Long Week

I’m sorry for such a long post but this was a very long week. This week was my first week of “classes” and orientation. We had a really funky schedule where some days we had to be there at 7:30 am and others we didn’t have to be there until 12:30. The first two days my host family drove me to and picked me up from the university. My first day we worked mainly on getting the paperwork to extend our visas. Most of us entered in with just tourist visas because somehow getting a visa for Ecuador has changed a bunch of times in the past few months and is all complicated. The main thing we had to do was wait in an unnecessarily long line to copy our passports and tourist visas. This wasn’t all bad because we all started to learn names and get to know each other while we waited. Afterwards, we had lunch provided which was a pretty traditional type of Ecuadorian lunch that included a soup, rice, some sort of meat and a mysterious fruit juice. (We had some sort of variety of this each day this week). I really enjoyed most of it, though this is probably the most soup I’ve had during a time when I’m not sick. After lunch we walked around campus some before the 3 hour long Spanish class. We found this little pond with a bunch of turtles and tried not to get a bit lost because the campus is definitely bigger on the inside than it looks from outside the protective walls. The Spanish class was a bit of a struggle to get through only because we were all exhausted and had very little motivation to focus. The professor gave us about four things to do for homework that night out of a 37 page packet that we somehow got through in this very short, week long class.

On Tuesday, we had our Galapagos/Quito orientation along with a campus tour. The university has about 8,000 students, who will be starting classes along with us on Monday, and I’m very interested to see how that many people fit in the still sort-of-small campus. The orientation was full of information that will be helpful in a few weeks as well as some very interesting background on the Galapagos. One thing I didn’t know was that people started living there like in Australia where Ecuadorians sent prisoners to live there who ended up creating little colonies. Also, Ecuador basically declared that they owned the Galapagos because no other countries had any real interest since the islands didn’t have gold or a pre existing civilization or anything that they believed to be worth taking over. The professor that was telling us this is a anthropologist and is currently researching to find information about if there were any people who lived on the islands before Spaniards or other Europeans came. They currently believe this because there is no evidence of other civilizations. This would be interesting because then the Galapagos would be one of the only big islands that was not inhabited by some sort of indigenous people.

This picture is from the bridge that extends the original campus to the other building that is connected to a huge mall. (Very convenient for when we needed some caffeine during our break in Spanish class)

On Wednesday we didn’t have to be at the university so I got to sleep in finally!! However this was the first day we were expected to find our own transportation to school. The buses here only cost $.25 per ride where as the taxis are at least $1.25, so most of us were texting each other trying to figure out where bus stops are and if the information our host families had told us held up to the information of other host families. I gave myself over an hour of buffer time to figure out how to travel the 5 minute car ride by bus. I asked my host dad and he said I could just wait outside the house and the bus would coke right by there. I got all my things together and waited out there for what felt like a good 15 minutes before thinking to ask someone to make sure I was in the right place. While waiting, this one car drove by then a few minutes later had turned around and came back by the house. I started thinking “oh gosh this guy is totally coming back to kidnap me” but this was at 11 in the morning so not super likely. Turned out he needed directions and somehow he thought asking the gringa would be the right decision. HOWEVER I actually gave him correct directions because he asked the Ecuadorian who was a bit down the road from me and she gave the same advice. I think he realized once I started talking that I was the wrong person to ask so that’s why he needed a second opinion but I’m proud of myself for just knowing the right way! The women he asked walked by me but then turned to watch if he went the right way but he took neither of our directions and went the opposite way. I then asked the women were the bus stop was to make sure I was in the right place and found out it was at the end of the road, just a few houses down. I waited for the bus for a few minutes along with another girl who was probably a year or two younger than me. After we both and been keeping an eye on each noisy car that rounded the corner for again what seemed like too long, the short blue bus finally rounded the corner. We hoped on and before we had even sat down the bus was back in motion. I learned by observing the other passengers that when you need to get off you just say “gracias” rather than stop because from my experience so far Ecuadorians all are super polite. I got off a few minutes later, the house really isn’t that far from the school but just a bit too much to walk. The corner where I got off left a bit of a walk up hill to get to the university. The dang altitude was getting to me as I felt my breath shorten way too fast. I recognized the buildings but to be sure asked a woman on the sidewalk if I was going in the right direction and she was soo sweet and said “si mi amor” and gave me the directions again to ensure I got there. I made it to the university, though out of breath, and had time to talk with my friends before we had lunch and then Spanish class again.

On Thursday, we had orientation with the entire section of international exchange students. This was basically five hours of listening to all the safety, security, and health things we need to know for our time here. (Which also included them making us do the Macarena twice to keep us all from falling asleep and the key ways to spot a fake taxi). Like the other days, we had lunch afterwards but now with close to 200 people rather than the 53 that are in the Galápagos program. Emma, the other student from UNC, and I sat with some of the Ecuadorian student ambassadors who were really fun to talk to. One of them was a Manchester United fan so we had fun nerding out about soccer during lunch. We then had Spanish again but during our break halfway through we found this amazing little roof top garden, seating area type thing. It was gorgeous, we were trying to find more time than the 10 minutes we had for break to spend out there. This is the view:

After class, I found some new bus buddies, Emma and Corey, and we waited to head back home.

Today, we had to be on campus at 7:20 to climb aboard the bane of many travelers existence, those huge tour buses. They tried to bribe us into being excited about being a huge group of tourist with some free chocolate but that only kind of worked. Thankfully I wasn’t the only one extremely uncomfortable having found ourselves being in one of the obnoxiously big groups parading through the town. That’s what’s so fun about this group is a lot of us have traveled before and hate being tourists. Today though we were full on tourists. It made me cringe when we took up an entire sidewalk and people were trying to pass by us carrying heavy bags some product to sell. There was one person who walked along side us trying to sell what was either marijuana or coca. Fun fact; apparently it’s legal to carry those drugs here but just not use them? Odd. We trekked through the colonial center, going to old, gorgeous churches and a museum that featured three levels to represent the three worlds (this is the best way to describe it) that was one of the world views of the Quechua. (Sadly, I don’t have any pictures from that museum).

The first picture is from Independence Square which has the Presidential palace, the office for the person who is like a governor and the church. The square is where people are able to express their opinions about the government really easily because it’s not uncommon to have protests or expressions of praise, depending on the opinions of whoever is there, to take place. The second picture is one of the churches we saw that I cannot remember the name of because there were a lot of churches that we saw! The third and fourth picture are from the Casa de Sucre. The fifth picture is from a cool colonial road that we walked through. The sixth is the gold leaf covered inside of another of the churches we toured. All of the churches had this gold leaf covered inside that was incredibly intricate. The last picture is from the outside of the fifth picture. That is where we got picked up to head back to campus.

Once we got back to campus we had our last Spanish class. I finished my two page paper that we had been given last night in the bus because sadly I’m not just getting to explore while here but also have to study. We had to write about and give an oral presentation on anything Ecuadorian. I decided to write about biodiversity because we have learned a little about that so far but looking into the research for this we really have hardly learned anything yet. It’s really incredible how much biodiversity there is in this little country and I can’t wait to start my first class next week to learn even more about it.