I LOVE MANGO

Today I woke up bright and early (7:15am, after getting 8 hours of sleep) to work more on my Ecuadorian Foods paper. Then I wrote a paper on some Incan ruins here which I plan on going to visit in about a week and a half. I am SO tired of writing essays in Spanish, or any other language for that matter. On my plus side, my teachers are pretty easy graders so hopefully all this effort will pay off.

In school, nothing particularly notable happened. I'll miss these classes, though. I love having fun teachers in an 8-person class. The fact that there's not normally much homework doesn't hurt either haha.

After school, I went on a small adventure to investigate more malaria medicine. Ali, Denise, and Austin all need more and I'll need more once I get home. At Fybeca (a rather expensive drug store), they told us we had to take some over the counter malaria medicine once every three days, but we didn't believe them. At a different drug store, they told us you three pills of that very same medicine in one day right before you go to the malaria area. The instructions said you take one a day starting the week before. Needless to say, we did not buy any.

Ali, Austin and I decided to go see Alice in Wonderland (which translates here to Alicia in the Country of Marvels). Our favorite movie theatre is temporarily closed, supposedly because they don't have enough parking so the traffic gets really backed up on the street in front. I'm not sure how they're going to fix that quickly. Instead we went to a theatre a few blocks away. It turns out this new theatre is in ANOTHER mall, so there are THREE 3+ story malls in between my house and my school, which is a 35 minute walk. This country is weird.
For dinner, I wasn't too hungry so for $2.25 I bought the Combo 2 from a little yucca bread stand; which consisted of 4 yucca breads (they're unfortuately very small, but delicious) and a medium mango yogurt, which tasted EXACTLY like a mango lassi (if you've never had one, go to an Indian restaurant right now and try one. Or, wait until I get home and go with me!). This was possibly the best $2.25 I've spent in this country; that yogurt was amazing :) Side note: yogurt here is super liquidy; there is no solid yogurt. I miss my Dannon vanilla yogurt a little bit.

Anyway we ate and watched the movie (this theatre was not as nice as our normal one, but it still nicer than Issaquah's). I then got a taxi ride home for a dollar, which is the minimum fare here so that was a nice change.

Tomorrow I'm getting up even earlier (last day of 6 am!) for my final day of service learning. More than 60 hours here I come! I am possibly the only person that will make it to the required number of hours, at least without fabricating my hours. I also have a large collection of adorable pictures of Ecuadorian 5 year olds which I will upload soon.

My backpack should be arriving in Quito in an hour curtusy of Austin's brother! I'm excited haha

Love Alex