Frog BirdsThere are these birds that hang out outside my window from time to time, and I swear to God, they sound more like bloated frogs when they chirp than they do like birds. They seem to like playing around in this weird fruit tree. I think they’re great. Sometimes the noise they make even sounds mechanical, like a metallic croak or something. To top it off, they are these pudgy, little gray birds with bright orange beaks, so they’re uber-cute as well. I can’t decide whether my new favorite bird is the pelicans that steal all the fish from the fisherman or these guys. I think I’d have to go with these guys. Tough decision.
UpdatesI have a million bagillion small updates on people that I might get out of the way now. As far as people who live here, I’m down to just Peter once again. Both Tom, Peter’s friend, and Joanna, his girlfriend, have gone since I last wrote. Joanna is a medical student in Germany, and she had to be back in time to start another shift at the hospital immediately after completing the arduous journey of arriving back home. Tom is actually in the U.S. right now, visiting his girlfriend who’s studying in Florida.
Worse still, March is Peter’s last month here in Ecuador. He’s going to Argentina on March 21st for a few days, after which he’ll be flying directly back to England. He’ll be spending only a few days in England before pursuing another teaching position (or some other Peter-approved job) in France. Peter speaks French as a foreign language in addition to Spanish. So sad that he’s going. Can you believe I’ve known him since November?
Speaking of England, that’s where Tom (Carla’s Tom) is now, having made good on his promise to make his first official purchase back home a healthy portion of “real” bacon. (Go, Tom! We already miss you here on the peninsula.) He starts his advanced teacher’s training tomorrow. How quickly one goes from being the teacher to being the student. Unfortunately, I won’t be seeing Tom for two and a half months.
The new volunteer who’s coming here, Adam, is officially in Ecuador. He flew in with the rest of the March volunteer group three days ago. I’ll be meeting him for the first time next weekend. He’s coming here for his site visit. We’ve been in contact via email, and I’ve managed to convince him to run a 10k race in Salinas taking place next week Sunday. It should be fun. I’m really pumped to meet the guy.
TeachingI have, surprisingly enough, a lot of things to say about teaching, despite the fact that I haven’t been teaching at all for the last week.
As the final major requirement in module 8, the oral presentations my students had spent so much time preparing went exceptionally well. I was slightly worried that a few of my students weren’t going to be able to finish their projects in time, but everything seemed to come together in the final days. A number of them chose really interesting topics as well, ones that I certainly wasn’t expecting. One student talked about the origins of Christianity and the early Christian church, one student talked about the Glass Ceiling, a book highlighting the challenges women face in advancing in the workplace (big ups to the Ecua-feminism!) and another student talked about the historical, as opposed to theatrical, Emily Rose (who, coincidentally enough, is actually named Analiese Rose). I was extremely impressed with how professional my students spoke and the amount of effort many of them put into research and pronunciation. I almost shed a tear… not really, but we can always pretend.
I found out only about a week before the actual date, but my school has moved from Santa Elena to Salinas. I remember walking into school one day just about two weeks ago and Humberto telling me, “Remember not to come in next week because nothing will be here.” Funny how quickly they’ll pull something like that on you in Ecuador. One day you’re here, one day you’re gone.
The reason is that the lease ran out on the building in Santa Elena. The building is now going to be a sort of municipal headquarters for provincia 24. Unfortunately, I have no idea in what capacity. Maybe I’ll try to find out from Humberto in the coming days here. He’s a bit stressed out as it is, though. He’s really taken charge in keeping CELEX running out of Salinas instead of Santa Elena. I don’t know too much behind the politics of it all, but the owner of CELEX, the specific language institution I work for, isn’t as into the Santa Elena location as he used to be. As such, there was a time when it looked as if the whole organization would have to shut down at my location (which would have effectively liberated me off my volunteer position). But, because of people like Tom and Humberto, things are still off and running. In the meantime, however, Humberto’s been working his ass off in trying to move all of the necessary materials, furniture, etc. from point A to point B. While I was off romping around all over Ecuador, Humberto was not having quite the vacation I was back here.
