A day in the life.



Every day I´m hussalin

 So I haven´t updated because there hasn´t been TOO much that has been extremely noteworthy. However, I realize that none of you know how a typical school day for me goes. So let me break it down for ya real quick. . .


6:45 - Wake up to the alarm. Proceed to frown and be upset for being up so freakin early (As some of you may know, I am def not a good early riser. At all). Some choice words or groaning also might be dropped.


7:15 - Showered and ate breakfast, which is usually a bowl of frosted flakes or toast with butter and a tiny teeny cup of orange juice. Can I just take this time to drop the fact that when I get into the new apartment, I´m going to make sure there is a consistant amount of fruit in the kitchen? Not having fruit to start off the day kinda sucks. . .what I would do to cut up a banana and put it in the cereal. At this point too I´m starting to feel more and more like a real person a la Pinocchio.


7:20 - Check email, play a song to get stimulated (as of late I´ve been waking up to Far East Movement´s "Rocketeer," but today was a new jam from Timbaland called "Swat Dat Fly" that leaked yesterday), gather my things, and get going. I´m fully awake now hopefully. Also take the time to pop a Zinc vitamin along with my fred flintstone tasting vitamin C pills.


7:30 - Drive to school with the fam. If I´m riding with mom, the ride is usually quiet and tranquil. If I´m dipping with pops, then my ears will be assaulted with reggaeton and / or pop. I prefer the ride with the pops. Big shocker.


8:00 - At school, in the sala de profesores (teacher´s lounge) for the 2nd and 3rd unit aka 5th grade to 12th grade teachers. I go here because it´s close to where I get dropped off and is a generally very quiet place. I check my email, write emails, check facebook, look at youtube, read espn, read washington post, read huffington post, check cnn, look at foreignpolicy.com, peep bbc (international version of course), take a look at my school e-mail, and occasionally do a little work for notre dame. Oh yeah, I also make money.


9:45 - first break of the day for the teachers aka coffee break. This is a period of 20 minutes where the kids can go outside and play and the teachers go to chug coffee, tea, and eat a small snack they bring in. This is usually where I make my move from the 2nd and 3rd unit over to the 1st unit, where I work at with 1st graders and whatever other grade they need me for. Over by the 2nd and 3rd unit, the kids can actually play the music they want over the loudspeakers for a short period of time. It´s funny most of the time hearing Miley Cirus get pumped over the whole scene, and sometimes downright crazy. Like the time the students decided to blast Cee-Lo´s unedited version of the song "Fuck You." I literally heard the f bomb dropped over and over again while kids played, the sun shined, and teachers didn´t notice or care at all. THAT´S ST. GEORGE FOR YA.


11:30 - done with helping classes of first grade, which mainly consists of me telling kids to cut this, color that, or copy these things. First graders are at the level right now where they´re just getting vocabulary down. . .they can´t really speak out full sentences quite yet, but are getting there. This is also the time where I´m primarly just speaking spanish. Yes, I understand that the kids should hear English but it does nothing for them if I speak in english and get blank stares. What I´ve been doing is speaking Spanish and then translating it into English. I actually love this, because it gives me a good opportunity to practice my Spanish.

12:30 - Just finished up lunch for an hour. Lunch here is by far my favorite part of the day. The buffett here at school is AWESOME. All you can eat fruit and veggies, bread, and soup. The fruit is no slouch either. . .they stack it up with sliced apples, pears, bananas, oranges, kiwis, and the occasional cherry. Sometimes the bread is freshly baked, which is ballerrrrrr. They also offer a tiny appetizer and an entre, which usually consists of some sort of carbohydrate (rice, pasta) with some sort of meat. They had mongolian beef the other day, and I just wanted to sit there for hours and eat it and just talk and then eat it again. Sooo delicious. I also eat usually with my friend Garrett and other English professors from the first unit aka a bunch of extremely nice women. Conversation is a good mix of English and Spanish, unless we´re sitting with other 1st unit teachers in which case Spanish is solely dropped.
Lunch conversations usually are about what happened in the past weekend, but they end up being COMPLETELY random. I´ve talked about vacation spots, watermelons, babies, why my host family is crazy, indigenous music, the story of how one teacher met her husband and almost married another man beforehand, and more.

4:00 - From lunch to the end of the da, I usually assist with 2 classes. . .sometimes 4. . .and if I´m frantically workin on a Notre Dame paper, zilch. These classes again are a repetition of before. . .helping out with random whatevers in the classroom, looking like a genius in front of the kids, and getting kisses on the cheek as the goodbye. Usually hellos and goodbyes with females means that they kiss the air by your cheek, but first graders don´t play like that. Instead, they plant big suckers right on you haha. Gotta love it!

