Pictures of Crepes & Waffles ice cream for Chelsea's (and anyone else who sees this) viewing pleasure. You can't actually eat any unless you come to Ecuador though...also, I have just been informed that Corfu ice cream is actually better. I will have to check it out.
I'm off to the jungle in Tena tomorrow for a sweet break from school...it should be awesome! (Just hope I don't get too many bug bites)

Second half...the year went by so fast!

I'm back in Ecuador...school has started again and is not too bad (yet) and everyone made it back OK. Some people volunteered to not get on their connecting flight from Atlanta to Quito (with $400 dollars and free food and housing, that's not a bad deal) and were going to get back Sunday night instead of Saturday, but then their pilot got sick. They ended up getting into Quito at about 6 in the morning on Monday, but amazingly they still made it to class! (A good thing too, because Mondays and Fridays count for double absences...yikes!) Mostly this blog is just a brief update, and for some reason my blog isn't showing any of the recent posts...so maybe republishing it will fix it, I don't know.


On a completely different note, I'm kind of stressed out right now...not about schoolwork exactly though. You see, a small group of students is going to California to promote CBC in May. I really want to because I think it would be fun (and hey, it would be a trip to California...) and it wouldn't conflict with camp or anything. The dilemma: We have to audition for it. Which, if you know anything about how stressed I was when I had to do musical auditions, scares me to death. It's also kind of ambiguous what they want...the auditions are for instrumentals, vocals, and drama. Now, unless they want a flute player (which they might, but I have no clue) I probably wouldn't be much use at instrumentals. A bunch of people are already trying out for vocals, although I'm not sure how many vocalists they want or what the gender division is with people trying out. Drama? I could probably do it, but it would be the hardest thing to find an audition piece for. I don't know. Anyway, I'm praying about whether or not I should audition, so I'd appreciate your prayers as well.

Thanksgiving at the beach...yeah!

I recently realized that all of my blog entries begin with the word "so". Henceforth I will not be prefacing them with that word, so if you catch me doing it, please beat me over the head with an electronic wet noodle.

Somehow my last post didn't get published (I probably hit 'save as a draft' instead of 'publish') but for those of you who don't know, we went to the beach for Thanksgiving. Now, I know most college students get to go home for Thanksgiving, but not usually those in Ecuador. So we had a big Thanksgiving feast here at school, with turkey and stuffing and potatoes and pumpkin pie and all that jazz. I got to decorate the tables, which is what really made it like Thanksgiving...I don't know what it would have been like if I hadn' t gotten to, because it wasn't that much like Thanksgiving. We still had classes and E4 and ministries...did I mention we ate Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday? That's because on Wednesday night at midnight we all climbed on a bus to head to the beach. It was sweet...the Pacific ocean, the sun, the sea-level altitude...
Unfortunately, there were a few downsides to this trip. Ready?

1. Due to an accident due to the stupidity of pretty much all of us, Greta, one of the students here, spent Sunday through Wednesday morning in the hospital. She's back now, and doing well, but she had a spinal injury that requires her to wear a brace when she's standing and pretty much she can't stand for more than 15 minutes at a time a few times a day. The rest of hte time she has to be laying down. So she and Annalea stayed here while we all went to the beach, and we felt that loss. Trust me, if you could read the e-mail I sent home after the accident (like, the day after, when we were all still really freaked out) you would realize how scary of a thing this was for us. So keep Greta in your prayers, and also thank God her injury wasn't worse...she'll eventually recover.

2. Sunburn. I put on SPF 50 about 3 times a day, so I only got a little bit of one. Some people, on the other hand, weren't so thorough, so there are quite a few people with red and peeling skin.

3. Insects. I have at least 12 bug bites all over my body, which sucks. That's the trouble with lower altitudes. Let's just hope there's no danger of me getting Malaria there, because I don't have to take Malaria medicine for where we live, and nobody said anything about needing it at the beach. Malaria would suck.

4. Does anyone else think it's ironic that they told us to make sure we locked our cabanas so nobody would steal our stuff, and then my digital camera gets stolen out of our room that we did lock? Natalie had shampoo, makeup, and all of her pants and a couple of skirts stolen too. Due to the nature of these thefts (and the fact that they were probably the only other ones in our room) we suspect the cleaning ladies. So while I did take some sweet pictures at the beach, the only ones who get to see them are the people who stole my camera.

Don't get me wrong, the beach trip was fun and really relaxing. It just stinks that there had to be so many things to make it less-than-perfect.

