Excitement!!!

Hello one and all! It's been a very exciting, busy few weeks for me. In the interest of convincing myself to do another post, I decided it would be easier to do another picture entry, rather than try to walk you through every moment. Here we go:

On April 13th, my host sister Anita had a baby!  Above, Tio Holger,  Tia Maria Fernanda, Abuela Carla y Abuelo Holger are admiring the photo Byron,  baby Emilio's dad,  took on his phone 5 minutes after Emilio was born.

The classroom for Linguistics is usually locked when we get there,  so the class congregates on the bench outside the room. Today, we're all studying frantically for the quiz we're about to take. On the far left, Mauricio and Emily (from Ambato and Indiana, respectively) are comparing notes. 

I finished the quiz early, so I decided to distract the rest of the class by taking a photo of them so you guys could all see a classroom. When we're not taking quizes, the desks are usually in a horseshoe along the walls. 

For the two weeks leading up to Easter, there were a TON of free concerts in all the churches downtown. The main event took place in a plaza outside between three or four churches. Above are some of the audience for the concert on the steps of one of the major Quito churches. 

In addition to the normal orchestra, the music (written specifically for this performance) incorporated Andean flutes,  bells from the surrounding churches, and a full telling of the Easter story through dance. 

To finish off the performance, there was a firework show right above us (plenty of debris fell on my head). It was pretty fantastic. The video's not the best, but you can get a sense of all the different things going on. 

For those of you who didn't know, this past weekend I spent 5 days in the Galapagos Islands.  As you might expect, they were absolutely incredible. Basically every day we had a three hour boat ride between islands. I usually chose to sit up on the bow,  since it was a little less nauseating, I got a better view, and I got to feel like an explorer!  

Our very first boat ride, we passed a huge pod of dolphins! They were jumping everywhere and sitting on the bow, I saw them zooming just under the surface in front of the boat. After about 5 minutes of them following us, we all threw on our snorkeling gear and jumped in to swim with them! 

Iguanas and sea lions are pretty much everywhere.  Here on the island of Floreana, these two little guys were taking a nap together. Marine iguanas shoot salt out of their eyes every few minutes to desalinate, and I'm pretty sure this one hit the sea lion in the face a few times.   

The Galapagos are volcanic islands, so on Saturday morning we took a 5 hour hike up the main volcano on Isabela. It was pretty exhausting, but a lot of fun. Our guide reminded us several times that it was still active and could explode at any minute.   

 On the far left, we have Galapagos penguins (adorable, as penguins usually are). In the middle are some classic blue footed boobies (no comment). And on the right, a pelican (which is every bit as ridiculously looking as the penguins are cute). We saw all three species all over, and even swam with the penguins! 

On one of our many snorkeling trips, we went to an area that has these cool (if claustrophobic) channels that are about 15 feet deep. The visibility was pretty bad that day (which was especially scary, since we saw a few sharks before we got in)  but we had no trouble seeing the sea lions (picture above)  when they swam right underneath us and stared us down. 

And of course, the HUGE Galapagos Giant Tortoises.  Not the most graceful eaters, but neither are lots of people I like,  so I forgave them. There are 11 different species of tortoise on the islands, including Solitary George, who is the very last of his species. We saw various tortoises several times throughout the trip, some in the wild, and some (like the ones above) in a special tortoise nursery to help increase population sizes.

It's been an amazing few weeks. I'm definitely starting to transition back to USA mode, in some respects, but I have exactly a month left here, so I plan to make the most of it. Final exams, some Ecuadorian politics, and a few more trips are all part of the plan.  Hope you're all doing well! 

For Samuel (And Everyone Else, Too)

In the past month, I've found a circle of Ecuadorian friends, stumbled into a communist political rally, received a 100% on a midterm (and a 30% on the following quiz), gotten a little bit robbed, and spent 4 days on the beach. All of them, in their own way, have been fun, interesting, and educational.

