Hiking with Flip Flops

6-2-11

I usually have some sort of eggs in the morning; they may be “soft boiled”, which means that they boil the eggs for a little bit, but not all the way, so they are still a little raw (not the best thing in the world), fried, or omelet-style with some sort of combination of spinach, tomatoes, or onions. With that, I have hot chocolate + sugar which is pretty indulgent.  I walk down to Muñequitos, greeting those who I come into contact with, and play soccer with the boys. Usually a little girl will start crying on the swings and I will have to hold her until she stops.  This goes on and on the whole morning. I am starting to make friends with the intimidating women (speak Spanish really fast, bigger ladies who wear 2-3 aprons while lighting gas stoves with matches) who cook at the “comedor” for the older people, so it’s getting to be more fun serving there.  I heat up lunch quickly that is sitting on the stove at my house after the comedor and head to the store for the afternoon.  Today I was lucky enough to hike down to the river that is nearby with Zack.  What a beautiful place!  I told myself that I have to go down there more often—so peaceful. Except, the funny thing is that I unfortunately wore black, really thin flip flops today.  It was quite an adventure, hiking down steep, rocky paths, trying to avoid the really fresh cow poop.  The scenery was very lush and green, with pretty yellow and pink flowers along the way.  It was a narrow path, with mountainous-like walls going down.  Once getting to the river, I couldn’t believe the sight I saw as I looked up.  We just hiked down a mountain, pretty much!  We were up there. The river was pretty low, with very big rocks. The water was dirty, with garbage on the banks, so I wouldn’t choose to swim in it. We headed back up (a different way that wasn’t as steep) but we had to avoid ‘prickers’ and “swim” through the overgrown path.

Later in the evening, we made some corn bread and cookies for a dinner party tomorrow night with a family of volunteers (who also happen to be from Kalamazoo!).  They are so kind to invite us into their home for “American” food (chili + corn bread + cookies=looking forward to it!) I went home for dinner, where we had soup (rice, chicken, chopped veggies) and finished off the meal with tea. It’s always great to drink tea with my host mom and sister, since that usually gets us talking and joking about things.  Another thing I’ve caught on about Ecuador (or at least my host family) is that they add “ito/ita” to the end of words, making it extremely difficult for gringos like me to catch onto different words in our vocabulary.  For example, the word for bread in Spanish is “pan”, so when my host mom randomly says, “do you want pansito?” I get very confused (as she also adds an s in the word).  That would mean “little bread”.  So we joke about that a lot, and it almost gets my host mom crying because she laughs so hard.  Great times.  After dinner and tea, my host mom and I watched some “soaps” on television in Spanish, which makes life interesting because they are enormously dramatic in these shows…good night!