Halloween was the first real even that I’ve had to miss being abroad, but I had actually had a very eventful Halloween despite being in the Southern Hemisphere. As usual, I’m writing all of this a month later and as expected it’s a novel so apologies but I hope you enjoy!
To start, people here actually celebrate Halloween. My neighbors have had a giant blow up pumpkin and ghost in their yard for the last month (another thing Ecuas love.. decorating for holidays months in advance, my Christmas tree has been up since the first week of November) and I saw signs around for Halloween parties and they were selling costumes at the mall so I figured I would get my students some candy to celebrate and we had a vacation for the entire next week so it seemed like a good time for a present. We had a quiz in all of my classes, and as students gave me their quizzes I gave them their Halloween candy. Unfortunately for me and for one of my students, I caught him cheating on his quiz. I have told everyone since the first day that if they cheat I throw their tests away in front of the class. I said it the first day of class, before the last test, and right before they took my quiz. I clearly have been dreading the time when I catch someone cheating because I really do love all of my students and I already feel bad when I have to yell at people for talking during class. But, I saw one student look at the paper next to his twice so I knew I had to enforce my rules. I grabbed his test, crumpled it up, and threw it in the garbage can in front of the whole class. The student didn’t say anything but was clearly embarrassed and it was definitely a miserable situation for the both of us. If things weren’t awkward enough, I had to hand him his Halloween candy on the way out the door and awkwardly mumble ‘Happy Halloween…’ What unfortunate timing. However, the mood of the class brightened when the next girl who left the class responded to my Halloween gift not by saying “Happy Halloween, teacher!” but rather just yelling “Haappppyyyy teacher!” My students only know the English that I’ve taught them in the last six weeks, but even they realized how ridiculous this situation was. I had to give them a fake stink eye to get them to keep focusing on the test, but we all had a good laugh about it and as other people left they yelled “haaapppppy” too. A hilarious/awful/it was going to happen sometime just unfortunate someone had to cheat on the day I’m giving them candy experience.
The next lag of my Halloween weekend took a turn for the worse. I hadn’t been feeling that well in my last class, but one of the other WorldTeach volunteers was in town visiting us so we had planned to go out to eat and go get drinks after class. After two bites of dinner I realized that food was not an option and had to go home and spent the next four days lying in my bed eating almost nothing. Food poising is definitely inevitable in this country, and I actually really had good timing because I didn’t have to miss any classes or wasn’t sick on a 12 hour bus ride so I’m definitely thankful for that but it was pretty miserable. I watched five movies and a season of Arrested Development in 48 hours and literally couldn’t do anything else. But, by Saturday afternoon I was feeling better enough to eat saltines and to be sitting instead of just asleep in my bed which was great because Saturday was my host mom’s birthday. My host sister Johanna flew in from Quito and a bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins, and my grandmas came over for a big dinner (which I couldn’t eat, so unfortunate. There were even three cakes, I was legit pissed) which was really fun. After everyone left at about I figured we would just go to bed, but Johanna asked me if I wanted to play cards. I was obviously jacked because I haven’t gotten to spend any time with her and Paul is really busy with work and school and we don’t really hang out or talk so I was really excited for some family time. We went to Paul’s room and the three of us played cards until 1 in the morning, it was so much fun. We played an old maid-type game for awhile and then they wanted to play something else. Johanna suggested rummy and although I haven’t played it that much I knew how to play so I was all for it. The only problem was they didn’t remember how to play so they asked me to sum it up for them. I’m not sure what rummy they were playing, but it was definitely not the rummy that I knew how to play. I usually don’t have problems with my Spanish anymore (aka I can always get my point across even if I say things wrong) but I failed miserably at explaining rummy. Paul laughed at me so hard (which is so exciting, I’ll take being super embarrassing so that we can be friends) and told me to explain it in English because they literally had no idea what I was talking about. I’m not sure how much English they know, but they both took WorldTeach classes when they were younger and if they went all the way through the program they’re really good so I embarrassingly couldn’t explain it in Spanish but they got it in English. Fail for my Spanish-speaking abilities but I made so much family progress I was so excited about it.
Both of my parents work for the Manabi (my province) Swim Association so we all went to Bahia for the annual swim tournament in the bay. There’s a big river in Bahia and every year swimmers from all over Ecuador come to swim from one side of the river to the other. Paul and Johanna both competed there when they were younger and Paul won once but now neither of them swim anymore but it was still really cool to watch. I still wasn’t feeling well so I had to go take a two hour nap on the beach but when I woke up I was hungry and didn’t feel completely exhausted for the first time in four days which was excellent timing because after the day at the beach we came back to Portov to go out for Halloween. My host mom told me I couldn’t go out if I wasn’t feeling better but I ate soup and rice for dinner and actually was feeling better so I got to go out. I didn’t realize that people actually dressed up here and Johanna and I looked all over Bahia to find devil horns or something to wear but there was nothing but unfortunate masks for kids and scrunchies (no one believes in pony tail holders here and everyone wears 100% scrunchies, it’s awful) so we just wore black and went out to the bars. It was so much fun because Johanna and her boyfriend and Paul and his girlfriend (named Paola, yess) came out (I found out Paul had a girlfriend on Saturday.. they’ve been dating since before I got here. Solid communication) so that was really fun to go out with my whole family! We went to this bar called GLAM which was pretty glamorous and they had an extreme Halloween party with ridiculous decorations and girls dressed in trashy costumes just like in the US. It felt like home and that was nice. There was even a costume contest where people went on stage and danced to see who won. It was the first Halloween that I didn’t eat candy and that I didn’t dress up which is extremely disappointing but I actually had a really good time and I was so glad I got to spend time with my family.
Monday was the last day of my vacation that I spent in Portoviejo and just planned to get ready for the next week’s lesson before traveling to the Sierra to spend the rest of my time off in Banos but I didn’t end up getting much done. My host cousin Fernando was in town from Navy school in Salinas and Johanna was disappointed that I hadn’t really hung out with any guys since I’ve been here so she set me up on a date with my host cousin. We went to a movie (Losers, it was horrible, don’t go) which wasn’t very good but it was really fun to hang out with him and he was really nice. We decided to go out that night again and went to go have a few drinks and I was planning to come home at 11:30 or 12 because I had to get up at 5am to travel to the sierra, but at 11 Johanna called me and her and her boyfriend and Paul and Paola came and met up with us. Everyone in Ecuador was on vacation for the holiday but nothing was happening in Portoviejo so they said we HAD to go to the beach. I was literally ready to fall asleep, but even Paul told me to go so I decided to suck it up and head to the beach. Portov is about half an hour from the beach, so we got there a little after midnight and hung out there until 3am. I was ridiculously exhausted but really glad that I went and had a lot of fun.
After sleeping for one hour on Monday night, I got up at 5am to leave for Banos at 6 am. We were told it would take about 8 hours to get there, but apparently that’s just for executive buses (which we thought we were on… and definitely were not). We finally arrived in Banos at about 6:30, more than twelve hours later. It was a ridiculously miserable day of traveling but I finally had my appetite back so after we met up with Jen and Cate (the Manta girls who I hang out with all the time) we went and ate some great pizza and went to bed at 8:00. We didn’t really get to see any of the city because we got in when it was dark (thanks, Ecuador) but in the morning we saw why people from all over the world come to Banos. It’s a small town that’s right in the middle of these giant mountains that are so green and there are waterfalls all around and it was just insanely beautiful. Banos is a few hours from Quito and is one of the most touristy places in Ecuador for its extreme sports and nightlife. It’s still really weird to see any other white people or foreigners because there aren’t any in Portoviejo, but Banos is full of people from all over the world. This also meant that there was food from all over the world which was fabulous for us. Jen had been to Banos twice when she studied abroad in Quito and knew of a great breakfast place.. which was literally the best breakfast of my life. I haven’t had whole grain anything since I’ve been here and they had fabulous bread and great eggs and great juices, it was so awesome and we went there every day that we were there.
After breakfast, we went to go figure out our plan for the activities we wanted to do. Jen wasn’t feeling very well and had already done all of the sports the year before so Cate, Heather and I signed up for a white water rafting and canyoning package for $50 (I love this country). The first day we went white water rafting and it was absolutely incredible. I had only been once before in Wyoming and that was more like a leisurely boat ride in a flashy raft but this was legit white water rafting. It was just the three of us and two Ecuadorians and a guide and we spent about half an hour learning how to raft and then just got right in. The river was so gorgeous and just cut right through the mountains – I couldn’t stop thinking about how fake my life is and how ridiculous it is that I’m here right now because it was just so insane. We rafted for about two hours and when we got done not only did we have to climb up about 20 feet of rocks to get back to the van but we had to climb up while carrying the raft. This was the first of many times we realized that fake mountain climbing is part of every single activity you do. That night we took a chiva (chiva means goat and also means party trolley) up to the volcano. We brought a box of wine and some candy bars and we drove straight up a mountain for about 15 minutes and arrived and what would have been a gorgeous view of the volcano.. but it was super cloudy so we couldn’t see anything. We got a free drink up there and naturally someone started a bonfire so we hung out on top of the mountain for awhile and then headed back down.
The next day we started off the day with canyoning which was the most extreme thing I’ve ever done in my life. I didn’t really know what canyoning was, but soon found out that it means you repel/jump down waterfalls. Huge waterfalls. Heather, Cate, and I had our own private guide and after getting suited up in full canyoning gear we extreme hiked up a mountain for about 20 minutes and got to the first waterfall. We had a five minute training about how to repel, and then literally just went for it. The first waterfall was about 20-30 feet tall and the biggest one was probably about 75 feet. It was literally insane an exhilarating and one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. We repelled down five waterfalls in total; some of them we just went down the rocks next to the waterfall but others we had to jump directly through the water to get down. So crazy and so amazing. And the views, as you could imagine, were incredible. By the time you got down one waterfall, you were almost at the next and it was absolutely amazing to wind through the forest with the greenest vegetation in a massive canopy over us and the water rushing down the mountain. I still can’t get over it and am so glad I had the opportunity to experience it.
In the afternoon, we rented bikes and took a four hour bike ride right in the mountains. We didn’t go literal mountain biking, but the road cuts right through the mountains so we were literally right below the mountains and along the river which was incredible. We stopped a few times along the way to take pictures and to ride a cable car down to a waterfall (never have I ever seen so many casual waterfalls as I have in this country). At the very end, we were exhausted but decided to venture on a hike to one last waterfall that was absolutely gorgeous. We hiked back up and stopped for some banana empanadas (heaven) before we rode back to town in the back of a truck with our bikes.
