First day of school

Today was our first official day of spanish classes, which meant getting up at 7, eating breakfast at 7:30, and trying to hail a cab to take us to the Experimento. We all made it there (although some of us overpaid for the cab ride) and split up into our different spanish classes. I'm in a class with five other students, and we spent the morning introducing ourselves to our teacher and reviewing some basic grammar. After that we had a 30 minute break where we ate bagels (amazing), borrowed books for our FIP projects (not so amazing), and got cell phones (super amazing)! The phones we got have all been used by previous students, so everyone had old contacts and text messages that were really funny to read.

After that we had more spanish classes, then went out to eat lunch and buy school supplies. Ecuadorians seem to have something against solid colors, because every single notebook has some sort of cartoon, design, or picture on it. So far my notebooks include: one with butterflies on the cover, one with two ladybugs that says "BZLLLLL!!!!", one with a cat that has hearts coming out of its tail that says "cat", and one with spiderman crouched in an attack pose. Please, try not to be too jealous.

Tomorrow we leave at 8 am for the Intag Cloud Forest, where we'll spend a week learning field methods in ornithology, entomology, and botany. We also spend three days in a rural homestay, which should be really interesting and (hopefully) fun! Our host mothers are all part of a women's artesania cooperative, and they make all sorts of crafts that we're going to have a chance to buy (read: everyone can expect things from here as Christmas presents.) I still have a lot of reading/packing to do, but I'm really excited to be done with orientation and starting some real adventures! We get back on Saturday night and on Sunday morning we get picked up by our homestay families, and I'll try to update before/soon after that!

Hasta luego,
Caroline