La Playa

I just had my second day at my internship, at the school. Let’s just say that I am completely unqualified to be teaching English. So far, I have mainly been working with kids individually, or in a small group. For example, we were working on present perfect, and I couldn’t explain why it should be “I have gone” instead of “I have went”. Apparently, “gone” is the past participle or something or another. Clearly I know what is right and wrong, but I am having a rough time explaining it.

This past weekend I went to the coast (2 Ecuadorian regions down, 2 to go!). It was super awesome! Our supposed 7.5 hour bus ride to the coast, turned out to be 14 hours. There was an accident or something, and we moved about 10 km from 1am until 6:30am. Literally, people got off the bus and were chatting it up with other people in the traffic. I was trying to sleep through it all.

Once we finally got there, around 12:30pm (instead of 6am) we hit the beach. Friday was fairly cloudy, which was good, because we all got more than enough sun on Saturday. I actually got the most homesick I’ve been on Friday night. We were all sitting around a campfire playing a game called ‘the hot seat’. Everyone was asking each other all sorts of questions about everything. Someone asked the group about one of the most fun days in your life. It definitely was making me homesick… the most I have been since I got here. Later that night we went down to the beach, and it just hit me how awesome it is that I’m here right now. There is something about an ocean and the crashing waves at nighttime, and about nature in general, that I can’t help but be reminded of how awesome God is. It definitely helped with the homesickness ;)

On Saturday, one of the guys made pancakes for breakfast in our make-shift kitchen. They were more of a scrambled pancake, but hit the spot, nonetheless. Then the rest of the day was a mix of laying out, swimming in the ocean, and reading. We all played in the ocean for over an hour…it was so much fun. I felt like a little kid out there in all the waves. Then another one of the guys made spaghetti for dinner and we bought some South American wine to go with. All of it was extremely tasty. This was probably my most fun day since I have arrived…. true relaxation.

My entire 3.5 day weekend, including transportation, the hostel, food, drinks, everything, was $98... pretty darn good. I even splurged on a drink called Atacames de la Noche that was $6 (most expensive on the menu)…. because I was hell-bent on getting a drink that was served in a pineapple.

Hope everyone is doing well!

Much love, Em