Chanchos...ugh...

So I have never been one for crazy stories, but I can now say I have at least one to tell. But let me begin at, well, the beginning. So, Friday night, my host brother, Javier, and I took a taxi to meet some of the girls from my program and their host brothers at a bar called the Western. Now, let me just say that this bar cracks me up--it´s like a bad theme restaurant from the US (Texas, to be exact). There are saddles and horseshoes hung all over the place and the poor waiters and waitresses are required to wear denim, red bandanas, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats. Think of the most stereotypical cowboy outfit you can and that is the outfits the servers where at the Western. And all this is made even funnier by the fact that we are in Ecuador, NOT Texas. I can only assume that, given the obviously tourist-y nature of the place, they are attemting to appeal to us Americans who, as you well know, will only eat pizza, drink beer, and listen to really bad ´80s pop music. However, after a few drinks of said beer, it´s a pretty awesome place!

So Friday night was really fun--just talking for hours, eating some AMAZING pizza (actually), and drinking some genuine Ecuadorean cerveza. And it is amazing, but the combination of having been in Ecuador for nearly a month and having a couple drinks really makes one´s Spanish speaking skills improve! I have noticed gradually how much easier it is to both understand and speak Spanish (though I do still have my "duh?" moments, for sure). We ended up more or less speaking Spanish the entire night since, though most of our host brothers know at least some English, it has finally reached the point where our Spanish is better than their English and so it just makes sense. Plus, we always need the practice.

Once we finally left (as the bar was closing), we split up, with my friends taking cabs with their respective host brothers and Javier and I in our own cab. However, (and this just shows you what a standup guy and good host brother he is) Javier insisted my friend, Rachel, take a cab with us so we could see her to her house since she did not feel completely comfortable with giving the driver directions on her own and she did not have a host brother with her. The next night, I must add (and I will elaborate on the rest of it later), when we were all out again, Javier left me and the rest of our group at the bar and took a cab to Rachel´s house and back because she wanted to leave early and he did not want her to leave alone. Truly a good guy.

ANYHOW, so Saturday morning, my host mother and I took a series of really confusing buses into Quito in order to embark on a mission: buy me a (cheap) fashionable outfit for a family wedding that we will all be attending this weekend. And on Saturdays, there is a part of Quito near the colonial, historic area that turns into this giant free-for-all of cheap stuff for sale. We went into this one big building with a labyrinth of cheap things on sale--clothes, shoes, appliances, you name it! As soon as we walked in, my mother grabbed my arm and dragged me over to the first women´s clothing store she saw, where the two women working there immediately starting clucking over me and offering me things to try on.

Now, I must stop here to point out that, by and large, fashion here is very different from the US. A little showier, maybe, a little tighter, a little tackier. And thus, with these two ladies and my mother crowding around me crying, "¡Que linda! ¡Que bonita!", I was kind of...peer pressured into buying an outfit that (how to put it politely) I might otherwise never voluntarily wear. They put me in a pair of spandex black pants and an equally stretchy blue and black top (I do not think there was a natural fiber in the whole place) that, frankly, appeared very similar to a maternity top, in my opinion. However, with my mother and these two ladies staring intently at me and after glancing around at my other options that truly were not any better than what I was wearing, I half-heartedly muttered, "Sí, está bien." And I also, apparently, could not escape without buying shoes to go with it. And since us gringas, besides being much larger generally than the people here that seem to average a height of MAYBE five feet tall, also have apparently freakishly large feet by Ecuadorean standards, I was forced to buy more or less the only pair in my size. Let´s just say they kind of complete the look I was going for (if that look is, in fact, complete and total humiliation of the big, scary gringa). Good times... :)

ANYHOW, I tried to forget the clothing I was stupid enough to pay money for by buying an Ecuadorean soccer jersey, which I was VERY happy with. Also, some cool bracelets. And afterwards, my mother took me to a restaurant for lunch. Besides what appeared to be actual chicken feet in my soup, it was otherwise very good.

After returning to the house after our shopping expedition, I spent literally all afternoon doing schoolwork at the local internet cafe and when I finally returned home around 7:00, exhausted and mentally drained, I intended to just zone out, watch a movie, and go to bed early. Well, that did not happen. As is known to happen from time to time due to construction in our neighborhood, the power went out around 9:00 (just as I was, in fact, watching the absolutely terrifying "Dawn of the Dead," in Spanish, on TV). My host family, among other things, thinks it is hilarious when I curse and have tried to get me to teach them English curse words on many an occasion. So it amused them immensely when, just as things were getting particularly terrifying and bloody in the movie I was watching by myself in the living room, the power went out and, after a moment´s silence, the words, "Oh, SHIT!" echoed through the house. I seriously expected a bunch of undead zombies to start banging on the window right then and there, though Javier proved scary enough when he decided to sneak up on me and scare the crap out of me as I was wandering blindly down the hallway.

Just after we lost power, some friends called from the local karaoke bar. And, with nothing better to do now that we had no power, Javier and I promptly went to meet them. We had a couple drinks at the karaoke bar (though, no matter how many we could have had, it NEVER would have made the singing going on in that place sound any better) before deciding we wanted to dance, so we went to a nearby discoteca. We danced for a while, had a few more drinks, and then sat out on the patio and talked for a while. A few people gradually left (including Rachel, who Javier escorted home since she was alone). Once Javier returned, we may or may not have played spin the bottle, which was a first for me. And since we outlawed kissing between host siblings in the game since that would, frankly, just be weird (from the moment I met him, Javier has literally felt just like one of my brothers, which is awesome but not so good for spin the bottle). And since only one other girl´s host brother, Andres, was there, there was basically only one guy for me to kiss. Which, also, was a first. What can I say--my first crazy-night-out story.

