As you know, we are a family of
planners.
Everything done way in
advance and every detail completed months before it is needed. That´s why I was so surprised that I was still
packing things in the basement 5 minutes before Andy took me to the airport last Wednesday. Good thing Daravann made me drink a beer to calm my A-type personality down. Anyway I arrived in Cuenca on Thursday and low and behold my husband and children had picked out 2 apartments to rent. We went to see them and strangely...um, they were not the third world options I had envisioned when thinking about this trip. Check out the pictures. I never lived in a place with 4 bathrooms! Our choices seemed to run from Peace Corps experience with two burners and a shared bathroom, which I am not sure I was ready to expose the kids to, or affordable high end condos. So with my head hung down and a broad smile on Lizzie´s face, we went for the biggest one we could find.Taking my family out of the country for a year requires a bit of flexibility. With very little investigation and a one week trip back in March, I set up options to live and work and learn and teach in Ecuador. Believe me, I was ready for bathing out of buckets and squeezing my family into a one room home. However, I now have to adjust my brain to a different way of thinking and being ok with that too. I know you are thinking, yeah, rough adjustment to a beautiful apartment with TV and maids quarters. But the problem is that if I spend too much time there, I don´t even feel like I have left the States. People talk about living like the Ecuadorians, but there are many ways that Ecuadorians live, just like in the States. We hope to meet people of diverse backgrounds, just like we do in the States.
We have all been working on our Spanish, especially Norm, who seems to be reading, breathing and eating the stuff. Al cena es español solo todo el tiempo (At dinner it is Spanish only the whole time.) Downtown Cuenca is beautiful and the surrounding mountains are also wonderous. Ok those doors up there belong to the Cathedral in the city center. We are very fortunate to have had a wonderful stay with Carmen´s sister, Marcella, and now we are out on our own. Here are a few more pictures of our surroundings. We are not yet hooked up to the internet so all communication is done in the internet cafe behind our apartment. Ciao for now.
