First day of school!

I arrived safely in Ambato yesterday, despite the threats of strikes that would shut down the highways starting on sunday night. I need to check the news to see if there really are demonstrations in quito and elsewhere. The people (mostly the indigenous people and some teachers) are protesting new laws that are being made regarding the use of water and minerals and education. The president, Correa, is in the process of reforming the education system and some teachers are not happy about it. Anyway, traveling on sunday morning was no problem.

I arrived in Ambato and moved in with a fellow volunteer named Kat. I´m definitely not staying the host family that I with whom I had originally been placed. I just don´t think I could deal with their two crazy kids and a newborn. But I had left half of my stuff in their house!! So yesterday I went back there to visit with them for a bit and gather my belongings. The visiting portion of the day mostly involved sitting with the family in the parents bedroom and watching TV. This sounds strange, but apparently this is a very common activity in Ecuador. However, most families love to watch their telenovelas. This family watches dvds of reggaeton music videos while their five year old son immitates what he sees on TV... It makes me think of mean girls when Regina´s little sister is watching girls gone wild and lifts up her shirt to be like the people on tv. It´s awful! So that´s pretty much what i did for 2.5 hours yesterday. Then I gathered my stuff and left. Hopefully I´ll stay in contact with the parents of the family, because they´re lovely, but i´m glad i´m not staying there for the year. I can only handle so much reggaeton.

Today was my first day of teaching! so far, so good. my class at 7 am had 22 students in it. They hate my no spanish rule and the no coming in late rule, but they seem to like me, and there are no discipline issues.. yet. I have a mix of professionals, college students and high school students, but they´re all at a fairly intermediate level. I have another class this afternoon, I hope it goes just as well!

We got mustarded!

Jenny and I almost got robbed today. We were walking to our conference hotel when this woman asked us what time it was. I quickly told her the time and continued walking. When we reached the hotel 1 minute later, a man pointed out that Jenny and I had mustard all over our backpacks and the back of our pants. It was then that I noticed the woman who had asked us the time standing next to the hotel entrance. As the man started to offer us napkins to clean up the mustard we bolted into the hotel. We had been warned about this kind of robbery during orientation. If we had been naive enough to think that this man passing by just happened to have napkins on him to clean up random mustard, that woman would have stolen our backpacks. Luckily we were right in front of our destination, I don't think these theives anticipated that. So Jenny and I escaped into the safety of the hotel with all of our belongings, but smelling like mustard. ew. for anyone traveling in South America, beware of anyone who tells you that you happen to have mustard all over your back!!!

Camping in Baños

This past weekend was one big adventure. Jenny and I tagged along with our host brothers outing club for a weekend trip to Baños. Baños is a cute touristy town in the mountains close to the tungurahua volcano. Its filled with shops that sell sugar cane toffee and pieces of sugar cane to munch on. We got there at around 10:30 by bus and left our stuff at the firestation because my host brother was friends with the fire fighters. Then we hired a pick up truck to carry all 15 of us to waterfalls where we would be hiking. Driving with all of us piled in the back of the pick up truck through the mountains around Baños was amazing! Everything was lush green and the weather was perfect. We hiked around two waterfalls that were incredbly powerful. When I can figure out how to put some pictures up here I will. That night, we camped out half an hour outside the city up in the mountains. However, at about 7:30 the leaders of our group were conflicted about whether to pay someone to drive us up to our campsite then and set up camp before going out for the night, or whether we should just go out and set up camp when we get back at 1 am. Thank goodness the problem was solved by the firefighters. They offered to drive us up to our campsite for free... IN THE FIREFIGHTERS AMBULANCE! so all 13 of us piled into the ambulance and drove on rocky mountain roads up to our campsite in the dark. It was terrifying. but we made it safely to our campsite, which by the way, was on the slopes of the active volcano, Tungurahua. We slept in the site where they collect seismic data on the volcano. After we set up camp, we went back into town in the ambulance and went to the thermal baths and had dinner and went out dancing until about 12:45. By that point, we were exhausted. We traveled back to our campsite in the back of a pickup truck and huddled to keep warm in the chilly night air. Jenny and I shared a two person tent and barely got any sleep. Between the Ecuadorians talking rather loudly and the cows that came by and nudged our tent in the middle of the night, we maybe got about 4 hours of sleep. We were up at 6:45 to pack up and catch a bus into town. I could finally see the road we had taken twice to the campsite! Once we got into town we had breakfast and started the day{s adventure: repelling. Repelling is a lot like rock climbing in that you{re wearing a harness attatched to a rope except you only go down. I had done this before in Israel and I thought that repelling meant that you just sort of walk down the side of a mountain while attatched to a rope. Well, Ecuadorians seem to think that it means lowering yourself down from hights but whithout anything to put your legs on, you{re just sort of dangling in the air and lowering yourself down. The first thing that we repelled off was a bridge where tourists were bungee jumping from. Our fearless leaders set up their equipment on the bridge and showed us how to lower ourselves down. and i did it! The scariest part was climbing over the railing of the bridge... But that was nothing compared to the next place we went to repell: a waterfall!! It was amazing! I lowered myself down a rope with waterfalling all around me, getting soaking wet. It was truly a beautiful experience. It was actually a very appropiate way to spend rosh hashana, marveling in the wonders of God{s creation in a tropical rainforest. shanah tovah!

