Hola Todos!
I figured Id upload some pics of my time so far...and let you know a little about my host family and my scruggles in daily life :) yay!
Where to start? I guess where I left off is a good place. So I get home to my house on Sunday night, and realize that I live with a pretty well off family. Its a nice house, with no yard but a house with a yard is pretty rare to come by here. All of the rooms are on the second floor and the floor is all hardwood or tile, pretty sweet right? Well since all my shoes have rubber soles, they squeak like mofos and my mom calls them zapatos musicales, musical shoes, even though she is prolly annoyed with it! Anyway, my dad is cool, he maintains machienery for a flower farm (exported to the us!) and has a hacienda (cabin kinda) where he farms cattle and has like 20 horses. Needless to say this fact is necessary to describe my host brother. Now most of the guys in Cuenca are rico-suave types, not this dude. Hes like a 4-H kid with beard and mustache. He is nice, I just dont see him a whole lot. He sells cowboy boots and loves Billy Ray Cirus.
So I got a ride on my first day of school. It took about 10 minutes in a car, and 40-45 minutes to walk. I decided then that I had better learn the bus routes because I have class at 8 am, come back for lunch, and go back for our afternoon lectures. I could probably write an entire entry about the buses here but I will keep it brief. So to get a bus (there are like 5 buses per line) you have to flag them down, a skill to which I am still perfecting, apparently. On wednsday morning I flagged like 3 busses down, none of which stopped for me, not to mention everyone who saw this scene chuckled to themselves because obviously it was HILARIOUS. Anyway, I did a good job at flagging down a taxi, which was sweet, especially when the driver tried to charge me 2 bucks when its 1.25; dont worry folks, I just relied on my expertly honed Spanish skills...??? But seriously I was like no dont charge me that dude and gave him 1.50 and left.
Speaking of Spanish skills...so I had a little problem adjusting to the freshness of the food here the last few days. My mom decided it would be a good idea to have me solo bebes te y galletes. Ok cool drink tea and something else I dont understand, awesome. So I sit down to dinner and she asks me if I like galletes, Im like no but I like their eggs. She was pretty confused then so I got pretty confused. I was like galletes, la mama de los juevos? (mom of eggs or chickens) and she started bursting out laughing, she was like those are GALLENAS not GALLETES. Yah, I was supposed to comment on the crackers (galletes) that I was eating. The sad thing is there are too many instances of that stuff, its too hard to recount. A funny/creepy story though: my friend Nubia in my program and a few other friends and I were going to take taxis from our houses to this Bar called Callyptus. I got there late and Nubia seemed pretty flustered and I asked if she was ok. You dont even want to know what just happened to me, well yah of course I did! She said she told the driver Callyptus, and he proceeded to drive her to the TOWN of Callyptus. Thank goodness she is a native speaker but even though her Spanish was awesome, the driver was pissed when she told him that she wanted to go to the bar.
What else? oh, im teaching english at an orphanage 8 hours a week, which is cool only I have no idea how to 1) teach english and 2) yell at kids in Spanish. So the girls, by the time I get there at 2 have already had a full day of school and the last thing they want to do is pay attention to some gringa whose only method of teaching includes bribary with candy. Anyway, Im working on it. When its all said and done, it will be integral for me to decide where I want to take this whole teaching for a carreer business.
I think thats all for now, I am going out for lunch today with my friend Claire. I have dance class later this afternoon and am going to a soccer game and then out to bars!! WOOP!
Pictures: guy in hammock=our bus driver for our first week of travel
me and my friends overlooking quito
CEDEI computer lab
me and claire scared of the ecuadorian guard
Hasta Luego!!
_ERIN_
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