecology students in English about *surprise* ecology. It was AMAZINGLY boring. Like about the different fertility levels of soil at different altitudes and how that creates diverse ecosystems. Who cares??? Definitely not me.

Then we had lunch, which I skipped because I still didn’t feel good and didn’t want to pay for it. So instead I went online and facebooked. After lunch, we had one more lecture in Spanish about the history of Ecuador. It was really confusing because the guy who gave it had a really thick accent and I didn’t know half of the words that he used. But I don’t think I was the only one so I’m not too worried.

After school my mom was there to pick me up and we took the bus back home. We both took naps and when I woke up we walked to the store for bread and milk. When we got home she cooked us dinner as neither of my siblings were home and then I went basically to bed. I think for the most part, this is pretty much how my days in this family will go.

Tuesday, October 6^th:

Today was my first day actually meeting the guy that will be my official professor. I really like him. And moreover, I REALLY like the program. Basically since we are here for language and culture, we get to do anything that interests us. So we have overnight and day trips and city walks and fruit tastings and all sorts of cool things to do. And we are going to have a Thanksgiving. Now normally I am not really a Thanksgiving-y person, but considering how much I crave something normal (like PB&J), I think this will be a Thanksgiving for the books. And I took the bus by myself today. Go me…I didn’t even get lost.

Some observations about Quito:

So first of all, the sidewalks and streets are treacherous. They have curbs that are perpendicular to the sidewalk that you have to step up and down and little lips to trip on and these ramp-like things that are just kind of weird. It’s like the sidewalk once had a few stairs and someone paved them over to be a steep ramp. And the drivers here are so crazy. You risk your life every time you attempt to cross a street, even at a crosswalk with the light in your favor. And the markings on the road mean nothing. People drive right down the middle of the white lines and on sidewalks and four across on a three lane road…the list goes on and on. I’ve never seen such daring old ladies and men.

All (and by all I mean EVERY SINGLE HOUSE IN THE CITY) has a huge gate and wall completely surrounding it. Every window is barred and every gate padlocked all the time. Our wall is about 12ft high and it has iron bars on the top of it. I told my mom that in the US walls like this were really uncommon and she replied “So then you can see the neighbor’s house?” And to top them off, literally, if a person feels that a fence isn’t high enough, they pour a layer of cement on the top of the wall and while it’s wet they stick broken pieces of glass (like half bottles and such) in the cement so that the sharp edges stick straight up into the air. Apparently it’s to deter all of the criminals who attempt to scale 12ft walls.

Instead of having house dogs or yard dogs, people keep their dogs on the roof. So you walk down the street and a million dogs bark at you from the roofs of random houses. No one shops at supermarkets, only these little hole in the wall places that sell fresh bread and junk food like candy and soda. Like imagine if AMPM had a bakery. And the other thing is that they shop every day. My mom and I and sometimes my brother go to random different stores every single evening and buy enough bread for dinner and breakfast.

I am lucky because my family eats dinner, but most families don’t. They have a HUGE lunch and breakfast and call it good for the day. Also (and this is not just my observation, the other students think it too): the amount of food that they eat here is amazing. My mom is convinced that I am on a diet because she thinks I should eat more, but it’s impossible to keep up with the servings! Like for dinner she gave me a bowl of soup, a big roll with ham and cheese on it, a plate of rice, a half chicken breast, a piece of fried plantain, and a radish-carrot salad. And then of course milk and juice and coffee or tea if I wanted it. And dinner is a small meal compared to lunch.

There is no such thing as personal space here. On the bus you are so close to people it’s like getting six hugs all at once.  From strangers. And the capacity of the busses? Guess- they are just normal size busses. It’s 128 people. And since there is no one here to enforce that, they cram WAY more people than that on them.

Thursday, October 8:

So a little background because I haven’t written in a while…

I really like school and our Spanish classes, the professor is really nice and helpful  and I think that I will learn a lot.  It’s a little lonely here sometimes because it’s such an effort to talk to anyone but school is really fun and overall I’m having a really good time.

Today was our first field trip with the school. We took a bus to old town and toured two churches and the President’s house, both of which were amazing. I have tons of really cool pictures, but unfortunately I have not been able to find internet that is fast enough to upload pictures to the internet, so it might possibly be that no one will see them until I get home.

Tonight everyone else is going to the bars, but I am going to stay in and do finish my weekend homework because tomorrow we are going to Otavalo, which is a town north of Quito with a huge market. I think the plan is to meet at the bus station at seven tomorrow and when we get there go for a hike to a waterfall and swim. Then on Saturday we are going to go to the market and come home. There is a huge soccer game on Saturday that determines whether or not Ecuador goes to the World Cup, and some of the group is trying to buy scalped tickets. We have a hostel booked that will be $5 for the night per person, and the bus is $2 each way. So this trip should be relatively inexpensive. I’m really excited for the market because it is really famous and supposedly has tons of cool cheap stuff.

So that’s that for now…but on an unrelated matter, since I am basically completely cut off from the US, I wouldn’t mind getting texts from everyone more often just letting me know what’s happening. Even though I can’t reply, it would be nice to know.

Sunday, October 11^th:

Yesterday we got back from Otavallo, and it was a really fun trip. We left really early on Friday morning and took a bus the two hours to the city. When we got there we went to drop our things off at the hostel, and despite being the cheapest hostel in the city, it was really nice. I shared a room with Leah and we all shared the bathrooms. For $5, I really couldn’t have asked for more. We went and ate breakfast, which was HORRIBLE…and then we went to the market. The market is huge and has about everything that you could possibly want for REALLY cheap. And it was good for my Spanish too because you have to barter for everything. I got some cool things, like a bag and a woven blanket, so overall I’m really happy. We went back to the hostel and hung out for a while and then went out to this bohemian café and got falafel for dinner. After dinner, we all walked back to the hostel. One of the girls had brought a guitar and three people in our group can play the guitar really well, so we sat around on the roof and sang random songs like “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” and “Santoria” for a few hours.

In the morning, half of the group left on the early bus because they paid an exorbitant amount of money to go to the Ecuador vs. Uruguay soccer game to determine which team goes to the World Cup. The rest of us stayed with the intention of going to the market in the morning and hiking a waterfall in the afternoon, but we ran out of time for the waterfall by the time we went to the market and ate and packed everything up. So we took a bus back at like two, and some of my group then proceeded to head to a bar to watch the game. I went home and took a nap and woke up just in time to see Ecuador lose in overtime. So now everyone is really disappointed around here. 

Today I am pretty much just hanging out because I finished all my homework on Thursday. I think I’ll walk to the internet café down the street and do a little web surfing, but that’s about it.

And a favor: I would really like to cook dinner one night for my family, but we don’t really have an oven that works. I think that you can bake things, but it doesn’t heat right and it takes a long time to cook stuff. Can anyone think of anything that I can make that is common in the US but doesn’t use an oven as the primary cooking method? From what I understand, the store Supermaxi should have any ingredient that I might need.