Let the countdown begin!

This weekend was a relatively lowkey one. After getting back from the coast last Wednesday night, almost all the students were physically and emotionally exhausted (not to mention, a few of my classmates may have brought some friends back from the coast with them in the form of parasites...yay!). Friday, I hung out with my host family and, as boring as it sounds, went to bed fairly early. I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow and, perhaps for the first time since being here, I slept like a rock and did not wake up once until my alarm went off early the next morning.

I got up early Saturday and, with my game plan written out on a piece of paper, set off to buy all the things I needed to buy to prepare for my independent study project in the Galapagos, which begins next Sunday (!). Lots of fun things, like a bed net and a face net, bugspray, sunscreen, garlic and B-complex to help keep the mosquitos at bay when the bugspray fails, a sleeping bag (yes, Mom, I know you told me to bring one and yes, I remember telling you that, "Oh no, I´ll never need one!"...but hey, at least in Ecuador, it is possible to get a really nice sleeping bag for all of $20--thank God for the lower price of living!), rubber boots, gardening gloves, and loads more of fun stuff. I went to one of the many giant, new malls in Quito, but one I had never been to before and, lucky for me, it pretty much had everything I needed. The only hiccup was when I asked the lady at the checkout of the ferretaria where I was buying my rubber boots where I could buy a bed net. She told me, "Oh, only in the centrohistorico!" That was disheartening (I did not really feel like getting robbed at knifepoint or pickpocketed or both, as was sure to happen if I ventured there on my own). Luckily, I did not listen to her and, when I spotted an outdoorsy-looking store, went in and asked if they had bed nets and sure enough, they did! They also, lucky for me, had some wonderfully fashionable facenets attached to some form of plastic hat thing...I will need to take a picture of myself in my whole volunteer get-up when I get to the Galapagos--facenet, rubber boots, gardening gloves, and all) to provide everyone with a good laugh.

After my shopping excursion, as boring as it is, I spent much of the afternoon working on a paper at the local Internet cafe that is due Monday. However, out of the blue, some friends called me to see if I wanted to go to the movies...in 30 minutes. Now, this might be doable in Cary, NC, but when you live in the very northernmost part of Quito and the theatre your friends are talking about is in the center of the city...not so much. So I sprinted home from the Internet cafe, changed, grabbed some cash, and hailed the first cab I could on the autopista. It was one of the times when I was glad of how crazy the cabs are here--I got there in no time and met up with my friends in the lobby at the very minute when the movie was supposed to start...although we then proceeded to stop and get some food and drinks and stuff, and ended up walking into the movie about twenty minutes late.

Despite missing the first twenty minutes, it was a really good movie--"Desapareció en la Noche" (aka. "Gone Baby Gone")--with Morgan Freeman and Casey Affleck. Really sad, but really good. It was in English with Spanish subtitles, which was nice for us. But it was hilarious reading the subtitles written for the characters´truly obscene dialogue (the language was kind of "Deadwood" meets Boston, basically). I never knew how to say, "Go f*** your mother!" in Spanish until I read the subtitles in "Gone Baby Gone." It´s amazing what you learn from the movies!

After the movie, we split up--Robin to go hang out with some friends, Laney to go deal with the parasite that may or may not have been feasting on the contents of her intestines, and Rachel to go on a "non-date" (kind of the way those guys from the US Embassy kept calling the base in Manta a "non-base") with a "28-year old kind-of-pudgy Ecuadorean ´philosopher`(aka. `unemployed´). Lara, my partner from the coastal village homestay, and I got some icecream and hung out for a while before taking a rather interesting cab ride around the city (the driver was apparently completely confused by the directions we gave him, so we ended up on the opposite side of the city from where we needed to be).

Today, I got up and caught a bus to Los Chillos to visit my family there and have lunch with them. Because of the whole Trebol disaster I mentioned a week or two ago, the road between Quito and Los Chillos was a complete mess, so it took a little more than an hour. However, finally, the bus dumped me off at good old Puente 8, the stop I had learned so well during my month in Los Chillos. I walked from the autopista down the familiar, winding road, through the park, and reached my old house just as Silvana was getting home from church. It felt so strange to be back--good, but strange. I felt as though I had come home, kind of, like I should be staying there, not just visiting for lunch.

Javier was in the backyard with Magdalena when I got there, pruning the bushes and trying to tie some of the branches into an arch (it sort of worked). I sat back there talking with them for a while, with the cat Culón in my lap (still definitely my favorite cat ever). We eventually went inside and had "sopa de china" (some kind of Chinese-style soup with egg and unidentifiable bits of meat in it), choclo (corn), rice, what I think was maybe a steak of beef (the meat here has no steroids like in the US, so it is all tougher and with less fat...so sometimes, it is hard to tell what you are eating except a piece of really tough meat of some kind), and (my FAVORITE!) jugo de coco (coconut juice...as in, Silvana cut up a coconut and put it in the blender with milk and sugar as we were sitting there....sooooo good!). All in all, a very delicious meal, for sure.

We talked for a while after lunch. They told me how Nathaly had left to study abroad in the US two weeks ago and that she was going to be studying in Florida for a year! And of course, how Magdalena had cried and cried when Nathaly left and Nathaly, likewise, had made many teary-eyed phone calls home since arriving in the US. I told them that, if they could give me Nathaly´s cell phone number in the US, I could maybe call her and visit her sometime since she is going to be in the US a whole year.

Eventually, it came time to leave and I said goodbye (and this time, it somehow felt worse to say goodbye than when I left them a few weeks ago for my Quito family...don´t know why...), promising to do my best to visit them one more time before going back to the US. Magadalena, for her part, reiterated her offer that she made me when I first arrived at their house way back in February, insisting that I bring my family to come stay with them and visit sometime.

Tomorrow, my very last week of class begins. And exactly a week from now, I will be in the Galapagos, beginning my three-week independent study project there. Words cannot describe how excited I am. While I know I should enjoy this week, since it is my last week of class here, I kind of just want to fast-forward through it and get to the Galapagos!

Take care and until next time, ciao!

-Alex

After lunch, we talked