if everyone had a hammock, we´d all be a lot happier.

things that i have learned/accomplished in the past 5 days:
l. being roughly 30 minutes from the equator DOES NOT mean blue skies, sunshine, and warmth...
2. the ´dry season´ means it rains for only 3 hours every afternoon
3. i have had more cups of tea than the previous 21 years combined
4. i have zip lined through the andean cloud forest... hundreds of feet in the air... with guides who don´t speak english...
5. i have shared a bottle of rum with some locals
6. i stayed in a 5 dollar hostel
7. sitting in a hammock overlooking the cloud forest in the middle of a rain storm while reading and writing in my journal just might be my favorite thing ever.

so that is the basics. here´s the dirty details...

i had my first lesson in español last friday. my teacher´s name es paúl. he´s basically a big (or small... i´m taller than him) 30-ish year-old dork who gets paid to teach stupid people like myself spanish. ha. he´s actually very nice, and he understands my awful accent and the gaping holes in my sentences quite well. thankfully he understands my sarcasm as well... as that has been quite difficult to get across in spanish. (old habits die hard, apparently.) we spent 3 hours going over basic phrases and trying to kick my habit of accidentally speaking french when i don´t know the word in spanish. then, we walked around the city for an hour and talked about the shops and stuff like that. all in all, pretty successful. so i´m learning. i can understand a lot... but can speak and write a little. it´s geting better everyday though. so i´m hopeful. after class, i went home and had dinner and studied a bit (like i said, old habits die hard... i had to explain to paúl that i hadn´t seen any movies because all i do is study... that was awkward.). then my señoras son and granddaughter came over... i´m not sure what the point was. but. he seemed nice enough. kind of arrogant, to be honest. he wouldn´t slow down his talking so i could understand him when he would ask me a question. basically he made me feel like an ass... but then again, i´m not dependent on my mother to bring me my dinner when i´m clearly in my late 30s or early 40s. so i think i win that game. his daughter seemed to be about 15 and she spoke very good english... i was impressed... and VERY thankful. sometimes i want to scream that i´m not stupid even though i can´t understand anything... it´s like, ´I PROMISE I´M NOT AN IDIOT IN LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS!´ oh well. such is the joy of immersion, no?

i got up at the ripe hour of 6 am on saturday morning to meet one of the people in charge of the program at the KFC on the corner (yes, the KFC... you heard me... it´s called ´chicky park´... no sé...). he took the group of us (there are 6 people studying at the school right now... who knew?!) to the bus station to catch the bus to mindo. we made it on the bus and drove for about 2 hours to this really small town outside of quito. it is super beautiful... and in the andean cloud forest. i figured out why they call it the frickin´ cloud forest later that day... but anyways. it was muy bonita. the 6 of us were a rather rag tag team: a 34 year-old hippie-esque woman from california, a 20 year-old girl from canada, another 20 year-old girl from penn state, a 20 year-old girl from u of michigan, a 20 year-old boy from sweden... who just finished 4 months of studying in cuba of all places, and myself. bottom line: 5 girls, 1 boy. and a whole lot of random. but fun. anyways. we walked around and bartered for a good hostel for awhile and settled on one for 5 dollars a night. not bad, eh? then we set out to explore and found the canopy tours. we ziplined through the forest for about 2 hours with our ecuadorian guides (don´t worry. i´m high ropes trained from camp... the harnesses were safe... promise!) and got caught in the afternoon downpour on the 30 minute walk back to the hostel. it seems to rain every afternoon and it covers the forest and the mountains in clouds... hence... cloud forest. these ecuadorians are geniuses. anyways. i made camp on the porch and sat in the hammock and read while the rain passed. the six of us talked for a long time and then decided to grab dinner. after dinner, we ran into some girls from ecuador who were visiting mindo for the weekend. we talked to them for awhile and bought a bottle of rum and a 3 liter of coke... and sat in the center of town and talked for a few hours. it was nice to talk to locals... it finally felt like we weren´t the stupid american tourists. so yeah. went to bed. got up. breakfast. more hammock time for me... and then we headed back to quito.

so here i am. in quito. searching for a park that supposedly has a 3 kilometer loop... we´ll see about that. hope all is well in the states! later!