My comfort foods are running out....

I just finished watching Phenomenon for the first time, and one of the special features was movie recommendations, you know, "If you liked this film, then you´re sure to like...." Only, the suggested movies for people who liked Phenomenon (a family drama) were: Ransom with Mel Gibson (action/suspense), Tombstone (western), Nightmare Before Christmas (kids movie), and.....Scream (horror).... I am for the life of me trying to figure out what these movies have in common that they would be similar enough to recommend to fans of Phenomenon...please help...

Also, I cannot tell you how comforting it is that even in a different hemisphere, in a country that does not speak english, or any asian language for that matter, that they still sell Cup of Noodles....

So, as many of you know, on February the 3rd my wonderful mother and HER even MORE wonderful mother, came down to this wonderful country of Ecuador for a wonderful 5 day visit. Marking the first visit from someone from back home, it was so incredibly great to see them. I took a minivan from Machala to Guayaquil, where they were arriving from Miami, Tuesday night, and then took a taxi to the Hilton, because for some unexplained reason my mother went completely against her nature and reserved a room in what is close to the most expensive hotel in Ecuador. I arrived there first, as their plane was delayed, and it was a slight shock to my system. When I travel around Ecuador, I am used to spending my nights in hostels or hotels that at the very top of their game are two stars....and these are ecuadorian stars, which are scientifically proven to shine brighter due to their proximity to the equator, but merit less when it comes to judging things. To stay at a five star hotel, with a shower that had BOTH hot water AND good water pressure, well lets just say I believe I´m going to be experiencing a bit of a cultural readjustment when I come home for good...because I was very aware of the luxury that we were experiencing.

They arrived around 1230 or so, and then they gave me gifts. This was not nearly the most important part of getting to see them, but it is important enough to warrent a sidebar on the food down here: Yes, they have cup of noodles, as well as strawberry and cream cheese toaster strudel (which for those of you who know me is HUGE, that´s really the only way I eat breakfast down here)...however, a couple things that I am missing in terms of normal everyday US food are as follows: Anything from Valentinos, Chipotle burritos, Arby´s beef n´ cheddar roast beef sandwiches, Duangrat´s spring rolls and that amazing sauce, anything from Cookout, and of course Ishi´s hibachi chicken with their amazing shrimp sauce. However, mom and grandma did not bring me any of those, altho I still hold that it would have been completely possible to bring me a Chipotle burrito... More generic, non-specific to any restaurant foods that I am missing are: Pumpkin pie with Cool Whip, barbeque of any kind, Lay´s KC Masterpiece BBQ chips, chili, Miller High Life Lite, Root Beer, Butterfingers, and Altoids. Again, they didn´t bring any of these things either. HOWEVER, what they DID bring, which is probably more important than the majority of anything already mentioned, was.....drum roll please....TWO kinds of beef jerkey, spicy and sweet oriental and teryaki nuggets, as well as a bag of fritos honey barbeque flavor twists, which ever since they discontinued the texas grill fritos, is my favorite chip. And, as the title of this entry suggests, even though I´ve been trying to save and ration and not chow down on those delicious snack foods, I am almost out of them all. Now, I would never do anything as crazy as request that these foods be delivered to me just out of the blue by wonderful family members and friends, however, if you are ALREADY sending me a package and there is space...well, I´ll leave that up to you....

Anyways, to more important things, like the reunion of the 30 year club...that first night, I got my grandma to stay up till 2AM, something she said she hasn´t done in many many many years...which I consider quite an accomplishment. The next day we headed down to see the center park, headed over to the iguana park, (I may have mentioned this before, but I find it fascinating that because of the differences in the climates or biomes or whatever, in a park filled with iguanas, a single squirrel causes everyone´s head to turn. You know what someone told me the other day? SQUIRRELS are considered an endangered species here in Ecuador....if I brought anyone back to Heywood Glen on any given day their head would explode), we continued with the Malecon, Ecuador´s version of a sweet boardwalk, and then, for dinner, we ate sushi at the San Marino Mall (which also features a TGI Fridays) with Craig and Carrie, the WT Volunteers in Guayaquil, and finished it off with a nightcap back at the hotel. That was the end of our first day.

Oh, and for those of you who didn´t catch the 30 year club reference, mom´s 30 years older than I am, and gma´s 30 years older than she is, i know, it´s cute, we planned it that way....

