Friday, February 13, 2009: El Viernes

Hola hola hola hola hola. I’m watching an old movie on the Turner Classics Movie channel. It’s in English and the girl says “you’re all cock-eyed, Johnny, you’re all cock-eyed” and the Spanish subtitles say “you’re wrong, Johnny, you’re wrong.” Now she’s singing in a nightclub in Montevideo. “Mother Nature was up to her old tricks” in English is “Mother Nature is guilty” in Spanish subtitles.

Today was interesting. It was a shower day, so I got up early, and then Amanda and I caught the bus at 7:30. We’ve been doing it later every day and always getting to school at the same time. Today I only had juice for breakfast – very good juice, I think guava – so I stopped at a panadería on the way and got a hot roll. They had donuts, too, I want one!!!!

Spanish class was pretty boring today but it was only two hours instead of four. For our Ecuadorian history workshop we did a kind of Jeopardy game with three sets of questions worth 50, 100, and 150 points. It was fun, but very strange because whenever neither team got it right, our teacher (who’s the director of the program, we’re lucky) (my group is 5 people, by the way) would ask us a question like “what color are my shoes?”, and “how many meters am I?”, “who can pronounce my name the best?” There was a lot of “what number am I thinking of?” too. Our team guessed his shoes were brown, and he gave it to us, but was like “but they are really more like wine.” We didn’t count up the points at the end.

After the workshop we did Ecuadorian games. Each of the five Spanish classes taught a game to the whole group. Our game was “el baile del tomate,” and it was basically just dancing in couples with a tomato between their foreheads, which is pretty awkward and hilarious. When the tomato drops, you lose. We also did the wheelbarrow thing and musical chairs, so it wasn’t totally Ecuadorian. We called it the effects of globalization. At the end of musical chairs there were two guys left and Elias, our workshop teacher who’s about 60 years old, was like, “do a sexy dance now!” and so they had to sexy dance around the last chair for a minute before the music stopped.

After class, a bunch of us went to the restaurant of one of our group’s host family. They serve food from Cuenca, the third biggest city. It was really good, so now I am going to Cuenca. I wanted to anyway, its supposed to be one of the prettiest colonial cities in South America. (The dog just started moaning again.) I had a cheese empanada, cream of spinach soup, and I shared fried plantains. When Amanda and I left it was pouring rain and we were very very lucky to find the right bus right away. We got soaked walked from the bus stop anyway though.

This afternoon I helped out getting reading for the party tomorrow (my host mom’s birthday) and played with Cami a lot. I washed chairs and helped set up the patio with my host parents and Sasa (his nickname, I think, a family friend). My host dad was making a fire in their new outdoor oven, and it was so funny, he just kept pouring on the lighter fluid. He tried putting a candle in and waiting for a log to catch. When it finally did keep a flame for a while he said “I’m such a boy scout” with the “boy scout” part in English. It’s been raining all day. I also peeled a lot of these grain things called chocho, I think, with my host grandma and helped take the hairs of the corn. I also chased Cami around the house a lot since we were playing who can get the bouncy ball. I showed Cami my family picture book, I haven’t shown anyone else yet since they haven’t asked me much about my family. Cami started showing me her photo book, starting with pictures of her mom in the hospital right after she had Cami, but then she had to go to bed.

Now I am going to bed, I’m getting all tired. It’s only 11:00 but all week I’ve been going to bed around 10:30. Everyone’s in their beds by 9:30 usually.