All sorts of happenings.

So many things to say!

The first and most important though is that I THINK I FOUND A CIRCUS!! I have yet to go and talk to anyone, but I have a lead!!!!! There was a poster up in a café near the university with a picture of a girl doing silks that said there were aerial classes at a gym kind of close by. SO. I am going to go check it out tomorrow. I have already sent an email to the group, but I haven’t heard back.

I think my classes are finally settled for the semester. I kept changing them around, but I’m finally happy with my schedule. For the most part. I’m taking Oral Literature of Ecuador, Geology, Andean Anthropology, Basic Qichua, Weaving, a community service class for my ICRP (Intercultural Research Project), and Capoeira as a gym class. I’m really excited about the weaving class. We’ve already started our first projects and I can’t wait to do more. The Capoeira class is kicking my butt. After the first class my entire body was sore. But that’s a good thing! My Geology class hasn’t started yet. I think it starts Friday.

Of course, not everything has been about classes. I’ve been having all sorts of fun while I’ve been switching around my classes as well. Last week I went to my first Ecuadorian soccer game. It was quite the experience. It was a big game between the rival teams of the two biggest cities in the country: Quito (la Liga) and Guayaquil (Barcelona). Before the game started, there were people going around the outside of the field, kicking soccer balls into the stands. The group I was with ALMOST got a ball twice, but none of us managed to actually go home with one. When the game got started, there were people setting off fireworks, and what looked like flares, from the Barcelona section. They also had to delay the start of the game because there were a bunch of people climbing up on the fence surrounding the field. People here take their soccer seriously. It was fun watching all the fans being super excited about the game and everything that was happening. During the mid-game break, and before the game too, there were a few people out on the field who were driving around little motor-cars and flying a mini plane and mini helicopter around the field. At some point, per the suggestion of my host family, I bought some stadium food: empanadas de morocho. My family wasn’t kidding. They were delicious. The closer we were to the end of the game, the more intense it got, because no one was scoring. In the end, it was a tied game, though la Liga got close to making a goal multiple times and Barcelona only once. When the game finished, we all tried to get out of the stadium and home as fast as we could. The importance of doing so was amplified by the policemen who came out onto the field at the end of the game. In full riot gear, shields and all. The section of Barcelona fans, considerably smaller than that of Liga fans, was let out about 20 minutes later than everyone else as well, presumably to prevent fights. The group I left with was totally unable to find enough taxis to fit all of us, so we got on a bus (usually a no-no so late at night) that took us to the airport, where we were able to get into taxis to take us to our separate homes.

Though I think some of the fans at that game thought so, not everything in life is about soccer. This last weekend, I went with my family to the coast! The ocean here is amazingly warm. We left right after my classes finished on Friday. We had to pack up quickly because the plate on Marco’s car ends in a 9. Wait what? Apparently certain days of the week, at certain times, cars with plates that end in a particular number aren’t allowed to be on the roads in Quito. I got home at 3, Marco’s car couldn’t be on the road past 4. So we threw a bunch of clothing articles into bags, threw the bags into the car, and booked it out of Quito proper until the license plate no longer had the potential to be restricted. At Andres’ empanada shop, we met up with one of Susie’s sisters, Roque, and her 16 year old daughter, Sofy. From there, we set off on the 5 hour (ish) drive to the coast.

