A Bump in the Road

I am writing from the Simon-Bolivar Spanish School in Quito, Ecuador (see picture), the first stop on my trip. Today is my second day of Spanish lessons. They begin in half an hour, so I thought I would take this opportunity to update my blog.

I guess I will start from the very beginning of my trip. My plane ride from NYC to Quito on September 24th was fairly uneventful. During the leg from JFK to Miami, I had a man sitting next to me who insisted on talking to me the entire way, even after I told him I was from New York! I was reading "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" by Jose Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. The man clearly thought I was brushing up my religious reading, because he proceeded to tell me that he was in New York visiting his cousin who is a minister. It wasn´t until he asked me whether I was Catholic that I finally broke it to him that the book was quasi-fictional literature, and not a religous text (far from it, actually).

The flight from Miami to Quito was great. I had a window seat and spent most of the flight watching episodes from season 1 of "House"on my laptop. Which brings me to some fairly bad news. When I arrived at my host family´s house (more on that below) in Quito, and attempted to start up my laptop, I got an error screen saying that my hard drive was not properly installed. My laptop has since refused to start up. I am trying to reach IBM, but it has been pretty difficult considering no one at IBM Ecuador speaks English. I will keep working on it, but I am afraid that I might not be able to use my laptop again until I´m back in the US. This is particularly disappointing since so many of the things I brought with me are dependent on my laptop (e.g. webcam, digital camera (good thing I have a 1 gig memory chip), DVDs, etc.). Oh well...At least I can keep posting to the blog, although, probably not as often as I would have liked.

Everything else has been wonderful. Absolutely no one here speaks English, so it has been a terrific opportunity to practice my Spanish. My host family is great. I live with Pepita, an older woman whose children have all moved out of the house, except for one, but he is only home late at night. Pepita is incredibly nice and an amazing cook (she knows I´m vegetarian), and she speaks no Enlgish whatsoever. Our conversations are amusing, to say the least. For example, she did not hide her disappointment when she learned that I had a "novio," because she was planning on introducing me to her 26-year-old son. Yesterday, while we were eating lunch, we watched "Full House" dubbed in Spanish. It was hilarious.

The school is great too. I started my classes yesterday. My teacher´s name is Zulma, and she is really nice and a great teacher. She does not speak much English, but understands enough to tell me the Spanish translations for English words that I don´t know in Spanish. We speak only Spanish in class, which is good practice. Yesterday, for homework, I had to write an essay about New York City.

I think people here are generally confused when I say that I am from the United States, because I don´t look like the typical "gringo" from the States. But they are curious more than anything.

That´s it for today. I will try and take some pictures and upload them on these school computers, so keep checking in every now and then!