Ecuadorian Culture

Megan:
We have been enrolled Spanish classes in Quito for only a few days, and Jon and I have already noticed a renewed enthusiasm in ourselves. We are looking forward to pouring ourselves into bettering our Spanish, and beginning next week, we will also be sharing some time with local kids who could use a little extra affection. We'll be volunteering for four hours in the morning at a home for underprivileged children, and then going to school for four hours in the afternoon. As we had hoped, I imagine this will keep us quite busy and engaged.

We also moved in with our local host family on Sunday. The mother, father and three kids have been a delight to be around, and they have provided us with a great venue to practice our Spanish. They have also been teaching us a bit about typical Ecuadorian cuisine. We began expanding that culinary knowledge last night in our first cooking class which our school offers each week. We have been very impressed by the organization and personal attention that the Simon Bolivar Spanish School has provided. Tuesday's school activity was salsa dancing. We attempted to shake our hips to the ever increasing speed of the Latin music, and I think we may have even made some progress by the end of the two hours.

Our first few days in Quito, we enjoyed exploring the city before we were committed to a schedule. Over the weekend, we stumbled upon a city-wide festival where performance stages were set up in various plazas around old town to celebrate Ecuador's Independence. We enjoyed seeing the huge crowds of locals dancing to different kinds of music in the streets, and found that we had a perfect view of one of the largest stages from the balcony of our hotel. We decided a bottle of wine would allow us to properly take advantage of our front row seats.

Due to the intense schedule that we have committed to for our three weeks in Quito, this will probably be one of the only blog updates for a while. I'm guessing we will make up for it the first week of September when we share our photos from the Galapagos Islands. That's right...we have booked our eight-day cruise to see some of the most amazing wildlife in the world. But for now we'll try not to let our imaginations wander too far into that aquatic paradise...after all we still have some substantial work to do before then.