Jungle Fever

Hi all!

First of all, WOOOO HOOO OBAMA!!! We watched the election results with a large portion of the Americans living in Quito in an American bar. It was so exciting! I am actually proud of my country, state, and little ol’ Kent County that actually went Democrat, in a completely shocking turn of events :).

Okay, time for jungle trek adventure update!! This weekend, we went to the Oriente, about 5 hours from Quito, and stayed in a jungle lodge.

Saturday morning started with a 3 hour walk through the jungle. Starting off, the air was clear, the sun was shining, we all had rubber boots to avoid the mud; it was perfect.

Halfway through, it does what it normally does in the rainforest: rain. A lot. Like torrential rains. And all of us dumb Americans had just figured, ‘oh, we don’t want to carry our rain gear, it’s sunny out!’ I don’t ever think I’ve been that wet in my life, lol. I’ll post the pictures later today on Facebook, they’re hilarious.

Haha, but still it was a blast. I learned all about how rainforest plants have all these medicinal properties, to cure everything from snake bites to stomach pain to muscles aches. We also saw a plant that if eaten was natural birth control, very interesting.

We also hiked through a dark, bat-filled cave that was knee-deep in water. We saw a spider that was literally bigger than a hand on the wall of in this tiny, dark cave. Lots of screaming ensued.

Anyways, next up was going to the zoo! Or more like a wildlife preserve to reintroduce animals that have been kept as pets: we took a canoe on the Napo river to Amizoonico.

Ever had a baby tapir repeatedly lick your leg? I have! There were also several varieties of monkeys just wandering around with us as we toured the zoo. We saw caimanes, which are small crocodiles (delicacy here), tigrillos, turtles, a bunch of animals that I had never seen before in my life, and one very large boa.

Also this day, we saw a demonstration of how pottery is made, which is a long 5-day process and is much more intricate than I though. And, saw some Petrogliphs made by whoever lived in this area thousands of years ago, very cool.

Anyways, in other news classes are going well, and I’m now tutoring in math in one of the local high schools. It’s really fun but also quite the challenge for my Spanish: how does one explain geometric series in Spanish? But most of the time it’s funny for the high schoolers (who think it’s hilarious if I don’t know the words) and I actually can help a lot, more than I thought I would be able to. They don’t know a lot of basic tricks for math, so it’s fun to teach them how I learned to do the problems, and see the differences. The biggest problem is they don’t have graphing calculators here, which slows down everything we’re doing all the time.

We also spent a good half hour last time translating the meaning of Britney Spears songs into Spanish, lol, still popular with teenagers everywhere.

That’s all for now, chao! Lisa