a week of farreando + atacames + food babies

We started this entry a while ago, but we never finished it, so it might be kind of a long one...

It all started on Wednesday, February 2nd at 9:40 pm. We arrived at Bungalow for free drinks before 10 (gotta love ladies night) to celebrate Jansey´s 21st!!! We had four drinks each before 10, so I´m sure you can deduct how the night went... Everyone was dressed to the nines and we danced the night away to some good ol`spice girls and an assortment of random songs from the US and Ecuador.

Let me preface this next statement by saying we had not actually been drunk or hungover in Ecuador up to this point. All we can say is the next day, Jane didn't feel so hot and the girls who usually keep it together were right there with her. But like the true champs, we returned to Bungalow the following night. It was a more mellow night where we just sat in the lounge and talked. The next night we went to a cutsie part of town in the Historic Center called La Rhonda. Unfortunately, there were not enough tables to house all 9 of us, so we went back to Gringolandia (Foreignerland). We didn´t last there very long because we were all super tired. The next night we went out to celebrate our friend Ariel´s 21st birthday. This night was cleaner and classier than the last celebration. We went to a Cuban salsa club with live music! (One of our friends even struck up a romance with the bongo player!) We had a lot of fun there, except for the creepers we met who literally pulled us apart when we were dancing. ¡Que grosero! (How rude!)

Then a week passed and we decided to go to the closest beach town for the weekend, Atacames. We decided this Wednesday afternoon and were on our way Thursday night. We got there Friday morning at 6 am and after a quick nap at the hostel and some breakfast we settled on the beach. We did much better here than in Canoa with putting enough sunscreen on and we limited our ice intake which had given us bad stomachaches in Canoa. Although we still came back with a slight stomachache. We had a wonderful time resting on the beach, exfoliating ourselves with sand, and eating lots and lots of food.

We are also becoming salsa dancing professionals (one of our goals before coming here). We go to class every Tuesday and then we go out dancing on Wednesdays to practice. We´ve discovered that we are the best partners for each other because we can do all the fancy moves we learned in class at the club that other men are just not capable of.

Amanda will be switching her internship placement because researching fish for 8 hours a week (in english) is nuts. She came here to improve her spanish skills, and staring at a computer is not helping. The organization was really interesting but she decided that she would rather do something social justice oriented and will likely be working with children who work as vendors in the streets or with children whose parents work in the garbage dump.

This last weekend all we really did was eat a lot of food. On Friday morning we went out for bagels and then we went out for pizza for dinner and then we just stayed in at one of our friend´s houses to watch a movie. The next night though was super duper fun. Seven other girls besides us came to Amanda´s apartment for a piamada (pajama party/cooking night). We made SO much food we thought we were going to burst. Our friend Mia made beef dumplings and curried rice noodles with vegetables and sangria with fresh fruit. Jane made crepes that we ate with nutella, ice cream, whipped cream, mango, babaco, strawberries, bananas, dulce de leche, and some expensive peanut butter. We also made even more dumplings with cream cheese, bananas, cinnamon sugar, and dulce de leche. HEAVEN. All our friends stayed over at Amanda´s for the night. It was cozy and cuddly. The next morning, we prepared our specialty for all our friends: egg in a raft aka one-eyed Jack, egg in toast, egg in a basket, egg in an inner tube, etc. along with some more crepes and banana milkshakes. As you can imagine, we were ready to burst. Unfortunately, it´s been raining, so we have yet to find a good time to go running to work off our food babies (especially after we got caught in a downpour a couple weeks ago), so we´re using that time to write here (and we bought chocolate croissants too!)

In case you were wondering, we do go to school...sometimes. We even have a test tomorrow and we went on two field trips this weekend for our Environmental Diversity class. We went to the botanical garden, the vivarium (where there were crazy snakes!), and the zoo. It was pretty fun, but kind of boring too. BUT, we´re going to the AMAZON in a week and a half where we´ll get to see some of these animals in their natural habitat. We can´t wait.

Missing and thinking of you all.

¿Got crabs?

We're finally settled into our class schedule now, however, neither of us are very motivated to do the work for our classes as we discovered this weekend while we were at the beach and then had to do our homework at 6 am yesterday after a night on a bus. Luckily, we did finish our homework, and we even participated in class although we were half asleep. It´s silly of us to complain, given that we only have 4 classes, minimal homework, and Friday´s off.

We both are getting settled into our internships here. Amanda started today with an organization called SIMBIOE: It´s an organization focused on conservation and biodiversity. She spent 4 hours today researching fish of the Andes. And that's what she'll be doing every Tuesday and Wednesday for the next 4 months in an effort to find information for the director of the organization to write a book about the conservation of those species (and her name will be cited in the book too!). Jane is working with an organization called Arte Educarte. This organization goes to public schools in the poorer regions of Quito and teaches art classes. On Tuesdays she helps in the office to prepare for class on Wednesday. On Wednesdays she goes with other volunteers and art teachers to the schools and help with the classes. She has a lot of fun with the kids, and it´s interesting seeing how education and discipline differs here.

Last weekend we took a trip to the Ecuadorian coast to a small beach town called Canoa. We left Thursday evening and spent ALL night in a bus and arrived in Canoa at around 8 am Friday morning. This was definitely a prime location to just relax for a few days. All we did was lay on the beach, lay in hammocks, drink piña coladas, dance on the beach, swim in the water, sunset walking on the beach, and lots of napping. Oh and ate a lot too. It was quite relaxing. The only downside was that there were cockroaches in the hostel. They fumigated the room the first night, and we slept in there, but that could not have been good for us. The second night, Jane slept in a hammock because she was too scared of cockroaches. Baby. The first night we were there we saw a beautiful sunset! We walked all the way down the beach, and as it got dark, there were a TON of crabs just running (or crawling?) along the beach. Kind of gross, but really cool too. We made good friends with the bartender who made us piña coladas (who was also the husband of our hostel owner) and with his nieces. We spent both our nights there dancing in his bar hut on the beach with his nieces who were about 11, 7, and 3 to the same three songs over and over.