Is it Christmas yet?

I hope you all had a good weekend. I did. Weekends here, when there are no group activities planned, tend to be really long, a lot like weekends on campus at the beginning of college. But this was a good one.

On Saturday I went to Milenium Plaza (actually, where I am at this very moment), which is one of about three malls in Cuenca. It has really fast, free wireless, and those two things are almost mutually exclusive here. Lauren and I just missed drowning in a horrendous rainstorm (a real "frog-strangler," if you were lucky enough to know my grammy), so most of the power was out when we got here, but it, along with the Internet, came back on long enough for me to Skype my wonderful roommate, Jamie, since it was her 21st birthday. The Internet came back in full force a few hours later, and I was able to get some pictures uploaded to Facebook.

My host parents were gone all weekend and actually weren't back when I left the house this afternoon. They went to Salinas, several hours away by bus, to visit Rita's grandmother, who apparently isn't doing very well. (After all, she is 104.) As a result, I spent the majority of Sunday with my host sister, María Fernanda, her husband, José (whom everyone calls "Pichi"), and their daughter, Antonela. We went to Pichi's parents' house for lunch. One of his brothers and his sister or sister-in-law were there with their kids, and they also had two friends visiting from Spain. The lady from Spain, who was actually Cuencan by birth, spoke really good English, which was nice. I still spoke mostly in Spanish, of course, but we made a few comments to each other.

After lunch, Antonela wanted to go to the toy store, rather than ride rides with her cousins at the random mini fair that suddenly appeared down the street, so I went with her and her parents to another local mall, Miraflores. The toy store there is apparently the largest in Cuenca, and it was maybe 1/3 the size of the Toys-R-Us with which I grew up. It was full of Barbies, GI Joes, bikes, baby dolls, dinosaurs, kiddy cars, and playhouses, and also full of parents and screaming children. Anto decided she's going to ask Papá Noel for a bike, a baby doll, and a Three Musketeers Barbie this year. (Three Musketeers is the latest in the line of Barbie movies, in case you're not up on that sort of thing.) We also went into a Christmas store, because María Fernanda wanted to get some ribbon for their Christmas tree, which they already have up. There were tons of bright, shiny, themed Chrsitmas trees, stockings, collectible villages, reindeer, and snowmen. There were a few normal penguins too, but María Fernanda and Anto kept referring to the snowmen as pingünos as well, and I didn't bother to correct them. I frankly think it's hilarious that snowmen are so popular here, since it never snows in Ecuador except much, much higher up in the mountains.

Now, after hearing Bing Crosby's immortal version of "White Christmas," I'm definitely wanting to break out the Christmas music. I've told myself I'm not allowed until the second week in November, though. I do this every year...last year I refused to let myself listen to Christmas music till after Election Day. We'll be in the Amazon during the second week of November, and it will probably be ever weirder than hearing Christmas carols during Thanksgiving in Pensacola, Florida, but I don't think I'll mind. Christmas is only two months from yesterday, you know...not that I would ever start a countdown to anything...yeah, never.