It's been way too long folks...

so I realize that it's taken me awhile to get "back on the wagon" blogger style. I will work on that. Hopefully next week we will have internet...in the HOUSE. I really AM living it up in Ecuador!

I moved a few weeks ago to my friend/coworker/all around favorite Cuencana Maria's house. I am having a blast. It's just her, her daughter and I (a lot less of a ruckus compared to the gringo house) but we have a lot of fun. I've been going to Yungilla the past few weekends with them and my adopted Ecuadorian family which is always a good time.

In other news I am addicted to Pet Society on Facebook. I am also addicted to calling it Littlest Pet Shop, for some reason.

School is going well. We just got internet installed today which is a big releif as the computer teacher. I was getting sick of diagraming computers and drawing our ideal peripherals. Yes, peripherals. Just because they're English Language Learners doesn't mean they can't have a nerdy computer vocabulary!

Apart from teaching computers, I work with the 2-4 year olds and the Kindergarteners. The babies, 2-4 yrs, are soooooo precious. They love to sing and dance, especially to Barney's famous: "Clean up, Clean up Everybody Everywhere"...I honestly never thought I would be singing that song past the age of 7. Either way, they're great. I usually cheat and whisper to them in Spanish. Things like: aw you're so cute, you were very well behaved today, isn't tia Erin cool? Usually things to make them love me.

The Kindergarteners on the other hand...well...they made a teacher cry the other day. Yikes. One of the students (which was hilarious to watch by the way) peed off of a tree stump right next to the patio in front of the school...on the first day. (He whips it out on many occasion.) And that's just one of the 20 bundles of joy. (I realize that that statement may have sounded as if I were referring to newborns, I apoligize, I just couldn't think of anything more clever plus I am pretty lazy en esta epoca.)

Oh, I am going to dance classes. It's like dance class plus arobics and no breaks. It's sweatty, but realllll good. I am learning to dance, por FIN, and break the stereotype that gringas can't move their hips. Well guess who can now? THIS GUY...girl...whatever. Regardless if I rock at dancing now, I still get made fun of by virtually everyone there, it comes with the territory I guess.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the brief update. Please send me a comment or two to let me know that someone out there reads this thing. Chau, cuidense.

new pictures

Hola everyone. I uploaded some new pictures in a new Picasa Web Album. Check it out: Ecuador August 2009

accosted by the vaca loca!

Hola everyone, I hope you are enjoying summer vacation as much as I am. It certainly doesn't feel like summer in Cuenca, though for about an hour each day it gets pretty warm :)

I have decided that I won't make any more excuses for not updating, other than I've been really busy. Ok, that's the last one...I really do promise this time to write more often! Ok. I am going to try to sum up the last month as briefly as possible because, well, a lot has happened.

After the school year ended I went with my friend Maria and her family to the beach. The town is called Playas (which means beaches in Spanish) but I had fun pretending the name was actually Playas as in, what a playa! (If you don't get it, that's ok.) The waves were the biggest I have ever seen, and I guess those beaches are one of the best surf spots on the west coast of S. America. I had a lot of fun and got a LOT closer to the family. Literally, 14 of us shared the beach house! They've been really great to me.

I enjoyed the next week hanging around Cuenca with no obligations! It was nice to actually be on vacation in the city and hang around town. My new favorite activity is going to the central park and watching people. I mean not creepily, it's just really interesting the mix of people who come to Cuenca. Whether its tourists from other countries, people from the campo, or people from the coast or the amazon (who you can pretty much pick out by their accents and stature)...it's a really cool mix of people.

The next week was pretty much a wash because somehow I picked up a bacterial infection in my stomache. (This is not uncommon here, in fact, you're not TRULY an ecuadorian adventurer if you don't get some sort of stomache infection: bacterial or parasites) I have really great roomates (all 8 of them!) and they kept me company because being sick in foreign lands is no fun!!

By the following week I was getting pretty sick of being on vacation...mainly because I was broke! :) So I started work in the CEDEI office with the directors. I mainly do document translation for my school but I have also started working on "Special Projects" which pretty much means I do anything they want me to do :) It's actually pretty interesting. I am making a mock internet course on Moodle to train one of the directors, and giving proposals on a study abroad plan we hope to pilot in October. So I am definately keeping busy. I am also starting an English tutorial starting tomorrow for some girls who are attending one of the best private schools in Cuenca, no pressure...

I plan on taking one short trip to Quito to visit my friend Allison who is coming down to study for the semester at the end of the month. I am going up with my friend/new cousin :) and am glad I don't have to make the 10 hour bus ride alone! I can't wait!

I start school (teacher training) on the 31st of this month and will be teaching pre-K ALL DAY! (I am no longer the GYM teacher, boo. That's the way things work around here, changing all the time!) I am their primary English, Math and Reading teacher and the nice thing is that I will be working less hours but still teaching the same amount of classes each week. The plan is to still ride the buseta (school bus) with them because, well, it's free and it's fun to get to know the kids.

I think that suffices for now. I will continue with hilarious commentary on my life at a later date ;) I miss all of you! Remember you always have an open invitation to come down! Cuidense.

Oh by the way (in reference to the title of this post): I went to this festival for the patron saint of a church near my house on Friday night and there's this fake cow that a person dances around with to music. There were probably like 100 people outside of this church gathered in a huge circle and my friends and I were on the inner ring of the circle. Anyway the dude with the cow came up to me and hit me in the chest with the cow's nose. It was supposed to be funny but he only hit me and not one other person of the hundred that were there...so, weird. I guess you had to be there.

who invited the pukey gringa?

Hello friends. I realize I haven’t updated in awhile and I am sorry for that. I had strep throat last week and this week marked the end of the school year. Needless to say, I’ve been pretty occupied.

So we ended the school year with a big party on Wednesday night but there wasn’t enough money in the budget (apparently) for lighting. Remember that we are in the mountains on the equator so when it gets dark, it gets DARK. It doesn’t help that this school is in the boonies. It was pretty funny because we had a dj that played mostly Michael Jackson songs (people here are still in mourning) but no one danced because you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I dubbed it the lamest party ever, but my jefa (boss) seemed to think that it went off without a hitch—maybe lighting is a cultural taboo I have not yet experienced in all my time in Ecuador… Anyway, I have one last meeting today about next school year and then I am on vacatio. I have to double check this with the director but I heard from multiple people that only 2 kids signed up for the summer camp that I am/was running for the next 3 weeks starting July 27^th. I’m not too worried because there are always jobs for English teachers here, you just have to know where to look. I might be able to do some odd jobs for the next month or so, which would be just fine with me because I would still get paid the same. So we’ll see. If more kids sign up for camp in the next week—it’s a go…but if not, then I’ll let you know what I am doing!

This weekend I was going to go to Isla de La Plata, “the poor man’s Galapagos”, for some camping/snorkeling/whale watching with my German roommate but we waited too long to get tickets! I guess it’s a lesson in: getting my butt in gear and buying the tickets ahead of time. It was a really good deal too…damn. Well I am sure that I can go find something cool to do. I mean come on, I’m in Ecuador.

So anyway what I ended up doing instead this weekend is my friend invited me to go visit a small pueblo about an hour outside of Cuenca because she volunteers with her friends doing social work and running a basketball camp in the town. So we get there on Saturday afternoon only to find that it was that town’s saint day and there was a fiesta. The pueblo, Jadan, is probably only about 50 people but busses came from other pueblos with soccer teams because there was a Futsal tournament (kinda like soccer but smaller ball/cement field) which was the big event. We couldn’t play basketball because the field was occupied but we played with the kids from the town for a long time. Then we went to the church for some kind of meeting with the elders in the town. I was sitting next to three girls and one, Jessica, was staring at me for (literally) 10 minutes. Finally I asked her if she had ever seen a gringa before and she shook her head. Honestly, I don’t think that anyone in that town had either. One little girl came up to me and said: why do you have blonde hair? For lack of a better explanation I just said that I was from the U.S. She then said: Don’t lie to me! And then ran to my friend Cisne and was like, is she lying!? It was a crazy feeling that’s for sure. Later that night we watched a movie called Pollito which was the first Ecuadorian-made movie I’ve ever watched. It was about migration and a little boy from a small pueblo near Quito whose dad leaves him with his grandmother while he tries to go to Spain to find work. It was pretty sad because I know that many of these kids have experienced a lot of the same things as the main character in the film. Migration is a HUGE issue in Ecuador and much of Latin America.

We slept in a room on the bottom floor of a children’s center. It was right off of the town square and because there was a fiesta going on as well as the tournament, I didn’t sleep. However, I was able to use my new knowledge of the indigenous Quechua language because I knew that the people outside of my window were talking about the hangover they would have the next day. Sooo that was neat. The busses came to pick up the teams at 5:30 am and that was when the music stopped and things quieted down, we got up at 8.

But all in all, I had a fun time in the town. When it was time to go home on Sunday I rode with this guy Vinnie, and Gaby and Andres. Everything was going well for the first 20 minutes, we pulled over a few times to take pictures, and it was all good. Then after about half an hour I got sick, like sick sick. It was crazy because I thought that I had gotten over motion sickness in the Andes because I ride the school bus with the kids everyday and believe me you need to have a strong stomach for that. However after thinking about the combination of eating food at the only restaurant in town costing $1.00 in some woman’s kitchen and Vinnie being a horrible driver, it all made sense. I’m never leaving Cuenca without Dramamine again!