Friday we headed to Ambato, a town about an hour away from Banos that’s the 4th biggest city in Ecuador. There are six volunteers placed there so it was really exciting to hang out with our friends that we hadn’t seen since orientation. We walked around the town for awhile and went to the creepiest museum of my life (the majority of it was filled with animals with two heads or too many legs or one eye) but were really just excited to see everyone. We went out for a real Mexican dinner which was incredible because despite the fact that you make think every Latin American country eats tacos constantly they actually never do. We all went back to our hostel to hang out before going out to a bar and spent the whole time telling ridiculous stories about our students or about weird people we’ve met. Overall it was just a great night and it felt good to have a night where it felt like I was just hanging out with people at college especially because we’re still in the awkward making friends stage which leads to a lot of uncomfortable situations.
We left early in the morning to go to Guayaquil so we could eat lunch on the way back instead of just a power 12 hours of hell. This seemed like a great idea until I got robbed in the bathroom at the bus terminal in Guayaquil. Guayaquil is the biggest city in Ecuador and its bus terminal is also really big which means there are always a ton of people there. The bathrooms are always completely packed and of course Ecuador doesn’t believe in having toilet paper in the bathrooms so I had to get mine out of my string backpack and when I put everything back in my wallet was sitting right on top of everything. I had to push through a bunch of tiny old ladies to get out of the bathroom, and when I was trying to get my wallet out to pay for my personal pan pizza (yep, pizza hut in the Guayaquil terminal, awesome), I realized that I didn’t have my wallet. I looked through all of my stuff and ran back to the bathroom and asked if anyone had seen a blue wallet (of course whoever took it was watching me frantically search the bathroom) and clearly no one said anything so I knew that it had either fallen out or someone had taken it. There was a zero percent chance that anyone would turn it in so I immediately called my parents and Paige to get someone to cancel my credit card. Luckily, they were able to cancel it within the hour and I only had about $4 and my ID card (worth a dollar) in there so it really went as smoothly as it could have gone. I was feeling really stupid about the fact that I could have just lost it until I got a call from my director Kate on Monday morning; whoever had taken my wallet called her because she was the first number on my emergency contacts card and tried to get a bribe to return my ID and my wallet. The wallet itself was the most valuable thing and clearly we weren’t going to meet some rando at the embassy to get it back so the lady said she was just going to throw it away. It’s unfortunate to know that I’m definitely a target and that I need to be careful around absolutely everyone here, but it’s also almost comforting because the majority of the crimes that happen in this country are old ladies pick pocketing people in the bathroom. People here aren’t trying to hurt anyone, they really just need money to survive and gringas like me are easy targets for a reason, especially while traveling. I’ll definitely be smarter next time I travel and hopefully I don’t have any more problems. Overall, an extremely amazing trip and I just love when I can say ‘I can’t believe that this is really my life’ every minute. Missing everyone and hoping everyone had a happy Thanksgiving, I’ll write about my ecua-thanksgiving soon! LOVE.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Intermediate 2's 'Portoviejo Tsunami'
So my last unit in my intermediate class was natural disasters and weather. To finish up the unit, I had them do a news report as a project about a tsunami hitting Portoviejo where one student was a reporter and each student was a person in the town (teacher, doctor, policeman, mayor, etc). They each had to talk about what they were doing before, during, and after the tsunami hit using various grammatical points and weather vocabulary that tied in with what we had been learning. I gave them part of the class for three days to work on the project and as they were writing their lines aka sitting there in silence on the first day, I went over to them and told them to make the project fun… that it didn’t have to be boring and they could make their lines exciting and have a fun plot. (One of my students responded by saying ‘but teacher.. a tsunami isn’t very fun’ haha). The next day they were much more lively as they were working on the project and they came up to me and asked ‘so teacher, we can make this fun right? You’re sure?’ And they spent the rest of the class giggling and looking over at me as they wrote their lines.
When it was time to present the next day, they were weirdly excited for presenting a project but I was clearly thrilled because usually they just sit there and seem bored so I sat in the back of the class to watch their presentation. I had brought my brush to use as a microphone but the reporter (also the girl who loves vampires and writes vampire smiley faces on everything) pulled out a microphone and her cell phone that had the news show’s ‘theme music’ and everyone started off by dancing as she walked out to start the news show. She had to give an introduction about what a tsunami was and explain what happened in general and then interview each character. I figured she would give the definition of a tsunami in this introduction, but she pulled out a picture of an obese man and said ‘yesterday’s tsunami was caused by an obese man jumping in the river in Portoviejo. Yesterday was the obese men’s holiday and all of them left their houses because they didn’t have to work and one jumped in the river and caused the tsunami that hit our city.’ She proceeded to show pictures of obese people jumping into the ocean and even a picture of an obese man where the paper was cut off at his head because ‘they were still unsure of the identity of the obese man who jumped into the river causing all of these horrible problems.’
She interviewed the rest of the students and most of their lines were all pretty weather-related, but when she interviewed the mayor his entire speech was about how they were going to make Portoviejo healthier and put all of the obese people on a diet so they could avoid problems like this in the future. I had to take a few points off because he literally didn’t use any weather vocabulary, but it was literally the most hilarious thing I had ever seen. And I only have 6 people in my intermediate class so I was just watching this by myself and I just lost it and could not stop laughing. I was so proud of them because they’re so creative and are motivated to learn English in a fun way. My intermediate class started out as my most difficult one because they were all at different levels and I didn’t know at all what they knew, but now I really enjoy it because they really can communicate and be creative and we can do really fun activities. We still have a lot of grammar to practice, but each class I can tell that they’re improving because they’re more and more willing to participate and put themselves out there with ridiculous scenarios that I don’t expect (obese men’s holiday, hilarious). I really hope I can move up with them after this session ends in December because I really do love working with students who I can challenge and who are really working towards speaking English really well. I absolutely love my job and even though they show up late and talk about vampires when we’re studying the present perfect, I really do look forward to each class.
When it was time to present the next day, they were weirdly excited for presenting a project but I was clearly thrilled because usually they just sit there and seem bored so I sat in the back of the class to watch their presentation. I had brought my brush to use as a microphone but the reporter (also the girl who loves vampires and writes vampire smiley faces on everything) pulled out a microphone and her cell phone that had the news show’s ‘theme music’ and everyone started off by dancing as she walked out to start the news show. She had to give an introduction about what a tsunami was and explain what happened in general and then interview each character. I figured she would give the definition of a tsunami in this introduction, but she pulled out a picture of an obese man and said ‘yesterday’s tsunami was caused by an obese man jumping in the river in Portoviejo. Yesterday was the obese men’s holiday and all of them left their houses because they didn’t have to work and one jumped in the river and caused the tsunami that hit our city.’ She proceeded to show pictures of obese people jumping into the ocean and even a picture of an obese man where the paper was cut off at his head because ‘they were still unsure of the identity of the obese man who jumped into the river causing all of these horrible problems.’
She interviewed the rest of the students and most of their lines were all pretty weather-related, but when she interviewed the mayor his entire speech was about how they were going to make Portoviejo healthier and put all of the obese people on a diet so they could avoid problems like this in the future. I had to take a few points off because he literally didn’t use any weather vocabulary, but it was literally the most hilarious thing I had ever seen. And I only have 6 people in my intermediate class so I was just watching this by myself and I just lost it and could not stop laughing. I was so proud of them because they’re so creative and are motivated to learn English in a fun way. My intermediate class started out as my most difficult one because they were all at different levels and I didn’t know at all what they knew, but now I really enjoy it because they really can communicate and be creative and we can do really fun activities. We still have a lot of grammar to practice, but each class I can tell that they’re improving because they’re more and more willing to participate and put themselves out there with ridiculous scenarios that I don’t expect (obese men’s holiday, hilarious). I really hope I can move up with them after this session ends in December because I really do love working with students who I can challenge and who are really working towards speaking English really well. I absolutely love my job and even though they show up late and talk about vampires when we’re studying the present perfect, I really do look forward to each class.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Profesora Solie
As usual, sorry about the delay in writing about everything but I’ve been crazy busy loving teaching and being absolutely exhausted sooo here’s some info about my experiences as a teacher in the last month-ish.
On September 20 I had my first real class with the students I’ll have for the next twelve weeks. I was extremely horrified and it didn’t help walking onto campus with literally every single person staring at me (worst awkward ugly kid first day of school scenario of my life) but I got through everything just fine. My first two classes of the day are Principiantes I aka students who’ve never had formal English classes before. The first day we rocked the alphabet and ‘my name is’ and played a ridiculous amount of games. Games, by the way, that were meant for the 40 people I was told I would have but only six people showed up for my first class. I had about ten in my second class and wasn’t so nervous so that one went a lot better. I also planned for a lot of students in my intermediate class and after half an hour one kid showed up. I had all these posters saying ‘who is your favorite singer’ and ‘why do you want to study english’ and me and the one kid filled them out while I panicked and thought of other stuff do to. About an hour after the class started, another student came in and the three of us basically just chatted for awhile and drew what we did last weekend on the board and it was a complete mess but I successfully completed my first day of teaching without failing completely, win for Krista.
Slowing down the Krista Rambles
Since the first day I’ve definitely gotten a lot better at teaching (I still have a ton to learn but I’m definitely improving with every class) and enjoy it more each day I teach. This week I finally learned all of my students names (they make fun of me because I say their names with an American accent and then I make fun of them for saying pour-pal instead of purple and we all laugh together) and I’ve gotten way more confident being up in front of the class so I feel like an actual teacher rather than an awkward girl who doesn’t fit in giving a presentation about the alphabet.
One of the most challenging parts of my class is not using any Spanish. I don’t speak any Spanish and I don’t let my students speak any Spanish or ask any questions or vocab words in Spanish so everything I teach them has to be demonstrated, acted out, drawn, or shown. I’ve gotten ridiculously skilled at drawing stick figures and have spent a considerable amount of every evening drawing stupid pictures but it really helps. And explaining directions for games each day is a full blown charades event; STAND UP (gesture) MAKE A CIRCLE (gesture) are extremely common activities for my class and they hate it but really like playing games.
Attempting to be a hardass
Also, despite being the general pushover I tend to be, I’ve surprisingly done really well with enforcing my rules and creating a good classroom environment. My main rules are no Spanish and no cell phones and I’ve already taken four phones and been pretty serious about my no Spanish rule even though the only thing my students really know in Spanish is what I’ve taught them. I haven’t had to yell at anyone yet but when they’re interrupting or not listening I give them the evil eye and they know I’m serious because usually I’m pretty laid back. I make them do a lot of ridiculous acting and games so it was really important to me to create a positive and easy going environment which I think I’ve done and I’m really proud of (unless they’re being annoying and I have to take their phones). They all stay after to individually say “BYE TEACHER” after every class and they always help me pick up all of my stuff that I have all over my classroom by the end of the class which is so nice. Overall I’m so excited to be teaching and it’s way more exhausting than I thought but really fun and I can’t wait to get the hang of things.
Hilarious things from teaching thus far
- My students not knowing what ‘we’re done’ or ‘class is done’ means so the end of class gets really awkward until I walk over to the door and open it and say BYEEEE.