I´ll post this now so people don´t complain about the length of my entries, the rest of the trip will be coming soon...

I CAN GET MAIL HERE!

So today I was sitting at lunch, and the doorbell rang and when Arlene came back she was holding 8 letters for me! Apparently the address that has been going around, which is quite possibly the most intricate address in existence, is for a PO box, and the family here doesn´t ever check the PO box, they have someone come and bring the mail when it´s full....clearly they don´t ever receive anything important via mail to that address... The point is tho, that unless it´s time sensitive, you CAN send me mail...talk to my mom (or apparently my brother...but i HIGHLY doubt he still has my address) in order to get the address, because it´s completely too long to type out, and the letters are all the way upstairs and I really don´t want to get up right now... BUT thank you to Mom and Dad, Lorraine and Glen, Cindy and Keith, Granny Jean, Krissy, the Shedlocks, Uncle Dave and Aunt Karen, and Grandma for the letters you guys have sent, it was really really good to read all of them today!

A couple weeks ago we had our WorldTeach Mid-service retreat, which was at a little private beach owned by the hostal we all stayed at, south of Puerto Lopez. This was an awesome experience, the hostal was more like a resort, with a pool, pool tables, ping pong (yes, we played beer pong AGAIN!!!), a bar, and instead of rooms it had three person cabins where we stayed. And the cabins had HOT SHOWERS! (for those of you who don´t know, there is no hot running water in Machala, or at least not in my house, so showers here are a bit like easing into the pool, where i first let the water touch my feet, then my legs, then my thighs....stop thinking about me naked...and then after mentally steeling myself for the cold....I jump under the water, moving my arms really fast over my chest with the idea that the friction will warm me up just a bit....i´m not sure it works really well) And they had mosquito nets!! (of course, Andrew kind of defeated the purpose by allowing a mosquito into the "safe area" before sealing himself in....he woke up the next morning with approx. 1500 bites) And I was paired with Andrew and Craig...which was one of the best pairings I could ask for...

The retreat was great because we got to see almost everyone, most of whom I hadn´t seen since the end of orientation in September. Out of the 40 volunteers, 37 came to the retreat (one had to leave for good because of medical problems, one was still in the states because of another medical reason, but she should be back any week now, and one was sick with pneumonia...ironically he lives in Vilcabamba, where legend has it everyone lives there until they´re 120, it´s supposed to be the healthiest city in Ecuador and he´s been sick more than anyone else in our group...) out of those 37, I had only seen 16 of them since coming to live in Machala, so it was really good to see everyone back in one group. Especially good was getting the mandudes back together, and we did very manly things, including hitting rocks with bamboo poles, playing football and ultimate frisbee, and making sexist jokes and belittling the weaker gender.

The retreat consisted of a couple classes on how to improve, as most of us are going into or are already in our second cycle of classes, other teaching strategies and suggestions for better and more fun activities. The most important thing about these classes was that they didn´t take up much time...and therefore we got to hang out at the beach, or in the pool, or do other things that were fun in our free time.

We also had the first annual WorldTeach olympics. We were divided up into our phone tree teams, meaning I was with the Coastal group, later dubbed "the monos" (there´s a pretty intense rivalry inbetween the Sierra and the Coast, and the Sierrans call the Costeños "monos", or monkeys, and the Sierrans are then referred to themselves as "longos", or hares...I dont know, dont ask.) The events were as follows: First event, the sandal on head relay, where everyone had to run down and back with their sandal on their head without touching it with their hands. This event was won by the Monos. The second event was "find a butterfly paper clip buried in the sand. This was a stupid event and was won by a different, insignificant team. The third event was the wheelbarrow race....which was a wheelbarrow race down the sand, but it was like 100 yards. This event was won by Quito North, the team who had Andrew, a ex wrestler, who did this for practice everyday for years....the competition was slightly tipped in his favor... The fourth event was "make the highest human pyramid"....we had the tallest guys, and the tallest girl BY AT LEAST 6 INCHES, and she stood on our shoulders....but somehow we ended up losing this event to the Quito North team...there were some seriously shaky measuring methods used here, and we feel still that we were robbed. The fifth event was the "who can hold the most ocean water in their mouth. Craig was a champ at this, and while everyone else was trying to kneel down in the ocean and daintily splash water into their mouths, Craig backflopped into the ocean, and came up with one huge mouthful....and the monos won this one by a landslide. The next event was the leapfrog relay, and lets just say we were robbed again and Quito North stole yet another event from us with the help of seriously faulty judging. Finally, we had to make a cheer, and ours was awesome but because we (I) were (was) obnoxious, no one gave us the points we deserved. We came a close second to the Quito North group in the final standings, but all us monos know we deserved gold...

