Alicia en el pais de los maravillas

Back! Two important things since the last post:

1. I´m now with my homestay family! They´re super great - the dad is a really talented artist who´s travelled all over the world selling his art, the mom dotes on me like a mother hen (and also corrects my terrible Spanish, which is really helpful), two older brothers and one 17 year old sister. The brothers spend most of their time playing Halo - the older one´s room is covered in anime posters, and the first time I met the younger one he was wearing an ¨Everything I know I learned from Zelda¨t-shirt. Speaking Spanish all day long is super exhausting, and there were parts of this weekend in which I freaked out a bit. But those times passed, of course. Yesterday we went on a hike to a super awesome waterfall. The most touching times are when you realize how completely similar people of different nationalities really are - like the dad who loves mountain climbing, like my dad, and the mom who packed us a huge, awesome lunch for the end of the hike.

2. Saturday night I went to a bullfight, which was shocking and amazing. First of all, bullfights in Ecuador are not like those in Spain, where the matadores are professional and inflict great harm on the bulls in order to rile them up. Here, the ¨matadores¨are just drunk spectators that climb into this giant ring and run around, alternately taunting and running away from the bull. The event is housed in this three story stadium made of thousands of pieces of wood tied together with cloth at the corners, so it looks like it could fall down at any minute. To get to the second or third floors (where we watched from), one must climb up ladders through trap doors in the floor. On the field, there are easily 100 macho men running around drunkenly, plus maybe 10 horse riders. The only people that I saw get hurt (I don´t think I saw anyone get gored, because all of them got up and walked afterwards) were ones that were so drunk they tripped and fell trying to run away from the bulls. Later, my host mother told me that 20 people die annually in Los Chillos (my town) in these bullfights - a number which is obviously exaggerated, but still shows the community´s perception of how dangerous these spectacles are. How fucking weird.

That´s all for now. I´m trying to keep my interneting down to twice a week, which I have so far been completely incapable of doing. But, it´s good to have goals.

love, Alice