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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

Thanksgiving with Bruce, Megita (aka Summers), me and Jenna... my favorite people in South America

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

Toasting on Thanksgiving

¿Como se dice "Gobble Gobble" en español?

Saturday the 20th was the ultimate and coolest collision of worlds. My parents came down to visit for a week! In typical me fashion, I managed to dig up a boat load of schoolwork to stress over but in the end, we all had a fantastic time. Bruce, Hannah and I all had family members arriving on the same flight so we hung around the airport being somewhat wired and illogically nervous (OK, that was just me). Sunday, my host dad took my parents and me to Otavalo (the first indigenous market I went to in August) and to Cuicocha (the lake where I went on the hike with my Quichua class). It was so odd being the one that´s supposed to be the expert. I think the theme of the day should have been “Communication Breakdown,” especially when it came to translating the lunch menu. But we all had a great time and after church, my parents came over to meet six of my eight sisters and brothers-in-law and the two little ones. At least they all speak English!

Monday, I brought my parents to the university to poke around and have lunch. They had the afternoon to themselves while I had my nervous breakdown of the week over classes. But as most of you know, they come and go like the tides. That night we ended up eating at my house, though it wasn´t exactly dinner (another communication breakdown) but afterwards, my host parents drove us around the old town which is gorgeous and lit up at night. It was kinda hard balancing my very gregarious host family with my much chiller real fam but all went well.

Tuesday was amazing. I brought them to the school where I teach to meet my kids. I taught a lesson last week on asking questions, interviewing, etc. but never told the classes why. So my parents walked in as an absolute and very well received surprise. The kids got to conduct an interview in English and loved it, my parents were amazing with them. I thought I would have to do a lot of translating but they had it perfectly under control. They gave out stickers, markers and all kinds of fun stuff before we left to go get pizza. Then, they came to my Quichua class. Now, Quichua is the coolest class in the world due to the chillness of the prof and everyone in it but freshman year, I was the only kid that brought the ´rents to class when the prof asked us to so I wasn´t sure how this one was going to go. It was awesome! Everyone had to ask my parents ridiculous questions like “How many bottles do you drink?” and “Where was Christina´s first kiss?” for half an hour and then they left and we learned. It was perfect and everyone had a blast. Dinner that night was an awesome steak place downtown where we all got unbelievable $6 filet mignon. Gotta love South America.

Wednesday, I went to class and left the parents to their own devices visiting the churches. After class, I ran around shopping for yams for our big Thanksgiving dinner. Grr, South America! The translation of yam is “camote.” The first supermarket I went to had about three of them and they were purple so I figured I should go to a bigger store. I finally get there after buying all the brown sugar and marshmallows only to find that apparently, South America doesn´t believe in sweet potatos…¡Que horror! On the other hand, I rand into my parents by accident and they convinced me that five boxes of mac and cheese would serve the Americans just fine. So I dashed home, made two vats of mac and cheese, dashed back to the hotel and we all went to dinner at the same steak place. After dinner, I took them to the Cuban place where I go to listen to live music. We kinda debated on going in but when we finally did, I couldn´t tear my dad away until 1 AM! Nevermind that I kinda fell asleep directly in front of the band…

Thursday, I took the day off and we went down to Saquisilí, the lesser known indigenous market to shop around and explore for a few hours, had lunch at a beautiful old hacienda, and tried to visit Cotopaxi, the volcano nearby but it was so cloudy we literally could not even tell it was there. And this is a BIG mountain.

Thursday night, we had a huge Thanksgiving dinner for the whole group at Adrián´s house. And when I say huge, I am dead serious (at least for me with the family of 9). The twelve of us, our director and her husband, Adrián´s host family, my parents, Bruce´s parents, brother and sister, two other gringa sisters, our guide from Peru and his girlfriend. It was a perfect Thanksgiving dinner with all the right food (except yams which no one seemed to miss), listening to Christmas carols and generally being the merry bunch that we are.

Friday morning, my parents flew home. I went to class after being up since five with them, came home putzed around and promptly fell asleep for fourteen hours. The weekend was a quiet one writing papers and watching “Love Actually” to get in the Christmas spirit.

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

Pre-gaming Ecuadorian style...
3 hours before the game in the pouring rain

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

Me, Bruce and Racek getting ridiculously decked out before the game

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

With Alegria, my niece

Everything I need to know, I learned from my seventh graders...

This probably won´t be a terribly coherant entry. Just wanted to put down some thoughts about teaching since I don´t know how much I´ve really mentioned it.

It definitely exhuasts the heck out of me and sometime it drives me crazy. I walk to the bus every morning thinking about how many fights I´m going to have to break up by grabbing them around the waist and hauling them off one another. But then I think about the fact that these are seventh graders and there might be two among my 70 students that are too heavy for me to pick up. I think about how many times I´m going to have to scream "Silencio" or "Atención" at the absolute top of my lungs to be heard and the headache I´m going to have. But then I think about the kids that catch me off guard with their questions that come out in little more than a whisper because they are so concerned with respecting the teacher. And then I remember that I am the teacher and if I command that much respect, I can´t imagine how they view the rest of the world. I sit in the office on my break reading a novel about the "underworld" of Quito for one of my classes. It has a lot of vocabulary, references to places, etc. that are completely foreign to my side of town. And then I hear my students talking about the same places and using the same words. I worried about monitoring the boys´drawings when I tried to teach anatomy and then Diego came up and asked if he could maybe take home the "mal hechos," the papers that people had mistakes or were ripped. I handed out Halloween stickers and was mobbed by kids with open palms when I tried to throw out the empty sticker sheets. Last week, they all gasped when they found out their trip to Colonial Quito should cost a dollar but the school was only making them pay a quarter. But today, I had my class interrupted twice by men selling Bob Esponja (Sponge Bob) activity books for $0.50. Literally every time I start to wonder what the heck I´m doing with my life and if I can even handle this profession, one of them comes over and hugs me or holds my hand. I have Hallmark commercial type moments every single day. Living in such a poverty stricken country changes your perspective. Working here has turned it upside down and inside out. I don´t know how I´m going to leave.

¡GOOOOOOOOOL!

The last couple of weeks have revealed more of Dante´s inferno to me than I have ever desired to encounter. In other words, I hate homework. There´s has been something of a deluge of exams, papers, reading complicated Peruvian novels and a delightful assignment that kept me up until 4am. Now really, how is filling four notebooks with letters using my left hand going to make me a better teacher? But I digress...

The weekend of the 12th to the 14th, the whole group went to a beach called Perdernales to celebrate Summers´ 21st birthday. The water was warm, the weather was unbelievable and nothing like an American style 21st birthday party with a bonfire on the beach to make for an awesome weekend. There are a great number of pictures and some will appear here later. Others however might be better for selected audiences. Also, the food on the coast is to die for and you know nothing gets you closer to my heart than shrimp and plantains.

This week has been a blur of work with the one highlight being yesterday afternoon. The entire city of Quito shut down for the Ecuador vs. Brasil futbol game. The game is a World Cup qualifier against arguably the best and possibly most arrogant team in South America and we dominated them for the entire game, ending 1-0. All of us had tickets but we ended up scattered throughout the stadium. It didn´t matter though because the raucous, out of control crowd was pretty uniform throughout. It felt like BC vs. Notre Dame football or Villanova vs. St. Joe´s basketball times a thousand. And the city was crazy ALL night with everyone driving through the streets honking and screaming ¡Ecuadoooooor! or "Si se pudo" (The chant during the game is "Si se puede" - sort of "Yes, you can" - and "Si se pudo" is "Yes, you could"). It was an absolutely awesome afternoon.

Thats a niiiice boulder

Here comes a big ol´entry: Yesterday, we got back from an amazing, incredible, unbelievable week in Peru.

Backing up a bit to Wednesday, how ´bout them Sox?! Wednesday night was both game night and the night before we left for Peru so to celebrate, a bunch of us went to Summers´ to make pancakes for dinner and watch the game. Go Medias Rojas!

So Peru...

Ten of us (nine girls and Bruce, poor boy) and our guide, Daniel, left Thursday afternoon and flew to Lima, just overnight. The next morning, we flew to Cusco and spent the day touring the Cathedral and generally poking around the town. Bruce and I were the only ones with energy by the end of the night so we tried out a few clubs in town but didn´t really find anything great. Our hostel in Cusco was amazing. It´s run by a Dutch couple who decided to adopt 12 of the street kids they found when they first came to Peru and now, 100% of the proceeds from the hostel go to feed 250 kids a day. Plus, it´s a beautiful building and breakfast Saturday morning was fantastic.

Saturday, we left Cusco and drove through Peru stopping at la Valle Sagrada (the Sacred Valley) to hike up to some ruins, at a llama and alpaca farm to learn about Peruvian weaving and get spit at by a vicuña, and to another site of ruins in Ollantaytambo. Hiking around the last site, there were a lot of little kids in traditional dress who would pose or sing songs in Quechua to have their pictures taken. I think we kinda caught them off guard when we answered them in Quichua. (Incidentally, in case anyone catches the spelling difference, Quechua and Quichua are essentially the same language but with slightly different pronunciation and a few different words. Quichua dialects are spoken more in Ecuador while Quechua ones are throughout Peru and maybe Bolivia.) That evening, we took a train from Ollantaytambo to a town called Aguas Calientes, that I am convinced is composed entirely by hostels, pizzerias and mini-grocery stores that sell trail mix and water.