I went with Humberto today, however, to check out the new school and find out as much information on my new class as I could, and this did afford me the opportunity to help with the moving, even if my contribution was rather small. I helped him move a bunch of cleaning chemicals, brooms and other boxed things from the new school back to his apartment. Nuestro Mundo, which is—get this—also a grade and high school, doesn’t exactly have the same storage space that the old school used to have. Fortunately, Humberto’s got a little extra space back home. As we moved things in from the cab, Tarjelia, the office secretary, was busy printing things out in Humberto’s computer room. Once we’d finished, he showed me his satellite TV. Humberto was quite proud of the two hundred channels that he receives. I didn’t dare tell him that two hundred is just a drop in the bucket compared to the average household in U.S. Shh!
What else can I tell you? I’ll be teaching absolute beginners this time around, which kind of scares me because—besides for teaching training five months ago—I haven’t ever worked with this level of beginners. I teach the same class for four hours a day, five days a week. Apparently (and I didn’t know this before today), I’m going to be teaching in the mornings instead of at night. I’ll be teaching from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. each day, which I’m kind of split about. I’ve gotten used to the night class thing. Oh well, maybe this will be better. Keeping positive, that’s what I’m doing. At least this will allow me to take advantage of running just before it gets dark. Besides very early in the morning (it’s too tough to wake up that early), this is when it’s the coolest.
Travel
While I could probably write a short novel with all of the travel stuff I’ve been doing over the last week, I’ll try to streamline things as much as I can.
I rushed to get my grades in two weeks ago Friday, but there wasn’t any point to this. Originally, I was going to spend some time in the jungle, but because of some planning miscommunications with a couple of other volunteers, it turned out that plan wasn’t going to work. I called up a whole bunch of people on Saturday morning to see if anyone else had off and, yes, some of them did, but they had other plans. Finally, I got a hold of BobbiLe, the volunteer from Minnesota who lives and works in Portoviejo, and she said, “Well, my host family is going to the beach tomorrow. I’ll ask if it’d be all right if you come too.” Later that afternoon, I took off up the coast to Portoviejo.
BobbiLe’s host family, Josh, the other Porto volunteer, and I all loaded into their family truck and, after a quick stop for a delicious bowl of encebollado, we were off to San Jacinto. The beach at San Jacinto is much more gradual than at a place like Montañita, which gives it its own sorts of ups and downs. The really fun part about San Jacinto is that the tide is really, really powerful in certain locations. Josh and I had a blast swimming with the waves as hard as we could, having them lift us into the air and then feeling the power of the waves crash us down into the swells beneath us. Most times the force of the water was so much that it literally rolled us along the ocean floor. On a completely unrelated topic, it was funny as hell when BobbiLe fell asleep on the beach and the tide began to push its way up the beach. Of all people, it was BobbiLe’s host mother who urged us not to wake her up. She was also the one laughing the hardest when the tide startled BobbiLe awake.
After a couple of days in Portoviejo, I decided to press onward with the vacation. Since I was already halfway there (more or less), I thought I would hop a bus to Quito to visit my beloved, old host family, the Pazmiños. I didn’t initially realize that Isaac, my good friend who lives in Vilcabamba, was also visiting the Pazmiños with his mom, who’d come from Berkeley to see her son. The reunion I shared with everyone on Monday morning was all too homely.
On Monday afternoon, I tagged along with Isaac and his mom, Anita, in the colonial part of Quito. We hiked around, checking out the sites, and stopped at this pretty hipster Ecuadorian restaurant to grub it up. That night, we ate a big meal with the Pazmiños, and I hit the sack early; dumb night buses wear me down big time. However, they’re extremely convenient.
