Since I've been gone...

Well, once again its been a while since I've written. A lot has happened in the last week and a half - including an impromptu trip to Cajas, the nearby national park, and a planned trip to Quito to see Ecuador play Uruguay. I'll update more about those two side trips later, but right now I'm just going to talk about the last couple of days.
Its has been an eventful two days in Cuenca. Yesterday, we woke up and went to school. I wasn't feeling very well, so once I found out that sick days were not the same as vacation days, I decided to go home and sleep for the rest of the morning (okay, so that wasn't very eventful). After I finally woke up (about 1:30pm), Slocomb got home from school. After a quick lunch, we had to head into town for my first Spanish class!
My classes are Monday and Wednesday afternoons, 3 to 5 pm, so we're probably just going to go straight from school to downtown and have lunch at one of the hundreds of restaurants there. Slocomb is planning to go with me a lot of the time because they have internet access and other nice things at the center downtown, so he'll be able to entertain himself while I'm in class.
Anyway, I'm in class with Livia, one of the other professoras at CEDEI school. She took Spanish in college, so she's more advanced than I am. However, its been seven years since her last Spanish class, so she says she needs to review a lot. She'll be reviewing and I'll be learning for the first time, so it could be interesting. I ended up getting placed into the second level (intermediate). I hope that's a good fit for me; I think that it is because of how similar Spanish grammar is to French grammar. So I know what structures to use; I just don't know how those structures are done in Spanish! We'll see how it goes. I understood everything in the first class, so I'm hoping that will continue.
My teacher's name is Eugenio, which seems easy enough until you try to say it in Spanish. So I guess one of the first things I'll have to work on for this class is how to say my teacher's name. Anyway, he is a professional teacher - he works in a secondary school in the mornings I think. He seems like a really good teacher.
We spent a lot of the class talking about saying hello and goodbye. Its actually kinda complicated in Spanish because they use like three different greetings all the time!! "¡Hola! ¡Buenos dias! ¿Como estás? ¿Que tal?" would all be an acceptable greeting from one person to the other. And then the other person would have to respond. Its complicated, like I said. Most people (me included) know that you just say, "Bien, bien, gracias. Y tú/usted?" to respond, but it was good to learn what people are actually saying.
Anyway, after talking a little bit about the differences between the two "to be" verbs in Spanish, that was pretty much my class.
Yesterday afternoon, a bunch of student teachers from the US arrived in Cuenca. They'll be working at the school for 6 weeks as part of their student teaching requirements. So I met them yesterday afternoon and then again this morning at the school. They all seem really cool and excited to work with us.
So a lot of this morning was spent getting them oriented to the school, meeting the national teachers, etc. I did have a really fun lesson with the kindergarteners about rain, but besides that it was mostly student teacher related stuff.
This afternoon I went and hung out at the CEDEI international programs office while Slocomb was having his class. I'm hoping to spend some of his afternoons in class at museums and other things he's not super jazzed about. We'll see. I just hung out on the computer today and did a little drawing. I'm hoping to get back in to practice drawing because there are so many great buildings and stuff to draw here.
Anyway, we went home after class just to turn around and meet up with two of the student teachers from the States who live close-by, Kelly and Johanna. We took them to the Super-Maxi to get shampoo and stuff and then we went out to dinner. It was really nice to have new people to hang out with. Not that the international team folks aren't awesome, but we see each other all the time. New people are nice. Another cool thing was being able to compare our Spanish levels. Most of them don't speak Spanish, so its really cool to be able to say to them, I didn't speak any Spanish 6 weeks ago, and now look at me! They all seemed really impressed. I was impressed too in doing my own comparison. I guess I shouldn't brag, but hanging out with non-Spanish speakers made me realize how far I've come in the past 6 weeks.
Anyway, that's the low down of the past two days. I'll post (hopefully tomorrow) about some of the other stuff that's gone on in the past weeks!