A room with a view
Trip Start
Jan 23, 2008
1
8
54
Trip End
May 23, 2008
Otavalo,
Ecuador
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Since the school is on the third floor of this building, we have great views of the surrounding countryside as well as life passing by on the streets below. Here are some of vistas from the school.
We also have front row seats to the construction of a new building immediately next to ours. This has been completely fascinating, if not sometimes deafening. The construction is based on vertical columns of poured concrete around a rebar skeleton. The forms are built by hand, the concrete mixed onsite, and then hand-poured via bucket brigade. Based on other buildings, walls seem to be filled in with either clay bricks or cement block, then adobed over. I won´t miss the loud hammering of forms all day long, but I will miss watching the rest of this process.
Gas canister delivered by bike
Otavaleño woman
Scap metal collection
View from my classroom
Handbuilt forms for concrete columns
Hand-pouring the concrete
Cement mixer #2 arrives
Comments
School?
What kind of a school are you talking about? High School, Spanish language?
Re: School?
Not high school Spanish. More fun, more intensive , and without the acne. :)
We enrolled in a short-term intensive Spanish language course here in Quito. There are tons of these spanish schools here (and elsewhere in Latin America), aimed mostly at foreign travellers. It{s a great way to pick up enough Spanish to make travel more easy, and allow one to actually gt to know people along the way.
Here is the website of the school we attended if you want to learn more:
http://www.instituto-superior.net/index.htm