Practice teaching

This week, we, the volunteers of world teach are offering a free two week English course to practice our teaching and lesson planning skills. I´m teaching an intermediate class yesterday, today and tomorrow at 7 AM. that means I have to leave my house to get to the school at 6:00. Which means I wake up at 5:30 for these three days. Ew. But so far, my lessons have gone.. ok. I planned my lesson around the fact that I would have a class of around 20 people. There are twenty people signed up for my class, but only 3 showed up the first day, and 4 the second day. If it were a free English at 7 am, I wouldn´t show up either, unless I was very committed. Today we learned some vocabulary about traveling and tomorrow we´re going to learn "leavin on a jet plane" by John Denver. (if I can make it through the class without crying...) then we´re going to do some role playing and see what my students would do if they had to go away for a long time and leave a loved one behind....

anyway, that´s enough of my brainstorming lesson plans on my blog. the point is, that so far, I´m loving Ecuador. This afternoon, there´s a chance that I might meet up with some ultimate players for some pick up. That would absolutely make my day.

First impressions of Ambato!

I just got back from my site visit in Ambato! I discovered a lot of important info about where I´ll be staying for the rest of the year. I will be teaching two classes each day, mon thru fri, of intermediates. My classes are from 7 to 8;30am and from 3;30 to 5pm every day. Kind of a crappy schedule, but not too bad considering I would be up that early anyway. Let me explain. I´m living with a host family that has a "lively" (as my description said) 2 year old and 5 year old boy. Maybe this is a cultural thing that I´m not aware of, but I swear these kids scream more often than the average child. Plus, my "mom", Yadira is very pregnant. She´s going to have a baby sometime this week. So by the time I return to Ambato in two weeks, there will be a newborn living directly below me... and there is no insulation in these houses... I don´t really know if this is going to work out with this family. They seem to be lovely, and they were very excited to introduce me to their extended family and show me around, but I don´´t know if I can put up with all their children for a year. However, my room is the only one on the third floor, and I have two balconies that lead to their laundry washing area on the roof. Plus i have my own bathroom with real hot water!! (not an electric machine that turns the water hot as it drips out of the faucet that I´m scared to electricute myself on...) So it´s not all bad. Plus I met some old WT volunteers who had stayed for more than one year. Kat from Texas is a nut case with more energy than a powerplant and Robert is a 76 year old doctor from rural Quebec. He told me the story of how he harbored Harvey Wells (i think that was his name) when he came to campaign in ME in the 1950s. Anyway, he´s nuts. And then Emily I have not met yet, but she lived with my host "grandparents" and apparently she plays ultimate!! yes!! so I will definitely be surrounded by some English speaking friends in Ambato. My goal is to then surround myself with Spanish speaking friends. I also would like to take salsa lessons, start running again (in altitude!! my lungs will be so strong) and start some kind of extra volunteer activity since I´ll only be teaching 15 hours a week. Well, for now, applying to graduate school will take up a lot of my time, so maybe I´ll start the volunteer project during the second half of the year.
For now, I´m back in Quito with two weeks of practice teaching and orientation ahead of me. I will be exhausted, I¨m sure. HOpe all is well in the states!

If I climb a mountain and I turn around...

Yesterday, our host brother, Daniel, took my roommate Jenny and me on the most intense hike of our lives. We left the house at 7:30 AM to catch a bus to where his friend Silvana picked us up in her car and dropped us off at another bus stop. We then took another bus to the teleferiqo, the cable car that goes to a view point above the city of Quito. the viewpoint at the teleferiqo is at 4,100 meters above sea level. This is a very high altitude and when I first stepped off the cable car I felt a bit dizzy. We sat for a bit to get acclamated to the altitude before starting our 3.5 hour hike to the top of la cara de sucre which is one of the peaks of la pichincha mountain. The hike was incredibly difficult because of the altitude. I felt so pathetically out of shape. I was breathing heavily and my heart was pounding after every 15 minutes of walking steeply uphill. But the hike was beautiful. you could see the whole city of Quito layed out before you. The city is surrounded by other snow capped mountains that Daniel was so proud to point out to us. That one is Cotopaxi, and that one is Antisana. He clearly has a real connection to the land. His friend Lily who climbed with us, cried when she reached the top of the mountain. Actually, I was told this. Jenny and I did not quite reach the top. We got way too out of breath at about 5,000 meters and decided to sit tight and watch the birds and airplanes flying below us. On the way we met a bunch of ther gringos, some from canada new zealand, and even a boy from Newton, MA with whom we shared a few mutual friends. The world is acutally quite a small place. We returned home from our exhausting adventure at about 6:30 starving. We had done all that exercise and only eaten apples and oranges along the way! Thank goodness madre had chicken soup and some fried rice ready for us when we got home. I took a shower and promptly fell asleep at 8:30 last night. It was an exhausting but incredibly rewarding day.

hot springs and a hike in Papallacta!

Today our whole group took a trip to Papallacta, a hot springs "resort" in the mountains. It was beautiful! First we went for a hike along a waterfall. the vergetation was so thick with so many plants that I´ve never seen before. One of my friends made a good comment that if this is the mountains, I can´t imagine what the rainforest in the eastern part of the country looks like! On our way back from the hike we saw llamas!! Then we ate fresh trout in a restaurant that looked like it would be denounced by the FDA if it were in the states, but everything tasted delicious! and so far, I do not feel sick. :) Then we went to the hot springs and relaxed in the warm pools while it started to mist cold rain around us. It was amazing. We had a really nice relaxing day, and now I´m going to back home to eat dinner at my host madre´s. Dinner will most likely be more rice, potatoes and maybe some chicken... per usual. oh comida tipica, how I will grow to love it. hasta luego!