Wednesday Was Supposed To Be An Easy Day...

...but I didn't know I wouldn't be teaching any classes. I was scheduled to do nothing until after breakfast the first recess, so I spent the hour nursing my sunburns (the skin on the back of my neck was peeling, you get sun burns WAY more easily up in the mountains), eating peanuts and helping Jen get her art class cleaned up after painting and glittering. I was scheduled to teach Language (English) to the 3rd-grade class after that, but we ended up having all the kids from 1st through 5th clean out the flower gardens of all the weeds and dead plants and water whatever was left. So I ended up going all the way to lunch and the second recess without teaching a class. Today is the day I was supposed to go with one of the directors to get sports stuff for Corporal Expression class, so after I ate my lunch during recess I went over to the offices to see whether or not we were going. I was told to get ready to go right then and there and to tell the national teachers that I wouldn't be taking their kids to CE class that afternoon because I would be gone with one of the directors. So I went and told them. Turns out, the two teachers who thought I would be teaching their kids weren't the two teachers whose classes were on my schedule, but we got it all worked out and now everybody knows where Slocomb will and will not be on Wednesdays.

So Braulio, the "I'm not sure what his official job title is because I'm still not quite sure what he does though I am sure that it's important," and Ramiro, the really cool really physically-fit caretaker of the school who lives and works full-time on-site (one time he climbed up the wall of a classroom and swung across the rafters cutting strings off on the ceiling, he's also from the Amazonian region of Ecuador so a lot of people call him "mono"), and I all went to the mall together to buy sports stuff and later to a ferrotiera (hardware store) get Rami (Ramiro) some stuff he needed to make repairs. We went to an expensive sports store called "Marathon," where Mark Odenwelder tells me I may be able to find a legitimate Ecuador jersey in my size because that's where he goes to get his (he's not my size, but he's not your average Ecuadorian either; we and another guy from the US joke that we three are of "un-rob-able" size), and we bought one nice basketball and one really nice soccer ball. The soccer ball is a Mikasa size 5, which is important because it is the official ball of ecuavoley. Ecuavoley is exactly what is sounds like: Ecuadorian volleyball. They play three-on-three and they use a soccer ball, probably because before volleyball became a big deal in Ecuador (which it is now, but only in its Ecuadorian form) that's all anybody had. Later we went to Carol, a "hipermercado" (Ecuadorian for WalMart), and bought a couple cheap basketballs, a couple cheap soccer balls, a cheap small soccer ball for the younger kids, a cheap volleyball, some tennis balls and some pong balls. I also saw that you can get a brand new guitar there for under thirty bucks. Of course, it's not a nice guitar, but for twenty-seven dollars I'll ask the music teacher and the school if he'll spend a bit of our free time together teaching me how to play guitar. Leslie could also teach me a bit I'm sure. My saxophone-learning process was delayed because the conservatory (which here means the place to learn elementary music, not the place for masters of music) was completely closed until all the kids went back to school, which of course when I started work so I haven't yet had a chance to go back and figure out what the deal is with learning the saxophone here in Cuenca. But it will happen. After the mall, which is pretty much just like any mall in the states, we headed back to school and stopped at a ferrotienda on the way to get screws and rope (for jump-rope because a normal jump-rope costs 4 bucks here and a hundred meters of rope costs a couple dollars) and a few other things. This stop took forever, because every couple minutes the lady running the store would remember where she had put a certain size screw Rami needed and every few minutes Braulio would remember another thing he needed Rami to fix and the lady would have to find that too. Then the lady had to run through all 20ish different things we ended up with and calculate the price for everything with a calculator. We got back to school just after all the kids had left, just in time for Braulio to stop in with the other directors and say a word and take Liv, Jen, Leslie and me to a restaurant near the Coloma's house.

The restaurant is called "Good Affinity" and it's owned by the parents of two of the students at our school who are both adorable, smart and speak very good English for their ages. It's a chinese vegetarian restaurant owned and operated by a Taiwanese couple and the food there is very reasonably priced and very tasty as well. We learned today (we plan to go there once a week, both because it's owned by the parents of a couple of our kids and they like to give us free desserts every once-in-a-while and because the food is good and fairly priced and Jen is a vegetarian and can order anything on the menu) that the "menu del dia," also known as the "almuerzo," is never as good as the other things on the menu and even though it's cheaper and we're all very money-conscious because we make sixteen dollars a day at work we're probably only going to order from the regular menu from now on.
Lunch was good. It started raining pretty hard when we first got there (we were sitting outside at first) and it kept raining for a long while after we were done eating, so we stayed until it stopped which wasn't a problem because it wasn't too busy and the people who run the place like us. Leslie and I walked home, which is only around ten minutes from this restaurant, depending on the traffic on the streets we have to cross.

When we got home, Nellie and Angel were here (Angel had been in out of town on business) and one of their friends was here as well. Angel and the friend and I (though we did the cordial introduction thing we never learned each others' names) spent a few minutes chatting about random Ecuadorian things like the game against Uruguay, traveling around the country and other topics. After Angel left the kitchen, leaving me alone to converse with his friend for a good ten minutes, he came back and asked me how I felt speaking with a coastal Ecuadorian because their accents and dialects sound so different. It was tough, but I was able to follow almost all of what he was saying because on the coast they cut up their Spanish the way we in the United States cut up our English. If they spoke English, the mountain Ecuadorians would say: "I'm going to the supermarket to buy some ice cream, don't you want to come with me?" Coastal Ecuadorians would say: "I'ma go to the store to buy ice cream, dontcha wanna come?" In casual settings, I definitely speak English like a costeño (This isn't me explaining what that words means {coastal person}, this is me explaining why I use parentheses so much. It's also the only time I'll ever use inappropriate parentheses grammar. I don't think in a linear pattern, and I definitely don't live life in a linear pattern either. I don't feel that my writing should follow the one-topic-at-a-time policy most people keep - especially now that my future doesn't depend on how it's graded - and I want this blog, MY blog, to reflect my life as much as it possibly can. Our mother used to always take us to the grocery store with her when Caldwell and I were young. When I was small enough to fit in the seat of a grocery cart - before Caldie came around - mom always had trouble with me pulling random foods off of the shelves and putting them in the cart. She'd end up at the checkout line with food she'd never wanted to buy or maybe even never seen before; eventually she had to pick her grocery stores according to how wide the aisles were. In my eyes, life isn't about taking the cart through the aisle. Life is about grabbing whatever you can and putting it in your cart.).