Blogs from Cuenca, South, Ecuador, South America - page 45

Managed to get up and out of bed in good time despite the cold. Amazingly the broken bed had held - I think we all have a new calling in life! Despite the good start we got stuck in a nearby cafe having breakfast so we didn´t actually make it to the site until 11.am. Managed to wangle our way inside for half price thanks to our lovely international student cards! (Honestly, because $6 is far too much to pay for anything - don´t know how I´m going to cope with English prices once I get home!) We went to the museum first and them onto the site where a guide did try to attach herself to us. No point having one really as the museum pretty much said no-one really knows what Ingapirca is ... read more

So, it was our last night in Quito. Our 11 hour bus journey leaves at 5am, but it is our last night, so we (me, Sophie, Kat, and the woman we all love, Lorena) decide to go out, just for a few hours, and catch danee salsa man playing his gig, and fit in some last minute Quito salsaring. Except of course this was soooo much fun, we decided it would actually be easier to make an all nighter out of it, you know, not have the pain of having to get up at a stupid hour in the morning. So at about 330, after long painful goodbyes to danee and his fantastic salsa friends (hahaha) we trudged back to the house to pack. Needless to say SOME people left stuff behind in the rush, but ... read more

First day of work today and Louisa and I actually managed to walk there without a) getting totally lost or b) being incredibly late. A pretty good start if I do say so myself! We´re working at Adinea, a school for disabled kids, in the mornings and at an orphanage in the afternoons. School´s ok but can get a little boring as there is already a university student, Maro, on work experience there so there isn´t a whole lot to do. Me and Louisa are in different classes, I´m with Greta who is incredibly vague. At break the teachers just wander around the playground talking to each other while we are left to break up the very frequent and really quite brutal fights. The kids are gorgeous but so physical whether it´s hugging you or hitting ... read more

Cuenca, Schools, Orphanages and Beyond! Well, we arrived in Cuenca at about 4.30-ish, and first impressions were, well, impressive. If I had to describe Cuenca in one word, I’d take the one from all the guide-books, colonial, which is why I guess they use it. The centre of Cuenca is made up of cobbled streets and one-way systems, incredibly confusing if you’re driving around, but really easy if you’re walking around as nearly the entire city is in a block format. The hardest part is remembering which roads run horizontally, and which run vertically! When you’re saying where you live in Ecuador, you don’t just say a number and a street name, due to the block system, you just give the two street names, which makes it a lot easier to find something as you ... read more

I was originally copying up my diary entries, but I figure that I'll never keep up, so I'll just write what comes to mind, starting off with a rough summary of this week. And what a week it was. On Monday I started off my Spanish course, we have to leave home at 7:15am and classes start at 8:30, its one-on-one individual teaching which is really awesome, and we finish at about 1pm. The rest of the day is ours. (Although the rest of the group have lessons in the afternoon instead.) Monday was absolutely amazing. We thought we'd have a nice easy day because none of us were well and truly adjusted to the atmosphere and altitude (we would walk about 10 steps, and be hopelessly out of breath, worse going up hill and Quito ... read more