 |
| The city of Quito |
First up is my trip I took to Ecuador for a little over 2 weeks in January 2012. I had always wanted to study aboard in a Spanish-speaking country so I though this would be a great opportunity. I guess I should say that I was a Spanish Major in College, having spoken it since the 8th grade. I would say that I had the knowledge, just not the confidence since I'm not a native speaker. Anyway, so the first step was getting to Quito (the capital) and meeting my host family.
At first everything went well; the flight to Miami was simple and I met up with my class which totaled 12 people (including the TA Jason and the teacher Norman). Our flight was supposed to leave at 3:00pm so we could arrive by 7:00pm but life had other plans. After waiting awhile, we finally boarded before we were told that the air conditioning wasn't working and they had to find another plane for us. By the time this got resolves, we didn't get into Quito until 11:00pm which would have been okay, but I had been traveling since around 6:00am and now I was in a foreign country that primarily only speaks my secondary language.
After making it though immigration and customs I ended up at the greeting area where I was bombarded with people with signs for taxis and had various names. I just kept going until I luckily found my name being held by my host sister. She was really nice and fluent in English so I didn't have much trouble communicating with her. She even invited me out to a party but I was completely drained so she just showed me my room and left.
I didn't realize that my family had a dog (a Bichon Frise I think), which would have been fine if she hadn't started barking. I realize I couldn't say her name to calm her down so I decided to call her cute names for a dog "perrito" but that obviously wasn't working so I ended up just closing the door. I later come to find out that she's partly blind and deaf so it probably wouldn't have worked anyway. I was able to connect to their Internet and connect call/skype my family from home. Somehow Quito is in the same time zone as home, which made calling home a lot easier.
After I got settled my host parents came home and I got to meet them and I learned that the dog's name was Bambina and their outside dog's name was Sultana. They were really nice and caring and even though they couldn't really speak English well, they were at least patient enough with me while I pantomimed (at times). I also learned that in this culture, you stay at home until you're married (which isn't much different from what I'm currently doing). They had a 4 bed-4 bathroom house with only 3 people living there so it made sense that they open up their home to students. A week into my stay, an Argentinan girl came to stay there for a month long internship. Talk about a language barrier: she spoke so fluid, with slang and with such quickness that I always had to ask her to repeat or slow down. haha.
By the way, the house was a pretty peach color located at the end of the street with a cool gated in area around the garage. There even was a maid, so I got to enjoy not having to pick up behind myself (where I was heavily assured by my parents not to get used to this kind of treatment) for two weeks. Plus I had my own bathroom, which was pretty nice. The only way to get to the neighborhood was through a security gate, so I felt really safe where I was. This pretty much covers my first night in the city.
I didn't realize I had so much to say, so I'm going to break this story up. Part 2 will appear sometime next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment