Spanish class and other adventures (partially about cellphones, sorry Mom!)

This is my one week of intensive Spanish classes before my TESOL course starts (a little extra practice on top of my intensive Spanish with my host family...). We have class from 8:30am-12:30pm every day, and a short break around 10:30. Usually we get some little snack either a pastry or yesterday it was a food similar to a tamale. We also sometimes walk to the little tienda on the corner. I have a class with one of my fellow TESOL students Josh (pictured below, from San Diego!) It has definitely been good practice and even my host family told me my Spanish has improved a lot in the first week. :)

My Intensive Spanish Class: Josh, me, and our teacher Vladimir (photo cred Josh) 

The EIL Ecuador building (the organization I am working with see here, it is part of the SIT institute in Brattleboro, VT) is about 3 blocks away from my host family's house. It is a perfect walk that takes around 8 minutes. The building is 4 stories high, and every day during our breaks we go to the top floor and are able to sit either in the kitchen or on the beautiful roof patio. There are great views of the city and the mountains. Today we were lucky because Cotopaxi, one of the snow capped volcanoes to the south, was not covered in clouds!

Cotopaxi to the South of Quito

Today I ended up on my first adventure (not outing, I've had those, but this whole experience was truly an adventure). I needed to set up my cell phone so that I could stay in touch with my family/classmates/teachers. I brought a phone from the US figuring I could just switch out the SIM card, but yesterday I bought one, and it said it needed to be unlocked. My host mother took me to the kiosk in the huge mall, and they told us we had to go to the headquarters downtown. So today after my class we went. We got to one place; they sent us across the street. Then we went across the hall to a third place. Then we were sent to another place across town. Neither my host mother or I had any small change, so by this point we were out of usable money for transportation. We went to 3 places. The first was closed, the second told us they could unlock the phone but it would cost $40 and I would have to come back to pick it up. I told them that was "muy caro" (very expensive) and asked them where I could just buy a phone. They sent us down a level, where I simply purchased the cheapest phone for $46! Awesome, problem solved right? No...not exactly...I had only brought $25 thinking that I would only be paying for an unlock and none of my cards, and my host mother only had $20 on her, so I really got the phone for $45 ha! We left after making a test call, all was well, but we had NO MONEY and were about 3-4 miles from home. We ran to catch a bus, and the door started to close on me...so my host mother and I had to struggle to hold it open while yelling at the bus driver. I got on, we rode to our stop, and ended up hopping off with out paying (my host mother had found a spare 35 cents or so by then). We were laughing and laughing and on the way home she had to stop to buy a cigarette. It was a pretty laughable situation all together, we were both pretty entertained by it.

When I returned home Josh and our other classmate Mia were waiting and we walked 2 km to a movie theater and saw Monster's University ALL IN SPANISH and for only $3 :) after we went to a Mexican restaurant and had some delicious ceviche and tacos! I really miss beans, I thought I would be eating them here, but I could be wrong. It was my first night outing, but all was well!

Hopefully there will be more pictures in my next post! I'm really trying not to carry much on my person so that I don't look to touristy, so I rarely have my camera :/ .