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!