Dwight Churute

Our guide/the fruit inside the chocolate plant, doesn´t it look creepy!??
Chocolate Beans!

Church across the street from the Orf

Birds in the Orf

The Orfanage Park near the Orf

Hahaha, I am hilarious. Well, no one else thinks I am because I made this joke about 57 times on our trip this weekend. We went to this reserve called Churute-Manglares close to the coast and I kept calling it Dwight Churute, no big deal if you don´t get it, you are just not cool enough apparently! Chendo! (kidding...) But it was pretty great to get out of ¨freezing asthma attack¨for a weekend. (That is Cuenca´s nickname here with the locals, I was weirded out with what a coincidence it was with my life, heh)

But seriously, we went to a cacao farm which is basically a bunch of chocolate trees, well not really, but thats what chocolate comes from. I took some pictures later that day on our hike and we saw monkeys as well as killer snakes. Ok fine, we never saw them but I swear they exist because we had two guides and one had to bring up the front, and the other the rear for that reason. Unfortunately my camera is a piece and ran out of batteries the first day of the three day trip, crap!

So it was basically like summer camp for two days, even though I never wet because I was too cool of a child. We stayed in a bunk house on this families´ land which was sweet. The next day we got up at the ass crack of dawn and went on a canoe ride which was scary as H. We went on this parana filled river on a canoe that fit 11 people but was as wide as our canoe at home. Also there was like three inches between the top of the canoe and the water and as soon as we docked we found out that it had a leak, woohoo! So we drove an hour to Guayaquil which I love, even though it was sweatty, I didn´t even care--because I could breathe! It was cool to see the difference between the people who live in the mountains compared to the coast. I don´t know if I´d mentioned this or not but I am taller than 75% of the population in Cuenca and that is no lie. Thank goodness because I was starting to freak out until we went to the coast and I felt short again, whew!

Hmm, what else? Oh I put some pictures of the Orf up. It´s really nice, well Ecuadorian-style. And I also found out that it is more for parents to put there kids in if they can´t afford to take care of them, so most all of them have families, but they live there. Teaching is going great, the girls finally understand me and I think they´re learning...??

So...anyway, I am majorly procrastinating typing up a paper for tomorrow and I should probably get going. Thanks for the emails everyone, keem em comin´.

Tengan una linda noche todos!!