On Tuesday, I woke up early and went for a short run, only to be reminded of the atrocious amount of transportation-related air pollution in Quito. My dad would have been proud, though, of my response to Anita’s question upon my return to the Pazmiño household. When she asked me if I was tired after running, I responded, “Yeah, I’m exhausted.” Really good, right? Yesch.
Later on, I met up with Ava, a Quito volunteer, and did some touristy type things in the city. We went to a reptile exhibit, a place called the Vivarium located in a huge park in the middle of Quito, and saw a bunch of poisonous snakes, turtles and stuff. Apparently, you can hold a boa constrictor or something for $3. It’s located in this weird backroom, and you have to ask to be able to do it. Unfortunately (maybe not so much), I didn’t know about this at the time. After the Vivarium, Ava and I went to check out this really impressive garden that’s also a part of Parque Carolina. The best part about the garden is the orchid exhibit. I had no idea so many different types of orchids existed! How pretty.
That afternoon, I took a hike into the Mariscal, my volunteer organization’s stomping grounds during orientation, and did some important shopping. After that, I met up with Kane, one of my field directors, and we ate some big sandwiches and caught up with all the goings-on we hadn’t had the chance to discuss since the Mid-service meeting that had happened over a month ago. Kane has so much happening in his life it’s almost ridiculous. I won’t get into all the details, but just as soon as he finishes up with WorldTeach, he’s going to be getting married, after which graduate school starts. Lots of planning for the Kane Dogg.
The day before, I’d whipped out a little “los invitamos” action to invite the Pazmiños out for dinner on Tuesday night. We loaded up into two cabs, soon finding ourselves at a little place called Toronto. Toronto is one of these big buffet places, only Ecua-style this time around. I always laugh because Marci, my former host mother, eats meat like no other (and she’s a small woman, which makes it that much funnier). I can’t exactly guess how much meat she ate at Toronto, but it was a lot! Ha! I get such a kick out of Marci. She certainly plowed through a lot of chuleta.
On Wednesday, after a lunch of guacamole, choclo (white corn), papas (potatoes), ensalada (salad) and fritada de pavo (fried turkey, of which I ate its fried, little heart) to rival the night before, Isaac, Anita and I took of for a mountain city about two hours south of Quito. Latacunga almost instantly entered into my top 10 coolest places in Ecuador. Immediately after getting off the bus, Isaac, who had been to the place previously during his travels, popped into a bakery and emerged with a hunk of cheese and a special type of roll called an allulla. Together, the queso de hoja and the roll fried in pork fat, compose a sort of regional food combination that must work to clog every artery in your body. There were, however, as good as they sound. Another cool thing about Latacunga, besides that it’s really clean, is that the volcanoes Iliniza and the monster Cotopaxi are very close to the city. In fact, they call the region that Latacunga lies in “volcano alley,” because of these two and other nearby volcanoes. Too bad we weren’t in Latacunga on a clearer day. A smaller, but still appreciable, aspect of Latacunga I also really liked was that Isaac and I found an internet café with the fastest connection I’ve yet had in Ecuador. It was even fast enough that we could watch a video that Steph had sent me and some other choice clips off YouTube (if any of my friends read this, I was sure to introduce Issac to our good friend Jack Rebney). After some quality interneting, we headed back to the pretty nice—and surprisingly inexpensive—room that we’d booked. We watched a bit of Underworld with Spanish subtitles before the vampire vs. werewolf conflict bored me to sleep. I’m usually so into fantasy!
The next morning, the three of us woke up at 5:15 to do one of the coolest things I’ve done in Ecuador. We hopped onto a bus that took us to a town twenty minutes down the road, to a place called Saquisili. Saquisili hosts a market every Thursday morning. And while this may not sound all that great alone, you must consider two things: who attends this market, and what is sold there. First, the primary people who partake in this market are all Quechuan, that is, they are the indigenous mountain people of the Andes, direct descendants of the Incans. So where my Spanish has been improving all the months, I went back to ground zero in Saquisili. Quechuan people have their own language, and it ain’t Español! Second, while food—of course—is sold in the marketplace, the areas we chose to focus on were the animal markets.