Other than that, there was card playing, good food, good drink, one heck of a campfire where I may have surpassed my waterfall badass picture with one of me posing in front of the fire, and a lot a lot a lot of laughs. Mid Service was a complete success!

I´ll talk about Mom and Grandma´s visit in the next entry, but I´m in the process of uploading more pictures, so feel free to check out the photobucket site: and I´ll have up to 50 new pictures added tonight!

http://s390.photobucket.com/albums/oo350/brycechadwick/

Check them out and enjoy!

Recent Happenings

So, lets get everyone caught up....

NEW YEARS- New years was a crazy four day event in Montanita, Ecuador. Montanita is this little beach town about 5 hours up the coast from Machala, really only 2 main streets that are a couple blocks long....but this place is PACKED with people. All different types of people too. They say that Montanita is one of the places in Ecuador which is "gringolandia", in other words, the population there was at least half foreign, there on vacation or to surf or whatever. I actually met a couple different people who had come down for a year-long program like what I´m doing, went to Montanita, and decided to stay and had now been living there for up to 5 years...almost all of them who live there are hippies, backpackers, rastas, (I´ve never seen so many blonds with dreadlocks in my life) but there also are a lot of people who just go there for vacation, some who seem straight out of a college brochure, and I swear I saw a sigma pi tshirt when I was down there. The interesting thing is that there is a huge mix of nationalities among the gringos there. Yeah, there are a decent amount from the states, but even more are from Europe: Germany, France, England, Ireland, Austria, some of the Eastern European countries, and Portugal as well. This means that altho there are white people all around...the language everyone still uses to communicate with people they don´t know, even gringo to gringo, is spanish, because that´s the one language everyone assumes people know...I mean, you´re down in Ecuador right? Anyways, it´s a fairly interesting social case study they´ve got going up there.

We stayed at the hotel montezuma...knocking wood constantly in order to avoid his revenge...and since there were six of us staying there we got the penthouse...which meant only that it was the room at the top of the hotel. Montanita is realllll laid back, and so they expect everyone else to be too...meaning no housekeeping, paper thin walls, and only one fan to cool down the sweltering room in the daytime. However, making up for all that, it had a deck and also two tables and enough space for us to play island pong! The only other time down here that I´d played island pong was with scooby doo cups (and my host nephew...who´s six...and don´t worry mom I drank half of his beer for him...) so to play with people who had recently graduated from an American University, and with cups that didn´t make you feel like you were at a elementary school birthday party....it meant a lot...

Montanita was also the best beach I´ve ever been to in terms of the ocean. The water was perfect, no jellyfish, no seaweed, no shells or crabs or rocks or driftwood spars or sharks, the waves were absolutely amazing...I´m talking HUGE for a while, then the sea gave you a break, absolutely perfect for bodysurfing...and real surfing...which I did not get a chance to try yet....AND, I saved a guy who could have drowned...not kidding, weak 30 something guy trying to swim against the current until finally he started yelling "ayuda" which for those of you who don´t know spanish means "i´ve really had enough of this swimming business and I´d like to return to dry sand please"...That incident also got me thinking, and now I´m looking out for opportunities to be especially heroic so that I get a story in the paper, and the only thing I´ll say is "I want a phone call from Obama", and then I´ll be sitting in my room watching west wing (Cuenca has US tv shows on DVD!!!!) and get a phone call and it will be the President and in the 15 minute phone conversation that ensues I will convince him to give me a job when I get back. My job hunting strategies are solid...

New Years was absolutely wild there. First off, it´s a party town anyways, so the beach clubs and bars are the most common things there you can find. Add New years, add the crazy traditions of burning lifesized dolls and surfing naked at midnight, add no covers and free drinks and amazing strawberry banana smoothies....and you have the beach completely filled with people at midnight, everyone chanting and singing and dancing....it was wild. And by wild I mean, clubs were still packed and open from the night before at 1 in the afternoon the next day...wild.

Note to self: Midservice and Mom and Gma´s visit in next entry....

Hope everything´s going well back home!