Despues de una semana...

I officially made it through one week abroad and have only 122 more days to go....

I feel somewhat accomplished. I have yet to have a ¨breakdown¨, two out of the 6 of us that are in the program have succomb to the breakdown, although i did count down all the days I have left and put them on my calendar.

This past weekend, some friends from the program and I went to El Centro de Quito, or the more colonial and older part of the city. Fue muy bellismo. Cada iglesia està muy bellìsima con sanctuarios con muchas esculturas de madera. We walked for hours, and found a neat museum that only cost a dollar with great views of the city and told a lot about the history of Quito, Ecuador and it´s inhabitants even before the Incas.

At night the one Ecuadorian friend took us to some night clubs in an area that slightly resembled New Orlean´s famed Bourbon Street, more like a quarter of the debachery...which was a good thing.

The next day I woke up at 11am to my host brother, Juan Pablo, asking me if I wanted to help his abuelita(grandmother) help move. Of course I said yes, y ahora me duele mi espalda hasta sàbado cuando les ayudè!!! Apparently the grandmother had her own T.V. cooking show at one point when we unloading the literally over a 1,000 books from her house to the truck, I saw one and was like...¨wait a minute¨.

Some general observations: NOBODY says adios here, it feels about as old as saying automobile instead of car. EVERYBODY says ciao. I feel ignorant if I say adios. Also, chevere is all the rave here. It´s the U.S. equivalent of cool. Professors say ¨superchevere¨ and chevere after everything...it´s pretty chevere, haha.

Remember when I mentioned that my study abroad experience would be so unique because of my the required service-learning facet...that´s turning quite sour, quite rapidly. So in the application there were a good two pages asking you to detail what type of service you´d like to be doing and with who and rank them. I was originally slated to work at a school called Colegio Ipatia Cardenas. Then when the IPSL sevice coordinator picked me up on Monday, we went to another school because apparently the other one had too many volunteers. We ended up waiting about an hr for the director or principal to come and then she gave us 5 min to tell us to come back NEXT monday. Victoria, the coordinator, said, No me gusta and we were off to Chicos de la Calle, a site where another girl in the program is working.

Upon entering we find out that padre Rodrigo had passed in December. Already an ominous sign right? So we went in and got put into their computer system but they seemed very busy and not too receptive. I was told to come back today, Wednesday for my first day. Victoria me dijo que necesito llegar a las ocho. Lleguè mas temprano a las siete y media. They didn´t open till 9!!! I called victoria at 8:15 and she told me to wait, so i did, another 45min!! All that only to find out that they were too busy today and I should come back on Friday. I understand that ...¨stuff happens¨. So I´m really not too worried, but I hope this service thing works its way out soon.

Time to go struggle through some reading, in spanish of course, for my service learning class at 2:30!!!

Oh and this weekend we might go to Otavalo, a largely indìgenas town that has become a tourist hotspot for weaved apparrel...leave a comment and I might get you something!