About three weeks ago, on a Saturday night, I got a call from my friend Ignacio (whom I met through the Jewish community) asking if my friend Caroline and I wanted to come to his cousin's house party. This plan seemed preferable to wandering the streets aimlessly, so we quickly accepted. At Cousin David's, we had some fantastic fondue and spent the evening hanging out with Ori, an Israeli guy working at the Israeli embassy in Quito, and Nir, an Ecuadorian Jew. We talked about everything from the minimum wage in various countries to why I'm not very good at doing "the worm". At the end of the night, Nir invited me to stay over at his house and go paintballing in the morning with him and some friends. In the US, paintballing never intrigued me, but in Ecuador, it sounded awesome. I was terrible, of course, but it was a lot of fun. Over the past few weeks, I (usually accompanied by Caroline (who's Vietnamese, but belongs to the JCC at home)) have had a lot of fun meeting up with Ori and Nir a few more times for pizza and TV, trivia nights, and generally going out on the town.

Although I usually speak English with this circle of friends, it's a much more Ecuadorian experience than speaking Spanish as I travel around to the touristy spot. Tonight at dinner, my host-brother-in-law and a family friend discussed how much more I've seen of the country than them. By staying in town and seeing what an Ecuadorian college student does on the weekends, I finally feel like I'm starting to get a sense of life here.

Two Saturdays ago, I woke up to what I have to assume was the Quito Pep Band playing outside my building. Like I was late to class, I jumped up, put on yesterday's pants and shirt, and raced outside with my camera. Apparently, it was the opening day of a political campaign discussing some proposed changes to the Constitution, and these people were gathering to expresse their strong opposition. For about 45 minutes, they played their instruments, chanted slogans, and had their official clowns on stilts dance in the street. Finally, they filed into an auditorium for speeches. That's when I started to notice several signs with hammer and sickles, flags with Che Guevara, and I was handed a newspaper with the slogan "Let the proletariate of every country unite!". Now, to be fair, there were a great number of other political organizations present too, but I couldn't help but feel that these people were not part of the political mainstream.

I don't speak about my classes very much on this blog, but I assure you they continue to exist, and are slowly demanding more and more of my time. Two weeks ago, for my class at the local university (PUCE) about the management of environmental conflicts, an Ecuadorian girl and I had an hour long presentation on mining in Ecuador. It was nice to have confirmation that procrastination is international, since we didn't start until the day before it was due. Nonetheless, we managed to put together a pretty solid presentation. My favorite class continues to be Linguistics of Spanish, also at PUCE. We mostly learn about the rules of pronunciation and the variation therein, which is a little boring for the Ecuadorians, but fascinating for a non-native speaker (although I can't always hear the differences between certain sounds). I am proud to announce that I got exactly 100% on my midterm for this class, which I took the day I left for Colombia. Unfortunately, I missed a few days of class while in Colombia, and we had a pop quiz when I got back, leading to the humbling grade of 30%.

My latest adventure took place in Atacames, a mid-sized beach town towards the north of the country. Four friends and I stayed at a hotel right on the beach and spent the day on a boat tour of the mangroves (although Cartagena was better), on a bananaboat, and lounging on the beach. Unfortunately, we were somewhat irresponsible, and one time left our stuff on the beach while we went swimming. Not surprisingly, when we came back, it was gone. Luckily, our hotel owner happened to have seen two guys take our stuff, and alerted the police. One guy got away with most of the stuff, including my iPod, but the other guy got arrested and taken to the station. I spent the next two days working my way through the Ecuadorian legal system, which was very strict and streamlined in some respects, and somewhat lax in others. I filed a report against the guy, Henry, and I was in the process of setting up an audience with the judge, when my hotel owner found me and told me to go talk to Henry. I went back to the police station and walked up to the holding cell (anyone can just wander over), and ended up negotiating a settlement, of sorts. I would drop my case against him if he paid me "the cost of the iPod", which we haggled to around $130. While some people may choose to look at the negative sides of being robbed, I had a pretty cool inside look at the Judicial system, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the whole experience.

And that, my friends, is the past month in a nutshell. Anyone want to place bets on how many more posts I'll fit in? I only have 7 weeks left!