Senioritis...in more ways than one

---

Bueños tardes!
So as usual a lot has happened since the last blog. We had a health brigade friday and saw lots of kids. We were all pretty tired afterwards. BUT since we had the weekend off a bunch of us went to Baños which is a very touristy town about 3 hrs away from Quito that has natural hot springs. We took a bus friday into Baños. We stayed at hostel/hotel called La Casa Verde suggested by Deepam. Everyone loved it! It is a house made by an Australian couple and it was clean, there was HOT water, big plumbing so we HAD to flush toilet paper down the toilet (we were all very excited about this) and of course no language barrier helped. We had dinner Friday night, went rafting Saturday in the day time in a river called el rio negro and then walked around town. We went out for dinner and out to the bars later that night. it is a very touristy place and you can tell bc all the Ecuadorians speak english pretty well and there are a lot of foreigners that settle there. There was this couple actually that was that the same hostel as us that came to Ecuador for some conference about international living. i think they are thinking of settling down here but golly i hope they don´t! they do not speak a lick of spanish (they are the typical tourists that repeat themselves louder in English if an ecuadorian doesn´t understand them...the natives aren´t deaf...they just dont always know english!) and i am pretty sure they have never traveled internationally before. they are in their 50s from California and seriously seem like they are in their 20s with their baked potato skin and shades on at 9pm indoors.... Maybe thats too harsh, but they seriously need to try to learn some spanish otherwise they are gonna get majorly taken advantage of.
anyhow, sunday we woke up and went to the hot springs which was not nearly as beautiful as i thought it would be. it was basically an overcrowded pool with natural water in it and the natural water had a very disgusting looking brown color...mmmm. We then took an early bus back into quito bc we were all tired and some of us feeling rundown.
As for this week, we are divided into different groups and going to our assigned clinic site in the am and then spanish class in the afternoon. Me and janushi did not feel well yesterday so we took the day off. I guess its nice to have some medical knowledge to be able to diagnose ourselves and self medicate with our pharmacies we brought from the states. We pretty much slept all day and didn´t eat much...great way to spend a Valentines day 😊 We also skipped this am, but i am here at the internet cafe before spanish class now and ate a little so I am doing a lot better. I think in another 24 hours i will be as good as new. So this week is pretty much same old same old. I think a lot of us are so tired that we just want some time to relax. However, when we get that time off we end up cramming in tons of touristy stuff so it´s our fault I guess.
As much as I like it here and have only been here for about 2 weeks, it seems like a year. And I miss the spicy food i have back home. the food here is really bland. I also miss dairy products...I am careful about eating that stuff here partly bc my lactose intolerance and partly bc well...its dairy in a foreign country.
See you all in a couple weeks!!!
Hopefully the weather is nice when i get back home!

---