Hola de Ecuador!

Indeed, I am alive, and at a computer to prove it.

I am happy to be settling into my home in Ecuador for the next few weeks, the city of Cuenca. It is 10 hours south of Quito by bus, and just a 45 minute flight. I went with the flight, though overall it was a loooong journey getting here. More about that to come.

Cuenca is beautiful, a historical city full of chruches and verdant squares surrounded by mountains. It´s comforting to me to live in a valley, being like home in the Santa Clara Valley ... which I learned to appreciate while living in Holland where the lanscape is completely flat (there was a hill in my host town of Leiden, for example, called a ´mountain´). The mountains are my friends, and I hope to explore them soon!

For now, I am just concentrating on getting settled and learning Spanish! I start class next week and cannot wait to feel more competent and able to interact with people without feeling totally dumb. I feel like a child, being dependent on my host family for comminicating and understanding what is going on.

Luckily my hosts are wonderful, patient people. I am staying in an apartment with a young married couple, Adrian & Julie. Adrian grew up here in Cuenca, and met Julie while she was visiting from her native France. They fell in love and she never left. Which worked out well for me, too! We are communicating with a mix of English, French, and Spanish. And lots of laughter, the international language of understanding. =) Adrian´s parents live next door with their cat, who got kicked out of its abode with Adrian & Julie because of me. Poor kitty. But we do have roosters, who do their call at the break of daylight, which comes before 6 am here near the equator. This morning, I laughed when I heard them then promptly went back to sleep.

I was pretty exhausted on arrival to Cuenca in the evening. Air travel always tires me out, though I can never figure out why when I´m so inactive. But this time, there were many other factors adding to the relative misery of my journey. I left Los Angles with allergies or a head cold, which started during the drive down there with my family (which merely complemented our adventures, such as car breaking down outside the Grapevine and depriving me of a visit to the LA County Museum and getting to bed early my last night in the country). I was very congested and had a continual headache by the time I boarded the plane, so I didn´t want to listen to my mp3 player (full of Spanish lessons I burned from Lauren & Kenny´s cds!) and could not sleep well. Combine that with the cabin pressure, a crying baby, and being surrounded by heavy smokers (not smoking on the plane but felt almost the same at times) and I was pretty relieved to arrive in Panama City 6 hours later. The airport in Panama is huge and very nice, and I made friends with a Swiss traveller my age on her way to Quito, so we had fun during our 2 hour layover roaming the airport and talking about great places in the world (and I felt sooo lame to have HER telling me how great Mount Rainier is - someone better go with me right away when I get back!). Though I couldn´t hear anything out of one year the whole time on land in Panama, and then on the flight to Quito I just passed in and out of some crazy dream-infested slumber. I had a long layover in Quito before my flight to Cuenca, so it felt refreshing to run around outside. Quito has a dramatic landscape with huge mountains close by, and the airport feels like it´s right in the middle of town. But I really just wanted to be settled and get some sleep. I was looking forward to a nap on the plane, but turns out I spent the journey trying not to throw up. I can only place blame on the food served on the flight from Panama to Quito, but I made it to the airport in Cuenca just in enough time to spend my first minutes there in the bathroom. (Continue reading this paragraph if you don´t mind hearing about bodily functions, otherwise skip ahead) But there was a line for this one stall, so I had to keep using for a couple minutes and then going back to the line and so forth for a couple rounds to get out what I needed. Then I felt better, and was greeted outside by Adrian and Julie. That night, I went to bed early, only to wake up around midnight and spent the next few hours in the bathroom expelling all remaining contents of my stomach through more than one orifice. Ahhh.

Welcome to Ecuador, gringa!

But I´m sure my stomach will adjust, and things have been great otherwise. The food here is reputably excellent, so I look forward to eventually enjoying it. We ate at a yummy vegetarian restaurant this afternoon, where I had a HUGE portion of rice, veggies, and soy fake meat with potatoes in a peanut sauce for a dollar - but I had little appetite so took most of it home. People who know me well would be astounded to hear I have no appetite - that´s how screwed up my system is right now! Maybe I can lose some of my post grad-school pounds after all. Just kidding. Kind of.

Well, I can´t explore Cuenca if I sit in front of a computer screen all day, now can I? But wanted to let people know I´m alive and very happy to be here, finally.

Buenos tardes, mi amigos! Weeeeeeeeeeee.