Cell phone!

SUCCESS!

I no longer feel naked, because I have a way to communicate with the outside world in my pocket as we speak. I mentioned this fact to my host family and they, if i understood them correctly, called me effeminate for feeling this way. My family respects me a lot, and I´m really glad we´re at the point where we can show that respect in such positive ways. I immediately went up to cry in my room and refused to come down until they had apologized and had told me how strong and masculine I was.

Without further ado, let me give you my number...

01159395489107

Yes it´s long, but I think it should work. The other thing is tho, that it´s expensive, so only do it if you´re willing to pay like 50 cents a minute...hopefully talking to me is worth that much, but I realize it´s a little annoying. If you really want to call me tho, it´s cheapest to do it via skype, where I believe the cost drops by over 60 percent. Also, if someone could explain to my mother what Skype is, and how to use it, that would be great, because I guarantee she´s lost just reading this section. I think you need to buy credit on Skype and then you can just call the number and I´ll be able to talk! Feel free to do this anytime tonight, as I will be taking a 10 hour bus ride to Machala for my host family visit there.

Yes, I´m already taking my first trip! At 945 today (tonight) I will be boarding a bus with the two other volunteers that are teaching in Machala, and we´ll be trekking across the country and arriving at 745 to meet our host families. I envision my first conversation being something like this (translated for your benefit).

Host Family- Hey Bryce, how was your trip?
Bryce- Goodnight.

Friday I have a meeting with my director to go over the classes I´ll be teaching. My schedule as of now is a three semester program. I´ll be teaching 3 classes a week, a beginner and probably two intermediate/advanced classes, 18 hours, until March. Then the fun starts. March and April will be the "intensive class" months. This means I´ll be teaching one class, five days a week, for FIVE HOURS a day...without breaks. This will be the highlight of my trip of course... Then after that nightmare I return to a normal, sane, reasonable schedule of three classes.

Other things that I´ve been doing- (they apparently don´t have semicolons or colons (the punctuation mark) here in ecuador, this keyboard is really irritating me.)
Today we went on a city tour, where we saw a bunch of buildings and people and monuments. The highlight of my trip was the spectacle of an old woman who had a pigeon on her head. I´m not kidding, apparently she had trained this foul bird from birth to stay on her head, even if it was startled and wanted to fly away. Why one would do this I have no idea, but it´s something I wouldnt mind trying. Unfortunately, I don´t think Mugzy has the staying power. The other cool thing I did was have someone take a picture where it looks like I´m high-fiving a giant statue of a winged virgin Mary. I´ll post this as soon as I figure out how. It´s awesome.

Other than that, orientation has been a bunch of seminars and stuff on how to teach. It´s a little boring, but the people there make it worth going to, so I´m having a pretty damn good time overall.

Hope everything is going well in the states, and because I´m almost out of time for my internet, I gotta go!

BRYCE