Rancho Alegre, San Antonio Ecuador

Yes, those really are clouds.

Monument on the Equator--almost

Jeanette and I straddling the equator--according to bad European math

 View from the top of Ilalo

Cross at the top of Ilalo

 Valle de los Chillos from the top of Ilalo

 Ilalo from my house.  If you look really hard, you can see the cross.

 My house

Notes on Ecuador

1) Traffic.
Getting in a car here is about the scariest thing I do. To start with, only the front seats have seatbelts. The backseat might have the shoulder strap and be missing the buckle, have the buckle and be missing the strap, or have neither part. Cars drive very fast here.  Stop signs (a red octagon with the word "para") don't actually mean stop to any true Ecuadorian.  Instead, you honk your horn twice.  If no one honks back, then you assume it is safe to drive right through the stop sign without slowing down.  If someone does honk back, then you slow down a little, but not very much. And if you can see around the stop sign without slowing down, then you don't need to honk at all. 

2) Food.
Food is amazing, and there is a LOT of it.  There are more kinds of fruit and vegetables than I have ever seen in my life, including at least 5 different types of bananas, not counting plantains, and at least ten different types of corn.  For breakfast I usually have a bowl of cut up fruit with yogurt and granola, or a smoothie-like drink and a grilled cheese sandwich. Recently they've also been serving me french toast. Lunch is the big meal of the day, and usually consists of two courses, a soup, and then something else with meat.  My family is a little less traditional than some, which only means that we don't eat rice with every meal, only with about half of them.  My family constantly asks me whether I like the food, and if I want more.  One day, they asked if I liked avocados, and when I said I loved them, lunch the next day included 1 and a half avocados PER PERSON, as well as a potato soup, salad, and shrimp.  How little I eat has become a joke to them, and they didn't believe me when I said I eat more then my mom and sister at home.  Luckily dinner is not a huge meal because I am generally still full from lunch.  We all have tea or coffee or hot chocolate (they looked at me like I was an alien one night when I said I just wanted water, so I have learned to always ask for tea when I'm full) and then a bread roll, and maybe a piece of cheese. 

Today for breakfast, my host parents took me for a special treat--chancho, or ordenado.  In English: pig.  We drove for about ten minutes and then stopped outside a restaurant with a table/kitchen area right on the sidewalk, and then a bunch of tables for guests inside.  On the table of the kitchen area were three fried pigs.  I mean whole pigs, with heads and feet still attached.  In making up our plates, the chef merely sliced some pig off and put it on the plate, along with potatoes, corn, and half an avocado.  The fried pig skin is especially a deliacy, although one I saved for last, and then said I was full after a few bites. 

3) Computer Keyboards
Are different here.  I have finally figured out how to do apostrophes, parentheses, quotation marks, and question marks, but I still can't figure out the at sign.  Every time I want to log on to my email, I have to find an at sign somewhere else, and then copy and paste it in. I also can't figure out how to put accents on letters, although it must be fairly easy since Spanish words need accents all the time.

4) Buses
Buses here are insane, but incredibly useful.  Most of them cost between 15 and 25 cents.  If it's going to be a long ride (over half an hour), it might cost up to $1.25.  Though there are a few defined bus stops, they don't really mean anything. If you want to get on a bus that's passing by, you stick out your hand and wave at the driver.  When you want to get off, you ask the driver to stop.  The second the last person steps on or off the bus, it lurches away, which means I'm frequently lunging for the nearest handrail so I don't fall over. 

The First Week

I've been here for a week now and it's incredible.  The first full day, we ate breakfast at a cafe nearby the hotel in Quito, then took a bus to San Antonio, a town about 30 minutes away, famous because the equator runs through the town.  We stayed at a place called Rancho Alegre, and had classroom sessions during the day followed by some activity at night.  The first night was a salsa dancing lession.  I am horrible, but it was still fun.  The second night we watched a movie about two women traveling around Ecuador. The third night we listened to a performance of music native to the Andes that was absolutely incredible.  Each member of the band played three or four different instuments, and between each song they all switched which instrument they were on.  One of the musician's girlfriend was there, and she had us get up and try to follow the dance moves she was doing, but I didn't even come close to getting it.  Each afternoon, we had some time to explore the town.  About a 30 minute walk from our hotel was a park and a huge monument marking the line that people used to think was the equator.  The equator is actually about 200 meteres away and runs through an ancient site used by the local indigenous people (who did know it was the equator and oriented the site accordingly), but when the Europeans came and tried to measure the equator, they got it slightly wrong.

Eating is a big deal here.  Every day, they served us food five times.  Breakfast, followed by a snack, then lunch followed by a snack, then dinner.  Everything was delicious.  There's rice at every meal, along with a lot of soup and tons of different kinds of juices.  My favorite juice so far is one made from blackberries.  The fruit is incredible. 

The fourth day (Thursday), we did what our academic directors Leonore and Fabian call a drop off.  In groups of three, we were given the name of a town, and we had to figure out how to get there by bus, and then get back to the hotel we stayed in the first night in Quito.  In the town, we were suppose to eat lunch, buy an ice cream, and talk to the locals about the towns history.  My group went to Nanegalito, a tiny town on the edge of the cloud forest. The bus ride was the best part.  The road winds constantly downward through the mountains, with a sharp drop on one or both sides of the road at all times.  It was a little scary, but an incredible experience.  Thursday night we went out to a club in Quito.  We got a lot of looks. Apparently a group of fourteen gringos all dancing together in one club is a phenomenon.  

Friday afternoon, we began our homestays.  My family has four people, the two parents (Vladi and Elsita), a nineteen year old son named Felipe, and a 22 year old daughter named Ana Belen. The first night, Ana Belen took me to a friend's house with her, where another girl on my program is staying. There were tons of people there, and they built a campfire in a backyard, and we all sat around it for hours.  After breakfast on Saturday, my host parents took me grocery shopping with them.  The grocery store is a huge supermarket called Megamaxi, and it's located inside a shopping mall (apparently most supermarkets are).  There were tons of fruits and vegetables I had never seen, and everything was so cheap compared to in the US.  Then we got ice cream (they eat a TON of ice cream here, you see signs for it on every street corner, and it's incredible), and returned to the house for lunch.  

Today, my host father took me on a hike up Ilalo, the volcano that towers over the town.  Los Chillos, where we're staying, is a suburb of Quito about 45 minutes outside the city, but it feels completely different.   Los Chillos is at about 8000 feet and the top of Ilalo is at about 9500.  The path is incredibly steep, and I had to stop and rest every ten minutes or so, because it was so difficult to breathe. The views, however, were amazing.  From the top, you can see all of Los Chillos, and a fair amount of Quito.  I have pictures which I'll post when I have a chance to upload them from my camera.  Along the entire route, random cows grazed, and there were also a number of cultivated fields, mostly growing corn.  The people who own them climb the mountain once or twice a day to tend to their crops.  We even saw one woman who was climbing it barefoot.

On the way down, it was so steep that the entire thing was a kind of run/walk, with a chance to slow down only every ten meters or so.  The fact I fell over once, and my host father fell over twice.  Every time one of us fell, he would say "es normal."  After the hike, he took me to drink coconut milk (they just wack off the top and put a straw in it), and I also tried a juice made purely from cane sugar that is the sweetest thing I have ever eaten. 

Classes start tomorrow morning at 8am, which is when we find out what Spanish level we're in.  So far my Spanish has been better than I thought.  My host family keeps saying I speak really well, since their previous student apparently was pretty awful, but I still have a long ways to go.

Leaving Tomorrow

My mom's been begging me for weeks to set up this blog, so here it is.  No promises that I'll update very often, but I'll do my best.  Today will be filled with last minute errands, and frantic packing, then tomorrow evening I'm on the plane.  I'm excited and a little bit nervous.