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.