This is day two of Spanish classes, and so far everything has been great. I'm in a class with four of my friends, Sara, Lauren, Katy, and Natalie, and our teacher is wonderful. We learned a ton of new verbs yesterday and we've been reinforcing them by drawing pictures, fingerpainting, and reciting them while jumping, shouting, or tying each other to chairs. It's a bit more interactive than any Spanish class I've ever had. We're doing a quick review of the basic indicative tenses, and this morning we spent about twenty minutes telling a story around the table about an evil maple tree, a good apple tree, a wise owl, a magical book, and shape-shifting wolves and sea lions to practice the preterite and imperfect tenses.
We had salsa class yesterday afternoon. It was a lot of fun. We had to take turns being guys and girls because poor Mark is the only guy here in Cuenca at the moment. The other four are all in the Galapagos this week. Everyone picked up the steps and the rhythm pretty quickly. The teacher is pretty funny, and I found out he's my host sister's brother-in-law.
So, all about the Galapagos:
We went to a total of nine islands: Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Española, Floreana, North Seymour, Baltra, Genovesa, Bartolome, and Plazas. Each island is so totally unique from all the others – that's what's so amazing about the Galapagos. Santa Cruz has the largest human population, around 17,000, but much of it is still undeveloped. It has beautiful beaches, but it also has a highland area where it's very wet all the time and there are so many different trees and shrubs and ferns. There are two huge craters in the highlands, los Gemelos (the Twins), which were formed by some sort of volcanic activity, but scientists haven't settled on the exact cause.
Most of the rest of the islands don't have a lot of green vegetation on them other than cacti and various little shrubby things that are good at surviving drought. Santa Fe, Española, North Seymour, and Plazas are very rocky and dusty, but Santa Fe and Española also have very nice beaches. Floreana and Genovesa are mostly huge lava fields, but both have pretty interior lagoons that are good places to see flamingos. Bartolome is very young, as islands go, and it's pretty much all tall mountains of volcanic ash. It made me feel like I was on Mars.
We saw so many animals...penguins, sea lions, fur seals, land and marine iguanas, lava lizards, flamingos, blue- and red-footed boobies, nazca boobies, swallow tailed gulls, Galapagos hawks, Galapagos mockingbirds, several types of finches, and more...and that was just on land. We went snorkeling every day, sometimes twice, and we saw sea turtles, starfish, sea urchins, manta rays, spotted eagle rays, moray eels, a few kinds of sharks, and so many fish!!
Our group had so much fun together, and we also had a blast with the crew on the boat. Our guide, Fazi, knew so much about the animals and the islands themselves, and he spoke really good English. The rest of the crew barely spoke any English, but they were really patient and encouraging with our Spanish. Everyone's favorite was definitely Raul, the waiter, who was so sweet and shy. He found out my friend Lauren is lactose intolerant, and he made a point of getting her food without milk, and he also taught us all how to fold napkins creatively. Jorge, the first mate, really tried to learn everyone´s names, and Alberto let a lot of us steer the dinghies. Alberto and Jofre, the captain, explained all of the navigation stuff up in the bridge to Lauren and me. Juan, the chef, made incredible food for every meal. Randy was hilarious, even though he was hard to understand because he´s from Guyaquil, and he hung out with all of us when we were seasick.
That´s right, there was one really bad night when we started sailing right after dinner, and we were sailing against the waves, so it was pretty much a constant roller coaster. Add in a big dinner, a bit of dehydration, and lots of sunburn, and none of us felt very good. I was one of four people who "fed the fishes" over the side of the boat. I guess you´re not a sailor till you´ve gotten seasick.
I´ve already taken over 1000 photos here, most of them in the Galapagos, and I´ll have them up on Facebook as soon as I can. Uploading pictures takes forever. We also have a Photo Bucket account for everyone on the trip, so I´ll put up that link ASAP. Class is starting now, so I´ve gotta go!!
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