Also, unfortunately, what I neglected to realize is that what goes along with the crazy-night-out story is the morning-after-the-crazy-night-out hangover. And I know that everyone says this, but after feeling the way I did for most of Sunday, I do not ever intend to do that again. At least, not to excess, for sure. For most of the day, I sat mournfully on the couch, afraid to move, occasionally uttering to whoever was in earshot, "I am SO regretting my life choices right now..." Not a good time and not something I intend to repeat.

To add to my misery Sunday (self-imposed, I know, and deserved), I was finally beginning to feel better to the point where I thought I wanted to join my family for lunch. And whatever they were cooking, it smelled good. And it appeared good--some sort of meat, battered and fried. My mother told me excitedly that it was chanchos, an Ecuadorean "comida típica." So, I cut into it and began to eat...and gradually, but painfully, realized that I was eating a pig´s foot. I ate the majority of it, as any polite gringa would, but it certainly did not do much to help my hangover.

ANYWAY, so skip to today, which was a very fun and interesting day. Last week, we were divided into groups of three and assigned grades at a local school where we were going to teach classes. The girls I was paired up with were assigned two classes with the fifth grade and one class with the first grade. We planned an art class and a culture class for the fifth graders and an art class with the first graders. Today, we actually got to teach our classes.

Walking into the school this morning was very cool--we were immediately greeted by all these smiling kids, all somewhat shyly saying "¡Hola!" and then running away. Our first class was with the fifth graders and it was art class. Since there were three of us in my group and three classes, we each decided to take the lead in teaching one class. And mine was first. I had made drawings of some mythical creatures (a dragon, a unicorn, etc.) and told the kids a bit about what legends and history had to say about each of these creatures. Then, they each got a piece of paper and had to create their own mythical creature. At first, the kids just sort of looked at us quizzically, without making much move to draw anything. So, I got a marker and asked the class to give me an animal, any animal. Someone suggested a fish, so I drew a fish on the whiteboard at the front of the class. I asked for another--a bird. So, I drew wings on the fish. Next--a dragon, so I gave it teeth and had it breathing fire. I asked for a few more animals and added a part of each suggestion into the animal on the board until we had a very strange but very cool creature. After that, they seemed to understand much better what I had been trying to explain and they all set to work, busily drawing their creatures. Once they were all done, we divided them into groups and each group made a scene on a piece of posterboard to glue their creatures onto. My group created a beach, with an ocean for the fish-type animals in the group and a beach for the land-dwellers. All in all, a pretty successful class.

NEXT, came the first graders...and this class, well, NOT so successful, but then, any class wherein the students do not eat each other alive perhaps qualifies as successful for the first graders. They were, in a word, INSANE. We had planned to tell them the story of the Easter bunny and Easter eggs, which they do not really have in Ecuador, and then have the kids each make a bunny mask and decorate an egg. Now, we were not completely unprepared: we had precut and prepared all the masks so all the kids had to do was draw on them, as were the eggs. HOWEVER, it did not matter--after about ten minutes of drawing, we lost them and there was no going back. Some of them were quiet and really into the activity, but the ones who weren´t (namely, a group of little boys at the back of the room) proceeded to run around, jump on each other, hit each other, you name it. I do not know how we made it to the end, but once class was over, we ran out of there like we were being chased by rabid dogs...which, in a sense, we kind of were, since the activity of choice for the kids during recess was to chase us into the bathroom ("la carcel", or "jail"), close the door which did indeed have bars, and lock us in. This, actually, was really funny and very amusing for the kids, so a good time was had by all, more or less.

After recess, our last class was back with the wonderful, angelic, attentive fifth graders. The girl that was leading that class, Kristen, talked to them about culture, about what culture is, and then compared some similar holidays (Independence Day in Ecuador vs. the US and Carnival vs. Mardi Gras). After we were done talking about Mardi Gras, we had the kids make their own Mardi Gras masks (which we had, also, premade). The kids decorated their masks and seemed to really enjoy it. Afterwards, Kristen had happened to bring Mardi Gras beads with her to Ecuador, so she gave one necklace to each kid. We all took pictures with the masks and beads, which was very fun.

After our last class, we talked with the teachers at the school for a while about the challenges of their job and how they do it. Let me tell you, they are saints; they have to be to work for $270 per month, on average (even with the lower cost of living here, that is still NOT at all adequate) and to deal with the lack of funds and resources like they do. I know they talk about the state of US schools and how classrooms are overcrowded, how education is not at a very high standard; but US schools, even the worst, have nothing on the schools here. Besides the fact that the teachers are grossly underpaid and that there are few books or computers or any sort of supplies, the buildings and desks are very rundown, with broken windows and even walls, in some cases. But despite all of that, when we talked with the teachers, they seemed pretty positive and stated the problems with the school system rather matter-of-factly. Overall, a very fun and enlightening experience, for sure.

The rest of this week, unfortunately, does not appear to be too promising as far as fun goes. It is our last week of Spanish classes and being in Los Chillos. Thus, we have multiple papers and exams the rest of this week, which I am NOT looking forward to. And I am DEFINITELY not looking forward to leaving my host family on Sunday (though my mother insists that I must call her if my Quito family does not treat me well, because she will take me back to live with her). But I have the rainforest to look forward to and my Quito homestay after that.

Until next time, ciao!

-Alex