Spanish Classes in Quito

I've now had three days of Spanish classes.  I definitely feel like a lot of it is coming back to me, but I still have a long way to go.  I have four hours of one-on-one lessons a day.  My teacher is really nice and very expressive.  She´s around my age and lives with her mother in Quito.  Most of my lessons are really just conversations with the teacher where she'll stop to explain the correct grammar or vocabulary for what I was trying to say.  For a smaller segment of the lesson she'll go over the basic grammar concepts and we'll go through both written and oral exercises together.  I have the option of switching to a different teacher next week, but I think I'm going to stick with this one.

A street in the Centro Historico

Along with the Spanish lessons, I'm staying with an Ecuadorian family who live about 10 minutes from the school (walking).  I lucked out and ended up with a terrific family.  The mother is a very sweet, worrisome, typical mother.  She even bought me flowers for my room on the day I first arrived.  The father is a civil engineer.  They have four kids all living at home ages 19, 22, 25, and 28.  There is also a Spanish student from Switzerland staying here, but even the family thinks he's very strange.  He doesn't try to talk with them at all and spends most of his time alone in his room.  For the last couple of nights I've spent my evenings hanging out and playing Chinese checkers in the living room with a couple of other people while he's gone into his room to read or do something alone.  He also likes to eat on his own at a different time than everyone else, so he misses out on that conversation too.  Even though I don't understand everything that they're talking about, I like listening to it and trying to understand as much as I can.

Iglesia San Francisco

In my afternoons I've spent time exploring the city.  I spent Thursday and Friday afternoon in the Historical Center of the Old Town.  Thursday it was a really nice day until about 3:30pm when rain clouds quickly came over the city and the sky opened up with a massive downfall.  When the rain started, umbrella salesmen appeared out of nowhere selling umbrellas for $2 each.  I ended up going to a church/museum that I really had no intention of seeing just because it was nearby and I wanted to give my pants a chance to dry off before I attempted to head home.  About an hour later it stopped raining and became sunny again.  I've been told this is typical weather in Quito.  On the plus side, I learned the Spanish word for rain - la luvia.

Plaza Grande

Thursday night the South American Explorers, a non-profit in South America geared toward travelers and ex-pats, had a speaker at their clubhouse talking about global warming and the effects on Ecuador.  She is an American who's been living and working in Ecuador for the past three years with different environmental groups.  She's part of the group of 1000 people trained by Al Gore to give his presentation, though she adjusted it to focus more on Ecuador than on the US.  From what she said, all of the developing countries, including Ecuador, are increasingly contributing to global warming at a much greater rate than the developed and undeveloped countries, although the developed countries still have the largest contribution overall.  She showed pictures of the changes of the snow levels on various mountains in Ecuador.  It was very interesting.  Most Thursdays SAE tries to have different presentations (in English) at their clubhouse; I'm looking forward to seeing who's there next week.

The Virgin

Friday afternoon I returned to the Old Town so I could see it without being soaking wet.  It's a really nice colonial city with most of the old buildings intact.  It was actually named a UNESCO world heritage site not too many years ago.  I took some pictures there that I'll try to add to the blog soon.

View from the window