I feel it

7-28-11

This week has of course, flown by.  Monday night everyone arrived from the coast and some of us who aren’t apart of the Illinois group went out to “La Ronda” in Quito.  La Ronda is a historic street in Quito that has been re-done and now is a laid-back area that has restaurants in the old buildings.  We have heard that it is really “tranquilo” and beautiful at night, so we decided to celebrate together on Monday night.  I guess no one goes out on Monday nights (rare, right?!), so we had to make our own fun, which wasn’t difficult to do.  We all had a glass of “canelazo”, which is a warm, alcoholic drink that tasted a little bit like hard cider with cinnamon.  We sat inside a small, quaint, old building and told stories about our weekend away from each other.  How sweet! ;-)

Zack, Michelle, Me, Tahjie, Marjorie, and Vanessa at our breakfast for dinner. 

The whole gang eating breakfast (pancakes, scrambled eggs with onions and tomatoes, and coffee) 

Tuesday was another day at the vocational course, where most of my time was spent helping out the cooks prepare lunch for the kids. Tuesday night, some of us went to Zack’s apartment to cook breakfast for dinner, since we all miss pancakes from the U.S! We made pancakes, eggs with onions and tomatoes, and passion fruit juice (and coffee for those of us who drink it).  It was great company with Michelle, Marjorie, Vanessa, Zack, and Tahjie. However, it was sad to see Michelle leave since she’s a fun girl to hang out with!  Good conversation to follow long into the night after dinner…

Wednesday night, the professor from U of I took all of the students out to a Pizza place for a good-bye dinner.  Before that, we were invited to listen to a guest speaker at the university in Cumbayá.  The speech was about education in Ecuador and it made me pretty depressed, but it was really interesting.  The education system in Ecuador is very poor and now I understand some of the things that are wrong with the system.  After the speech the pizza was amazing, as we were able to try 6 different kinds.  I’m not sure when the last time I had pizza that was like pizza from the U.S.!  After eating a lot of pizza, we eventually went back to Lumbisí where we played a couple games of pool until later in the night.