Ok, so I should probably go...the next three weeks (only three weeks before we go home!!! AAAAAHHHH!!!) are going to be CRAZY. A brief schedule for you, excluding practices and probably a lot of things that I'll forget.

Thursday, Nov 30. Cookie baking with our E4 groups for Friday
Friday, December 1. Sandwich making for the Dump party on Saturday...basically we're going to be assembling 2500 sanwiches. Also cookie eating and singing of carols.
Saturday, December 2. We leave school at 6:30 am for the Zambiza dump in Quito. It's basically this huge carnival thing where we have games, face painting, and of course food (all free of charge) for some of the poor of Quito. That's where the 2500 sandwiches come in. There are a bunch of other churches and groups from the States that will be helping too, but it's going to be chaotic nonetheless.
Sunday, December 3. In order to get back here after Christmas, the CBC students must all have something called a Censo. The Censo office is retarded, and although we tried multiple times to get our Censos months ago, they kept refusing us. So the only time we can go now is this Sunday. I'm pretty sure we're leaving at something like 6 am this time, and when we get there we get a number, then leave and go to church, get lunch, and go back to the Censo office and hope they feel like giving us Censos. Please pray...we really don't want to have to go through this anymore.
Monday, December 4. We have classes in the morning, but in the afternoon we have something called "Quito days" on campus with Margot, our spanish teacher. None of us really knows what it is, but it's supposed to be fun. Unfortunately...
Tuesday, December 5. Freaking 2500 word paper on The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer Due. After that weekend, and taking into account the fact that most of us haven't finished the book yet and it's not light reading. We're all gonna die.

After that, things aren't so bad....well....maybe...

Friday, December 8. All day trip to Otavalo. I'll be doing all my Christmas shopping here, so if you want anything specific you might want to leave me a comment or send an email about it.
Saturday, December 8. All day dress rehearsal for our Christmas concerts.
Sunday, December 9. Sometime a concert in English for English Fellowship church, then after that a spanish one for a bunch of Spanish-speaking churches. By the way, did I mention that we're singing eleven songs, most of them in both languages? And doing puppets, and drama, and I have to do a painting sometime really soon. We're not that ready at all. Yikes!

After that all we have is finishing up with school stuff (which, by the way, we have classes on all of the weekdays except for the friday we go to Otavalo) and the Christmas party for our ministry sites and a party for ourselves and then we all fly home. So much stuff in so little time!!!!

So I really need to go read Bonhoeffer. Please pray I don't go insane. See you all in three weeks.

So....went to Guayaquil this past weekend, and even though it's supposedly the "most dangerous city in Ecuador" we had no problems and a lot of fun. The one downside was the 8 hour bus ride required to get there...but it went all right. Highlights were eating dinner on a pirate ship, checking out some museums, and going on a bus tour around the city. In other news, I finally got a package (the first mail I've gotten here) from a family friend, mostly containing Halloween-themed chocolate. Halloween was fun...I borrowed Cassie's farm boots (you know...the knee-high rubber kind) and went as puss in boots. A bunch of people climbed Cotopaxi, the highest active volcano in the world (fortunately not erupting at the time) this past weekend, although not all of them made it to the top due to altitude sickness and such.
Oh...random other news...one of my suitemates, Elise, went home on friday. Apparently she'd been struggling a lot with being away from home, so she left at the end of first term. Sad stuff. First term exams went pretty well...when I get back the paintings I did for Christ and Culture I'll try to take pics and post them, because they're sweet. I have to go now...otherwise I'll be late to spanish. Oh, and most of the pictures are pretty self-explanatory except the first one, which is Dan and Caroline dressed as Peter Pan and Tinkerbell for Halloween. Enjoy all this!

(p.s. Kylie...dangly earrings would be sweet. I'll probably end up buying myslelf a bunch here, because they're everywhere)

So...the internet cafe I usually go to just installed 3 places where we can hook up our laptops...so I get to make another attempt at adding pictures! Here we have a group picture from our horseback ride at Banos (from left: me, Natalie, Karianne, Tim, Holly, Laura, Heidi, Hannah, Mary, Jenni, Elin) Natalie cutting Dan's hair while Caroline watches, random cows walking down the street in La Merced, a really pretty view from the horseback ride, and me on the horse I rode, Campeon. No huge news except that I have finals on monday and tuesday (we have trimesters) and about a million projects and papers due on those same two days. Fun!