Anyway I took it easy for the better part of yesterday but in the evening a roommate and I (I have eight of them so far—there’s room for 10) went to his girlfriends’ performance in the park. She’s a hula-hooper from Wisconsin and she is so freaking cool! There’s a band that plays like bongos, flutes, etc. and then she hoops. I guess they make the big money as soon as church gets out (well like $5 or 6), there were easily 200 people in the mass on Sunday! It is pretty usual that bands and vendors are in the park after mass gets out, now I know why!

Well folks, I need to get going but I hope everyone is having a great summer so far! I’m freezing my butt off but hopefully I’ll get to the coast soon. Make sure to check out my updated Picasa site! Happy Monday!

e.Lo

one point five more weeks of school

Only 8 more days left of school! Woohoo! We end July 15^th, though teachers stay until the 17^th. After that I have a week off until summer camp starts on the 27^th. I am trying to decide what to do/where to go.

I think I am going to go to Saraguro for a few days (about 4 hours outside of Cuenca in the Sierras, and lower elevation which means it's a lot warmer than it is here!). I went there two years ago and it was easily my favorite pueblo. It's completely indigenous and its number one export is handicrafts such as beaded necklaces, rugs, and hammocks. The reason I want to go is to get out of the city for awhile and slow down the pace of life for a bit. Don't get me wrong, the pace of life here is a lot slower than in the US!! But the hikes and views are spectacular, so I can't wait!

I hope everyone had a fun 4^th! I was definitely homesick for the first time since arriving in Ecuador, but I did see some fireworks and drank some brewskis…so pretty much the same right!? I even celebrated national hangover day on Sunday the 5^th, so…

I am meeting more and more people. I mainly hang out with friends from work and my housemates, but I have lately been hanging out with one of my coworkers and her family (Maria). She is from Cuenca but moved to Eden Prairie when she was 19. Now she's back and most of her family lives here. (WEIRD? yes. What is even MORE weird is that one of her cousins is visiting for the summer and she teaches at my old Elementary School--Prairie View!) She has a ton of cousins around my age which is a lot of fun. On Saturday, I taught them the shoulder drinking game, and I ended up losing BIG time, ie-my Sunday the 5th. They're pretty well off. Actually, funny story…Friday was pay day and we were told to meet at this building downtown at 3pm to pick up our checks. We get there and they aren't signed (this is getting to be less and less of a surprise), and we end up waiting until 5 o'clock for this guy to show up. By that time, all of the banks were closed and we were pretty bummed out. Maria to the rescue! She called up her uncle and we signed over our checks to him and he cashed them for us! Gotta love the rich uncles of the world.

So my plan for this week is to get my foot in the door with CEDEI's OTHER school closer to my house and work there part-time starting ASAP. I already talked to my boss at my current school and told her I wanted to work with the Kindergarten and Preschooler's next year (mainly because it's less hours, but of course I didn't say that) and she said fine but I am also the Educación Corporal teacher now for next year for all grades (gym teacher) which is fine with me. We don't really have any resources (ie-balls, jump ropes, etc) so I could use any and all suggestions you have!

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now! I can't believe I've been here for a month already. Make sure to look at my Picasa site because I keep uploading new pictures! Chau chau bacalao's!!

 

no more spideys!

For the last few nights I have waken up to seemingly hundreds (really 15-20) spider bites. Monday night I dreamed I belonged to a Lepper colony. On Tuesday, I moved into the room next door and my bites are gone!!

It's a small victory...I'd just like to thank Earl for moving back to the U.S. so this could be possible. The room is probably double the size, as is the bed.

I PROMISE I will update asap with better pictures and some HILARIOUS commentary. I am so freaking busy; the school bus picks me up at 6:45 everyday and drops me off at 3, then I usually make an appearance at the Orf for a few hours. Next week is the second-to-last week of classes so I get to sleep in an hour and leave an hour early! Yes, the school year is fricken LONG here. Sept-Mid July! But elementary school goes from 7:30-1:30 and High school is from 2-6 or 7. As a teacher, it makes you appreciate the three months off in the summer.

I hope all is well wherever you are!

Picture Website

Instead of posting slideshows that take forever to upload...go to this link to see my photos :)

Picasa Web Albums

Also check this video out. We watched Happy Feet last week and so far the only English command that these kids know is "Dance like a penguin"...sorry Ecuadorian parents--I'm new.