read the next one first...
ok, i'm back. i didn't actually get locked in, but i moved to the library anyway. oh yeah, today was the first day of classes so i'm at my university. ok, so the museum....

the museum is called "la casa de kingman." it's actually the house of the artist E. Kingman preserved as a museum and it is AMAZING! (aside: i forgot to load the pics i took onto my comp so i'll put some up later) i took about a million pics. the place is Huge and i had free reign to go where ever i wanted to. i'll explain more when you see the pictures. in general though, kingman paints the native people, especially the women, in an attempt to express their pain and suffering. he uses very bold colors and always paints big hands. i LOVE all of it and want to but it all. but it's not actually for sale. also in the house are: an original salvador dali, tons of really old (like hundreds of years old) furniture, and religious art work from the 16th century painted on pounded gold! it was amazing.
I also walked over to Maura's house tonight to see if she wanted to take the bus with me in the am to orientation. i ended up staying for coffee and bread and cheese and cards. they play rumi-kube but with cards. I also taught my host mom and sister (camila, 16) to play american rummy. they have some wacked out way of playing that never seems to work out right and you're always left wondering what to do at the end cuz there are no more cards but no one has any points or goes out... needless to say, they like my version WAY more. oh, and NO RICE TODAY!!! i want to write a hiku about rice but i don't know how many sylabuls (sp?)...

8-27-06 things ecuador and illinois have in common
1) toll booths. busses go through them in ecuador and I run them in IL. actually, i only ran them once. it was that stupik "I-Toll" thing. newsflash IL, not everyone knows about those and they are CLEARLY not well marked.

2) sugary foods. IL-Jelly Belly factory. ecuador-pinguino, it's and ice cream/popsicle brand that sells using sex. now, i'm not really sure how eating a superman popsicle is going to attract anyone, but it works in the commercials.

3) that's all IL and ecuador have in common actually. Ecuador: andes mountains, pacific ocean, amazon rainforest. IL: not so much. a bunch of farms. and chicago.

on a more serious note, i went to the musuem my mom works at with her today. brb, i think i just got locked in this room. i'll finish this post later...

8-26-06

I was really sick all of yesterday. didn't get out of bed till 4 pm and then only cuz i had to use the bathroom. took a lot of medicine, had a fever. hallucinated a little bit. yeah, it was bad. but i'm better today. for the most part. i didn't eat anything yesterday either. my host mom made me some tea when she got home from work and that's all i could have. anyway, today...
started off really well, had a nice long convo with adrian (my host brother who's 27.) he found out the other day that he was named lawyer of the year in pinchinca, which is basically the equivalent of a state in the US. he had to go to work at noon though. i guess you have to work weekends if you're lawyer of the year. i think we're going to go to the old city next weekend though, so i'm happy. then i went to call home but the cabina (phone/internet store) wasn't open so i went to la fruteria juanita and i ran into Maura! (another student from UW) she lives 2 blocks from me. her mom invited me over so i went and met maura's host family. maybe it's just the culture but all the women tell me i'm attractive. maura's family did, as did juanita who runs the fruteria. anyway, then i went home for lunch (which my mom always makes and sets out on the table before she goes to work.) that's when my days goes bad... i was in the bathroom and i was leaning on the sink a little bit when the whole sink fell off the wall!! AHHHHHHHHH!!! no one is home and i have NO idea what i should do. i put the sink back on the wall and i don't think it's going to fall again but i put my suitcase under it for extra support. i don' tknow if i need a plumber or a dry-waller dude, but i'm nervous. i have to tell my mom when she gets home from work and i don't know how much it costs to fix something like this. i'll offer to pay but she won't want me to, but i know they don't have money for things like this. two weeks ago her car was stolen from in front of the house and she had had 3 jobs, but now she only has 1 cuz it takes 2 hrs to get to her job on the bus (it was half an hour by car.) for now i just have to wait. this sink thing happened at 2:30ish and it's 5 now.


8-26-06 later that day...
it's all going to be ok. on monday Catalina (host-mom) is going to call the landlord and he'll send over a plumber or something. so i'm calm again. on another note, i've never eaten so much white rice in my life. i'm going to explode soon. i know it. there's just no flavor. ICK. sometimes i try to mix it with other things, but that mostly just detracts from the flavor ot the other food. and i hate to come across as a wasteful, ungrateful, stuck-up american, but i end up throwing some away at every meal. there's just so much. there's ALWAYS a giant pile of rice served as the main course and then something else small on the side, like a fried banana and a piece of chicken or something. but they make the rice in a giant rice cooker at the beginning of the week and then put it in a bowl in the refridgerator and serve it cold. i mean, i know WHY there's so much rice, it's cheap and a filler, and i appreciate it, but MAN, i need to find a way to make it barable. it's only been 3 days.

i'm here!! alive and well

so here's the plan, i think to catch you all up on what's been going on, i'm just going to post some of the more interesting parts of my travel journal...

8-23-06 Miami International Airport...

1. ...Then i got to Miami int airport. wow, I hate MIA. it sucks [a lot]. there are No resteraunts, i was starving and i had till 4:30 pm to sit around at the gate doing nothing. How did i pass my 6 hours in the airport? well the first 45 min i just walked around the airport with my carry ons that hurt my neck trying to find the shopping mall part of the airport with the food and books and stuff that, ya know, Every airport has. I discovered that there are no resteraunts or stores at MIA. So i look at my ticket to see what gate i fly out of next and it didn't say. so i walk back to the C terminal that i flew into. Alright, confession, i thought my ticket said gate 29 C. All the signs in the halls pointed to C 3,5,7, and 9. Ok, maybe C29 is a bit further? No. C29 is my seat in the next flight. Yup, way to go me, good reading. So i ask and i'm flying out of gate A which is (as the signs say) a 25 min walk from where i was. finally i get to my gate and i have LOTS of time to pass still. I bought a book, but it completely sucked so i stopped reading it in about 10 min. "In the Shadow of the Ark," don't read it. finally i got really hungry and i found a bar in the airport (actually there are a LOT of bars in MIA) that had a sign for mini-pizzas. great. but what's not so great is that everyone who works at the airport is latino and think that i am also latino. so i order my pizza, IN ENGLISH, and the hispanic woman who's working says it'll be about 10 min and i say that's fine. this is NOT a busy resteraunt/bar, there're maybe 7 other people in there and i'm sitting at the table right in front of the counter so she can just hand me the pizza when it's ready. so 5 min later she starts talking to me in Really fast spanish. she asks if i paid her already i think? so i say, "si, ya he pagado." 25 min later i'm still sitting there, no pizza, hungry as hell. so i go ask the lady if my pizza is ready. She says, "i thought you already had it. that's what i asked you and you said si." WHAT??!! you've gotta be kidding me! i was sitting right in front of you the whole time and somehow you gave me a pizza and i magically ate it? so i finally got the pizza and it was very sub-par.

ok, so then i arrive in quito. blah blah blah. love it. love the family. you'll hear more about them later.

first post (still in the US)

hey guys! bienvenido a mi blog! i've never done this before but i figured it was a better way to keep everyone updated on my life in quito than flooding everyone's in-boxes with unwanted e-mails... anyway, i hope you visit it often and send me an e-mail or two. i might not get back to you right away, but i still want to know what's going on with you! i'll try to keep this page updated with fresh pictures and embarassing stories so that my life seems really entertaining. and let's be honest, with the awkward situations i get myself into, i should have some stories to tell...