Sunday, February 10, 2008

Finally here!

Before I get to all my recent adventures, I have to put this disclaimer on my blog cause peace corps requires it. So not to totally insult anyone´s intelligence, but in case you were confused this is my personal blog and is not an official peace corps publication nor are the opinions contained within official peace corps info.

So now that I´ve gotten that out of the way, I can tell y´all about my adventures so far. I arrived in DC last Saturday and had fun visiting some friends and watching the super bowl (go giants!). Monday was the start of our training and it was mostly ice-breaker stuff and basic info (dealing with unwanted attention, safety techniques, etc.). Wednesday was the big day of flying to Ecuador! We had to get up at 5:30 in the morning (even though our flight didn´t leave until 11:00) to make sure everyone was ready with their stuff packed. Then it was on the plane to Miami and then on to Quito! Customs was uneventful, although the first thing you noticed getting off the plane was the altitude. I don´t think I´ve ever been that tired just walking to the luggage carousel. We kept hearing this cheering while we were going through customs and thought maybe someone famous was at the airport, but it was actually current peace corps volunteers cheering our arrival =)

From there it was off to the hostel and some much needed sleep. The next day was spent at the peace corps HQ in Quito getting shots and filling out some more paperwork. After that we went to a town northeast of Quito which is where our training will be for the next 2 months. After two days in a hostel near the training center we finally moved in with our host families. I was pretty nervous and excited about the prospect, as my spanish is not quite conversational but my family has been really nice about it. Our conversations have been pretty stilted and one sided but I´ve already learned a lot. Yesterday I helped my host mom cook up dinner, after trying to explain that I am not a good cook but was willing to help. We had an interesting discusstion about why french fries are called french fries (my host mom and sister wanted to know the english word). I ended up telling them that we have weird words in english and I don´t really know why. This morning I helped my host parents pick potatoes (we need lots as we´ve had papas fritas at every meal), so now my fingernails are officially dirty again yay! Well I think that covers all the excitment here so far. I find myself smilling and saying sí alot but hopefully I´ll get better. Please feel free to email as there is an internet café´10 minutes from my house. ¡Hasta luego!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hooray for muddling through with Spanish! I'm sure you'll get a lot better soon. I'm glad you had an uneventful flight and it was definitely nice to see you before you left.