Thursday morning in Saquisili started off innocuously enough. Isaac acting as our tour guide, we got a bit lost upon getting off the bus and took a rather lengthy hike around the town before wising up and asking for directions to the animal markets. It should have been no mystery for us to get there: just follow the trucks with all the farm creatures jammed together in their beds! You hear the Saquisili markets before you see them. Some woman was talking into a loudspeaker, advertising some wonder drug that cures everything from hypertension to prostate cancer, I’m sure. When you get a little closer, you can see all the animals.
We went to the pig market first. The pig market was a wide open—and quite stinky—piece of land littered with either black or white pigs, something like polka dots over a blanket of mud. Each pig had an owner who held a rope tied to some part of each pig, usually one of its legs. Every once in a while, a pig would go absolutely bonkers, either because of another pig or because of some unknown dispute it conjured up with its owner. Suddenly a pig would produce a great racket and try to take off. This was when the strength and will of its owner was tested. This was also the time when Mark got particularly frightened, because here is an irritated and snorting two hundred pound animal trying to break free of its comparatively meek-looking master. Quechuans, in general, are not big people. Quechuans, in general, are significantly stronger than they appear. Still, even when a reasonably large pig did manage to tear the rope out of its owners hands, the pig never made it very far before it would either decide to stop running or another Quechuan would step on the loose animal’s rope.
Isaac and I (Anita, perhaps wisely, decided to remain a safe distance back) also had a great time listening to everyone barter. The half Spanish, half Quechuan hybrid was in full force! This isn’t even to mention the customary dress that everyone was decked out in—invariably including a really cool traditional style hat (that I really need to include a photo of… stupid camera). Isaac and I tried to determine how much an average pig went for, and the best I could figure out was that two relatively young piglets went for around forty dollars. It definitely wasn’t what I was used to, seeing indigenous people holding big wads of dirty, dirty American dollars. In general, Quechuans are an extremely frugal people. Watching them flip through a small stack of twenties was one of the last sights I might have expected to come away from this experience having seen. Apparently, you can make some money being a farmer.
After that, we hit up the cow market, which just wasn’t as exciting. The best part about the cow market was watching some of the helpers feed the calves. If nothing else, the calves were that much cuter than the big smelly pigs.
We spent a good deal of time looking at all of the different foods in the market as well. The most striking food you could buy was the guinea pigs. Merchants kept hordes of guinea pigs inside big tan wicker baskets. They’d arranged these baskets in a sort of semi-circle, which acted as a kind of guinea pig warehouse, so to speak. The actual sales took place in the middle of the semi-circle. There, merchants picked fresh guinea pigs out of plastic sacks. Buyers then had their choice of any merchant’s stock. If they decided they liked a certain guinea pig, it was put inside the buyer’s plastic sack. A few dollars were exchanged, thus completing the transaction. In general, I think a full-grown guinea pig goes for around $2. For better or for worse, these little guys aren’t destined to become Nutters, Butterscotch or any other cherished third grade classroom pet. No sir, these guinea pigs live out a much less promising existence.
Later on Thursday afternoon, we checked out of our hostal and hopped on a bus that would take us closer to the Quilotoa Crater, a really famous land feature here in Ecuador. Quilotoa is an inactive volcano crater that, over the years, has filled in with water. I’d heard about the place before from other volunteers, but I had no idea how immense or beautiful the crater really is.
The bus ride to get from Latacunga to Zumbahua, the closest settlement that allows you access to the crater, is absolutely incredible. The whole way there, you’re above 3800 m, so you’re not that incredibly high up, but it’s still quite a distance to be in the sky. Before you even get too far outside of Latacunga, the mountainsides turn into a black, brown and green patchwork of farm fields and animal pastures. You can see Quechuan shepherds leading their sheep to water or some other destination along the mountainsides. Much of the road here is still paved, but once you get beyond Zumbahua, much of it is gravel and dirt (this really, however, doesn’t affect how fast the bus drivers are still willing to go).
