Hey everybody! Actually, I´m not sure who ¨everybody¨ is... it might be just you, Mom and Daddy. Haha, but anyway, I´m finally starting this blog, so... post comments, questions, keep me motivated to keep writing!
I got to Quito about a week ago, and things have been going really well ever since I flew out of Raleigh; it was the best flight down to Ecuador I´ve ever had (really smooth, not stressful), and seeing Gabriel, his parents, and my exchange host mother Paty in the airport was GREAT. Then the next day, Lily arrived, not even 24 hours later, and that was wonderful; I still think it hasn´t quite sunk in that she´s here in Ecuador with me! Of course, not really ¨with me¨...after the first 48 hours or so we dropped her off with her new host family, who she´ll live with for the next three weeks while she works with an organization in Quito. But either way we´ve already gotten to hang out a few times, and it´s so cool to be able to call her up without paying anything!!!!
Gabriel and I spent a few days last week just hanging out, walking around, catching up. We also went over to my new APARTMENT several times to meet my roommates and drop off a bag of clothes. The apartment is really, really nice. It´s spacious and disorderly (a good sign), and even though there´s not a lot of furniture (they all seem to be on pretty tight budgets) they´ve definitely improvised, with slabs of wood draped with cloths to make tables and a few beach chairs scattered around the living room. Oh, and my room is great, so much bigger than I expected! It´s also got a beautiful view of the mountains and part of the northern part of the city. It has a private bathroom!!!! The only bad part is that they say it´s the coldest room in the house, because it´s up against a wall where apparently the wind blows all night. Get ready Lisa and Julia!!! haha. But, I mean, we´re talking ¨cold¨ like maybe 45 degrees...we´ll bundle up and be fine. Anyway, the best part of all is that my rooommates (housemates, I guess I should say) seem like really great people. They´re not that talkative at first, which was a little disconcerting--I was running up eagerly to hug them hello and they were sort of standing there stiffly. But after talking with them for a little while they loosened up, and the good news is that the girls who live there (one is Pavla, who´s from the Czech Republic and is wonderful, and the other is Camila, one of my housemates girlfriends, who doesn´t really live there, but practically) are both great, really talkative and sweet. One of my biggest complaints about my exchange year in Ecuador was that it was really hard to make friends with girls, so I think I´m off to a good start this time!
So then, yesterday, Gabriel and I got on a plane and flew to Loja, the southernmost province in Ecuador. Gabriel has these adult friends he made in Idaho who are now working for an NGO in Loja, going around to small communities and addressing health issues, specifically epilepsy. We´re going to be working with them in a tiny town for this whole week, and then next week we´ll have more time to explore around the area, which has a ton of cool places to go, like Zamora, a jungle province with huge animal reserves and cool towns to explore, and Saraguro, a predominantly indigenous area north of here with an apparently very distinct culture (sorry, I don´t actually know anything about it yet, just that it´s supposed to be interesting, haha). Anyway, the best part of this whole trip is that one of Gabriel´s good university friend´s parents own a hotel here, and she talked with them and they agreed to put us up for FREE for these two weeks. It´s not quite the luxury hotel that we were for some reason expecting (it´s actually amusingly non-luxurious, I´ll try to take some pictures and put them up here), but it´s free! So that´s all good.
Anyway that´s about it for now, I´m glad I finally started this blog and I´ll try to make some good updates in the next few weeks! Thanks for reading, yay!!!
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