Settling In

I’m relieved to announce that classes have officially started. This morning we spent an hour and a half discussing various definitions of “conflict” according to Marx, Gluckman, Weber and many more, in my class “Basic Tools for the Management of Socio-Environmental Conflicts”. Both that and “Phonetics and Phenology of Spanish” are at a local university, while my “Environmental Diversity of Ecuador” and “Internship” classes are at the IES center. While it’s definitely harder to take a class in Spanish, it also allows me to focus on the more important part of any concept, since I can’t understand/ don’t have time to write down the extraneous information. It's a little more exhausting to listen to lectures, but when I'm focused enough to stay attentive, I think I'm getting most of what my professors say.



This weekend, we took a bus to the Historic Center of town (the very first UNESCO World Heritage Site, as every single Ecuadorian will make sure you know). We visited to Presidential Palace with it's huge rooms and mediocre presidential paintings, chatted with a South African drug addict who asked us to buy him paint to help his crusade against graffiti, and climbed the Basílica’s towers to get a fantastic view of the city. I’m glad the South African probably used the paint to get high, because in one of the towers of the Basilica, we found the best church graffiti ever: “Jesus estuvo aqui” . Also this weekend, a group from Colby University stopped by Quito on their way back from the Galapagos, giving me two new housemates for a few days. One guy spoke a bit of Spanish and the other none, so I got to play translator. It was especially hard to speak Spanish when I wasn’t in charge of what needed to be said, but it worked out pretty well, and was lots of fun. It also reminded me how weird it is to be living with host parents and not with fellow college students.


I’ll leave you, for the time being, with a picture of a short Ecuadorian women with a crapload of shoelaces: