Ladrones!

Hola,

All is well here and it looks like this Saturday we’ll be able to head to Puerto Quito for our week-long technical training session. Afterwards, the IT folks will be heading to San Juan Bosco in the southern rainforest area of Ecuador for another week of training. We’re all looking forward to a change of scenery from the training center in Tabacundo.

This past week we had to give our first presentation in Spanish, which actually went pretty well. We also had another oral language proficiency exam and I moved up a level to Intermedio-Alto (High Intermediate), so I guess I sound better now than a month ago!

In other news, there were a couple of incidents with “ladrones” (robbers) recently. The first (and most interesting!) was when some thieves tried to steal the car computer out of our around-the-block neighbor’s car which is also where two other trainees live. The father heard some noises, so he opened the gate and the three robbers pointed guns at him. He quickly closed the gate and called the police. He also called my family. After my father hung up he was like, “Hay ladrones, ladrones! Vamos!” (Robbers, robbers, let’s go!). I was thinking to myself, “Oh man this is going to be interesting.” He then pulled a rifle out of the closet that looked like it was from WW I and the two of us ran down the stairs to his car. On the way down, he put a stick in my hand that’s about 2.5 feet long and about an inch thick. I’m thinking, “Right… I’m going to defend myself against 3 armed ladrones with a palo flaco (thin stick).” On the car ride there I was getting ready to duck down to avoid the crossfire, but luckily when the neighbor had called the robbers had already run away. When we got there, a bunch of other neighbors were there and we helped push the family’s car into a gated area. The police came but couldn’t do much, and that really was the end of incident. The second incident was super sad. The Internet store that I’ve been sending all these blog entries from was robbed of all their computers, so now I’ve had to move to another store that’s not nearly as great. We had all become friends with the owners of the place and had even interviewed them for a small business project the day before the robbery. They had only been open for 2 months and had taken out a $6000 loan to buy the equipment (which is huge when people in my neighborhood make $500 a month and oftentimes much less). Hardly anyone has insurance here for something like this so now the owners are in bad shape. :( We’re trying to help them out somehow, but it looks like the chances of them being able to reopen are pretty slim.

Besides the robberies, things are going well here. This past weekend I went with the family to the market since they wanted to make crabs. However they were 10 for 6 bucks which is super expensive so they ended up making some seafood soup instead with octopus, calamari, conch, and some other mystery seafood pieces. We bought a cherimoya at the market as well which is probably one of the best fruits I’ve ever had. It tastes kind of like a cross between a pear, a banana and cotton candy. Highly recommended! We also went for a boat ride on the Laguna San Pablo north of Cayambe and attempted to go fishing as well (which was unsuccessful). Sunday night was a big two-hour episode of “Bailando por La Boda de Mis Sueños” (Dancing for the Wedding of My Dreams). One “famous” person (none of which I’ve ever heard of) dances with their fiancée and the winning couple after many weeks of competition wins the wedding of their dreams. The dancing is pretty shoddy, but people are pretty obsessed with the show here and the results are even recapped in the news every night. My family claims that the dancing gets better as the show progresses, but we’ll see how it goes!

On Tuesday, we all headed to Lake Cuicocha near the town of Cotacachi to hike the 15 km around the crater. The weather turned out to be beautiful and it was a nice change from the daily grind at the training center. There’s an active volcano beneath the lake, and 3000 years ago when it last erupted, the lava formed two islands in the middle of lake. The water in the lake is an awesome turquoise color, and in certain areas you can see bubbles floating up from the steam vents way below the surface.

I probably won’t be making any posts for the next two weeks, but I’m sure I’ll have lots of stories when I get back from two weeks of traveling.

Enjoy the pics below and click to enlarge.