La Comida

I eat a lot of rice.  Almost every meal has rice in it, sometimes even breakfast.  Lunch is the largest meal here.   During the week I might just get something small, like a bagel sandwich but it costs about the same if not more than a traditional lunch at a small restaurant. A traditional lunch consists of soup (usually with some sort of meat or potatoes), a plate of rice with meat and a vegetable/ salad.  Dinner with my host family includes a lot of starch.  It's possible to have pasta with rice and potatoes, corn and bread.  I'm not sure if this combination has happened yet, but we've gotten pretty close. We drink something called avena at my house. It's made from a type of wheat and sometimes mixed with a fruit juice (like apple).  It's sort of like a warm smoothie.  My host family uses a lot of sugar in all beverages, unless it's water.  Everyone stirs in at least 2 spoonfuls of sugar to their drinks. Speaking of drinks, there's a brand of tea in the family's collection called "Power Sex."  I'm not sure what that's about; I have opted not to try it. 

Besides the "Power Sex" tea, I've pretty much eaten everything that I've been served.  For dinner twice now I've had "meat" but I'm pretty sure one time it was liver and the second time it was the udder part of a cow.  I don't think too hard about things that I'm eating.  One thing that I couldn't eat was undercooked soft boiled eggs for breakfast.  The night I arrived, my host mom asked me if I drank coffee.  I told her that I do occasionally but only a little bit.  I soon realized that the Spanish word "cafe" which I thought meant coffee is also used to refer to breakfast.  I have since then asked her for a little bit more to eat in the mornings, and that mistake has been corrected :)  For breakfast I've eaten large bowls of fruit: apples, papaya, and banana.  The other day my host mom bought Guaba for me.  I don't know what this is in English.  However, it's shaped like a giant pea pod the size of my forearm.  Once split open it looks orange and white with fuzzy texture.  One more interesting little detail... it's common to put popcorn in certain types of soups.  The popcorn is served separately from the soup, so the first time this happened I started eating the popcorn by itself.

Guaba

Overall, I like the food a lot.  The avocados are delicious!  It's also neat to know that a lot of the food comes from our neighborhood.  The corn we eat is grown on the family plot and many of the ingredients are fresh out of the garden.  It's possible that the chicken we ate at night is one that I heard crowing in the morning.  

The Escape of the Chicken:
After English classes on Wednesday, Alexis and I saw a chicken escape a small boy (about 3 years old).  Alexis chased the chicken back to the child, then the boy smacked the chicken in the face and grabbed it by the feathers on its neck to bring it back home.  Funniest thing I saw that day.



Random updates:
English classes seem to be going well.  The first day we only had one 7 year old boy show up.  Our program coordinator, Maria, came to Lumbisi to check-in with us.  She saw that there was only 1 kid so she said she was going to go get more.  More indeed.  Maria drove around town and picked up kids and brought them to us.  There were about 10 more kids that came back with her.  More than half of them were related in some way.

I'm still working on making Ecuadorean friends.  I failed at getting a conversation partner yesterday, partially because I asked the wrong people.  A staff member gave me his coworker's phone number because he wants to practice speaking in English.  I probably will not call Juan, lo siento senor.   

Yesterday was the first time it rained (downpour) since I've been here.  My host family kept telling me that before I arrived it rained a lot in Lumbisi.  What can I say?  I bring sunshine with me wherever I go... But this morning the view from my window was pretty cool: