1st week of Spanish School in Quito done

E.J. here.

I was just lying in a hammock in the dark, in the back courtyard of our new hostel, listening to the many dogs of Quito bark into the night. Maggie was lying in the other hammock, a few feet away. I looked over to her and said "What happened that this is now my life?!" There are moments when everything seems so surreal. And then despite that, we've gotten adjusted and acclimated and oriented and then I look up and say "Huh. This is my life now." 

This past Monday, we started our language school here in Quito (http://www.yanapumaspanish.org/). We're signed up for 2 weeks. We had originally talked about starting off with a month, but I think by the end of next week, we'll be ready to go travel and explore a bit. 

We had a class of 5 students and a teacher, so the small group instruction has been great. Class goes from 9am to 1pm. We go over a thematic chunk of vocabulary, talk about verb conjugation and practice creating sentences. A lot of the class is very informal back and forth with the teacher. It felt a bit overly-informal at first. I felt like I should be getting quizzed on irregular verb conjugation or something, but in time I came to see that we're getting real-time feedback and in this setting, I'm learning very organically.

Wednesday, the teacher listed off a number of fruits that you can get in the market here, which don't exist much elsewhere. Each student picked one, and our homework was to go to the market, buy the said fruit and bring it in the following day. 

We came in on Thursday and each student sliced their fruit up with enough portions for the 2 classes and had to tell the group about their "show and tell". Its pretty amazing all of the flora in Ecuador that I've never heard of before. We went around the table and sampled all of the fruits, from most tart to sweetest. One of the most fascinating (to me) was called Taxo. 

They were these stubby little guys that looked like tiny yellow squash. But when you cut them open, they were filled with juicy seeds with a bright, tart citrus-y flavor.

Maracuya was a sub-species of passionfruit and ovillas were these little orange cherry tomato-looking things that are actually fruit and have a bright, citrus-y explosion of flavor. My very favorite, though was the Tomate-de-Arbol, which means tomato-of-the-tree. They look just like roma tomatoes, but they grow on trees and have a fleshy, tart taste. Tomates-de-Arbol are used as the base for the national salsa, called aji, which are a kind of hot sauce that people put on everything. You cook town the "tomates" with onion and hot chiles. Delicious.

I'm really enjoying how the classes allow us to explore Spanish as a conversation instead of passive learning (memorization). There's a big focus on how it can be applied. How will this be of use for me? What will I need to know to get around? What tools will I need to be able to learn more and continue moving forward? The teacher spent a bunch of time introducing us to free learning modules and curricula online that we can use moving forward. No hard sell that we should be signing up for a month of classes instead of 2 weeks. No selling us books or access to restricted sites. There's an appreciation for us simply wanting to be able to communicate more effectively and I love the hell out of that. 

We're going to go on a day trip tomorrow and then ride out this next week of classes before out into greater Ecuador. And I'm going to try to speak for myself and let Mago blog her thoughts in her own time, but I think I can get away with speaking for both of us in staying that we're excited to go see some of the sights. There are something like 40 volcanoes in Ecuador, something like a dozen of them active so some degree or another at this time. Many of those have created different sets of hot springs around the country, a couple of which we hope to visit. On a clear day, you can see one of them (Cotopaxi) in the distance from Quito. Coffee plantations, llama farms. Rain forest. Cloud forest. Some of the best bird-watching in the world. Incredible hiking. We've been in Quito for 8 days now and while I have absolutely fallen in love, I'm getting excited to see whats next.