The first part of the trip seemed to be totally downhill. Which makes sense, since we had to go from 2 miles up to sea level, but did that ever make for some fun curves. There were signs before a lot of the curves that said “Slow down. NOW!” We definitely drove through both farmland and pure jungle. The first farms were on the steep hillsides, but after we had descended a bit more and passed through the cloud forest area (clouds everywhere, gorgeous mountains, full of extremely green vegetation) the farms became banana farms (I don’t want to call them plantations because they really weren’t big enough). I spent some of the ride listening to current American pop music with Sofy. She seemed to be really into American music for some reason. We arrived late in Esmeraldas, a city on the coast. Driving around trying to find what I thought was going to be a hotel was an adventure. We had to go a certain distance down one pot-hole filled dirt road, turn onto another, then turn back the way we came from on yet another super-sketchy looking road, until we got to a gate with a guard and the name of the “hotel.” Once inside the gate though, it was clear that this was a NICE place. There was a giant pool, everything was freshly painted in pretty colors, the flowers, plants, and grass were all well-kept, and each place for rent was like a mini apartment. Everyone, except the nocturnal teenager, was tired after being in the car for so long, so we stayed up just long enough to watch the end of a telenovela (these people know what is important in life…) and then prepared to crash. Except that Sofy wanted to stay up to watch the Victoria’s Secret Fashion show. Don’t ask me what is so intriguing about an underwear fashion show, but she wanted to watch it, and since the TV was in our room, I watched it too. It was a strange experience to be watching something sort-of in English, but occasionally dubbed in Spanish. I was never quite sure what to listen to.

The next morning, at breakfast in a neighboring town, I had the best thing I have tasted here yet: a coconut batida. A batida is sort of like a milkshake, and the coconut one was absolutely delicious. I want to go back to the coast just to be able to drink more coco juices and batidas. That good. Since we had a large and late breakfast, we spent the next chunk of the day walking of the beach. The tide was a little high, so there were people everywhere, but it was still enjoyable to see everything. There were all sorts of things that one could pay a bit to do. You could put on a life jacket and go tubing on a giant banana-shaped thing behind a boat, or a big triangular thing. OR you could hook yourself up to a parachute and be pulled along way up in the air behind a different boat. And there’s nothing in particular required in order to be able to do this. You just walk up to the guy, pay him, put on a life-jacket, and go. I didn’t try any of the interesting activities, but I think I will if I manage to go back.

We took a break from the beach to swim in the pool and eat something, but Roque was a magnet for walking on the beach, so we soon returned. After dinner though, the tied was out and Sofy and I spent the whole walk looking for snails at the edge of the water. They are extremely fun to dig up. As dusk was falling, Roque and Susie insisted that Sofy and I had to draw hearts in the sand with our names and those of our respective sweethearts. It’s always interesting to me what exactly my host-mom insists I do.

We walked to breakfast the next morning and on the walk back sofy and I found more snails and a bunch of live sand-dollars. I’d never seen one alive before, but there they seemed to be all over the place. Breakfast consisted of one of my new favorite foods here and a shrimp omelet. This new favorite food is called a bolón. Bolónes are made of mashed up green plantains (like a banana, but hardier) rolled into baseball sized balls with cheese in the middle, and fried. They are delicious and nicely filling.

We couldn’t stay long though, because we didn’t want to have a rushed journey back to Quito. Everyone washed up and we all got ready to head out. My shower was comically interrupted by Roque, who didn’t seem to think that I needed privacy in the shower and proceded to fetch her shampoo out of it while I was in the middle of it, trying ineffectively to hide behind the shower curtain. In the end, everyone got clean and packed and off we went. Later, as usual, that planned. We stopped in a couple different places along the way, one to buy fruit, one to eat lunch, another to buy fruit, and one to buy cheese. The cheese place was right next to a candy shop, where I picked up some coconut candy, Marco bought me some sweet made of fruit (I have no idea which fruit), and the guy at the stand gave me a piece of taffy which he was stretching right there and then.

One of the interesting things about the trip was seeing the different interactions between people. According to Roque, I have great skin and legs and Sofy needs to drink more water and tan more and eat more and do more exercise so tha she can have skin and legs like mine. To which, of course, I have no idea what to say. I don’t think I would know what to say in English, but the whole language barrier thing makes it that much more awkward. Granted, Sofy is about as big around as a toothpick and very insistently contrary to absolutely everything, but it was still a weird experience to be complimented and compared so much. Another interaction that this trip really drove home was the amount of service (of certain kinds) there is in this country. As we were leaving, a young man came with a cart to push our luggage out to the car, and the guard at the gate opened it for us. We tipped them both. There’s just a culture of servant-like service here. Possibly it stems from the colonial history of the country, but that’s just speculation.

All in all, the trip was fantastic and I hope I can go back at some point to experience more, but for now I have school, and homework, to catch up on.