4:30, 5ish - I get home from my 25 minute walk, which is a nice way to end off the day. I´ve been more and more using this time to reflect, pray, and just thank God for what he´s given me and the opportunity I´ve been given to help (?) the school.

6ish - At this point, I´ve had my "once" (eleven), which is just a small snack. Usually I grub on 2 pieces of toast with jam and cream cheese. I also fill up my 48 oz water bottle, because I´ve drank one bottle and plan on drinkin at least half of it again.

730ish - I have gone to the gym or ran outside by the river near my house. Since I don´t have any grading, ND work, and in general responsibilities at home, I work out at the gym around 4 times a week and running 1 or 2 days. I can´t freakin wait to live in the apartment near a metro station so I can meet some friends to ball.

830 - Dinner is served, usually something fairly modest. For instance, last night I had pork chops with toasted bread, along with chopped tomatoes and onion in olive oil and basalmic vinegar. DELICIOUS.

1030ish to 11 - I do whatever I do at the computer. . .catch up on the latest U.S. music, check the news again, chat on gchat / skype / aim, rock my SNRG mexico shorts, lay around and watch tv with the host bros, etc.

REPEAT 5X.

I love you all. XOXO.

p.s. some of you may already know this, but I am going to be starting a sort of video blog too. It´s really for my former kids in Phoenix, Arizona that I taught. . .but in reality, it´s more of a way for me to keep track of what´s happening here through another format. Follow the youtube channel so you stay updated at MrCastillotoPhoenix. . .in the meantime, here´s the link to the first video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNUOQSxKh-M

Let me know what you think, what you may wanna see, if videotaping my daily schedule might be worthwhile / funny!

st. george kids and halloween

So it´s been about a month since I´ve been in Chile. . .man how the times flies! I´ve spent the majority of my time here observing first grade, and for the past two weeks I´ve been subbing a few times a week in the fourth grade classroom in an English club. I wanted to take some time to describe St. George. . .because this place is unlike any school I´ve ever seen.

St. George

First of all, let me start by saying the school is MASSIVE. It runs from kindergarten to 12th grade, which is quite a range of kids first of all. However, the school body consists of almost THREE THOUSAND KIDS, over a hundred teachers, and all the administration. . .the school is huge. It´s very possible to go through your time here and not see other people at all. For example, our group is split between the elementary (1st through 4th grade) and the second and third levels (5th and up). I hardly ever see the people in the second and third levels all day. This is because of two things: 1. We´re busy and even more importantly, 2. The school campus is enormous. ENORMOUS. It has the feel of a college campus, because not only is it just massive, but the campus itself is immaculate. It´s well trimmed, flowers are blooming everywhere, and trees are everywhere to be seen. Just beyond the school itself in the background are snow-capped mountains that add to the already beautiful scene. The school is equipped with two huge computer labs for the staff, multiple labs for the students, and some classrooms even have smartboards. Resources do not seem to be lacking in the school, that is except for English materials. . .but that is just a given in a place where a book to learn English is hard to find and expensive as crap.

The kids

The students. . .dear god the students. Take whatever level of independence you´ve seen, multiply it by 34873674, and you get the level of St. George kids. The general feel of the entire school is one that fosters the individuality of each child and that their opinion matters. Of course, this is a great thing right? You have little first graders switching between classes, 2nd and 3rd graders walking across the entire campus to get to certain classes. . .it´s unbelievable. The only thing I´ve heard is that the kids, when they´re older, start to question EVERYTHING. They comb through their grades for mistakes, they fight tooth and nail for every point, and they challenge every answer that a teacher may give. This sounds awesome I know. . .for everyone BUT the teacher trying to teach the class.

Speaking of class, classroom management is practically nonexistent. The first time I went to a classroom was the English department head´s class. Now this is a lady who is in charge of about 30 teachers under her, and this is the ONE class she teaches. It just so happens this class was taking a test, and that myself and two others were brought in to talk to the kids about the States and our experiences. Now in my experience, a test is serious business. . .nothing on the desk but a pen or pencil. These kids had newspapers, notebooks, magazines out. . .some of them even had in headphones listening to music during the test. While we were talking, a good deal of them were talking, listening to music, or just staring out of the window. The head teacher was talking to them to pay attention. . .funny enough, the kids were able to answer her exactly at whatever she was saying, no matter how little attention they were seemingly giving. First grade itself is crazy. . .it takes about at least ten minutes to settle the kids down, plus 5 to clean up. Keep in mind the classes themselves are about 40 minutes long, so thats almost half the class just getting the kids to sit down and stop talking.

