First festival weekend

After classes on Thursday Natasha invited Shari and me out for dinner with her Peace Corps friends and other random people who speak English. It was a lot of fun because she even had some of her students who are advanced come along. The Peace Corps vols were super interesting because they are each doing something totally different. One girl is working in an orphanage, one girl is working at a health clinic giving AIDS talks, and a guy is working on re-foresting a park.

Then on Friday I did some laundry (this time with just a washing machine, not hand washing needed) and had my Spanish class. I´m not a huge fan of the teacher because she is German and knows Spanish because she married an Ecua. She also just uses a workbook and asks us to work out of it. There isn´t enough explanation. I think Shari and I are going to look for somewhere else to take Spanish classes.

Then Pedro came up from Quito and we went to the parade. Parades in Ibarra are very interesting. It´s like there is one group of people that walk by or dance by or whatever and then 5 minutes later another group comes by. So there is a lot of waiting around and the parade took like 3 hours. We ended up going to get food in the middle of it because we were hungry.

Then next day we went to Otavalo, an indigenous market so Pedro could take pictures of indigenous people. It is a really neat market but it is a little annoying to be a gringa there. Everyone kept asking me to buy from them incessantly. It was like I couldn´t even look at something without being harrassed. I´m sure I´ll go back because it is an amazing market with a ton of stuff. I´ll just have to work on me ¨I don´t speak Spanish at all¨ look.

On Saturday night there was the ¨Reina de Ibarra¨ beauty pageant. It was pretty funny watching these 17-18 year old girls parade around in swimsuits and evening gowns. It was a legit beauty pageant.

Then on Sunday I did a whole bunch of planning and rested up for my week of teaching.