Sunday morning, we hiked a part of the Inca trail. Now, you can spend around 21 days on the trail but we opted for the one day option and even that took some convincing for some people. We left the hostel at 7:20 am and hiked until 4 pm. The first part was along the train tracks where trains would pause to first sound their whistles in our ears before a barrage of camera flashes emitted from the hands of German tourists to wake us up. Once on the Camino Inca itself, we continued for hours along a surprisingly not murderous trail, periodically catching glimpses of ruins high up in the mountains or of the trail where we started, suddenly a few mountains away. We stopped to have lunch in one ruins site where we demonstrated to our Ecuatoriano and Peruano guides just how much American girls can eat. Nothing like PB & Js with a Swiss Army knife and tuna dumped right from the can since we only had those little Lance plastic cheese spreaders. Oh yeah, and the Peruano energy bars that have a certain Floam-like texture. A few hours later, we rested at another ruins site, pretty tired and slightly antsy to arrive at wherever we were headed. Suddenly, the clouds below us parted and ::cue the singing angels:: there was Machu Picchu. My only point of reference for Machu Picchu is a card from a GeoSafari game I used to have. This blew that picture out of the water. For an hour or so, we just sat on the agricultural terraces (see the pictures) above Machu Picchu and stared. That night back in Aguas Calientes, we tried to hit the thermal baths as a reward. You know there is going to be trouble when you all walk towards a pool and the men start cheering and when you turn to each other to pause and construct a plan of action, they boo. Plus the water smelled a bit like turkey. Not gonna lie. Needless to stay, we didn´t stay long. Bed was a bigger reward.

On Monday, we took a bus back up to Machu Picchu and had the whole day to poke around there. After touring with a guide for a couple hours and going into heart arrest when lunch gave us our first taste of U.S. prices in quite some time, a few of us got crazy/brave. Daniel and six of us decided to ignore our grumpy quads and calves and hike Wayna Picchu, the big mountain behind the ruins. Standing in at the base and looking up, it becomes obvious that this mountain is straight up. But you only live once right? It only took about an hour to summit but it was an intense hour with very narrow paths, a ton of old stone stairs and ropes on the inside of the trail so you can pull yourself up. There were times I really thought I was doing more rock climbing than hiking. But SO worth it. There wasn´t even land at the top, just a bunch of boulders were we crowded in to take pictures and for fear of imminent death. We reached the bottom covered in dirt, sweat and drizzle and feeling tougher than ever. Another hour or two sitting on the terraces writing in journals, listening to music or just gazing and we headed back down to town.

Tuesday, we took the train and van back to Cusco and toured yet another ruins site called Saksaywaman (spelling is inevitably way off) where we found great views of Cusco, including the shape of the city like a puma, an animal that was sacred to the Incan culture. A museum, market shopping and just strolling around the city until sunset followed. That night, we practically gorged ourselves at our last Peruvian meal, complete with live music, and ran around TVs and internet cafes stressing about the election. At 5:15 Wednesday morning, we were on our way to the airport and headed back to Quito.

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

The whole group on the terraces overlooking Machu Picchu

(It was a cheesy idea but the end result is pretty cool. I´m the one on the left.)

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

Group shot on top of Wayna Picchu

Clockwise: me, Bruce, Jenna, Hatch, Summers and O´Malley (in case anyone was really that curious)

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Machu Picchu from the top of Wayna Picchu

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Machu Picchu

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Resting at a waterfall

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Cliffs of the Inca Trail

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Ruins along the Inca Trail

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

Children on top of the Ollantaytambo ruins

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Originally uploaded by amantedivita.

Gabriela, Angelica and Robinson working on their human body tracing

¿Mashna wakratak tiyan?

Weekdays lately have been essentially not worth mentioning but the weekend after Baños trip II was amazing. The one exciting evening was our Red Sox party for the last game against the Yanks. Twelve people in a bedroom with great quantities of pizza, various mentions of Quichua homework, me taking up a full corner of the room with the lesson materials I was making last minute and renditions of the song "Jesus Walks" every time Jonny Damon made a move.

Saturday morning, a few of us left Quito at 7am (extremely early for those of us who didn´t get home until 2) for Peguche, a village up north just outside the main indigenous market in Ecuador, Otavalo. There were 9 students and our Quichua professor staying in his house in the village. That day, we hiked to some waterfalls and spent some time talking to a group of people preparing for a wedding. And by preparing, I mean slaughtering a cow. Slight cultural differences but I was impressed that none of the gringo contingent even flinched. And in that vein of conversation, I finally tried cuy (guinea pig) for lunch. Kinda fatty, not a great deal of meat but hey, it´s tasty and cholesterol free!

That evening, we went to a restaurant to hear some live indigenous music. It was filled with people from the village and a few of us actually had a conversation with them in Quichua. Of course, there was the one minor failure in which one guy asked "How many cows do you have?" (See subject line)of the 25 year old indigeno in an Iron Maiden tee shirt. Our prof also made us dance because he thoroughly enjoys laughing at us and the darling young gentlemen of Peguche attempted to introduce us to the customs of social drinking/reciting poetry in girls ears/trying to kiss in Peguche. The wingman behavior of our group deserves a big medal. Sunday, we went on a four hour hike around Cuicocha lake which was rather intense (think constant wheezing) but a ton of fun.