FAQ

Since many of you have asked some of the same questions, I´m going to answer many of them now in this handy FAQ:

Q: Are you really taking Spanish classes? What is that like? What does it involve? Who is your teacher?

Yes! I´m really taking spanish classes. I have two hours in the morning for grammar and two hours in the afternoon for conversation and exercises. My teach is Jaime and he teaches everything in Spanish… it´s going well so far. I think it´s a good refresher, as the school in Cuenca will be a bit more difficult.  It´s just so frustrating to me that I have to learn all of this again.

Q: Where are you staying? What are the people like who run the school/hotel?

I´m staying at a hotel called The Sundown Inn. It´s a pretty modest place… but just fine for now. Juan-Carlos and his wife Mari-Elena run the place. I´m guessing they are around my age – maybe a few years older. Mari-Elena and a woman named Narcissa cook and clean. Juan-Carlos and his father Jamie teach the classes and when there are a lot of students, they bring in other teachers from Canoa or Bahia. Lindsay is Juan Carlos and Mari-Elena´s 5 year old daughter. She is very cute. They have Lindsay in private school in Bahia de Caraquez, and so Juan-Carlos takes her and picks her up from school everyday – going on the bus and the ferry four times everyday back and forth. They are very nice and friendly and seem to be good people. They have a cat – Pancho – and there is the friendliest dog ever named Perrita (little girl dog, very creative) who I love. She looks like a daschund, but is definitely a mix of something.

Q: What are you eating?

Since I´m on the coast, I´m eating a lot of seafood. Ceviche de pescado is absolutely wonderful and they also do this dirty rice-shrimp thing that is delicious, and of course the empanadas!!! I have been eating most of my meals at the hotel (because it´s included) and so meals generally consist of the following:

Breakfast: Steamed milk with instant coffee (the majority of the fabulous ecuadorian coffee is exported and too expensive for ecuadorians to buy!!!), 2 eggs either fried, scrambled or hard boiled, and a few pieces of bread, either regular toast or homemade rolls that are a cross between dinner roll and croissant.

Lunch: Soup of some kind (cream of spinach, rice soup, cream of various beans), then a plate of meat or fish with rice or potatoes and a vegetable, often broccoli or carrots or corn or a salad of tomato, avocado and radish (my fave), along with fresh fruit juice they squeeze and then freeze so that it´s actually slushy fruity deliciousness.

Dinner: Basically the same as lunch without the soup. It´s different at every meal. I haven´t had cuy yet – that´s guinea pig, the national dish of Ecuador, no kidding.

Q: Have you sent me a postcard?/Why haven´t you sent me a postcard?

No, I haven´t sent you a postcard. I´m sorry, but they don´t sell postcards here. I´m in a very remote area and it´s not exactly the postcard type of place. Also, in Canoa, there isn´t a post office. In fact, the homes and stores don´t have addresses as there is no mail service here. No one receives bills or letter or packages in the mail and there aren´t even street names. Really! They do have mail service in other parts of Ecuador, so I´ll be sending mail and postcards in the future, just not from here.

Q: What do you do all day?

My days have been going something like this during the week:

6.30am – Wake up

Go for a jog on the beach

8:30am – Breakfast

9:30- 11:30am – Spanish grammar class with Jaime

Lay on the hammock or lay on the beach, read and study

1:00pm – Lunch

go swimming, walk to town or lay in the hammock

3:30pm – 5:30pm – Spanish conversation-exercises class with Jaime

go for a walk on the beach, watch sunset, read, study or lay in the hammock

7:00pm – Dinner and watch DECISIONES on tv (the best tv show ever, more on that in a future post)

Read, study, go to sleep

No, I´m not always going to be so vago (lazy) all the time, but it´s nice to have some down time at least right now and there´s not a ton to do here anyway.

Q: What is going on in Ecuador?

From what I´ve been able to gather from the nightly news (addmittedly not much), the biggest story right now in Ecuador is that we are having a gas shortage. Donde esta el gas??? – asks the chyron every night. People are beginning to freak out and it´s the top story every night. Should I be worried? They keep showing the same b-roll of what looks like people sleeping at the control center at the gas plant in Esmeraldes… but surely, this can´t be true? In Bahia, you can see people rushing to the station with their gas cans to fill up. Also, a young girl was murdered outside of Quito a few weeks ago and that is also a big story. I don´t think they have caught the man who did it, but they think they know who he is. It doesn´t seem like there´s a lot of violent crime like that here. Also, the night, they found a drug smuggling ring in Machala, a town south of Guayaquil, they were using the gas shortage crisis to store drugs in gas cans and taking them across the border! Though I have yet to see any reporting on the war in Iraq, Jaime, my 70 year old Spanish teacher, often brings it up and cannot understand why we are there, what we are doing… I can´t offer him any answers obvioiusly since they are the same questions I have too.