Recess is something I have to describe on its own. In the states in my Phoenix school, we had five to six people watching kids outside playing at any given time. Why? Simply to break up fights, solve disagreements, or stop kids doing something generally outrageously stupid. Here though at St. George, things go a little different. While 1st through 4th grade are outside playing, which by the way means hundreds of little kids are running everywhere, there are ZERO people watching. ZERO. And what are the kids doing? Well, they´re either

1. playing ¨soccer¨ which means they´re slide tackling each other, kicking and headbutting the air in any way possible to come in contact with the ball, and running into each other. By the way at any time there are about 8 games being played, with goals made up on the spot
2. climbing trees or crawling through bushes
3. running on the 2nd floor as fast as they possibly can
4. rolling slowly on the dirt through everyone doing all the above
5. eating and drinking each other´s food while doing at least one of the above

The first time Garrett and I saw this, we were horrified because this was a nightmare come true. In the states, if this went down, the kids would literally kill each other and the school would get shut down. Here in SG, there. . .was. . .nothing. No problems, whatsoever. ONE time I saw a kid get upset at not kicking the ball and started to cry. So what did the other 30 kids he was playing soccer with do? They freakin SET UP A PENALTY KICK so he could kick it. When he missed the kick the first time, did they give the ball up them? No, they let him kick it AGAIN at the goal. It was honestly unbelievable, and spoke volumes to me about the character these kids have at times.

Halloween

Since there was 12 of us in the program, we decided to all be months of the year. I luckily got September, so in true Chilean spirit for the 18th, I was Chilean pride. Everyone´s costumes came out to be incredible. . .and the party itself was amazing. Soooooo much fun. Here´s a sweet group pic:

from top left to top right: January (new years), February (cupid). march (march madness), april (april showers), may (may flowers), june (summer on top, winter on bottom). From bottom left to bottom right: july (uncle sam), august (uh. . .stealing of the mona lisa), september (CHILEAN PRIDE BAYBAY), october (witch), november (dia de los muertos), december (christmas tree)

asados = God's gift to man

So this past wekend was a long one due to the fact that it was Colombus Day. It was kind of interesting to see that they celebrated it here in Chile, even though they changed the name of it to "Day of the exploration of the new world," but still. A South American country, celebrating the legacy of centuries of conquest, exploitation, and brutality by the colonialists? It seems kind of roundabout to me, and I honestly never really liked the idea of "Colombus Day" because Colombus was a complete ass. Maybe if they changed it to the name they have here, or celebrated the indigenous that lived in the states beforehand, or something to take the focus off of Colombus's crew and made the meaning of the holiday something other than HE. . .but whatever. It was a three day weekend, and I was about to experience in every way what chilean asados mean.

Now for those of you who don't speak the "Spanish," asado means bbq. In Chile, men take bbqs are seriously as China is about violating human rights (Seriously, throwing the Nobel Peace Prize winner's WIFE under arrest too? What are you thinking??). Asados by NO MEANS are just times where guys put meat on the grill and fire up the gas tank. It's a time of family, friends, music, drinking. . .the food just compliments the overall merry mood of being outside and enjoying life with the people you love. But my god, do they compliment well. I should mention that a great majority of the grills aren't gas operated as well. . .you have to fire it up either with coal or wood, and since you're usually cooking for a huge group of people, this means starting the fire up takes up a special importance. Every guy it seems has their own method to start up the fire, whether that be arrange the wood pile in a certain way, or using a certain amount of newspaper and waving it a certain way around the coals before setting it down, to literally making a Molotov cocktail with a wine bottle and throwing it into the grilling abyss. . .it's awesome. Sooner than later, I'm going to have to figure out my own style and when I do, I'll let you know. . .hopefully you see it for yourself if you come and visit!!

Anyways, about my past weekend. . .it was purely with my host family for almost the entire time, which was actually pretty great because I got to hear an enormous amount of Spanish and practice. I picked up on a few key phrases here and there that apparently are said nowhere else in the Spanish speaking world. I just hope I don't walk away in over a year speaking Spanish and then have Spanish speakers go "Huh??" every time I start talking. In any case, it was on Saturday when the whole fam and myself piled into the family and drove to the beach, to a little town called Hanga Roa. Apparently no one on the staff recognizes the town, so I might be stating the wrong place. . .although I'm 99.9% sure that was it. Anyways, after about an hour and a half of driving, we pull up to this HUGE house where the parents of my mom live. It was absolutely GORGEOUS. . .it had the feel of an old house, full of antique furniture, amazing wooden floors, and fireplaces everywhere. And I mean everywhere. It was actually pretty chilly and cloudy (what a bummer) so they had 2 fireplaces going on in the hallways of the house.