So...I haven't updated in like forever, but I also haven't been on the internet for like two weeks, so that may be why. I had a free hour saved up at the internet cafe (not the wireless one) so I feel like I can actually spend some time here to update people.

Even though I should probably tell my family this before I just randomly post it on the internet...oh well....
I GOT MY EARS PIERCED ON MONDAY!!!!
Not that exciting for most people in the world, but it's a big deal for me, ok? The place was very clean and the guy there was uber-concerned with making sure we knew stuff was sterile. A few people got belly-buttons and eyebrows and such, and Caroline (if any of you know her) got her lip pierced. So I don't think what I did was too extreme.

A few weekends ago a bunch of us went to Baños, a 3.5 hour bus ride away. It's called Baños because of the hot springs there, but there was plenty of other stuff to do. We went horseback riding, and for those of you who have only been trail riding in the U.S. (the kind where the horses just walk and eat the whole time) you have been missing out! These things went at a full gallop several times on the way back, and the trotting in between was downright painful...but so much fun! We rode up to this waterfall and got off to take pictures, and it was pretty sweet. And it cost...you guessed it...eight dollars a person. How much does that cost in the states? I don't know, but I bet it's more expensive and it's definitely not as cool.

Other than that, I don't have much news...I've had a bunch of work to do, so I haven't been doing much interesting stuff except on weekends. Oh wait...we went to the Basilica cathedral in Quito on Monday (for spanish, though I'm not sure why) It was cool, but the "stairs" leading to some of the towers were absolutely freaky...more like ladders. I ended up going into this big open tower that I most definitely would not have climbed to if I had known that was where we were going. Fortunately, Caroline is freaked out by heights too, and Micah and Elin were both kind of surrounding us to make sure we made it to the top and back down without freaking out and freezing. It's a pretty sweet cathedral, and if you're ever in Quito I'd definitely suggest it. anyways, I should go before my internet bill goes up any more...more updates later! I just found out a few days ago that there may be free wi-fi at the mall, so I have to check that out.

So after I just looked at Kylie's blog for the first time since I got here, and I realized how terrible I've been about updating this thing. It's just that there's simultaneously so much to tell and so little to tell. I mean, I could go into a detailed explaination about every single thing I do here, but it would take forever and I'd have to pay a lot more for internet.

So I've been here for over a month...that's so weird. I absolutely love everything about it though. The people are awesome, both inside and outside of CBC. My roommate, Ahna, was pretty cool...but she was having a lot of issues at home, and she left after the first week. Kind of sad, but she needed to be there, and it's better that she got to where she needed to be than stay here and be worried all the time. The work is interesting, though some of the books we have to read are not what I'd call enjoyable reading. We had two papers due today, so about half the campus (myself not included) stayed up most of the night finishing them. I was done by 11 and in bed by 12...pretty sweet compared to the people that stayed up all night. The picture here is of the little girl who just randomly kept hugging me on the bus...sometime I'll try to get pictures of the other CBCers and the adorable little kids from ministry. On wednesday afternoons we go to three different locations (La Merced, Las Palmeras, and La Montana) to do ministry with the local kids. I'm in La Merced, which means that soon I'll probably have little kids greeting me when I walk around town. They're adorable...all we basically do is play random games with them, give them piggy-back rides (although they call them....horse...rides? They call the guys caballos, anyway) and then tell a Bible story and give out sandwiches. This week we had to divide our sandwiches in half so all the kids could get one...we always end up with more kids as soon as we start handing out food. Speaking of food, we've eaten at a few fun places since I've been here. For example, there's this place that I don't know the actual name of because everyone just calls it "Batidos". Batido is spanish for milkshake, and it has the best milkshakes EVER. Anyone ever had a mango milkshake? How about peach, mora, maracuya, or guayabana? Pretty sweet. Also, there's this Colombian restaurant at the San Luis mall (in San Rafael) called Crepes and Waffles. It sells...you guessed it...ice cream! Well, it does sell fresh, fruit-based ice cream...and crepes, and waffles. The desserts are absolutely beautiful...literally. If I could figure out how to get pictures to work, I'd post one...the aforementioned picture of the little Ecuadorian girl will have to wait, because blogger hates me right now. If there are pictures here, it's because I got it to work...if not, it's because I didn't. In any case, if there are pictures, it's me with a cute Ecuadorian girl who latched on to me on the bus, a confection from Crepes and Waffles, and a few of us girls hanging out at Batidos.