After twisting and turning through this dream landscape for a couple of hours, Isaac and Anita arrived at their destination, Tigua, where they had plans of spending the night at one of the nicer hostals in the area. The two of them had plans of hiking south into the mountains, and I just couldn’t spare that much time myself. They wouldn’t see the Quilotoa crater until Sunday, and I taught on Monday, so I’d known for a little while that we’d have to make the split eventually. I waved to them as the bus pulled away and they confusedly began their search for the hostal they’d being trying to get in touch with by cell phone for the last few days. I carried on for about another twenty or thirty minutes inside the bus until arriving at Zumbahua.
I was pretty hungry by the time I’d arrived, and Isaac had recommended a place near where the bus leaves you off, so I thought I’d give it a try. The place I went inside advertised that it was a restaurant, but in a town of that size, that really doesn’t mean there will be food. I inquired inside, a guy went back to the kitchen, and after opening a big stainless steel pot, responded that, yes, he could serve me scrambled eggs and rice. I said perfect. After I’d eaten a bit, I spent some time chatting up the locals and one of them mentioned that he could take me to Quilotoa in his truck. I might have mentioned this before, but any and everyone in Ecuador doubles as a taxista. It doesn’t matter if their vehicle isn’t properly marked or it isn’t registered with some organization, almost every car on the road will give you a ride somewhere. While this might sound slightly scary, you don’t have much of a choice when you’re in a town this small. A bus only goes from Zumbahua to Quilotoa once or twice a day, and I definitely didn’t have the patience or the knowledge to time that up correctly. This guy told it’d be $5 for the thirty-minute ride. What a rate! And in the mountains, no less. This was the price that Lonely Planet mentioned as well, so don’t think I was getting any sort of special treatment (or that I was overpaying the infernal gringo tax).
Edwardo (yes, Jesse) drove me in his red truck from the restaurant to the tiny town of Quilotoa, which has really only come into existence in the last few years as a result of tourism. Before long, Edwardo had filled the bed of his truck with a number of locals as well. We talked a lot about tourism and what it’s meant for the area, and also some of the differences between people living in the mountains and people living on the coast or elsewhere in Ecuador. Edwardo had a lot of questions for me about how much I’ve been enjoying Ecuador and why. I, of course, cited the food. Edwardo, as well as anyone else I’ve ever talked to it about, was extremely pleased with my reply. I’m not sure that I’ve encountered the same sort of pride that people have in how beautiful Ecaudor is, or how good the food is here. The road finally leveled off at a small gate. I paid the $1 entrance fee to Quilotoa and Edwardo dropped me off at a hostal he insisted a friend of his owned. The place was pretty nice, but if I had to do it all over again, I would have stayed at the community-owned hostal that’s just up the road from the one I stayed at. I like trying to support the little guy as much as I can.
Humberto, the owner of the hostal I stayed at, showed me to my room. There were three individual rooms connected together, of which I was paying for one. Pairs of people were staying in the rooms above and beside me, but no one was in at the moment. A small stove beside my bed kept the small complex warm. Quilotoa was freakin’ cold (actually, so was Quito) and I was damn happy that stove was where it was. I spent a little time chatting to Humberto about the place before asking him how to arrive at the crater. Basically, he pointed up the street—the street that defines the town—and told me to walk.
One of the really cool things about the Quilotoa crater, besides that it’s crazy beautiful and pretty ridiculously cheap to go see, is that it doesn’t look like anything from a distance. That is to say, the way that the feature was geographically formed, it’s fairly hidden within the surrounding mountains. When you arrive to Quilotoa and actually have the chance to see it up close, the whole immense landform seems to emerge out of nowhere. There’s a big sign up the road from the hostal that points you in the right direction. Originally, I thought I might have to walk for some time, but about five minutes into it, I found myself ducking down a short trail, and then—BOOM!—I was looking at one of the most incredible sites I’ve ever seen stretched out before me. It was five or six o’clock by that time, and it was drizzling slightly, so between the fog and the failing light, I didn’t have much time to explore on Friday.