- I’m getting used to speaking in Spanish so whenever I say anything in Spanish everyone always yells ‘teeeacher no Spanish!’ because they hate when I say it every five seconds to them
- When practicing phone numbers I asked everyone their phone number on the way out and after he told me his phone number one guy said ‘teacher, write that down in your notes’ haha
- Whenever I walk anywhere in town but especially on campus, people will yell ‘teeeacher’ and then anything they can think of in English. ‘Ohh teeeacher see you soon hello very beautiful goodbye what is your name very pretty.’ It’s absurd and hilarious.
- One of my 13 year old girls in my intermediate class is OBSESSED with vampires and draws vampire smiley faces on absolutely everything. Including her drawing of a flood: a bunch of people dying and also, vampire sad face.
Since I started writing this post I’ve now finished three weeks of classes. I’ve definitely improved since the first week but also bombed a few classes which is to be expected and hopefully the number of awful classes quickly goes down. I’m getting my students ready for their first test next Tuesday and most of them will do great and some of them can’t say ‘My name is’ so hopefully my review sessions have helped. My basic students have made a lot of progress; I’ve now taught the alphabet, numbers, colors, classroom objects, prepositions, classroom commands, and descriptions of people (how are you, what are you like, and what do you look like). It’s a lot of stuff but has really been going well. Lesson planning is still extremely difficult for me because as we move past the basic numbers and letters a lot of them have a tough time understanding when I don’t explain things in Spanish. I just keep acting everything out and drawing horrible pictures and using a lot of repetition to try to make sure everyone understands.
My intermediate class has also been getting better (thank goodness) because the first two weeks were pretty awful. My students are at very different levels and there are only 5 of them so it’s really hard to know what they’ve learned before and what they haven’t but I’m getting better at thinking of level-appropriate activities and lessons. I’ve been doing a unit on weather for the last two weeks and since the first day it’s gone much better; the first day I decided to do a vocab “review” of weather words which ended up all being new words. First of all, I had way too many words and second of all, there is no way that anyone from Portoviejo, Ecuador will ever need to say “It is freezing” instead of “It is very cold.” I was talking with Heather after class and we realized we were going about the class in the wrong way; we didn’t know how to say any of those weather words in Spanish but wished we knew them so we thought they would want to learn them in English. Turns out, there’s a reason we didn’t learn those words in an intermediate class. It turns out that I can functionally live in Ecuador and have conversations about the weather just fine knowing a very basic vocab. Thank goodness we had this realization early in the class because now I’ve had a much easier time planning my lessons to basic stuff that they need to know but making them practice in more challenging ways. In our weather/natural disasters unit we’ve now covered present progressive, past progressive, adverbs, and prepositions of time. It’s a lot easier for me to be a successful when I can help my students be successful with each class instead of scaring the shit out of them with way too many weather words that we only use in Minnesota. I’m having them do a project now where they’re each a different character in a news report and each have to describe their version of what happened when a tsunami hit Portoviejo. They’re all really quiet but smart so hopefully they get into the project a little bit and make it kind of fun rather than staring at me like they’re bored all the time.
Lesson planning has definitely been the most difficult part of all of this which I didn’t really expect. I have so much respect for good teachers now because it takes so much work to think of good activities that are actually fun and make you learn. I’ve been using some grammar books for basic ideas, but I have to decide everything I want my students to know and plan a way for them to be able to learn it without using Spanish. A lot of games or activities would be great for the lessons I’m teaching, but there’s no way to explain them just by demonstrating or with their limited vocab so I can’t do them. I’m finally learning which games work and which ones don’t so it’s gotten easier as I’ve narrowed down the endless possibilities of activities. And even if I have one good activity, I have to make it flow with an entire class of stuff so that it seems like one class instead of a bunch of different activities. We also have our students do different levels of ‘practice’ with the material we teach them; first we have to diagnose what our students already know about the topic, then present the new material, then have a guided practice where you help them go through the new information, followed by an independent practice where the students produce the new material on their own. Orientation really prepared me for understanding how important all of the different stages of a lesson plan are but I was not prepared for how long it would take me to successfully come up with appropriate activities for my classes. It’s definitely getting easier each day but still is really hard.
So as usual, I wrote all of that more than a week ago. Apologies for my ultimate fail at keeping a blog, but hopefully I can stay on top of it now that everything isn’t so overwhelming. I’ll add stuff about all of my trips soon, AMOR!
On September 20 I had my first real class with the students I’ll have for the next twelve weeks. I was extremely horrified and it didn’t help walking onto campus with literally every single person staring at me (worst awkward ugly kid first day of school scenario of my life) but I got through everything just fine. My first two classes of the day are Principiantes I aka students who’ve never had formal English classes before. The first day we rocked the alphabet and ‘my name is’ and played a ridiculous amount of games. Games, by the way, that were meant for the 40 people I was told I would have but only six people showed up for my first class. I had about ten in my second class and wasn’t so nervous so that one went a lot better. I also planned for a lot of students in my intermediate class and after half an hour one kid showed up. I had all these posters saying ‘who is your favorite singer’ and ‘why do you want to study english’ and me and the one kid filled them out while I panicked and thought of other stuff do to. About an hour after the class started, another student came in and the three of us basically just chatted for awhile and drew what we did last weekend on the board and it was a complete mess but I successfully completed my first day of teaching without failing completely, win for Krista.
Slowing down the Krista Rambles
Since the first day I’ve definitely gotten a lot better at teaching (I still have a ton to learn but I’m definitely improving with every class) and enjoy it more each day I teach. This week I finally learned all of my students names (they make fun of me because I say their names with an American accent and then I make fun of them for saying pour-pal instead of purple and we all laugh together) and I’ve gotten way more confident being up in front of the class so I feel like an actual teacher rather than an awkward girl who doesn’t fit in giving a presentation about the alphabet.
One of the most challenging parts of my class is not using any Spanish. I don’t speak any Spanish and I don’t let my students speak any Spanish or ask any questions or vocab words in Spanish so everything I teach them has to be demonstrated, acted out, drawn, or shown. I’ve gotten ridiculously skilled at drawing stick figures and have spent a considerable amount of every evening drawing stupid pictures but it really helps. And explaining directions for games each day is a full blown charades event; STAND UP (gesture) MAKE A CIRCLE (gesture) are extremely common activities for my class and they hate it but really like playing games.
Attempting to be a hardass
Also, despite being the general pushover I tend to be, I’ve surprisingly done really well with enforcing my rules and creating a good classroom environment. My main rules are no Spanish and no cell phones and I’ve already taken four phones and been pretty serious about my no Spanish rule even though the only thing my students really know in Spanish is what I’ve taught them. I haven’t had to yell at anyone yet but when they’re interrupting or not listening I give them the evil eye and they know I’m serious because usually I’m pretty laid back. I make them do a lot of ridiculous acting and games so it was really important to me to create a positive and easy going environment which I think I’ve done and I’m really proud of (unless they’re being annoying and I have to take their phones). They all stay after to individually say “BYE TEACHER” after every class and they always help me pick up all of my stuff that I have all over my classroom by the end of the class which is so nice. Overall I’m so excited to be teaching and it’s way more exhausting than I thought but really fun and I can’t wait to get the hang of things.
Hilarious things from teaching thus far
- My students not knowing what ‘we’re done’ or ‘class is done’ means so the end of class gets really awkward until I walk over to the door and open it and say BYEEEE.
- I’m getting used to speaking in Spanish so whenever I say anything in Spanish everyone always yells ‘teeeacher no Spanish!’ because they hate when I say it every five seconds to them
- When practicing phone numbers I asked everyone their phone number on the way out and after he told me his phone number one guy said ‘teacher, write that down in your notes’ haha
- Whenever I walk anywhere in town but especially on campus, people will yell ‘teeeacher’ and then anything they can think of in English. ‘Ohh teeeacher see you soon hello very beautiful goodbye what is your name very pretty.’ It’s absurd and hilarious.
- One of my 13 year old girls in my intermediate class is OBSESSED with vampires and draws vampire smiley faces on absolutely everything. Including her drawing of a flood: a bunch of people dying and also, vampire sad face.
Since I started writing this post I’ve now finished three weeks of classes. I’ve definitely improved since the first week but also bombed a few classes which is to be expected and hopefully the number of awful classes quickly goes down. I’m getting my students ready for their first test next Tuesday and most of them will do great and some of them can’t say ‘My name is’ so hopefully my review sessions have helped. My basic students have made a lot of progress; I’ve now taught the alphabet, numbers, colors, classroom objects, prepositions, classroom commands, and descriptions of people (how are you, what are you like, and what do you look like). It’s a lot of stuff but has really been going well. Lesson planning is still extremely difficult for me because as we move past the basic numbers and letters a lot of them have a tough time understanding when I don’t explain things in Spanish. I just keep acting everything out and drawing horrible pictures and using a lot of repetition to try to make sure everyone understands.
My intermediate class has also been getting better (thank goodness) because the first two weeks were pretty awful. My students are at very different levels and there are only 5 of them so it’s really hard to know what they’ve learned before and what they haven’t but I’m getting better at thinking of level-appropriate activities and lessons. I’ve been doing a unit on weather for the last two weeks and since the first day it’s gone much better; the first day I decided to do a vocab “review” of weather words which ended up all being new words. First of all, I had way too many words and second of all, there is no way that anyone from Portoviejo, Ecuador will ever need to say “It is freezing” instead of “It is very cold.” I was talking with Heather after class and we realized we were going about the class in the wrong way; we didn’t know how to say any of those weather words in Spanish but wished we knew them so we thought they would want to learn them in English. Turns out, there’s a reason we didn’t learn those words in an intermediate class. It turns out that I can functionally live in Ecuador and have conversations about the weather just fine knowing a very basic vocab. Thank goodness we had this realization early in the class because now I’ve had a much easier time planning my lessons to basic stuff that they need to know but making them practice in more challenging ways. In our weather/natural disasters unit we’ve now covered present progressive, past progressive, adverbs, and prepositions of time. It’s a lot easier for me to be a successful when I can help my students be successful with each class instead of scaring the shit out of them with way too many weather words that we only use in Minnesota. I’m having them do a project now where they’re each a different character in a news report and each have to describe their version of what happened when a tsunami hit Portoviejo. They’re all really quiet but smart so hopefully they get into the project a little bit and make it kind of fun rather than staring at me like they’re bored all the time.
Lesson planning has definitely been the most difficult part of all of this which I didn’t really expect. I have so much respect for good teachers now because it takes so much work to think of good activities that are actually fun and make you learn. I’ve been using some grammar books for basic ideas, but I have to decide everything I want my students to know and plan a way for them to be able to learn it without using Spanish. A lot of games or activities would be great for the lessons I’m teaching, but there’s no way to explain them just by demonstrating or with their limited vocab so I can’t do them. I’m finally learning which games work and which ones don’t so it’s gotten easier as I’ve narrowed down the endless possibilities of activities. And even if I have one good activity, I have to make it flow with an entire class of stuff so that it seems like one class instead of a bunch of different activities. We also have our students do different levels of ‘practice’ with the material we teach them; first we have to diagnose what our students already know about the topic, then present the new material, then have a guided practice where you help them go through the new information, followed by an independent practice where the students produce the new material on their own. Orientation really prepared me for understanding how important all of the different stages of a lesson plan are but I was not prepared for how long it would take me to successfully come up with appropriate activities for my classes. It’s definitely getting easier each day but still is really hard.
So as usual, I wrote all of that more than a week ago. Apologies for my ultimate fail at keeping a blog, but hopefully I can stay on top of it now that everything isn’t so overwhelming. I’ll add stuff about all of my trips soon, AMOR!
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
One Week in the Dust
I’m still loving Portov and haven’t gotten asthma from the dust so I think the first week was a success. Here’s a small rundown of the week’s activities.
Becoming a member of the Sierra Family
So my host family is definitely awesome and I’m so excited to live with them this year. We already get along really well and I’m so excited to spend more time with them. Here’s a little bio on each member of the fam:
Ruth (mom): She definitely runs our house and is in charge. She’s a civil engineer but also is the president of my province’s swimming association so has an office at the huge sports complex in town. She’s a great cook and I’ve loved everything we’ve had so far… mostly various combinations of fish, meat, rice, and plantains. I definitely missed plantains after the DR and eat them a bajillion times more often here so that’s really exciting. My mom is also trying to lose weight so always has a “smaller” bowl of soup or plate of food but she told me that she realizes it’s the same amount of food just in a different serving dish but she feels better about it: definitely my eating style. She loves to watch the news and after lunch we usually sit at the island and watch the news or random movies until she takes her daily post-lunch nap. She loves chatting with me about random stuff and she likes to hear about everything from home or that I’m doing here so it’s really awesome she’s so involved but never pushy about anything and always gives me as much space as I want.
Artillio (dad): I’m obsessed with my dad and I think we’ll for sure be good friends this year. My new father-daughter activity of the week was going to work out with him at the sports complex. He goes running for an hour three or four times a week and leaves me in the dust (literally, the track is made out of pure dust) and I jog/mom walk at the same time. He does a crazy stretching warm up routine and loves to listen to Lionel Richie, Elton John, or ‘Eye of the Tiger’ when he works out. He works at the hospital right by our house and does all the electrical work at home; he just put in a new bathroom for Paul and I and is always fixing stuff around the house. He went to the jungle on Thursday and will be back next week so I’m really excited to continue our team workouts.
Paul (brother): Literally the coolest kid I’ve ever met and the biggest dream friend I’ve ever had. I knew he was a competitive swimmer, but when I was upstairs I saw a walmart bag full of medals and asked him how many he had and he said over 300. He was the national champion in Ecuador (the whole country) in the butterfly in 2004 and has competed in the US, Cuba, Panama, Argentina, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela, and a few more and is like famous in Portov. I asked him if he still competes and he said he ‘doesn’t really have time’ but he trains 6 days a week and is super intense. He has a few competitions in November that I’m stoked to go to. He’s also in a rock band and is super good at the guitar.. he practices in his room a few hours a day and is really good and he had a concert at a beach town this weekend but my mom didn’t want to go because dad was out of town so hopefully I can see him play soon. He also just graduated but is working on his thesis right now (you do your thesis for about a year after you graduate) and is building a literal house for his project because he’s an architect. He also watches Glee which definitely sealed the deal. He’s pretty quiet though and talks really fast so I only know what he’s saying about 50% of the time soo hopefully that improves so he’ll be my friend.
Johanna (sister): I still don’t know that much about her but she’s a journalist who lives in Quito and is working on her PhD right now so she’s super busy. She might be coming for the day sometime in October otherwise maybe over Christmas or New Years depending if she can get off work. She’s crazy busy but seems really cool and I’m excited to meet her. I’m going to a wedding in her place in October which should be really fun and interesting.. I need to learn to salsa before then so I don’t make a fool out of myself (even though that’s probably inevitable).
Playa
I had my first beach trip on Monday to a little town called Crucita which is about 30 minutes away from Portoviejo. My parents took me and Heather to see not only the beach but also our BEACH HOUSE. Yeah, my family not only lives in a crazy nice house in Portov but owns a house about 50 yards from the beach. Insane. My host mom and her brother own it together and the whole family will go sleep out there and spend the weekend at the beach sometimes so I’m pretty jacked for those weekends. It was cloudy and really windy when we went so we just sat on the beach then went and had some awesome empanadas and drove home but I can definitely tell it’ll be an awesome place to go when the weather is good. Ha funny thing about the weather; my family thinks it’s crazy that we have a TV channel devoted solely to the weather. No such channel exists because on the coast the weather is always the same and in the Sierra everyone always brings a jacket and umbrella because they assume it will rain even though it only does a couple days a week.
School
I had my first meeting on Wednesday with my director and got a little more info about my classes and everything. Here’s my ridiculous schedule that literally couldn’t be any more awesome:
10:30 -12:00: Principiantes I (very basic beginner one class)
3:00-4:30: Principiantes I (I have two sections of the same class so I have a lot less to lesson plan)
4:30-6:00: Intermedio II (second level of the intermediate classes)
So not only do I get to sleep in and be done by 6pm, but I only teach Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I think I had worse hours when I ran my lemonade stand in kindergarten. I make $400 a month (comes out to about $5/hour that we’re teaching) and we give $200 to our host families. We have an office on campus so I’ll still go every Thursday to lesson plan and prepare for the next week but four days weekends for a year are going to be ridiculous. Cycles are 12 weeks long and I’ll have three of them while I’m here, this one ending about Dec. 15 for Christmas.
Our office has AC and a bathroom and we each have our own desk so that’s really nice. There are tons of grammar books and random toys and magazines from the literal 90s (I saw a People that had the cast of ‘Pearl Harbor’ on the front.. 2001 was a big year). It’ll be really nice to have resources though because I have no idea how to teach despite being fluent in English so that’ll definitely take some practice. My classroom is really big and has really nice big desks and office chairs which will be cool. It’s still an insane concept to think that I’ll be in the front of the room after so many years of being a student but I’ll have to get over that pretty quick.
Portov Futbol
I went to my first soccer game on Friday night which was so much fun despite how terrible our soccer team is. The Portov team used to be really good but now I guess they’re horrible but people still go and get really into the games which is really fun. The stadium is right by the university and isn’t anything too fancy but is pretty big and is painted green and gold in a very similar way to the Mayo High School stadium. The Mayo soccer team probably could have beaten the Portov team but I’ll definitely still go to games just for fun.
Hot Spots for Teens
Saturday night I finally stayed up past 11:00 and made some friends. Ellah is a WT volunteer that’s been in Portov since February so she has a lot of friends which is really helpful because Heather and I failed at trying to find friends on our own. We went to one of her friend’s apartment (slight detour on the way there though.. Ellah’s phone didn’t have service and when we got lost we just had to tell the taxi driver to let us off at a little restaurant while we waited for her to call.. it’s definitely not the norm for two blondes to order cokes—which apparently translated as bad orange pop—in a small Ecuadorian restaurant but we finally figured out where to go) and met her friends Reuben and Juan Carlos. They were hilarious and so much fun and told us all the bad words we need to know and we got to try this strong sugar cane liquor that was bad but apparently doesn’t give you hangovers (we’ll see about that). We were just going to watch a movie but they wanted to show us the downtown area so we went to a little bar and danced on the smallest dance floor I’ve ever seen. I got a few stares for my white girl dancing but hopefully I can learn to be “mas suave” and eventually pretend to blend in despite being one of two blondes in the town. They finished the night with a medley of American soft rock tunes that should never be played in a discoteca but it was really fun to not be watching TV in my room or hanging out with my host parents. I’m really excited to start making more friends and just meeting different people; everyone here is so nice and welcoming and excited that we’re here so I think it’ll be super fun to go out and meet people.
My internet has been down for the last few days so I wrote this last weekend.. I started teaching this Monday and loved it/survived and will write about that as soon as I have more time! AMOR.
Becoming a member of the Sierra Family
So my host family is definitely awesome and I’m so excited to live with them this year. We already get along really well and I’m so excited to spend more time with them. Here’s a little bio on each member of the fam:
Ruth (mom): She definitely runs our house and is in charge. She’s a civil engineer but also is the president of my province’s swimming association so has an office at the huge sports complex in town. She’s a great cook and I’ve loved everything we’ve had so far… mostly various combinations of fish, meat, rice, and plantains. I definitely missed plantains after the DR and eat them a bajillion times more often here so that’s really exciting. My mom is also trying to lose weight so always has a “smaller” bowl of soup or plate of food but she told me that she realizes it’s the same amount of food just in a different serving dish but she feels better about it: definitely my eating style. She loves to watch the news and after lunch we usually sit at the island and watch the news or random movies until she takes her daily post-lunch nap. She loves chatting with me about random stuff and she likes to hear about everything from home or that I’m doing here so it’s really awesome she’s so involved but never pushy about anything and always gives me as much space as I want.
Artillio (dad): I’m obsessed with my dad and I think we’ll for sure be good friends this year. My new father-daughter activity of the week was going to work out with him at the sports complex. He goes running for an hour three or four times a week and leaves me in the dust (literally, the track is made out of pure dust) and I jog/mom walk at the same time. He does a crazy stretching warm up routine and loves to listen to Lionel Richie, Elton John, or ‘Eye of the Tiger’ when he works out. He works at the hospital right by our house and does all the electrical work at home; he just put in a new bathroom for Paul and I and is always fixing stuff around the house. He went to the jungle on Thursday and will be back next week so I’m really excited to continue our team workouts.
Paul (brother): Literally the coolest kid I’ve ever met and the biggest dream friend I’ve ever had. I knew he was a competitive swimmer, but when I was upstairs I saw a walmart bag full of medals and asked him how many he had and he said over 300. He was the national champion in Ecuador (the whole country) in the butterfly in 2004 and has competed in the US, Cuba, Panama, Argentina, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela, and a few more and is like famous in Portov. I asked him if he still competes and he said he ‘doesn’t really have time’ but he trains 6 days a week and is super intense. He has a few competitions in November that I’m stoked to go to. He’s also in a rock band and is super good at the guitar.. he practices in his room a few hours a day and is really good and he had a concert at a beach town this weekend but my mom didn’t want to go because dad was out of town so hopefully I can see him play soon. He also just graduated but is working on his thesis right now (you do your thesis for about a year after you graduate) and is building a literal house for his project because he’s an architect. He also watches Glee which definitely sealed the deal. He’s pretty quiet though and talks really fast so I only know what he’s saying about 50% of the time soo hopefully that improves so he’ll be my friend.
