The long awaited weekend away

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Hola chicitos! OK, I´ve got a lot of blogging to do, so forgive me for random punctuation errors and typos...
And by the way apparently I got eh dates wrong on my last blog. Well excuse me, but it is very difficult to know dates when you are this side of the Ecuator. You Northern Hemispherers have got it easy. Just so we´re all clear, by the way, today is Sunday.
So on Thursday I was up reasonably early for my first day at Ab Linc school, although my padres stressed so much the night before about me being up on time, and when it came to it they were faffing around making breakfast at 7.55am and I was like "erm... first day of work, 8am... mean anything to you?" I was only a few minutes late though, because it wasn´t too far away, so Imo and I were shown in, communicated a little with the headmistress about the sort of work we´d like to do, and then were shown to a classroom by the English teacher (who, by the way, I think feels slightly threatened by our presence) and told "they´re learning about the house. Teach them something". Argh! So we drew a fairly ropey looking house on the board and taught them bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen... Not sure how much they actually learnt because we asked them to draw a house in their exercise books with the labels in English for each room, but, being a big group of girls, they took so long drawing a perfect house that half of them never got around to writing in English...
Then everyone was marshalled into the courtyard for a school assembly on account of the fact that it was Dia de la Mujer (International Women´s Day), which I don´t believe we do in Britain, but which is a great excuse for a bit of a fiesta! So after a bit of recorder bashing, singing and poetry reciting, the kids were let off for break, and we were shown to the staff room where we had the most random selection of celebratory food: fizzy strawberry soda, KFC meals for all, a huge slab of chocolate cake and ice cream each, coffee and champagne! We just didn´t know what to make of it. In addition, we got a rose each, and a butterfly thing on a stick with a smiley face on it and a sweet. But I lost mine 😞 I was supposed to leave at 11.30am and get the trolé to CENIT where everyone was having a big women´s day procession, but some other group of people decided to have a protest about the new President of Ecuador, so I couldn´t get there. Instead I went with Imo to the Conservatorio de Musica for a bit of a gander. After that I pretty much wandered around a bit and then went home, watched some French TV (I can still understand French, yay!) and went to bed.
Friday morning was a bit more typical at Ab Linc, I reckon. We arrived slightly more on time, and spent the whole morning teaching a rubbish English version of La Bamba to three different classes. They loved it! It´s so brilliant at our school because when you walk into any classroom all the kids cheer like it´s a huge treat, and whenever you´re in the playground the kids just run at you and try and hug your legs and hold your hand and kiss you and talk to you and trip you over and allsorts... It´s like being a celebrity. Or a walking childmagnet. Apart from singing, we were also supposed to walk round the classroom and mark the kids´work and suchlike, but most of them just wanted to play with our watches and flipflops and ask questions like "is it dangerous in England?" "why is everyone in England white?" "does anyone in England have black hair?" "are you sisters?" and so on. In fact, later on in CENIT someone asked Georgia if I was her daughter. Odd, seeing as Georgia is even smaller than me and looks completely different.
At breaktime we were offered empanadas and drinks and allsorts, but we declined because we just were not hungry. I think they were possibly mortally offended, but if we accepted every bit of food we were offered we would have to buy ourselves an extra seat each for the plane home. So then I hopped on the trolé (like the tram, costs $0.25 wherever you go) for the 40 minute ride to CENIT. Seeing as my project leader wasn´t there I went with Georgia to a market called San Roque, where there is a kind of homework club for market children, so they can go there and use materials and get help from volunteers. It was chaotic, but the kids loved having us there, and everyone wanted us to come and draw with them and play with them, or do long division (oh the shame, I´ve forgotten how to do it the school way, and they use some crazy South American system so I couldn´t help! I´ll have to relearn). However, we really had to hang on to our watches and bracelets, because the kids would pretend to examine then and then oh so subtley start to undo the strap... I suppose you can hardly blame them as many of their families live on a few dollars a day, and flogging a watch or ring would buy them an extra meal or two for a few days.
Friday night was spent at an all-you-can-eat tapas and wine bar with the Quito girls. By the time we left we all agreed that we had not eaten all we could, not by a long shot, and there was still plenty of wine to be drunk. But the company was excellent, so a good night was had by all.
Saturday morning, Imo and I were up at the crack of 7am and my padre took us to the scary bus station (a lot less scary in the morning) where we managed to meet up with the other Quito girls, minus Georgia, and to successfully get on a bus that took us all the way around Quito and up in to the misty mountains towards the little community of Papallacta. When we left Quito the weather was fairly reasonable, and it looked like we might soon be soaking up the sun in some idyllic little mountain spa. We were half right... By the time we reached our junction at Papallacta and hopped off the bus, we were actually walking through a cloud. Very damp, muddy and... well, basically, not sunny. Not to let the weather dampen our spirits, we hitched up our socks and began the hike up the hill towards the Termas de Papallacta (thermal springs). It wasn't the most arduous of climbs, but we did feel like we'd earnt a good soaking by the time we reached the spa centre. It consisted of about 25 pools of varying sizes and temperatures, all fringed by leafy plants with orange flowers, with steam rising from each pool, and the volcanoes rising into the mist all around... It was beautiful. Which was good because Ecuadorian bathing suits are a real eyesore.
So we spent a good few hours relaxing, floating around, searching for the source (according to Claire the hottest part of the spring and not some geeky geographical obsession), and getting gawped at by the locals men. Although we obviously weren't in any real danger, because all of the men had clearly been dragged there by the missus.
After an interesting lunch of what could have been cow-heel and corn soup for Imo, and fried ice cream for pudding (yes, it does work, and yes, it is as amazing as it sounds!), we tripped back down the hill to the village of Papallacta itself. Caroline was really working the Papallacta-chic look with her linen trousers tucked into orange checked socks, and we attracted the attention of part of an English film crew, who were here to begin filming a documentary called Beyond Boundaries or something similar. It sounded very interesting, so look out for it! *Plug!*
We ended up in a cheerful, cheap-as-chips hostel called Hostal Coturba, where we were put up in a $25 room for six, but then couldn't afford proper food so we popped down to the local shack-shop for a variety of biscuits, wafers, crisps, bananas, fizzy drinks and some dodgy peach schnapps, which Tamsin ended up drinking most of because it was disgusting. The sleepover would have been bangin', except that most of us were conked out by 8.30pm. We're so rock 'n' roll!
After a fantastic 12 hours' sleep we were crawling out of bed and back into our cold, damp bikinis for our second spa experience, which was much cheaper, but also a lot more basic. Basically, three warm swimming pools and a lot more gawping men. After a while we decided we'd had enough and traipsed back to the shack-shop to wait for the bus back to Quito. The journey home was reasonable enough, and made all the more entertaining by the choice of music, my favourite song being Mr Boombastic. Choon! I arrived home to the greeting of "hello, how was your weekend? By the way, the computer's broken..." Luckily I sorted it and everything is hunky-dory and the blogging will go on! Wahey!

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Photos

Pretty scenery
On the busride to Papallacta.

The back of beyond
Papallacta, it's the village of the damned!

Again
Ghost town

Action shot!
We're all well excited to be hiking up a hill towards some mountain spas.

Comments

[Lewis]

ha
do u expect me to read all that? lol, hope ur having fun, but, when do u get time to write all these really really really long things? about stuf? lol have fun, lew x