Changing Tides and Adventures on the High Seas

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It’s been a while since my last entry, and ironically as soon as I wrote about my daily work life, everything changed.

Long story short, the English team at Génesis dropped from three to four mid-August, changing all of my classes. For the start of the new semester, which began last Monday, we grew back to four with the addition of a lifesaving assistant named Gustavo.

My schedule has changed as follows:

1. No more adorable first graders!! Instead I have adorable second graders, but I’m still grieving the loss.

2. The tornado-like third grade class that was split in two has been put back together. Gustavo saves me from running for my life.

3. No more fourth grade. It was sad to lose them after all the progress we’d made, both in discipline and English. But, I’m rolling with the punches.

4. Sixth grade, with two drastically different levels of English, has been put back together. No more small advanced group. But, as it turns out, the whole grade is a delight to teach and Gustavo can help me with the levels.

5. Welcome back to high school. My final group is a mixture of tenth and eleventh graders, which is actually a really nice break from the tater tots. They’re a bit rowdy (big surprise), but this week I taught them to respond to my “Yo, yo, yo!” with “What’s up?” The catch: if anyone’s still talking after, they have to sing and dance in English on a chair in front of the class. Works like a charm, at least for now.

It’s been kind of crazy to jump into these new classrooms midyear, especially because Open House, the biggest event of the year, is coming up mid-September. That means I’ve been rigorously preparing these kids for English presentations in front of their parents. Each and every child has to participate, which is kind of nerve-wracking. Update on that come D-day.

This brings me to the high seas adventure upon which Keiron and I embarked during a three-day weekend in August.

We hopped a couple of busses down to Puerto Lopez, a southern beach town, for close encounters with humpback whales.

I don’t know what Puerto Lopez is like during the rest of the year, but during whale watching season it seems to be a major hippie-hub. I’m talking jewelry sold on blankets and advertisements for “hemp” and yoga posted on restaurant doors.

We also found a gringo couple with a cozy ocean-view restaurant. Finally some real vegetarian food.

The town centers around the beach strip, a stretch of ocean and bamboo bars flanked by mountains and fishing boats. The shops along the street in the excitement of the holiday weekend were a rush of color and movement. Souvenirs, seafood and the honking of horns intermixed with the reggaeton of locals riding back and forth along the same mile-long stretch of road in search of girls.

We arrived starry-eyed with plans to explore Machalilla National Park, home of pristine beaches, a cloud forest and an indigenous community with a sacred sulfur hot spring. Sounds fantastic, right?

We wouldn’t know. Keiron got extremely sick from some fruit-juice-gone-wrong and spent all of Saturday in bed. At least we had cable and hot water.

The score: Susan 3, Keiron 2. Or maybe I get an extra point for actually landing in the hospital.

Anyway, the fortunate part is that we had booked the main event, whale watching, for Sunday, which was a huge success. I say huge because there is just no other way to describe the surfacing creatures that surrounded our 20-person boat in the deep blue.

The highlight was the whale who suddenly sprang from the water, exposing his face, fins and barnacle-y belly, and evoking screams and awes from the pair of boats who happened to catch it.

In the photo, the whale doesn’t look so close to us, but believe me in person the whale was so enormous that I felt like my whole field of vision was occupied by its rubbery body. Spectacular.

In the end, our trip had its ups and downs – perhaps more downs for Keiron than me who could escape for intermittent shopping trips and beach walks on Saturday – but those five seconds with the jumping whale were worth the four hour bus ride.

Our next adventure: hopefully Quito. So I’ll see you at the middle of the world.

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Comments

[Mom]

Whale watching
Wowie!!! I gasped just when you did. They are spectacular. Was it the same one or were there others? You are so lucky!! xoxoxoxoxooxo

[Susan P]

whale watching
There were a ton - the person driving the boat would find a group of them and then once they went deep underwater look for more.