Eventually, I retreated to the hostal, where I found my other roommates had since returned. I struck up a conversation (“Where are you guys from anyways?) with the two guys in the room beside mine after I’d heard them speaking in English. They happened to be from Michigan. One of them goes to school in Ann Arbor (shout out to the Cheese!) and he was the one who’s studying in Quito for a while. The other guy had come to visit his friend during his Spring Break (how early is that Spring Break?). We talked about this and that until dinner—that and breakfast included in the cost of the room—at 7:30. After dinner entertainment included trying to relight the fire, which just wasn’t going my way. I took the bull by the horns in getting the helper boy, Humberto’s nephew, to cut us some kindling and gathering some cardboard and matches. I put all of my Eagle Scout experience to work in building a small teepee inside the stove and lighting a delicious, little fire. Unfortunately, my badass Boy Scout skills just weren’t enough to compete with how wet everything had become during the day. Eventually, I conceded and asked Humberto’s nephew to help us out, if he could. He kind of waved me off, but came back after a little while with a cup of what I thought was his Pepsi. Nope, this was, I should have guessed,the cup of kerosene. Pretty soon, we had a roaring fire inside the stove. I was glad he didn’t just come into the room and rearrange a few sticks to get the damn thing going. That would have made me feel like a complete idiot. At least with the kerosene, I only feel like 80% idiotic. The Michigan guys and I had a good laugh about once the helper boy had gone.
I woke up nice and early Saturday morning (Quilotoa doesn’t have much of a nightlife…), and caught as much of the sunrise that remained. I was lucky. The sky had cleared quite a bit from the day before. After eating a little breakfast with the Michigan guys and the rest of the hostal’s guests, I started my hike into the belly of the crater. The lake, or laguna as everyone calls it in Spanish, only takes about half an hour to get to by foot. I made the descent early enough that there still weren’t all that many other tourists out. I liked it better this way. Too bad that meant that I hadn’t given the kayak guys enough time to get to the bottom either. You can actually rent kayaks from people and tool around in the laguna for like $3, that is, if anyone is around to rent them to you. Of course, just as soon as I was halfway back up, that’s when I saw that they’d found their way to the water. No matter. The laguna was crazy beautiful even regulated to its shore. It’s filled with this green sort of water that makes it look like a gigantic mirror from a distance. It’s extremely alkaline as well, so no drinking! I spent a pretty long time just sitting there beside the water and watching the Quechuan shepherds taking urging their flock God knows where. I spotted a small hovel in the side of one the closer mountains and devoted a good deal of time trying to understand how life would be different in a place like this. Being at Quilotoa crater by myself was one of the first times in a very, very long time that I’ve truly felt alone. It was really quite nice.
I bid my farewell to the Michigan guys who were headed on their way down as I was headed back up. It didn’t take me long to get back to the top of the crater, despite what Lonely Planet recommends for travel time. Near the crater head, a local artisan waved me into his home to look at his paintings, which I thought would be cool to see. This guy also rented out horses to take you up and down the trail to the lake. Isaac had mentioned that he’d seen pairs of local boys running horses back and forth along the steep mountain trail, taking horses to and from and tourists for a few cents from the horses’ owners. The boys made a race of it, so Isaac mentioned that it was pretty cool to see all of these kids doing this amazing physically feat as if it was nothing. I wondered then how many of this artist/business owner’s kids who’d followed us inside to get a look at the gringo who could speak some Spanish, did that kind stuff. After that, I took an absolutely freezing cold shower and called up Edwardo, who’d promised me the day before that he’d be willing to drive up and take me back to Zumbahua. On the way back down, Edwardo pointed out all of the fields of plants, which I’m pretty sure was hops, that gets shipped out to make Pilsener beer. Who would have thought that’s where they grow it?