Johanna (sister): I still don’t know that much about her but she’s a journalist who lives in Quito and is working on her PhD right now so she’s super busy. She might be coming for the day sometime in October otherwise maybe over Christmas or New Years depending if she can get off work. She’s crazy busy but seems really cool and I’m excited to meet her. I’m going to a wedding in her place in October which should be really fun and interesting.. I need to learn to salsa before then so I don’t make a fool out of myself (even though that’s probably inevitable).
Playa
I had my first beach trip on Monday to a little town called Crucita which is about 30 minutes away from Portoviejo. My parents took me and Heather to see not only the beach but also our BEACH HOUSE. Yeah, my family not only lives in a crazy nice house in Portov but owns a house about 50 yards from the beach. Insane. My host mom and her brother own it together and the whole family will go sleep out there and spend the weekend at the beach sometimes so I’m pretty jacked for those weekends. It was cloudy and really windy when we went so we just sat on the beach then went and had some awesome empanadas and drove home but I can definitely tell it’ll be an awesome place to go when the weather is good. Ha funny thing about the weather; my family thinks it’s crazy that we have a TV channel devoted solely to the weather. No such channel exists because on the coast the weather is always the same and in the Sierra everyone always brings a jacket and umbrella because they assume it will rain even though it only does a couple days a week.
School
I had my first meeting on Wednesday with my director and got a little more info about my classes and everything. Here’s my ridiculous schedule that literally couldn’t be any more awesome:
10:30 -12:00: Principiantes I (very basic beginner one class)
3:00-4:30: Principiantes I (I have two sections of the same class so I have a lot less to lesson plan)
4:30-6:00: Intermedio II (second level of the intermediate classes)
So not only do I get to sleep in and be done by 6pm, but I only teach Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I think I had worse hours when I ran my lemonade stand in kindergarten. I make $400 a month (comes out to about $5/hour that we’re teaching) and we give $200 to our host families. We have an office on campus so I’ll still go every Thursday to lesson plan and prepare for the next week but four days weekends for a year are going to be ridiculous. Cycles are 12 weeks long and I’ll have three of them while I’m here, this one ending about Dec. 15 for Christmas.
Our office has AC and a bathroom and we each have our own desk so that’s really nice. There are tons of grammar books and random toys and magazines from the literal 90s (I saw a People that had the cast of ‘Pearl Harbor’ on the front.. 2001 was a big year). It’ll be really nice to have resources though because I have no idea how to teach despite being fluent in English so that’ll definitely take some practice. My classroom is really big and has really nice big desks and office chairs which will be cool. It’s still an insane concept to think that I’ll be in the front of the room after so many years of being a student but I’ll have to get over that pretty quick.
Portov Futbol
I went to my first soccer game on Friday night which was so much fun despite how terrible our soccer team is. The Portov team used to be really good but now I guess they’re horrible but people still go and get really into the games which is really fun. The stadium is right by the university and isn’t anything too fancy but is pretty big and is painted green and gold in a very similar way to the Mayo High School stadium. The Mayo soccer team probably could have beaten the Portov team but I’ll definitely still go to games just for fun.
Hot Spots for Teens
Saturday night I finally stayed up past 11:00 and made some friends. Ellah is a WT volunteer that’s been in Portov since February so she has a lot of friends which is really helpful because Heather and I failed at trying to find friends on our own. We went to one of her friend’s apartment (slight detour on the way there though.. Ellah’s phone didn’t have service and when we got lost we just had to tell the taxi driver to let us off at a little restaurant while we waited for her to call.. it’s definitely not the norm for two blondes to order cokes—which apparently translated as bad orange pop—in a small Ecuadorian restaurant but we finally figured out where to go) and met her friends Reuben and Juan Carlos. They were hilarious and so much fun and told us all the bad words we need to know and we got to try this strong sugar cane liquor that was bad but apparently doesn’t give you hangovers (we’ll see about that). We were just going to watch a movie but they wanted to show us the downtown area so we went to a little bar and danced on the smallest dance floor I’ve ever seen. I got a few stares for my white girl dancing but hopefully I can learn to be “mas suave” and eventually pretend to blend in despite being one of two blondes in the town. They finished the night with a medley of American soft rock tunes that should never be played in a discoteca but it was really fun to not be watching TV in my room or hanging out with my host parents. I’m really excited to start making more friends and just meeting different people; everyone here is so nice and welcoming and excited that we’re here so I think it’ll be super fun to go out and meet people.
My internet has been down for the last few days so I wrote this last weekend.. I started teaching this Monday and loved it/survived and will write about that as soon as I have more time! AMOR.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Byeee Quito, what up Portov!
LAST WEEK OF ORIENTATION!
Although it’s been great to hang with the WT kids in Quito, spending days on end in a conference room was getting old so luckily a bunch of crazy stuff happened this week. Monday was Cate’s (volunteer who’ll be in Manta, like 40 min from Portov aka one of my new besties for the year) birthday so we went out to an Irish pub to watch the Boise-VA Tech game. I had a cheeseburger and fries and watched football with a bunch of Americans.. pretty awesome. Wednesday night was the second part of the Recopa de Sudamerica (South American Championship) so Liga (the Quito soccer team) played against the Estudiantes from Argentina again and the score from the game two weeks ago got added to this game to see who wins the championship. We went to the big plaza downtown by all the bars to watch the game because they projected it on a huge screen. It was super crazy and fun, everyone was going nuts the whole time and doing all these cheers we tried to learn but didn’t and just drinking in the streets. There were a few fights which got a little scary but overall it was super awesome to be right where everyone was especially because Liga ended up winning the championship so it was craaazy and everyone started throwing their bottles around so we got out of there super quick but it was still great. Thursday night we went to an Irish pub to watch the Vikings/Saints game which was a sad loss but really fun to watch so much football in one week. Everyone is either from the south or hates Farve so I was the only Vikings fan in the bar (and probably in the country) but it was super fun and hopefully I’ll be able to watch a few more games. Also on Thursday night my host sister Evelyn had her baby, Sophia Emelia!! She wasn’t due until the week after we left but had her early so we got to see the baby on Friday! I’ve never seen a newborn baby before and she was so adorable but had a full head of hair so looked older than a newborn but it was so great to be a part of. Friday was our last day in Quito so after seeing the baby we had a party with our Spanish class and made canelazo (hot wine) at the Spanish school then went to a karaoke bar at 1:30pm and sang horrible karaoke for two hours, it was great. I definitely sang some Daddy Yankee and other reggaeton favorites. Friday night we had a party with our practice teaching class and met them at this little Cuban bar and were just hanging out for awhile but then it came up that I had learned to dance meringue in the DR so we danced with our students and they taught us meringue and salsa which was so much fun. After class we had our final WorldTeach dinner with all the volunteers and our directors at this awesome Italian place with great pizza but I’d been sick all week (better now) and didn’t need to be sick for my 9 hours bus ride at 8am on Saturday so ordered spaghetti which came INSIDE a pizza crust. Literally insane and the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. We tried to go out afterwards but 33 gringos in a bar is a horrible plan so I ended up just saying goodbye to people and going home early.
PORTOV!
Now I’m finally in Portoviejo and I’m super excited about it. We were told the bus ride would be 9 hours but we actually got here in about 7 so that was an excellent surprise (especially because there was a screaming baby in the seat right behind us. Perfect). My host mom Ruth came and picked me up from the bus station.. Heather and I were sitting together therefore we were very easy to spot (I’m pretty sure we’ll be almost the only blonde people in the entire city). She’s adorable and excited to have me and has been explaining to me how everything works which is really nice. She’s a civil engineer and designed the house that they live in now (which is AWESOME.. get to that in a sec). My dad’s name is Artillio and he’s really funny and always tries to say stuff to me in English even though he doesn’t know very much and is always making jokes. He’s an electrician at the hospital which is like three blocks from my house and put all the electrical wiring in their house and is very handy and already helped me fix the drawers in my room. Paul is my host brother who is 23 and is writing his thesis this year and still lives at the house and Johanna who is a journalist in Quito. I just met Paul this morning and haven’t talked to him very much.. but he’s one of the best competitive swimmers in Portoviejo and there’s a big competition this fall that I’m super excited to go to and he’s been to national and international tournaments and stuff and has a ridiculous amount of metals and trophies. He’s also in a rock band which I can’t wait to find out about .Their house is beyond cool.. they told me that every weekend people take pictures of it when they drive by because the architecture is so different from any of the other houses in the neighborhood (I’ll put pics up soon). There’s a gate/garage door that’s really sturdy so that makes me feel safe and you walk around the house to the driveway/patio where they park the car and also have a little seating area and hammock (and they told me they have dance parties out there too.. super jacked for those to happen). My room is right by the back door; I have a double bed, a desk, two nigh stands, and not a real closet but a place to hang all my clothes with drawers below it so there’s plenty of room for all my gear. My bathroom is right next door and it’s the only bathroom on the main level but I don’t think anyone uses it but me (we also have no hot water because it’s so hot here all the time.. getting super jacked for 365 days of cold showers). Next to my bathroom is an empty room that they’ve used for other volunteers (5 bedroom house, it’s huge). They have a really big living room with super elegant furniture and the kitchen is MASSIVE (it would miserably put the chateau kitchen to shame).. there are huge marble countertops and a big island where everyone eats (everyone in the family has their own spot and I learned mine at breakfast this morning) as well as a table with some fancy chairs that appears to be more like a dining room table that’s for special occasions. Also really exciting about the house.. I have a roof again like I did in the DR!! It’s pretty hot and humid here so I’m not sure how much time I’ll really spend up there but it’ll be so nice to have somewhere to go and read and attempt to not be so white and gringa. Oh and another awesome thing about my house… for $15 a month I get unlimited internet which is super great because the internet cafes that are close are like $1.50 per hour soo I’ll be able to work in the evenings (and skype and watch Glee which were also top priorities).
After my tour of the house and unpacking, my parents took me out for dinner. On the way we stopped at the bigger mall so they could show me around.. it’s a super nice mall that’s two stories and has a walmart type thing attached to it and a Payless and basically anything else I’d need. Oh and hilarious, the mall is called “Paseo Shopping.” Nice. For dinner we went to a “BBQ” place which just means a lot of different kinds of meats grilled and the BBQ sauce is actually green and nothing like American BBQ sauce but still really good. I could already tell I was going to get along with my fam because they love to sing and dance to any music that’s on and they tipped the little boy who cleared our table because he was dancing the whole time we were there. They both have a ton of energy and have had volunteers for 9 years (and one extended and lived with them for 2 years) now so I think everything will be awesome this year. My parents usually go to bed at like 9 so I watched Sherlock Holmes and went to bed early.
