update... por fin

Hi everybody,

I guess I´m not as good a blogger as I promised I would be...I´ve gotten lots of feedback that I don´t update frequently enough. SORRY! I think it´s a difference in the fact that I´ve been here before, and it´s sort of like now that i´m settled in here, I don´t feel like anything I could tell would necessarily be earth-shaking...I mean, obviously it shouldn´t have to be earth-shaking in order to warrant getting written down in an Internet blog. But at this point I guess I just sort of feel like I´m living here, going along, waking up every morning, going to work, hanging out, going to classes...and then now and then there are cool new things to tell, but I don´t even remember them when I sit down to write a blog entry!!! So yeah it´s lame I know! But okay. Things are good. The FAO is good. It´s actually pretty funny. I reread my last entry, which was my first entry about my new job at the FAO and how wonderful everything looked. And things are still really good, and I have fun and enjoy the work I do. But the kind of things I´ve done during the last month have been almost laughably varied, from attending gourmet hotel receptions after international conferences on water management, social project design, food security, etc!!!, to helping my boss´s girlfriend fill out her US visa application in English, to going in a bus with lots of cool environmental people to this tiny community an hour and a half outside of Quito, where they´ve recently implemented an entirely sustainable agriculture system, owned and controlled by the entire community, and helped funded by lots of international and national organizations. SO!!!! Every day is definitely unpredictable, and another good thing is that I´m definitely getting more comfortable talking to businessmen and women about official issues in formal situations, something I would never have even wanted to try a month ago. Ricardo (my boss) will call and say, "Sara, do me a favor, call up Laura so-and-so and ask her if the Dutch expert on such-and-such as been confirmed for the meeting tomorrow at 10 am, and then if she says yes, call these five other people who should attend the meeting to remind them what time it´s at." You get the idea! I still don´t particularly enjoy it, but at least I can handle it. Compared to waiting tables at the Naranjilla Mecanica, it still seems blissfully simple!!!!!

Classes are excellent. Yoga is fun, and relaxing, and the people are all really great (it´s about 7 girls and one American guy, which makes for a very "sisterly" atmosphere, with the added element of the American guy, who is HILARIOUS). We´ve been doing different kinds of yoga, including things like talking about nutrition and hygiene, which is apparently also yoga--according to the professor, basically everything that improves your lifestyle is yoga. So, that´s interesting, haha. We did one kind of yoga last class which was basically just interpretative dance--fun!! At one point, she put on this classical march and said, in this very dramatic voice, "Approximately 1500 years ago, some geniuses decided that people should celebrate the spring. So, let´s celebrate!!!!" and she just started dancing around, and pretty soon we caught on and also started dancing, swinging by the elbows, etc. Haha.

Creative writing is also really great! The teacher continues to be frighteningly blunt at times, but she´s also really efficient and dedicated in general, and I think recently she´s seemed more respectful towards almost everyone, like she´s realized that none of us are TERRIBLE writers, and that we´re all getting better. We´ve already started setting aside especially good pieces of work to read at our poetry reading in October!!!! THAT will be a scary/hopefully exhilarating experience!!!!

This weekend was QuitoFest, a huge music festival in a huge sunny park that overlooks historic Quito. This Chilean reggae band I love played there on Sunday, so Gabriel and I went early and rented bikes and biked around the park, and then got up close to the stage in time to hear that group--Gondwana, in case anyone wants to check them out. We met up with Anna Grant there (Lisa´s friend from Chapel Hill, now my friend in Quito!). That was fun.

Gosh, I actually can´t really think of anything else interesting that´s coming up soon. But I´m sure things will continue to be lots of fun. It´s so cool--I HAVEN´T gotten robbed and HAVEN´T gotten sick (except for fainting this one time a little while ago, but that was apparently not indicative of any bigger health problem)!!!! It is so nice to feel like I can live here and be healthy! I had started to doubt whether it was actually possible.

Oh yeah, one more thing that I guess I never wrote about in here--two weekends ago Gabriel and I went to the beach! HIs dad lives in Esmeraldas, this city on the coast, and so we went one weekend when his mom was already going to go there to visit him. It´s a 7 hour bus ride from Quito, which at times can feel intolerable, but it´s beautiful scenery the entire way and we had a great time going to the beach, drinking coconut shakes, eating delicious seafood, and watching the Ecuador-Bolivia soccer game at his parents' friends house. Now Gabriel´s trying to get me to go to the Galapagos Islands with him when he goes sometime this semester to try to renew his residency there, but it´s extreeemely expensive, so I´m doubting it. We´ll see.

So there you have it, the update!!!!! Hope you all are doing EXCELLENT and that you comment or ask questions if there are large portions of my life that I´m forgetting to mention, haha. Will try to write again (relatively) soon!!!!!!