Hola de Quito!

So I made it to Quito safe and sound... so far it seems kind of like freshman year of college meeting the 32 other volunteers and traveling in packs everywhere we go. I just moved in with my host family and it is finally starting to feel like I am in another country. My host mom´s name is Piedad and she has a 20 year old daughter named Andrea who is "chevere" (cool), but she is super busy. I have another volunteer living with me for this month and Andrea has promised to take us out on the town one night :)

The biggest adjustments so far have been the altitud and the shower... I had a continuing headache for about two days but that was cured after drinking TONS of water. It is also winter here and "esta ay chay chay" aka its cold. During the day it is actually pretty warm, but my house is in the mountains and does not have heat. I have been layering on about half of the clothes in my suitcase while I sleep, but it does the trick. The shower... well it turned off today before I was able to rinse out the shampoo in my hair, but after a few minutes I was able to get some nice cold water to finish my shower. Fun stuff

My orientation schedule is pretty busy and so far they have spent about 2 days teaching us all the possible scams that could occur while we are here. This includes the possibility of getting "mustarded" where I could be walking down the street and all of the sudden have mustard squirted on me... the nice people that come to help with then rob me. Yay cant wait.. it made us all very aware which was the goal, but I am ready to stop discussing the dangers and move on to why we came here. Tomorrow we start getting teacher training! yay

On an exciting note, we have salsa lessons tomorrow and then are venturing out to a salsa club! Yes, 33 gringos at the salsa club...

Here comes the nerd in me... we started Spanish class yesterday and I am loving it! We are divided by level in small groups and we only have 5 in our group which is nice. We will have class for 1 hour each day! We have been discussing specific tenses in detail and today learned a ton of Ecua-isms. We had to go out on the street and ask Ecuadorians to explain words like "poser", "wasted", "friend with benefits", and "mama's boy". haha soon I will be talking like an Ecuadorian :)

Thats all for now... ¡te le vaya bien!