The New Schedule For Daily Life

Monday:
We get up every day around 6am to be ready to go to school a little after 7. We take two city buses to get to school and arrive around 7:30-7:40 to be ready to teach at 7:50. On Mondays, I teach 3rd- and 4th-grade English and 5th-grade gym class. We get done every day around 1:30, and Monday through Thursday we take another bus into downtown, eat lunch at one of a few restaurants and one of us has Spanish class. On Mondays, Leslie has class so I either hang around (like I'm doing right now) and use the internet or go home. Spanish classes are from 3pm to 5pm. Normally on Mondays I go home while she's in class to rest before my saxophone lesson at 6. Although I think it's getting bumped up to 5:30 which is great because I'm paying (five bucks) for hour-long lessons and the conservatory closes at 6:40 every day. That's pretty much it for Mondays.

Tuesday:
Same morning routine, except that I start the day teaching 2nd-grade English and spend the rest of it in gym class. On Tuesdays I have Spanish class, and right now Leslie almost always sticks around for the internet because she's in the process of applying to grad schools. The three places we normally go to eat are Moliendo Cafe, a Colombian place a couple blocks down from the CEDEI building where we take our classes (great coffee), Mambos, a sandwich place run by our Cuban friend Betu. He makes the only real batidos in the city, so we end up there very often. Batidos are like milkshakes, but made with fruit and not nearly as bad for you. The third place we usually go is the market 10 de Agosto. Food there is good and cheap and the goodness and the cheapness make up for the fact that we stand out so much not only for being gringos but for obviously being of at least the middle class here. Cuencanos with money are way to class-ist to eat in the market, regardless of how good the food is. School and class are pretty much it on Tuesdays.

Wednesday:
Wendesday is pretty much the same as Monday, the only difference being that I only have to teach two class periods and they're both gym. Every other day of the week I have five periods, which makes Wednesday an incredible day at work. Also, I should note that for one reason or another the saxophone lesson gets canceled about once a week, which is fine because we move really fast and sometimes I just need more practice before I'm ready to move on.

Thursday:
Thursdays are pretty much the same as Tuesdays, except that I teach four periods of English (to 2nd and 4th) and only one of gym. My stress and energy level really aren't affected by the gym classes, and we do the same things in all the gym classes (tuned to the physical abilities of the students, of course), so it really doesn't matter which classes I teach gym to any day except sometimes on Friday. The other interesting thing about Thursdays is that they are the official night for partying in Cuenca. Sometimes we go out on Thursdays, but we never stay out too late (we always get really tired at 10 because that's when we go to bed on school nights) and we never drink enough to be affected by it in the morning.

Friday:
Friday I teach English to 3rd grade in the morning and end the day, and the week, with three straight gym classes with the three oldest grades in the school (3rd, 4th and 5th). This is only particularly stressful when we have a free day in class, because that means all three classes want to play a game of Tio Slocomb vs. everyone soccer. And since these three classes come right after the second recess (the day's big soccer match for the kids, in which I play whenever I can to even out the teams and remind them that you can't win without playing defense), some Fridays I end the day with three and a half straight hours of soccer. Thank God we get to go home after school on Friday. We usually go to La Fornace, a pizza place with good ice cream and usually a good deal on a personal pizza, ice cream and a coke. Friday is also payday, but only once a month. There's a bank right next to La Fornace where we can cash our checks without any fees, so we always go there whenever we get paid. After lunch, we try to rest as much as we can before our dance class at 6pm downtown. We've been learning the bachata and the merengue so far and will be moving on to salsa as soon as the instructor thinks we're ready. It's an especially nice dance class because Leslie and I are almost always the only people who go (it's provided for all the international teachers at the elementary school), so we actually get to learn and practice dancing together.

Weekends:
We are going to try to travel a lot on the weekends, seeing all the Ecuadorian sights we can this year. When we're in town, Pepe Luna and I play racquetball for a couple hours either on Saturday or Sunday. We really don't go out to party all that much, but when we do we prefer to got with Pepe and his friends because they drink less and dance more and go to places that aren't full of gringos.

Special Notes:
There's really only one. One thing that has majorly affected our schedules recently is the power outages around town. We're in the rainy season right now, and it hadn't rained in over three weeks until just now after I started typing this blog post (it's Monday afternoon btw, even though the post says something different). I was so excited when I realized it was raining, that I interrupted Leslie's Spanish class to inform them it was raining. Everyone was really excited, because hopefully they'll stopp cutting the power now. The electrical grid in Cuenca is powered by the rivers the run through the city, and the rivers have been running so dry that they've had to cut off power to different neighborhoods at different times during the day in order to not have a complete system failure. They announce in that morning's paper which barrios will have their electricity cut off when so as to inconvenience the people of the city as little as possible with these necessary power cuts. We're hoping they won't have to cut the water supply. Also, when there's no power there're no street lights, which is a major problem right next to where we live and it really messes up the city bus schedules. We've been getting to school late every once in a while because the streets the buses come in on are so backed up.

So this didn't end up being all that happy a post, but that's life here sometimes. There's a reason why countries like Ecuador are referred to as developing.