Two weeks, two schools: from a high-altitude metropolis to a laid back beach town

We’ve now been out of our home for 26 days, out of Colorado for 19 days, and out of the country for 10 days. After traveling across the U.S., and our little detour through Panama City, we were ready to nest a bit when we arrived in Quito. We bought groceries, cooked, went to the gym and attended school.

Just down the street from the delightful apartment we rented on Airbnb, we took one-on-one lessons four hours per day at the Vida Verde Spanish school. The only other students in the school were young teachers participating in the ChACE program, associated with Notre Dame University, which sends American Catholic school teachers to teach for one year in Santiago, Chile. The program has partnered with Vida Verde for the past nineteen years to provide Spanish instruction to its participants before they head to Chile.

My teacher, Lucía, is very smart and, as she is just two months older than I, super young! She quickly identified some bad habits I had developed over the years in Spanish, and I am working hard to nip them in the bud. Peter and his teacher, Karina, spent hours discussing the history and culture of Ecuador (in Spanish), and I think he too was able to break some bad Spanish habits. We felt the school would have benefited from more structure and a more focused curriculum, but to be fair the concerns may not be the same for students who stay for longer than a week.

At about 9,200 feet, Quito is the second-highest altitude capital city in the world (after La Paz, Bolivia). It has undergone rapid growth in the last several decades. The temperature hovers under 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and, because of its proximity to the equator, the sun sets and rises around the same time every day.

Our final couple days in Quito featured a couple semi-creepy moments. First, we celebrated several birthdays at the school. As part of the festivities, the school director brought a long, phallic-shaped water balloon, asking each student and staff member to spank the birthday honorees with it. When it burst, she requested that a student remove his belt to continue the celebration. He obliged. It was sort of in good fun, but sort of not.

Then we headed off to our final planned Quito event with the other students and staff to tour a former prison on Friday night. The tour turned out to be a reenactment of prison life, with the tourists serving as prisoners. The tourists were to meet in Plaza del Teatro before boarding a bus for the former prison. The “guards” arranged us in two lines and barked orders, while a small group of men sat in front, yelling obscenities for a good twenty to thirty minutes, apparently unconcerned about the many families with small children strolling by. As we waited, the tour leaders explained (and repeated several times for the foreigners in the group) that the safe word for this game was “libertad.” But Peter and I abandoned ship without boarding the bus, before we had to use any safe words. For Peter the deal-breaker occurred when the guides insisted we had to give them our cell phones during the tour, and for me all bets were off when they slapped plastic handcuffs on our wrists. After we bailed on the prison tour, we headed in the opposite direction, enjoying our first fancy dinner in Ecuador and preparing to leave the city. Apparently, the students and staff from the school later wished they had followed our lead.

On Saturday we drove six hours to the coast in a rented pick-up truck, crossing the equator twice and passing lush farmland. Although not pictured here, we drove by several fantastic trees, the likes of which we had never seen.

And now we are in Canoa, Ecuador, a small funky town whose sandy beach spans a full 17 kilometers.

We are staying in a low-budget but quite lovely hostel right on the beach, with a shared kitchen and a large private room facing the ocean.

The hostel hosts a one-on-one Spanish program, again four hours per day, which we began today. We like that the program includes a more structured curriculum. And sitting outside listening to the ocean certainly enhances the experience! We are both optimistic about the week to come.