Today was a really fun day with the fam.. for lunch I tried ceviche for the first time which was super awesome and they have it every Saturday so I’m pretty jacked about that. They also eat a ton of chifles which are basically chips made from plantains (Artillio’s brother owns a factory and is really proud of his fam’s chifles) and really good juice.. so far my mom is an excellent cook and I can’t wait to keep trying more stuff. She’s also really excited that I don’t drink milk or coffee because she doesn’t either and she likes that I eat like her. After lunch we went to the mall to buy random appliances.. for Christmas this year they’re redoing all the bathrooms in the house so we hung out in the hardware section for awhile and got a bunch of gear. This afternoon we went to this pool/sports/restaurant place that’s like an hour from Portov for my cousin’s 16th birthday so I met a bunch more people in my family. I rode with Paul and two of my cousins there and we listened to his ipod on the way there.. it was pretty much all American classic rock and more current rock so I knew like all the songs. It’s kind of weird to sing Bon Jovi with your Ecuadorian host brother but it was pretty badass. And it was really nice to be able to see the country on the coast.. it’s definitely not as crazy impressive as the mountains in the sierra and it’s mostly just rolling hills with brown vegetation and palm trees but I honestly couldn’t be more pleased with my placement. It’s nothing fancy but has everything I need and I am so excited to feel like I’m part of a real community rather than constantly being surrounded by Americans. I definitely stand out and everyone stares at me but I think I’ll be able to ignore that pretty quick. I can’t wait to start making ecua friends and to start classes and start real (fake) life.. I can already tell this year is going to be so awesome and challenging and the best thing I ever could have done.
Ok, hopefully I never write this much at once again but I finally have free time and am so excited to finally be here so lo siento and I’ll write again soon! AMOR.
Although it’s been great to hang with the WT kids in Quito, spending days on end in a conference room was getting old so luckily a bunch of crazy stuff happened this week. Monday was Cate’s (volunteer who’ll be in Manta, like 40 min from Portov aka one of my new besties for the year) birthday so we went out to an Irish pub to watch the Boise-VA Tech game. I had a cheeseburger and fries and watched football with a bunch of Americans.. pretty awesome. Wednesday night was the second part of the Recopa de Sudamerica (South American Championship) so Liga (the Quito soccer team) played against the Estudiantes from Argentina again and the score from the game two weeks ago got added to this game to see who wins the championship. We went to the big plaza downtown by all the bars to watch the game because they projected it on a huge screen. It was super crazy and fun, everyone was going nuts the whole time and doing all these cheers we tried to learn but didn’t and just drinking in the streets. There were a few fights which got a little scary but overall it was super awesome to be right where everyone was especially because Liga ended up winning the championship so it was craaazy and everyone started throwing their bottles around so we got out of there super quick but it was still great. Thursday night we went to an Irish pub to watch the Vikings/Saints game which was a sad loss but really fun to watch so much football in one week. Everyone is either from the south or hates Farve so I was the only Vikings fan in the bar (and probably in the country) but it was super fun and hopefully I’ll be able to watch a few more games. Also on Thursday night my host sister Evelyn had her baby, Sophia Emelia!! She wasn’t due until the week after we left but had her early so we got to see the baby on Friday! I’ve never seen a newborn baby before and she was so adorable but had a full head of hair so looked older than a newborn but it was so great to be a part of. Friday was our last day in Quito so after seeing the baby we had a party with our Spanish class and made canelazo (hot wine) at the Spanish school then went to a karaoke bar at 1:30pm and sang horrible karaoke for two hours, it was great. I definitely sang some Daddy Yankee and other reggaeton favorites. Friday night we had a party with our practice teaching class and met them at this little Cuban bar and were just hanging out for awhile but then it came up that I had learned to dance meringue in the DR so we danced with our students and they taught us meringue and salsa which was so much fun. After class we had our final WorldTeach dinner with all the volunteers and our directors at this awesome Italian place with great pizza but I’d been sick all week (better now) and didn’t need to be sick for my 9 hours bus ride at 8am on Saturday so ordered spaghetti which came INSIDE a pizza crust. Literally insane and the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. We tried to go out afterwards but 33 gringos in a bar is a horrible plan so I ended up just saying goodbye to people and going home early.
PORTOV!
Now I’m finally in Portoviejo and I’m super excited about it. We were told the bus ride would be 9 hours but we actually got here in about 7 so that was an excellent surprise (especially because there was a screaming baby in the seat right behind us. Perfect). My host mom Ruth came and picked me up from the bus station.. Heather and I were sitting together therefore we were very easy to spot (I’m pretty sure we’ll be almost the only blonde people in the entire city). She’s adorable and excited to have me and has been explaining to me how everything works which is really nice. She’s a civil engineer and designed the house that they live in now (which is AWESOME.. get to that in a sec). My dad’s name is Artillio and he’s really funny and always tries to say stuff to me in English even though he doesn’t know very much and is always making jokes. He’s an electrician at the hospital which is like three blocks from my house and put all the electrical wiring in their house and is very handy and already helped me fix the drawers in my room. Paul is my host brother who is 23 and is writing his thesis this year and still lives at the house and Johanna who is a journalist in Quito. I just met Paul this morning and haven’t talked to him very much.. but he’s one of the best competitive swimmers in Portoviejo and there’s a big competition this fall that I’m super excited to go to and he’s been to national and international tournaments and stuff and has a ridiculous amount of metals and trophies. He’s also in a rock band which I can’t wait to find out about .Their house is beyond cool.. they told me that every weekend people take pictures of it when they drive by because the architecture is so different from any of the other houses in the neighborhood (I’ll put pics up soon). There’s a gate/garage door that’s really sturdy so that makes me feel safe and you walk around the house to the driveway/patio where they park the car and also have a little seating area and hammock (and they told me they have dance parties out there too.. super jacked for those to happen). My room is right by the back door; I have a double bed, a desk, two nigh stands, and not a real closet but a place to hang all my clothes with drawers below it so there’s plenty of room for all my gear. My bathroom is right next door and it’s the only bathroom on the main level but I don’t think anyone uses it but me (we also have no hot water because it’s so hot here all the time.. getting super jacked for 365 days of cold showers). Next to my bathroom is an empty room that they’ve used for other volunteers (5 bedroom house, it’s huge). They have a really big living room with super elegant furniture and the kitchen is MASSIVE (it would miserably put the chateau kitchen to shame).. there are huge marble countertops and a big island where everyone eats (everyone in the family has their own spot and I learned mine at breakfast this morning) as well as a table with some fancy chairs that appears to be more like a dining room table that’s for special occasions. Also really exciting about the house.. I have a roof again like I did in the DR!! It’s pretty hot and humid here so I’m not sure how much time I’ll really spend up there but it’ll be so nice to have somewhere to go and read and attempt to not be so white and gringa. Oh and another awesome thing about my house… for $15 a month I get unlimited internet which is super great because the internet cafes that are close are like $1.50 per hour soo I’ll be able to work in the evenings (and skype and watch Glee which were also top priorities).
After my tour of the house and unpacking, my parents took me out for dinner. On the way we stopped at the bigger mall so they could show me around.. it’s a super nice mall that’s two stories and has a walmart type thing attached to it and a Payless and basically anything else I’d need. Oh and hilarious, the mall is called “Paseo Shopping.” Nice. For dinner we went to a “BBQ” place which just means a lot of different kinds of meats grilled and the BBQ sauce is actually green and nothing like American BBQ sauce but still really good. I could already tell I was going to get along with my fam because they love to sing and dance to any music that’s on and they tipped the little boy who cleared our table because he was dancing the whole time we were there. They both have a ton of energy and have had volunteers for 9 years (and one extended and lived with them for 2 years) now so I think everything will be awesome this year. My parents usually go to bed at like 9 so I watched Sherlock Holmes and went to bed early.
Today was a really fun day with the fam.. for lunch I tried ceviche for the first time which was super awesome and they have it every Saturday so I’m pretty jacked about that. They also eat a ton of chifles which are basically chips made from plantains (Artillio’s brother owns a factory and is really proud of his fam’s chifles) and really good juice.. so far my mom is an excellent cook and I can’t wait to keep trying more stuff. She’s also really excited that I don’t drink milk or coffee because she doesn’t either and she likes that I eat like her. After lunch we went to the mall to buy random appliances.. for Christmas this year they’re redoing all the bathrooms in the house so we hung out in the hardware section for awhile and got a bunch of gear. This afternoon we went to this pool/sports/restaurant place that’s like an hour from Portov for my cousin’s 16th birthday so I met a bunch more people in my family. I rode with Paul and two of my cousins there and we listened to his ipod on the way there.. it was pretty much all American classic rock and more current rock so I knew like all the songs. It’s kind of weird to sing Bon Jovi with your Ecuadorian host brother but it was pretty badass. And it was really nice to be able to see the country on the coast.. it’s definitely not as crazy impressive as the mountains in the sierra and it’s mostly just rolling hills with brown vegetation and palm trees but I honestly couldn’t be more pleased with my placement. It’s nothing fancy but has everything I need and I am so excited to feel like I’m part of a real community rather than constantly being surrounded by Americans. I definitely stand out and everyone stares at me but I think I’ll be able to ignore that pretty quick. I can’t wait to start making ecua friends and to start classes and start real (fake) life.. I can already tell this year is going to be so awesome and challenging and the best thing I ever could have done.
Ok, hopefully I never write this much at once again but I finally have free time and am so excited to finally be here so lo siento and I’ll write again soon! AMOR.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Still loving absoluely everything
8/22/10 – 9/5/10
Hola a todos! I’m just finished up my third week in Quito and everything is so fantastic. I’ve been crazy busy but I’ll try to talk about all the cool stuff I’ve done. Sorry that I write so much and feel free to just look at my fbook pictures if it’s too much (Paige).
WEEK DOS
On Sunday we had a picnic with all of the volunteers and their host families which was really fun.. it was at a huge park with a fabulous view of the mountains and it was really fun to meet everyone’s families and hang out in a non-conference room setting. I also played my first game of soccer! One of the host moms even played and she was for sure the most aggressive one out there, it was so much fun but exhausting because we’re at such a high altitude and I haven’t played soccer in years so I’m going to have to get ready to play a lot more this year.
This week I alsoI watched my first soccer game.. It was the championship of something that I’m still not sure of, but the Quito team ( Liga) played against the Argentina team (Los Estudiantes) and won 2-1. People here really do get super excited about soccer and we went to watch the game in this Indian restaurant (literally called “Great India Restaurant” and they constantly play ridiculous Bollywood music videos on their big screen TV when soccer isn’t on) and everyone just goes crazy all the time. After the game we went out to another bar called Bungalow 6 which has ‘ladies night’ every Wednesday. Ecua ladies night = no cover and free drinks from 8-10pm every Wednesday and no guys are allowed to come in the bar until 10 and they literally line up at 10 to come in and hang out with the drunk girls. Hilarious concept, but we usually just stay until 10 because it’s a super gringo (American/anyone who’s not from Ecuador) bar but really fun for awhile and who doesn’t love free cocktails.
