Okay, so I never write anything.

So I know that 98 days sounds like a lot of time, but for me it is nothing. Classes at the university started up for me again at the beginning of February, and the time since then has flown by. I am really busy with my Spanish class alone. I am in the last level of Spanish this quarter, so the second quarter of the semester I am going to have to take another language to show the U of I that I’m actually doing something here. Portuguese it is! In this 6th level of Spanish, I have loads of homework every night. We are reading an intense novel called Aura that is really great. I feel so smart reading a novel in Spanish! Ja ja. Our final project in the class is to turn in a research paper about any topic having to do with Ecuador. I chose “Las Petroleras en el Oriente Ecuatoriano”, and so, grandma and grandpa Sakrison, that article you e-mailed me covering the devastating situation that indigenous groups face in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been useful in my research (with the exception that it is in English :D ). The topic is very interesting; it’s just the whole having to read bundles of articles in Spanish that makes the project difficult.

I also have the class with my exchange program director, Dr. José Yanez, which includes my volunteer work. I’m doing the same projects as the past semester; I’ve only switched up the days on which my work falls.

The last thing that has been keeping me busy is the obvious: this whole never-ending culture experience. Everyday brings me a surprise. Whether its my bus driver trying to rip me off of my 5 cents (no way was he getting away with that), or my continued misinterpretations of things that people say to me (like just now when I thought my mom told me she was taking breakfast to the homeless boys in the Carolina tomorrow morning, which was plausible because tomorrow I volunteer in the Carolina and it would make a little bit of sense even though she has never done it before and it would be something completely out of the blue BUT what she really said was that she was going to leave breakfast out for me in the morning because she was going to go walking in the Carolina and wouldn’t be there to accompany me while I slurped up my coffee and ate my banana). (Sorry for that ridiculous run-on sentence and even sorrier if what it said didn’t make any sense, but I just don’t feel like revising it and it’s just really hard to explain anyway).

Truly, it is just really difficult for my brain to interpret the fact that I am going to go back to the United States in 98. I just don’t know how I’m going to deal with not being able to speak Spanish whenever I feel like it. I absolutely LOVE speaking it, and I just don’t know how my heart’s going to take all of this. I feel so lucky to be here and this language is just so damn cool that I don’t want to leave it behind. I’ve heard that after you study abroad and learn a new language, you can lose all of what you’ve learned in less than a month if you quit cold turkey. I don’t want that to happen! And this, my friends, is why I am determined to find a job where I can speak Spanish when I get back to Boise. And that, my friends, is why I could use some suggestions. Can someone help me? Give me a hand with my Plan Refusal to Return to Monolingualism. And if you can help me with a cooler name for my plan, that would be appreciated as well.

Anyway readers, I had a blast this past weekend. I went three hours out of Quito to Santo Domingo, a city midway between the Coast and the Sierra. I went with two other gringas, and the boyfriend of one of them: Giovanny. We went to Giovanny’s grandma’s hacienda, or ranch/estate. This weekend trip was one of my favorite trips that I’ve had in Ecuador. We got there at night and rested up because Saturday was going to start early. We woke up at 6:30 to help with milking a few of the 50 or so cows that roam about the hacienda. I woke up to the sounds of cows mooing, roosters crowing, the dog barking, and birds chirping. It was almost frightening because I’m so used to waking up to car alarms, traffic honking, and my brother José complaining that he needs some lunch money that my host mother obviously isn’t going to give him because she knows that he will probably spend it in a casino or something of the like as he often does.

We milked those cows dry, ate a breakfast of mashed up plátano verde mixed with vegetables and the milk, and then we headed off on our journey towards the river. The hike to the river took about an hour and was fantastic. We first hiked through a giant sector of palm trees that are used to make soaps and oils. We ran into a herd of cows that were very distinct from the cows right outside of Quito. They were cows with humps on their backs and that extra skin on their necks. They were very mellow cows and bulls that Giovanny pet without fear of being eaten alive. After the palms, we found ourselves climbing up hills of corn fields. It was such a sudden leap of crops, but not as sudden as the leap from the corn into the field of banana trees. There were bananas hanging all around us and by this time we were soaked with sweat because it is a humid, and very hot, climate.

