Ballin´

September 15th
What’s this? Almost 2 months? Que loco!
I am doing so much better. All of my infections are gone. I still have a little bit of a cough( tos tos), but I believe I’m over the worst.
Life in Quito is carrying on quite quickly. I can hardly keep up. I love my weekends here. Two weekends ago, I got invited to go paintballing and discovered my inner killer. Not to brag, but I’m pretty good :P Later that night I went to a baby shower and then to an English speaking church on Sunday morning.
That proved to be a tough week for me. I acquired a really intense cough that I’m sure annoyed my classmates and made me just want to lay in bed, but I kept going out and doing things anyway ( like accompanying Agnes to get her eyebrow pierced and buying clothes from a crazy lady)
I made another trip to the beach this last weekend, but this time with my cousin Karen. She’s my friend, guide, and protector all in one. We stayed in a house at a beach called Casablanca with 16 people in total (all Ecuadorian except for me). Rightly named, all of the buildings are white with blue accents which reminded me of Greece. It felt so good to get out of the city. I think I really needed it. And though for most of the others it was more of a crazy weekend, I took the opportunity to relax by the ocean; playing in warm west coast water (it always blows my mind that I’m still on the west coast), talking with Karen, and sleeping.
On a side note: I love ceviche. That stuff is amazing. I don’t know what changed, but I used to hate shrimp and now I eat it all the time.
This week is flying by. I’m making progress on my first silver ring in my jewelry class. It’s a little bit manly looking, but…it’s my first one and I’m really excited to make more. I get to watch cool movies in my cinema class, but because I’ve been sick, my speaking in that class and my conversation class have been pretty nonexistent…which is really bad. I like my literature class a lot, though I feel like an idiot because I have to read each story about 3 times and look up every other word in a dictionary before I kind of understand what is going on.
My volunteership (this should be a real word) has just been getting better and better. I’m working with a boy’s soccer team (ages 8ish to 12ish) on Tuesdays and Thursdays after my classes. They are a crazy bunch. Pulling from my track knowledge, I’m trying to teach them coordination with their running. They can play soccer quite well, but they can’t run, so I give them exercises like skipping and karaokos to do. So far we haven’t gotten much farther than that because they’re not very good at skipping and unless my boss is there, it’s difficult to make them listen to me when I don’t know what to say in Spanish. But they are a great, eager, silly group and I’m already starting to get attached to them. One of them, a redhead, is always at my side. One day he practically forced me to play games on his iphone. And there’s another boy that is a really good player, but he’s so tiny. My boss commented that he needs a smaller ball. He’s soooo cute.
Yesterday was the first time I went to Tumbaco without my boss. I took them through some drills and raced them because they wanted to see me run. Then I got to play soccer with them and the older group! OH MY GOSH I’ve missed playing so much. I was awful, but I did score twice.
Yesterday was also Yui’s birthday, so we had a little SUA BCA Quito reunion and went to a concert in the historical district, out to eat, and then dancing in the mariscal. I didn’t get back to my house til 2 or 3 in the morning…on a Tuesday night! But that’s just how things are here. I am deathly sore, but I’m happy