It's hooooot

I don't really remember all that's happened since I last updated this... Well, last week I spent Sunday to Thursday at a Spanish Orientation Camp, at the Decameron resort in Mompiche (7 hour drive by bus from Portoviejo). We took 6 hours of Spanish classes each day but the learning and Spanish parts were sort of over shadowed by being at an all-inclusive resort on a gooorgeous beach with 24 hour buffets and 5 pools and shows every night and a discotequa that's open until 2 am. So it was fun and a good refresher for my struggling Spanish. A picture is below (not taken by me though!) of the resort and one of the ocean (taken by me!). My friend and I watched the sun go down over the beach from our room's balcony (that's what the picture's of) and maybe I'm just a novice sunset watcher but I swear it took max 80 seconds to fully set... mind-blowing.

Anyway, speaking of Spanish (that's a pun!) my Spanish speaking is improving sort of unevenly. I can communicate a little better, just by course of knowing more everyday words and local abbreviations/etc. but I understand a TON more than I did even just a week ago. I don't really think it was the camp even -- I realized a few days ago that I suddenly don't need every single sentence repeated 19 times in slow mo, so even though I have a looooong way to go it was sort of reassuring that I'm not still the completely  illiterate gringa I was 5 weeks ago (so weird that it's been that long).

After I got back last Thursday, my host mom let me/basically forced me to skip school to "descansar y ir a la piscina conmigo" so I went to the pool with her in the morning! It was nice, although kind of sad to see how far I've slipped out of swimming shape. Maybe through the year I'll try to get back into it (Ha!). Then at night me, my mom and Pamela went to the Manta airport and waited 2 hours for our flight to Quito, only to find out that due to a plane crash and snow (unrelated but probably each enough to shut down an airport alone) the Quito airport was closed. But do Ecuadorians let snow or crashed planes stop them? Of course not! So we took an overnight bus to Quito and got there 8 am the next morning. Gotta admire that. We spent the weekend visiting with my host mom, Eulalia's side of the family, who there is a.) a lot of, and b.) all living in Quito. I absolutely loved Quito -- it's the capital of Ecuador, and about 2 million people big, and is literally nestled in a mountain range, so it's COLD. It was such a nice change for a few days, mainly because I've been missing New York fall weather. There are also a fair amount of parks, so I liked being able to walk around outside -- you really can't do much of that here, because of safety reasons -- and with tons of vendors and artists doing portraits and displaying their work and stuff like that, so with both that and the weather it reminded me of NYC, which may be why I liked it so much.

The only other notable thing this week was Monday night I slept over at a friend from school's house with another girl from school, and we got up at 4:30 am to go to the "Caminata." It's this thing that's once a year, where for a stretch of fifteen days, at 5 am each day, a ton of people walk around the streets of Portoviejo in a processional and say the rosary and sing prayers and things like that, and people carry crosses too. It's from 5 to 6, so it's still dark the good majority of  the time; when I went Tuesday there were minimum 800 people doing it -- it was actually really incredible how many there were. So I'm glad I went to that even if I'm still SO tired (although I'm basically tired 98% of the time).

Oh, also, today I sprayed myself in the face with 98% deet bugspray... cool. Hurt SO bad in my left eye. I'll probably have mutilated retinas by the time I get home. You know that useless deet free bugspray that's advertised as "family style", I think I may have to invest in a bottle.

So that's my life! It's boiling hot right now... Can't wait for summer in 3 months?!

Gringa intercambios

Mompiche

Gorgeous gorgeous sunset.

Quito!

...and from above

I love this view so much.