Que Chévere

Ok, so I have officially survived 2 weeks of school. YAY for me. I am not sure how I feel about the Ecuadorian school system. My school is really strict, and it doesn't seem to allow for much creativity. You have to dress the way everyone else does, have absolutely spotless and perfect notebooks, and I don't think they have ever heard of art classes. Oh, and my classroom has two tiny windows and barely any functioning lights. So its more like a "Jaula" than an "Aula. (Aula means classroom, and Jaula means cage, I made the mistake of calling our aula a jaula the other day, but everyone just laughed because it really does look like a cage.)  But other than that, the school is nice. My uniform isn't that cute, but I can live with it. The nice thing about school is that sometimes the teachers just decide not to show up.(And I am pretty sure Ecuador has never heard of substitute teachers.) Then we just have to pretend we are doing something productive so that the "inspectora" doesn't come in and decided that we need to learn everything there is to know about the rule book. 

I bought Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Spanish. YAY. I haven't started to read it yet, but I am very excited to. I found out that my best friend at school (Cristina) and my friend from Missouri who is on the exchange program have never read Harry Potter or seen the movies. It is a terrible thing, so I  have promised them that by the time I leave Ecuador they will both have read all the Harry Potter books at least once as well as seen the movies. Unfortunately the date for the new Harry Potter movie has been moved back and I will have to see it when I get home, although I was excited to see it in Spanish. (I wonder what British-Spanish accents sound like...) However I will still be able to see Twilight here, as well as High School Musical 3!!! So that should be exciting. 

Thursday we only had two classes in the morning of school. Unfortunately I had Bio and Math. Thankfully, my Biology teacher didn't show up, but I did fail my math test. (I am not positive how exactly I failed it. But there were only 2 questions and I definitely got one of them wrong. I had done the same problem right on my homework, but when I got to the test I just kept 2nd guessing myself.) But anyway, after school Emily and I had our first ride on the "Trole". (The Trole is this big green bus that has actual stops like a train and it travels around on wires like in San Francisco). Everything is still cheep here. The Trole costs the same as the bus, 25 centavos.  So compared to the US where you can't even get a gumball any more for a quarter, here you can get a ride all around the city if you wanted.  Emily and I went to the civics museum in the old city. Emily had to go there for homework, but I just tagged along. We saw this beautiful art exhibit of paintings from Mexico and Ecuador. They were all Diego Rivera like. (Actually some were by Diego Rivera.) But it was really beautiful. Afterward we had to draw our own version of one of the paintings in the exhibit with black paper and chalk. I drew this picture called the Cadete and it looks a whole lot better in the actual piece. My drawing made him look like Pinnochio. We also explored the area of town by Universidad Catolico. And went to the artisan market near Amazonas. I bought a little Ecuadorian flute at the Artisan market, and Emily and I made  necklaces from cords and a pair of earings we found there. 

Normally on thursdays I have Spanish class and then Salsa class, but Emily and I were so exhausted after our adventures, and Gabi was exhausted after school that we all just went to Emily's house and ate ice cream. (We were going to bake a cake, but we couldn't figure out how to turn the oven on.) 

Yesterday was pretty uneventful, I had a full day of school, but it was more like a full day of math. I had double geometry, and technical drawing. Thankfully, English was the last class of the day. I got a 20/20 on my George Bush essay. (I know, you were probably all worried I would fail.) 

Right now I have to write a play version of the first Cantar de Mio Cid. :-( My group for literature is performing it in class on Monday and I think I volunteered to write the script. (I have no idea where that came from.) It's not too hard, because I don't have to worry about grammar, they are going to fix that for me, and I am working off a summary of the play that was written for 5-year-olds so I can understand it. 

Oh, I almost forgot...Last night Xplorer had a party for all the returning students who were from Ecuador and went on exchange programs. It was really great because we got to hear their stories, and I learned a lot because they experienced what I am experiencing now. 

Chiao, 

Zoe

P.S. I finally have wireless at the house! So I will probably update the blog a little more frequently.