Our second week orientation finally got into the fun teaching stuff instead of just the logistics of how we’re going to get pick-pocketed. I’ve determined I have absolutely no idea how to be a teacher but I think once I learn how I can be really good at it. We’ve been learning a lot of teaching strategies and different games and activities we can do in our classes (which also means we get to play a lot of ridic games which is pretty fun).
Our second weekend was the first actual weekend we had off so we got to go out on Friday night. There are tons of bars in the center of Quito in an area that’s called the Mariscol and none of the bars are really huge but all super packed every weekend and play a mixture of salsa and reggaeton which I looove so much (it’s so great to hear Daddy Yankee again and all the Ecuas look at me funny because I know all the words despite my blonde hair and blue eyes). I also forgot how hilarious the guys are here when attempting to pick up girls when they’re bad at English.. I already have one boy who’s told me he loves me and is coming to Portoviejo to find me. He also was wearing a ridiculously tight v-neck , had overly gel-ed hair and kept fist pumping and it felt very Jersey Shore. Hilarious.
Saturday we went to a town about two hours north of Quito called Otavalo that’s famous for its huge market that has literally everything like jewelry, food, hand crafts, scarves, ridiculous pants that look like they’re for clowns but apparently are super popular, and a bunch of trinkets. I got 2 scarves for $2 each and an Ecuadorian National Team soccer jersey for $10, nice. I’m super bad at bargaining but am getting better so hopefully I’ll be a master by the end of the year. After spending the morning in the market, we were going to go to a waterfall that was about 10 minutes away but decided to take a bus to a town called Cotocachi (famous for its leather market but we didn’t go there) and go to a crater lake that’s in an active volcano, BADASS. It was literally one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.. the mountains are all around it and the water is so blue and it was so great to be out in the country instead of breathing in extreme smog in Quito. We took a half an hour boat tour around the lake and got to see the part of the lake where you can tell the volcano is still active because bubbles come up from the bottom. The water was still really cold and I don’t think it’ll erupt any time soon but it was still super cool. That night when we got back we went to La Ronda (the historic district) for a chill evening with some canelazo (the really strong hot wine stuff) and some empanadas.
On Sunday I did the most random thing ever.. I hung out with Dimitri Herard, one of my really good Haitian friends who was studying in the Dominican at the same time I was last year. He’s been going to the military school in Quito for the last year so I sent him a facebook message to see if he was still in Ecuador and it turns out he’ll be here for the next three years so on Sunday I went and hung out with him and his friends and his sisters. So crazy because I really never thought I’d see him again but we both ended up here which is so cool. His sisters and his cousin moved down here about a month ago and are going to school here too and have their own apartment so we just hung out all day. Dimitri and his friends live at the military school and Sunday is their only day off that they can leave so every Sunday they leave at 6am and spend most of the day drinking before they have to go back at 8pm so we had a few beers and were going to have Haitian food but went to KFC instead (everyone is OBSESSED with KFC in this country.. I’ve seen so many and they all are like two stories and have playgrounds in them that are way bigger than normal fast food restaurants in the US). We went to a KFC in a mall where I thought everything would be really cheap but turns out is super expensive.. like Payless shoe stores are everywhere but everything is close to $50 which is crap so I have to stick to my mom shoes. It was hilarious walking around the mall though because everyone kept staring at us because I was the only white person and he was the only black person in the entire mall. In general racism doesn’t seem as intense here as it was in the Dominican but it’s definitely a real thing that I’ll have to adapt to again.
WEEK TRES
This week has been one of my most fun and important weeks of orientation because I started practice teaching! There are two English schools in Quito that WorldTeach works with called SECAP and SEC and they let us give a free two-week class for anyone who wants to sign up so that we can practice teaching before we completely make fools out of ourselves when we start later this month. We’re all teaching in groups so I taught my class with two other people – we all did get to know you activities together the first day to see kind of what they know and then I was the first one to each by myself on Tuesday and Wednesday. My class was from 6-8pm because most of the students are adults who come right from work (fun fact: one of the guys in my class looked EXACTLY like the Ecuadorian version of Steve Carrell. He’s even as the same mannerisms and I had a hard time keeping it together). Anyways, the first day we had about 24 students but by Wednesday we were down to about 16. Teaching for the first time was super nerve racking but went pretty well.. I was teaching an Intermediate 1 class which I assumed would still be pretty basic but they actually knew way more than I thought so that was tricky (one girl was literally reading “Dracula” in English). My topic for two days was supposed to be food/the market/cost of stuff but they knew way more foods in English than I could think of but they’re all really excited about the class and excited to know the material. To practice I had them each make a menu and pretend to be a restaurant or a customer and they just loved it. The next day I wanted to do something where they had to talk more so I started the class with some tongue twisters about food like “how many cookies could a good cook cook if a good cook could cook cookies.” Beforehand I knew I would have to explain the difference between a cook as a chef and cook as a verb, but then they asked me why cook the verb doesn’t have an ‘s’ on the end because it’s third person singular. Ultimate fail in the first two seconds of class but somehow I managed to explain that it’s a conditional sentence and that they’d learn about it later. (Luckily I knew that and could give them some type of explanation.. I’m going to have to learn what I’m doing really quick here). But the rest of the class went really well; we had a Food Network show and first I did Food Network: Minnesota and told them about the food, the weather, the culture, the history, etc of Minnesota and then had them do presentations on the different regions of Ecuador. To make it more real, I brought my curling iron to use as a microphone and they loooved it when I presented about Minnesota and thought it was hilarious and then they loved using it themselves during their presentations. Literal adults in suits and business clothes talking about holidays in Ecuador into a curling iron microphone, it was a huge hit. I have no idea how to be a teacher but I have some really good ideas and I think I’ll learn pretty quick how to not talk so so fast and how to teach something rather than just ramble. It was a ton of work and really scary at first but I’m so excited to be a teacher this year and can’t wait to have my own classroom.
Yesterday (Saturday) we got to go to Papallacta, a town way up in the mountains about two hours east of Quito that has natural hot springs. It was super gorgeous because it’s literally in the middle of a mountain and there are a bunch of different pools that are different temps and it was so relaxing to just hang with the team and soak in the hot baths. We at lunch in the town and had llapingacho which is a traditional Ecuadorian dish that includes these potato cake things stuffed with cheese, fried eggs, sausage, avocado, beets, and salad (aka lettuce). The food is definitely different from the Dominican but I’ve been able to try more things that just soup, rice, and potatoes so that’s been good. I’m super excited to get to the coast because they eat seafood all the time out there and less rice and potatoes so that’ll be a nice change of pace. When we got back, we went to our director Kate’s apartment for a fiesta which was so much fun. First of all, she lives in an entire floor of an apartment building and her bedroom has the most ridiculous view of Quito ever. It’s super huge and super awesome and was perfect to fit 40 loud Americans for a party. Her sister-in-law has her own handmade chocolate business and is working on marketing for selling her chocolates in the US so we had a ‘focus group’ before we got too drunk where we got to try a ridiculous amount of amazing chocolates. They were all so good and had some really cool ones like passion fruit and other rando ecuafruits that we don’t have in the states that were soo good and we just had to tell them what we thought about them and what would make them sell in the US. After we finished our chocolate homework we drank wine all night and played a bunch of drinking games which was so much fun because usually we don’t all get to hang out together because there’s never enough room in the bars for all 33 of us. We went out downtown after for awhile but were pretty tired from getting up at 7 to go to the hot springs so we didn’t stay out too late.
Today has been the first day that I’ve actually just done nothing and it’s been great. We’re all going to our sites next Saturday so my roommate Sara and I decided we should do our laundry now because we won’t have time this week. My host mom did our laundry last week but we learned how today and got to wash our clothes on a washing rock before we put it in the washing machine and hang them on the line and everything so that was actually really fun to hang out with my host mom. After laundry I showed her all of my pictures of my family and friends (a lot of which are ridiculous/semi-drunk pictures but she loved them) and we drank tea and talked about politics and our families and it was just a very lovely afternoon. I can’t believe this is my last week in Quito and that I already have leave this host family, but I can’t wait to get to Portoviejo and get settled in my real house for the next year. Miss everyone so much and I’ll write again soon! AMOR.
Hola a todos! I’m just finished up my third week in Quito and everything is so fantastic. I’ve been crazy busy but I’ll try to talk about all the cool stuff I’ve done. Sorry that I write so much and feel free to just look at my fbook pictures if it’s too much (Paige).
WEEK DOS
On Sunday we had a picnic with all of the volunteers and their host families which was really fun.. it was at a huge park with a fabulous view of the mountains and it was really fun to meet everyone’s families and hang out in a non-conference room setting. I also played my first game of soccer! One of the host moms even played and she was for sure the most aggressive one out there, it was so much fun but exhausting because we’re at such a high altitude and I haven’t played soccer in years so I’m going to have to get ready to play a lot more this year.
This week I alsoI watched my first soccer game.. It was the championship of something that I’m still not sure of, but the Quito team ( Liga) played against the Argentina team (Los Estudiantes) and won 2-1. People here really do get super excited about soccer and we went to watch the game in this Indian restaurant (literally called “Great India Restaurant” and they constantly play ridiculous Bollywood music videos on their big screen TV when soccer isn’t on) and everyone just goes crazy all the time. After the game we went out to another bar called Bungalow 6 which has ‘ladies night’ every Wednesday. Ecua ladies night = no cover and free drinks from 8-10pm every Wednesday and no guys are allowed to come in the bar until 10 and they literally line up at 10 to come in and hang out with the drunk girls. Hilarious concept, but we usually just stay until 10 because it’s a super gringo (American/anyone who’s not from Ecuador) bar but really fun for awhile and who doesn’t love free cocktails.
Our second week orientation finally got into the fun teaching stuff instead of just the logistics of how we’re going to get pick-pocketed. I’ve determined I have absolutely no idea how to be a teacher but I think once I learn how I can be really good at it. We’ve been learning a lot of teaching strategies and different games and activities we can do in our classes (which also means we get to play a lot of ridic games which is pretty fun).
Our second weekend was the first actual weekend we had off so we got to go out on Friday night. There are tons of bars in the center of Quito in an area that’s called the Mariscol and none of the bars are really huge but all super packed every weekend and play a mixture of salsa and reggaeton which I looove so much (it’s so great to hear Daddy Yankee again and all the Ecuas look at me funny because I know all the words despite my blonde hair and blue eyes). I also forgot how hilarious the guys are here when attempting to pick up girls when they’re bad at English.. I already have one boy who’s told me he loves me and is coming to Portoviejo to find me. He also was wearing a ridiculously tight v-neck , had overly gel-ed hair and kept fist pumping and it felt very Jersey Shore. Hilarious.
Saturday we went to a town about two hours north of Quito called Otavalo that’s famous for its huge market that has literally everything like jewelry, food, hand crafts, scarves, ridiculous pants that look like they’re for clowns but apparently are super popular, and a bunch of trinkets. I got 2 scarves for $2 each and an Ecuadorian National Team soccer jersey for $10, nice. I’m super bad at bargaining but am getting better so hopefully I’ll be a master by the end of the year. After spending the morning in the market, we were going to go to a waterfall that was about 10 minutes away but decided to take a bus to a town called Cotocachi (famous for its leather market but we didn’t go there) and go to a crater lake that’s in an active volcano, BADASS. It was literally one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.. the mountains are all around it and the water is so blue and it was so great to be out in the country instead of breathing in extreme smog in Quito. We took a half an hour boat tour around the lake and got to see the part of the lake where you can tell the volcano is still active because bubbles come up from the bottom. The water was still really cold and I don’t think it’ll erupt any time soon but it was still super cool. That night when we got back we went to La Ronda (the historic district) for a chill evening with some canelazo (the really strong hot wine stuff) and some empanadas.
On Sunday I did the most random thing ever.. I hung out with Dimitri Herard, one of my really good Haitian friends who was studying in the Dominican at the same time I was last year. He’s been going to the military school in Quito for the last year so I sent him a facebook message to see if he was still in Ecuador and it turns out he’ll be here for the next three years so on Sunday I went and hung out with him and his friends and his sisters. So crazy because I really never thought I’d see him again but we both ended up here which is so cool. His sisters and his cousin moved down here about a month ago and are going to school here too and have their own apartment so we just hung out all day. Dimitri and his friends live at the military school and Sunday is their only day off that they can leave so every Sunday they leave at 6am and spend most of the day drinking before they have to go back at 8pm so we had a few beers and were going to have Haitian food but went to KFC instead (everyone is OBSESSED with KFC in this country.. I’ve seen so many and they all are like two stories and have playgrounds in them that are way bigger than normal fast food restaurants in the US). We went to a KFC in a mall where I thought everything would be really cheap but turns out is super expensive.. like Payless shoe stores are everywhere but everything is close to $50 which is crap so I have to stick to my mom shoes. It was hilarious walking around the mall though because everyone kept staring at us because I was the only white person and he was the only black person in the entire mall. In general racism doesn’t seem as intense here as it was in the Dominican but it’s definitely a real thing that I’ll have to adapt to again.
WEEK TRES
This week has been one of my most fun and important weeks of orientation because I started practice teaching! There are two English schools in Quito that WorldTeach works with called SECAP and SEC and they let us give a free two-week class for anyone who wants to sign up so that we can practice teaching before we completely make fools out of ourselves when we start later this month. We’re all teaching in groups so I taught my class with two other people – we all did get to know you activities together the first day to see kind of what they know and then I was the first one to each by myself on Tuesday and Wednesday. My class was from 6-8pm because most of the students are adults who come right from work (fun fact: one of the guys in my class looked EXACTLY like the Ecuadorian version of Steve Carrell. He’s even as the same mannerisms and I had a hard time keeping it together). Anyways, the first day we had about 24 students but by Wednesday we were down to about 16. Teaching for the first time was super nerve racking but went pretty well.. I was teaching an Intermediate 1 class which I assumed would still be pretty basic but they actually knew way more than I thought so that was tricky (one girl was literally reading “Dracula” in English). My topic for two days was supposed to be food/the market/cost of stuff but they knew way more foods in English than I could think of but they’re all really excited about the class and excited to know the material. To practice I had them each make a menu and pretend to be a restaurant or a customer and they just loved it. The next day I wanted to do something where they had to talk more so I started the class with some tongue twisters about food like “how many cookies could a good cook cook if a good cook could cook cookies.” Beforehand I knew I would have to explain the difference between a cook as a chef and cook as a verb, but then they asked me why cook the verb doesn’t have an ‘s’ on the end because it’s third person singular. Ultimate fail in the first two seconds of class but somehow I managed to explain that it’s a conditional sentence and that they’d learn about it later. (Luckily I knew that and could give them some type of explanation.. I’m going to have to learn what I’m doing really quick here). But the rest of the class went really well; we had a Food Network show and first I did Food Network: Minnesota and told them about the food, the weather, the culture, the history, etc of Minnesota and then had them do presentations on the different regions of Ecuador. To make it more real, I brought my curling iron to use as a microphone and they loooved it when I presented about Minnesota and thought it was hilarious and then they loved using it themselves during their presentations. Literal adults in suits and business clothes talking about holidays in Ecuador into a curling iron microphone, it was a huge hit. I have no idea how to be a teacher but I have some really good ideas and I think I’ll learn pretty quick how to not talk so so fast and how to teach something rather than just ramble. It was a ton of work and really scary at first but I’m so excited to be a teacher this year and can’t wait to have my own classroom.
Yesterday (Saturday) we got to go to Papallacta, a town way up in the mountains about two hours east of Quito that has natural hot springs. It was super gorgeous because it’s literally in the middle of a mountain and there are a bunch of different pools that are different temps and it was so relaxing to just hang with the team and soak in the hot baths. We at lunch in the town and had llapingacho which is a traditional Ecuadorian dish that includes these potato cake things stuffed with cheese, fried eggs, sausage, avocado, beets, and salad (aka lettuce). The food is definitely different from the Dominican but I’ve been able to try more things that just soup, rice, and potatoes so that’s been good. I’m super excited to get to the coast because they eat seafood all the time out there and less rice and potatoes so that’ll be a nice change of pace. When we got back, we went to our director Kate’s apartment for a fiesta which was so much fun. First of all, she lives in an entire floor of an apartment building and her bedroom has the most ridiculous view of Quito ever. It’s super huge and super awesome and was perfect to fit 40 loud Americans for a party. Her sister-in-law has her own handmade chocolate business and is working on marketing for selling her chocolates in the US so we had a ‘focus group’ before we got too drunk where we got to try a ridiculous amount of amazing chocolates. They were all so good and had some really cool ones like passion fruit and other rando ecuafruits that we don’t have in the states that were soo good and we just had to tell them what we thought about them and what would make them sell in the US. After we finished our chocolate homework we drank wine all night and played a bunch of drinking games which was so much fun because usually we don’t all get to hang out together because there’s never enough room in the bars for all 33 of us. We went out downtown after for awhile but were pretty tired from getting up at 7 to go to the hot springs so we didn’t stay out too late.
Today has been the first day that I’ve actually just done nothing and it’s been great. We’re all going to our sites next Saturday so my roommate Sara and I decided we should do our laundry now because we won’t have time this week. My host mom did our laundry last week but we learned how today and got to wash our clothes on a washing rock before we put it in the washing machine and hang them on the line and everything so that was actually really fun to hang out with my host mom. After laundry I showed her all of my pictures of my family and friends (a lot of which are ridiculous/semi-drunk pictures but she loved them) and we drank tea and talked about politics and our families and it was just a very lovely afternoon. I can’t believe this is my last week in Quito and that I already have leave this host family, but I can’t wait to get to Portoviejo and get settled in my real house for the next year. Miss everyone so much and I’ll write again soon! AMOR.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Things I'm really pumped about
Sooo I've been trying to make a list of things that I love so I don't have to write for days on end. As of week one, here are a few of my cosas favoritas:
- Living in a huge city that’s surrounded by mountains
- Most of the mountains are actually volcanoes
- My Ecuadorian cell phone is just like my Dominican gigapet phone… it’s an Alcatel phone sponsored by Claro which means nothing to anyone but my favorite ISA kids
- The poster on the door to my room is of the three stooges golfing and says “golf with friends”
- My host fam has two huskies (who even knew they had huskies in South America..)
- Eating soup for every lunch and dinner
- Lunch (almuerzo) costs between $1.50 and $3 for soup, rice, chicken/fish, vegetables, and a dessert
- I’m taking a Spanish class and there are only three of us so we get to learn exactly what we need to
- My WT director is awesome and was a WT volunteer in Cuenca, Ecuador about ten years ago and married an Ecuadorian soccer player and has two ecuakids
- The weather is like fall in Minnesota without the rainy days
- I’m not nervous to speak Spanish and I can understand everything and it’s already hard to switch back to English.. I love it and can’t wait to only speak Spanish in Portoviejo
- Everyone is a fabulous dancer and there are salsa clubs all over the place
- Private salsa lessons cost $6 an hour and I’m going to be the best rubia salsa dancer by the time I leave
- My host brother explained what an owl was by explaining that it is Harry Potter’s pet
- My host brother has an Avril Lavigne poster in his room but also loves all the same American music I do
- Being called Kreeesta
- There’s way less traffic and cat calling than I expected
- Ecuadorian Spanish uses a lot of Quichua (indigenous language) for expressions so I’m learning a lot of new words (a-cha-chay is the same as saying brrr when you’re cold)
- People really are playing soccer all the time
- Everyone (still) thinks Minnesota is right next to Chicago
- I’ve seen at least four Ecuadorian guys who are taller than me so there is hope
- I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else in the entire world right now
- Living in a huge city that’s surrounded by mountains
- Most of the mountains are actually volcanoes
- My Ecuadorian cell phone is just like my Dominican gigapet phone… it’s an Alcatel phone sponsored by Claro which means nothing to anyone but my favorite ISA kids
- The poster on the door to my room is of the three stooges golfing and says “golf with friends”
- My host fam has two huskies (who even knew they had huskies in South America..)
- Eating soup for every lunch and dinner
- Lunch (almuerzo) costs between $1.50 and $3 for soup, rice, chicken/fish, vegetables, and a dessert
- I’m taking a Spanish class and there are only three of us so we get to learn exactly what we need to
- My WT director is awesome and was a WT volunteer in Cuenca, Ecuador about ten years ago and married an Ecuadorian soccer player and has two ecuakids
- The weather is like fall in Minnesota without the rainy days
- I’m not nervous to speak Spanish and I can understand everything and it’s already hard to switch back to English.. I love it and can’t wait to only speak Spanish in Portoviejo
- Everyone is a fabulous dancer and there are salsa clubs all over the place
- Private salsa lessons cost $6 an hour and I’m going to be the best rubia salsa dancer by the time I leave
- My host brother explained what an owl was by explaining that it is Harry Potter’s pet
- My host brother has an Avril Lavigne poster in his room but also loves all the same American music I do
- Being called Kreeesta
- There’s way less traffic and cat calling than I expected
- Ecuadorian Spanish uses a lot of Quichua (indigenous language) for expressions so I’m learning a lot of new words (a-cha-chay is the same as saying brrr when you’re cold)
- People really are playing soccer all the time
- Everyone (still) thinks Minnesota is right next to Chicago
- I’ve seen at least four Ecuadorian guys who are taller than me so there is hope
- I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else in the entire world right now
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