MindoLindo

So work has been absolutely killing me recently. I currently have three classes, each with 20 or more students, with every single student studying at varying levels of English. It´s going to be a long couple of weeks before I get my feet solidly under me. Some of the most exciting stuff that has happened in Aula (classroom) number two in the past week is that we did a put on\take off cothing relay type race to study the vocabulary words for clothing. Thus I got to see Ecuadorians dressed in all of my clothing which certainly provided a couple of laughs.

So as I mentioned on Wednesday I got to check out Mindo a week ago. The immediate thing one notices about Mindo is that it rhymes with the Ecuadorian word for beautiful. Thus if you could have a weekend retreat in a place called Rutiful, Critty, or Morgeous you would be in the same boat as I was in. However, sometimes my sense of humor doesn´t translate into Spanish. Not one single person thought it was funny when I burst out, ¨MINDO-LINDO!¨In fact they just remarked, ¨Well yes Mindo is a beautiful place.¨

This has happened numerous times. Ally was able to score me a Alvaro Noboa t'shirt on the eve of his destruction in his third presidential race. Thus I brought it my Noboa t'shirt to the clothing race thinking it would get some laughs, but no dice. People take politics VERY seriously here. I guess that makes sense when you have 115 presidents in 100 years. However, sometimes sense of humor is the only way to cope with ridiculous circumstances. My most recent joke bomb was, upon entering into my host family house dripping with sweat (I had just walked about three miles to get home from paying my taxes! YIPPEE I can still go back to the US without getting arrested!) my host brother asked me why I looked so hot. I told her I was going through menopause. Crash and burn Mav. Crash and Burn. I wish I knew how to say ¨Slider (sniff) you stink¨ in Spanish.

Anyway after our rocky re-entry into the country, my now augmented work schedule, and my propensity for telling jokes to a silent audience, our weekend retreat came at a great time.

A couple things about Mindo that proved to be fun.

1) There were no banks in the entire city. We had traveled with 40 dollars between the two of us. Not a good idea. Thus we grovelled around the streets desperately searching for a place that accepted credit cards so that we could eat some dinner. However. We finally found a brand new hotel in the outskirts of town that did in fact accept the plastic. (By ¨outskirts¨, I mean to say that Mindo´s downtown consists of two city blocks. After exiting downtown you enter the suburubs-basically a soccer field and some churches, and arrival in the outskirts demands a 300 yard walk from the center of downtown).

2) We actually encountered some pretty nice people in Mindo, which was a huge pleasure. One of the people was a gent who rented us some decent mountain bikes, which turned out to be the highlight of the trip. Though the bikes were old, and Ally´s gears didn´t work, we did manage to make it up to the top of the mountain. About 6 km to the top, we switched off between biking and walking (much to my masculine chagrin. I would have made it if I wasn´t traveling with a girl obviously) and were able to snap a pretty cool photo of the town from where we were. Nonetheless, thanks to Sir Isaac, ¨What goes up must come down.¨and we promptly bombed the entire hill straight down. Thanks to loose suspension and soft tires the rocks weren´t too bad, and the adrenaline rush was outstanding. Bombing down the mountain´s curving trail all the way to the group of buildings known as Mindo is one of my top 5 best memories of Ecuador.

3) After our bike ride\walk the next coolest part of the trip was an hour we killed lying in our canopy-well mosquito netted anyway- bed before going to dinner. Right at sunset- and this is the best way to explain it- started up a symphony of frogs and toads. It sounded like the most elegant child burping contest in history. As the light faded they got louder and louder, pretty soon the birds chirpped in, and as soon as everything got dark it was time to go to dinner. Awesome experience.

4) Ally cooked her own dinner at the credit card place. When she found her fish to be undercooked she asked the chef what she should do. He said that he way taking a break. So Ally walked out to the grill and cooked her own food. Definitely a first for me and I am sure a huge majority of the United States population. I mean honestly, how many times do you go to a restaurant to cook your own food. Plus we encountered the first Ecuadorian (a waitress) who didn´t know what rum was. We asked for some rum and juice and got to watch this waitress do shuttle runs for twenty minutes bringing contestants back to her boss for the winner of the ¨Which one of these is Rum¨contest. You gotta love times when you feel like you have to be on candid camera or Punkd or whatever.

5) The next morning we checked out a butterfly, orchid, and humingbird ¨living museum.¨Not really knowing what to expect, we went in with marginal hopes only to be pleasantly suprised. I would say that I had the exact same experience with my viewing of the Da Vinci Code. The orchids were, for the most part, slowly dying, but there still was a plethora of different speices and colors. After the orchids we entered the museum´s tour de force: The butterflies. Absolutely spectacular. In what was pretty much a conference room sized space, enclosed by a mosquito net, flapped about 100 butterflies. Everywhere you walked the little buggers darted around, over, under, and next to you (Do you like my prepositions? I really am getting a harness on the English language.) In fact, in one of the best unintentional comedy moments to date, one of the butterflies flew into an Ecuadorian lady´s shirt. She shrieked in terror, while her son filmed the whole thing with the camcorder laughing like a that truant kid everyone had in their class as children (mine was a kid who´s Dad looked like Bram Stoker´s Dracula) who had just succeeded in whoopie cushioning his least favorite teacher. We got some dynamite pics of the butterflies that I will try to put up as soon as I find an internet cafe that allows laptops. The humingbirds were also cool. They sounded like a helicopter, with all their little wing flaps reverberating on top of each other.

6) The bus ride home featured the worst smelling bus in the history of phantom pooped in the corner pranks. It couldn´t have been any worse. The bus helper made three separate trips to case the place with air freshener, sniffing desperately to find the origin of the scent. I mean I really was begging for the candid camera people to make an appearance. How could they not. Sometimes I really wonder if I have actually been placed on some sort of Reality National Lampoons Movie Set.

I hope everyone in the states is doing well. We have our half-way point conference in a couple of weeks, which basically means an expense paid trip to the beach. It´s definitely going to be interesting to see how everyone else is faring in their respective provinces.

Big hugs to everyone.

Kane train