I walk outside to a view of the coast in the distance (the house was set more or less on a hill, so the beach was on a down slant), along with rose gardens to my right and an actual playground on my left. Directly in front was a huge outside eating area, with two MASSIVE wok-looking bowls of seafood paella, avocado, tortilla española (scrambled egg and potato mix), crackers, smoked sausage, different types of cheeses, homemade sangria (easily the best I've ever had in my life), and bottles upon bottles of wine, red and white. Needless to say, I was blown away. It was an impressive spread, and the fam took me in like one of their own as they served me a great portion of EVERYTHING while talking about international travel, their families, and the grandparent's upcoming cruise trip. After the paella, they came out with three different types of cakes. After the cakes, they brought out their french-press for coffee and fruit bread. Incredible. After a brisk walk around the premises afterward to settle the food down, I watched Narnia and The Da Vinci Code with the kids of the family, read some "Mountains Beyond Mountains" (excellent book, I recommend it), and went to sleep happy.

I woke up on Sunday to another cloudy morning. After a shower and quick breakfast, we left the grandparents and drove back to Santiago. . .but here´s the twist. We went back to our house ONLY so the kids could shower and change, and we dipped out in 15 minutes to a friend of the dad´s house for, you guessed it, another asado. As soon as we walked in, I was greeted by the family, offered drink and chips, and then was given a choripan (chorizo sausage in toasted french bread) which was delicious. I heard more talk of international travel (I guess quite the topic nowadays) and watched as steak after steak get grilled up, that complimented this massive salad that had some type of awesome cheese, olives, and sun dried tomatoes. I ate, drank, and played with the family's six year old girl, who had made a picture book in her school of songs in Spanish and French. Which she sang to me. Which was the cutest thing I've seen, more cute than that dog picture from the jungle. Sunday night I was finally able to catch up with Greg, kicking it at our friend Sebastian's house while drinkin microbrews, eating sushi, and watching the 49ers screw up every possible thing (and by them, I mean their qb) against the Eagles. God I hate the Eagles so much.


After being comatose from eating so much, I woke up on Monday and got myself to the gym to work out. Which really didn´t help, because I got back home and my family asked me if I wanted to go out to lunch with them. I said of course, not realizing that we were going to the mall and not coming back for another 4, 5 hours. We got to a restaurant called Tip y Tap, which had maybe one of the strangest meals I've seen. "Carne Crudo" was what they called it, and lemme try to explain this: So basically imagine a piece of good quality hamburger meat was on your plate, BARELY cooked. Like it's still very much raw. Mush it with your fork and spread it out on your plate. Now absolutely douse all the meat with absurd amounts of lemon, garnish it with onion and cilantro, and mix it all up. Finally, spread the meat on pieces of toasted flat bread and eat. That's crudo in a nutshell. I didn't order it because I didn't want to get something potentially godawful at first, but I did try it. . .and it didn't kill me, and actually tasted pretty decent.

After shopping in the mall, I came home, read, and laid around until nighttime. While I didn't necessarily go camping or have crazy adventures, I saw a big piece of how Chileans socialize: with CRAZY GOOD FOOD, amazing wine with something else, and lots of time to just sit and talk. This is something I could get used to, and I know for a fact that when we get our own place, asados will be a part of my weekend routine too. By the way, sorry for the lack of pictures, but I accidently left my camera at my grandparent's house and seeing as they went on a cruise, I won't get it for a few weeks. . .so here are a few pictues to give you an idea what went down.



basically what the weekend looked like, with more people, more food, and def more smiles



This is exactly what the paella looked like, more or less. No joke. Except maybe a little bit bigger.



Santiago, Chile baybay

So it is currently the second week of being here in Santiago so far. I haven't posted because I wanted to take a decent amount of pictures first. . .but honestly, I haven't had enough time to do so. Allow me to tell you what happened. . .

