¿Que? No se.

My new favorite words - what? and I don´t know. No more English slang or familiar idioms, I simply repeat these few simple words all day long. And of course, when I´m really confused, I just laugh.

I suppose I thought beforehand that learning Spanish would be difficult, but I never truly realized how difficult it would be to jump from no Spanish for 8 years to Spanish for 10 hours a day!! Breakfast, lunch, and dinnner in Spanish, 6 hours of class in Spanish, activities in Spanish, homework in Spanish, and then finally bed and I get to dream in English! It sounds exhausting, but its getting better and feeling a little more routine. Now that we´re settled and rested, we´re absorbing a bit more and picking up new words all day. Sometimes it seems impossible to learn an entire new language, but we´re comrehending difficult topics pretty well on our third day, so hopefully in 3 weeks, we´ll be able to describe them a bit better.

Quito is a fantastic city. It is nestled right in the valley of the Andes at 9.5K and has beautiful architecture. There is an old part of the city with churches and lots of old buildings with unique architecture and also a new part of the city with lots of cafes and bars. There are a lot of students and travellers here. I think it must be a big South American hub for volunteers and students. We haven´t met many people yet, except a few from our school, but we´re going to hang out in the city a bit this weekend to orient ourselves and explore a bit more. So far the people have been great as well. They love to drink and eat and party and they are all very friendly, patient, and interested in the gringos!

As Allen said, our family is fantastic!! I think we got really lucky because our house is only 30 seconds from the school and the family is very friendly and accomodating. They love having students, so they talk to us all the time and include us in everything. The house is fairly large for Ecuador, I think, and they have two employees that help with the cooking, cleaning, and kids. Pretty nice. There are two little girls - Gisella (4) and Samantha (6) - who are really cute. The food is good so far, but I think the rice will definitely get tiring after a little while (so the other students tell us).

Not much has happened so far so stay tuned for my exciting adventures, but for those of you who like to try new recipes, heres one we learned in cooking class yesterday:

In a large saucepan or pot, combine one beer (anything you like with good flavor) a few cloves of garlic (whole), one green onion (the stem cut in half), some salt, and cubed chicken breast (probably 3 for one beer). Stir until the beer evaporates and then add 3 tablespoons or so of corn oil and saute the chicken until lightly browned. Yum!! It was really good and so simple. Must have been the beer…