Back in Zumbahua, I flagged down a bus headed to another city called Quevedo. The ride from Zumbahua to Quevedo is supposed to have some of the nicest vistas of any bus ride in the whole country, and it really was quite impressive. I watched the mountain scenery give way to the cocoa and banana plantations below. I began to see just how it’s possible that something like 70% of the world’s banana supply comes from Ecuador. You can drive for miles and see nothing but endless rows of banana trees.
In Quevedo, we took a roundabout way of finding the bus terminal. Once we’d gotten there, I bought a ticket to Guayaquil and grabbed a quick bite to eat. I don’t have much to say about the bus ride back to Guayaquil, other than that one of the coolest parts about my entire vacation was getting to witness the effects the rain has had on some of the towns outside of Guayaquil. When I mentioned in the last post that it’s been raining a lot, I don’t think that was an accurate enough telling for a place like Babahoyo, where children were making the most of the rain, swimming in an area that was once their yard, using 7up bottles for water wings. In some places, I doubt even I could have stood up and still been breathing. Really, many of the homes were well equipped to deal with the deluge. They’d been built on bamboo stilts and could even handle another foot or two before the floorboards would be underwater. These were the homes that men and women were traveling back and forth between in thin wooden canoes. Other homes, however, were not so prepared. These were the homes whose windows peaked out of the water like a hippo’s eyes. I wonder if, even after the rainy season, they can ever be salvaged. Seeing this area made me realize just why Rafael Correa had declared a national state of emergency. In a place like Babahoyo, something like 75 or 80% of its residents are swamping out their homes.
I gained a sudden appreciation for why civil engineers build the roads the way they do—high and dry. Only in one place had the rainwater washed over the road. The bus easily chugged through about three inches of water, the only thing slowing us down were the somewhat more hesitant vehicles and motorcycles in front of us. The banana plantations outside either set of windows were helplessly flooded. In some places, it seemed as if we were driving upon an island between lakes. I imagined a miles long bridge; the other passengers and I moving along a strip of land surrounded by nothing but trees and crops with their roots submerged. Tall swatches of grass like many-fingered hands struggled to keep themselves above water. I must admit that the bus ride home from Quevedo was visually on par with the Quilotoa crater, but with a much different sort of sentiment attached to it.
Back in Guayaquil, I was a big moron and got onto a bus headed in the opposite direction from the terminal. It took me about forty-five minutes out of my way before I was able to get on a bus headed back where I needed to be. Lesson learned: always ask before you get on! Suddenly the taxistas in the Trans Esmeraldas station demanding $3 for a five-minute cab ride didn’t seem so evil. I made it back to the peninsula by around 11:00 at night.
I spent Saturday and Sunday just resting up and taking it somewhat easy. Peter and I caught up on the adventures we’d been having over the last week on Saturday. We spent today, Sunday, at the beach with Hannah, the Peace Corps volunteer who lives in Palmar that I mentioned in the last post. Carla is somewhere in the house right now, making vanilla ice cream. I can’t be writing this all night if it means she’ll eat it all without me!
Other News
This may be somewhat difficult to believe, but today is my six-month anniversary in Ecuador. Crazy, I know. I can hardly believe I’ve been here this long. Yeah, me! I’ll drink a Pilsener tonight with Peter to celebrate.
Other than that, I bought my plane ticket home while I was at the internet café in Latacunga. So it’s official now: I’ll be home from the 6th to the 21st of April. While it’s always awesome to see the family, I’m most excited to see my girlfriend, Steph. It’s hard to describe how much emotional support she’s given me throughout my being here. “One more month, just one more month,” I keep telling her now that we’re edging along that border. (I think I probably remind her too much….) March is going to be a drag when I’m looking forward this much to April.
God, waiting is hard work! I need to do something to distract myself.
