Day 3: Don´t Drink the Water and Don´t Breathe the Air
I actually managed to get up at 7 AM today. Unfortunately, that still wasn´t enough time for me to get out the door at 8 like I´d planned, partly because Isabel´s staff make a delicious breakfast. I speed-walked down to La Lengua, the Spanish school, where I got a bit of a surprise when I met my tutor.
Not counting a very forgettable semester in college, I studied Spanish for three years, in high school. Each year, my teacher was Señora Cooley, a middle-aged and very matronly Peruvian woman. Pilar, my tutor at La Lengua, is almost the opposite: she´s only four years older than me, and she could easily pass for four years younger than me. However, she´s been a teacher for four years, and from what I´ve experienced so far, she´s a very good one.
We spent the morning reviewing la alfabeta, and some basic grammar, vocab, and especially pronunciation. I´m a shy person by nature, and I´m pretty sure Pilar picked up on that, since ´verguenza´ (shy/nervous) was one of the first pronunciation examples she used. Vocab isn´t that hard, so Pilar plans to focus the first set of lessons on conversational skills and grammar, which should be useful.
When the lesson was over, I returned to Isabel´s just long enough to pick up my camera equipment and tell the staff they didn´t need to make lunch for me, since I had so much to do that I was leaving right away. My cellphone hasn´t improved - in fact, it hates me so much it´s gone into security lock - so I hiked around Quito looking for a phone store with technical service, and when I couldn´t find one, I retreated to an Internet cafe and spent the rest of the afternoon uploading photos.
Needless to say, I wasn´t in a good mood, and as I walked home, my view of Quito started to darken a little. When there isn´t rain, smog from the cars builds up thick enough to make your eyes sting. The buses are the worst: they spew black diesel smoke from their tailpipes, and they seem to love blasting me with it when I´m waiting to cross the street. Some other colorful sights included a dozen police in riot gear waiting to cross the street with me, lots of anti-Colombia and anti-fascist graffiti, and a guy relieving himself on the wall next to the sidewalk.
Back at Isabel´s, I made another try at Ecuadorian TV. To my delight, there´s a channel that plays The Simpsons, but I didn´t get a chance to enjoy it because Isabel had some friends over, and they wanted me to have dinner with them, dinner being the reheated lunch I´d said I didn´t need earlier. Still, it was fun, and I got a chance to practice my Spanish.
La Lengua really is a school - it assigns homework. Not much, but enough to keep me up later than I wanted to be finishing it. I´ll have to try getting up earlier tomorrow if I want to get anything done.