The banana field came to an edge with a steep slope that led down to the river. With difficulty, we found the trail that led down the slope. This little trail looked like a section of the rainforest cut out and pasted into this hacienda. The giant trees were wrapped with vines and there were brilliant flowers popping out of every corner, along with mushrooms hiding beneath rotting chunks of wood.

After I’d slipped on my butt on the muddy trail, we arrived at the river’s edge, and it was pure tranquility. As half the river was part of Giovanny’s grandmother’s private property, we were all alone on our shady little bank. We swam for hours in the cool river as we watched giant butterflies fly over our heads. We played “el tiburón” (the shark), a game that Giovanny taught us. One person is el tiburón and has to catch the others and whoever gets caught first and is bitten by the shark becomes the new tiburón. I felt like I was 12 again and there is nothing wrong with that.

Once we had our fill of the river’s majesty, we were ready to take the trail back to the house. The only difference about the return trip was that Giovanny wanted us to guide him back without giving us any clues. We did well at first, but after a while it all became confusion. We hiked through these tall, green grassy fields and came upon a gigantic herd of cows. They all looked at us as if we were the typical gringas getting lost in the middle of no where, with our (my) tacky tourist hat. Well we gave those cows the finger and continued on our way.

It was like 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the sun was shining directly down on us, along with this whole humidity thing. Luckily, I brought my sweet hat that protected me from the sun. The others weren’t as lucky. I got really thirsty, and Giovanny went over to a lemon tree and had me eat some of the slices. He said it would make me stop being thirsty, which it did, as it was the most sour lemon I’ve ever eaten in my life and after eaten it up, the last thing I was thinking about was that I had been thirsty.

We eventually made it back to the house and we were all exhausted from the sun’s heat. The grandma and her helper had lunch ready for us, which was such a satisfying treat after our grand adventure. We hung out that afternoon on the porch until we finally decided to walk a couple miles down to the little store to buy drink some Coca Colas as a sort of you-deserve-this-for-your-hard-work sort of thing. We walked down to the store, and found what seemed like the entire town of 70 people all standing around watching a soccer game that was going on in the local soccer field, something that is never missing in any town in Ecuador, no matter the size of the town.

We drank our bottles of Coke as we sat on the bamboo trunk that was a bench, watching the end of the soccer game. The sun had gone down and it was dusk. The whole setting was so Ecuador. It couldn’t have been a better way to finish my perfect day, and, in fact, it wasn’t. Above us from the bench we could see an extensive dark mess of a cloud that threatened us with every inch it moved. Just right when we were finished sucking down our drinks, it started to pour. It continued to pour. It became a literal torrential downpour, and we had no other choice than to walk the give or take 2 miles back to the house. It was pitch black and the only thing guiding us was Giovanny’s instinct of this dirt road that he had walked on so many times throughout his childhood. In Quito, a storm of that giganticness would’ve been a pity because Quito is up in the mountains at 9,000 feet. But we were in Santo Domingo. This was the warmest rainstorm I’d ever been in and the wettest one too. I was lucky to have my raincoat to keep my torso relatively dry, but the rest of my body was soaked from head to toe. I rang out the skirt I was wearing the entire way back and still ended with buckets of water soaked up in its pleats. As we watched the strikes of lightening stretch across the sky of no depth and listened to the deep rumbles of thunder, there was nothing else to do but to just enjoy the surreal moment in that which we were caught.

This past weekend was truly incredible and I hope all of that didn’t just cause you to quit reading my blog that I never have time to update.

I am really tired, so I am going to leave you all for now. Hopefully I can put up some pictures sometime before I get back to Boise! I mean seriously, I haven’t even shown you what I did over my “winter” break! But I gotta go. Tomorrow it will be 97 days or so (just ask my Dad, I think he’s counting down the seconds) so don’t you worry, I will be back in no time.

¡Chao!

Love, Chelsea