A Typical Day

I don't have a whole lot of new and interesting things to expound upon, so I thought I'd write a little about what a typical day is like here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM, and I usually get out of bed around 6:10...or 6:20...or 6:30....I eat breakfast, which usually consists of fruit, some type of bread, and milk that I think my host mother sets out the night before. (The milk here is different...it comes in bags, and though it usually resides in the fridge, it seems to be fine sitting out for hours at a time.) With the help of the microwave and a cute little tin of cocoa powder and the sugar bowl, I turn the milk into hot chocolate. The cocoa that my family buys is not really sweet at all, hence the added sugar.

I'm out the door by 7:20, and I meet my friends Kyle and Lauren on the corner and we walk to school together. It's about a mile, mostly uphill, with my laptop on my back, and Kyle and Lauren are both taller and walk even faster than me. I will never complain about the hills at Montreat again. (Okay, that's a lie, I'm sure I'll complain about those hills every year of my life. But I'll always remember that it was worse here. At least the drivers at Montreat make a point of not running over pedestrians.) By the time we get to Amauta, our school, I'm out of breath, the backs of my knees are quite unhappy, and I'm pretty sweaty. We go upstairs and immediately take out our computers to do Internet-y things.

Class starts somewhere between 8:00 and 8:20. When we have history with Narcisa, we usually start pretty promptly. For grammar with Julia, though, we get there when we get there. There's this concept of “Ecuadorian time,” and a lot of people aren't very concerned with punctuality. Class goes till 10:00, and then we have a thirty minute break for tea, coffee, and whatever bread or crackers are downstairs. Most people spend a large chunk of break on the computer too. In order to check my B-W email, I often have to start loading the page when I get to school, let my computer run all through class, and then I might actually have my inbox available to me during break. Squirrel Mail sucked, it's true, but did anyone really expect a Microsoft-powered system to be any better?

We have class again from 10:30 to noon, and then Lauren and I usually walk home for lunch. A lot of people go out to local restaurants, though, and I think we're going to go out with a group tomorrow. You can usually buy a two- or three-course meal for $1.50 or $2.00. (Yes, Ecuador uses American currency. I think they switched over in 2000. They used to use the sucre, but it became devalued to the point that it took tens of thousands of sucres to equal one dollar. Ecuador makes its own coins, but they accept American ones too, and they buy the bills directly from the U.S. mint, so they all have George Washington and Abe Lincoln on them. I find it kind of hilarious. And you know how you never see gold Sacajawea dollars in the States? It's because they're all down here.)

We usually go back to the school in the afternoon for salsa class, ecology discussions with Dr. Melampy, to meet about our group projects, or once again, to use the Internet. Today we have salsa, but I also need to do some research since I have to write 1,000 words about the government of Bolivia for Friday. Joy.

Sometimes small groups of people do something together in the late afternoon, like get ice cream or run some errands. Then we walk home. I get home somewhere between 6:00 and 7:30, and then I do homework. We have a small dinner, often leftovers from lunch, between 7:30 and 8:30, and then I take a shower, finish my homework or do some journaling, and go to bed because I'm exhausted.

I feel like I'm constantly busy here. I really relish the three or four hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings when I can just sit on my bed and do nothing...if I don't have too much homework, that is. It's frustrating, because everyone is always saying, “Go out and enjoy yourselves! Have an adventure! Get to know Cuenca! Be involved with your host families! And now do this mountain of homework, yay!” On top of that, we walk almost everywhere, and it takes an hour on average to get there and back. I walk at least four miles a day. The one benefit is I've already lost some weight. And I'm sure it's character building. My dad says that about anything that's unpleasant. I can think of a few people, though, who would argue that I'm enough of a character already.