Holla. Hola.
Lovin this. I was a little nervous and overwhelmed about the idea of being in a foreign country before coming here, but now that I am here I see how truly amazing it is to live in a new place, exposure to culture and to be able to just wake up and experience every day fully. I feel so busy! I don´t even know feel like I am doing so much every day but at the end I barley can finish all my homework for the next day. Lessons take up a good part of the day, de uno a uno, cuatro horas lunes-viernes. After I usually end up walking all around the area in between the school and casa, finding a new delicioso place for almuerzo.
This weekend Johna and I went down to this huge amazing mercada down in the park very close to our house. It was amazing and I had not expected to want to buy every single thing I saw, but the crafts were mad dope. Beautiful and funky clothes, and blankets, and satchels and art and JEWELRY! The art and jewelry were killllling it.
Tuesday night we went and saw a friendly match between the national Ecuadorian team vs. Chile. Except I´m pretty sure Chile is ranked higher than Ecuador internationally but Ecuador smashed! 6-1... so maybe it wasn´t the national Chile team, or their B team? Not sure, but it was so great that Ecuador scored so many times because every time they scored the crowd went insane, and were in super joyous, exuberant mood. Though they were singing and drumming for the entire game with out fail, (the whole crowd must have known 8 or 10 different futbol songs) whenever there was a goal, the special ¨goal¨ song was sung, which was a pretty great song and incorporated a lot of fist pumping and jumping. And by the 4th or 5th goal we were able to get the hang of it. A lot of great energy. And they were some nice pretty goals too. There was TONS of security, every where, seriously, all over that place. We had to go through two check points and our tickets had two stubs to be pulled at each place and any plastic water bottles were confiscated upon entry and the water poured into plastic bags. So you couldn´t bring beer bottles in, but plastic bags full of beer were a must! And the whole field is totally fenced off, a very tall fence and net, with a maybe four foot extension of fence coming out at an angle away from the main fence toward the crowd, imagine like a Y, sort of. Clearly designed to keep people from climbing the fence and getting to the field. So, the part protruding out, if you can imagine what I am talking about, was in reach of us fans, and thus had the opposite effect of keeping people away and off the fence. Before the start of the game, there was first three young men, and then all of sudden, 10, 15, 20 hombres climbing up the fence and were sitting on top of the fence protruding out, and had friends handing them up fire extinguishers. I don´t know if this is big all over the world for soccer, or South America, or if it´s just an Ecuadorian thing but when the Ecuadorian team came out onto the field they all released their fire extinguishers and it was just a huge white cloud and seemed like it was snowing.
After lessons yesterday I talked with the volunteer coordinator at Yanapuma, my espanol escuela, which has turned out to be really awesome. I am jaaazzzzzzzzzzzed. There are SO many amazing programs all over the country outside of Quito where I can go and live/work, volunteering in the community working on forest restoration, environmental education with children or local farmers, sustainability, composting and recycling, learn about permaculture, working in an organic garden, work with endangered and rescued animals, work to improve native flora...etc etc etc. I have had the hardest time choosing which places I want to go, and of course wanting to go to all of them and wishing I was here for six months instead of two. December 19th feels so soon now! I am leaning towards three weeks with a foundation working with animals in the jungle, ten minutes outside of a small town called Puyo, (which I actually learned all about this specific town in my last quarter of college when I wrote a paper on an indigenous tribe of the Ecuadorian amazon and the peoples effort to protect their land from oil extraction by large multi national companies). And three weeks in a community an hour outside of Quito where I would live on an organic farm and continue my Spanish lessons hopefully, learning and teaching all about environmental education and farming. There is much more to say about both but I have to hurry this up to get to my studies cause apparently it´s ladies night in Quito, so I have finally been convinced to go out...plan on being careful though! lolly... (caution is the THEME here of the Ecuadorians, and I have my white skin to make me a sweet target...)
best best best best to all the beautiful people!
¡chao!
No comments:
Post a Comment