So we left on Sunday last week before the crack of dawn. Now I enjoy traveling, but I HATE packing and moving all my crap from one place to another. I also don't enjoy waking up before 8. So as you can imagine, moving all my possessions and waking up at around 4:45 in the freakin morning made me about as happy as Tiny Tim before he got all the goodies on Christmas. I piled into a cab with Phil and we drove (correction, driving would be the normal word but our dude was easy goin 40 over the speed limit and speeding through red lights) to the airport. I felt kind of bad handing our driver 5 dollars in nickels, dimes, and pennies but honestly I had to get rid of as much change as I could.

So we fly first to Lima, Peru and had about an hour layover (big ups to airports with free wireless, honestly all airports should have this). I was a little bummed this was gonna be a 3 hour plane ride. . .until we got on the actual plane. It was the size of Fisher Hall in Notre Dame, with each seat equipped with its own TV and access to over 40 movies, TV shows, music playlists, weather reports. . .I'm surprised the TV didn't have the capabilities of makin me a sandwich. Which really didn't matter, because we got handed a bigass in-flight meal AND free refills on drinks. . .including wine and beer. While I got a water and inca cola, how sweet is that though? LAN airlines really knows how to pamper their customers.

And now on to Santiago. . .honestly, this place reminds me a lot of like the best parts of LA. The weather is dry, it gets hot but never too hot, and it's incredibly more modern than Quito. Not even close. I honestly I feel like I'm in the states except for the fact that people are incredibly hard to understand. It's one thing to not know Spanish. It's another thing ENTIRELY to not know Chilean Spanish. Oh my SWEET DEAR GOD it is different. First of all, people cut off their s's from words. Now I was used to this on the Ecuadorian coast, because people do it at the end of words. But no, Chileans do it at the end, the middle, and the beginning sometimes. Also, there's a lot of slang I need to get used to. . .in general, I've heard a lot of people say "pues" at the end of their sentences. This has been cut before into just "pue" and in Chile, it's said like "po." Why? I have absolutely no idea. All I know is that it makes it extremely hard to understand people for the most part. . .but just like anything else, it will come in time.

OK, here is a lil tidbit about the family I stay with. First of all, I almost didn't have a family at ALL. I was going to live with the director of English at St. George, and the current CHACERS did everything in their power to NOT allow that to happen. They obviously know the director and thought it would be everything I wouldn't want. . .so they were able to find a family that took me in at the last minute.

Flash forward to the moment when all of us are waiting in the CHACE apartment for our families to pick us up and talk to us a moment. Nerves were running a little high. . .the experience was getting more real, and going home to actual St. George families (that's the school I'm teaching at) was really knocking the point home. The CHACERs told families to get there at 6:30, expecting people to show up at 7:00. . .typical Chilean arrival time. However, lo and behold at 6:20 the doorbell rings. Then again at 6:40. Yet again at 6:45. Families start pouring in, and I was told that the families must have been outrageously excited and eager to come so early. Before you know it, 7 hits and all my buddies from St. George have families. . .

. . .except Eamon, Greg, and I. As we sip on Chilean wine and shuffle our feet, a mom and dad come powering through the door at 7:15. MY FAMILY! I eagerly say hello, and listen to a small conversation they have with the professor taking care of us new CHACERS in the group. We leave fairly soon, and we're just doing rapid fire conversation. . .and I'm following everything. Once we put my stuff in the car, we start driving and things are good. Then this happens. . .

Dad: So do you like sports?
Me: Yes, I really like playing basketball actually.
Dad: YOU DO? I WAS ON THE NATIONAL CHILEAN BASKETBALL TEAM!!!!
Me: Wow, really??
Dad: Yes, many years ago. . .but our family is like a team you know. We do two things: play sports, and eat well.
Me: niiice.

So right off the bat, I know that my dad might be a little intense but is going to be someone I like. Tomorrow, I'll take some pics of the school and post some more stories soon. Until next time!

Medellin, Colombia. . .yea it happened

So because I'm absurdly behind on my blog posts, I COULD tell you about Medellin, Colombia. But that mess happened about 3 weeks ago. In order to catch up on the current times, I'm going to link ya'll to various other blog entries from my friends about what happened that weekend. . .

http://aislinninsouthamerica.blogspot.com/2010/09/medellin-colombia.html
http://chilegreg.blogspot.com/2010/09/best-part-of-waking-up.html
http://philinchile.blogspot.com/2010/09/iviva-colombia.html?spref=fb
http://garrettsvoyage.blogspot.com/2010/09/medellin-columbia-paradise-in-south.html

Lazy? GET OFF MY BACK. Now that that's taken care of, I can move on to bigger and better things. . .like chileeeeeeee. Look for that next!

day 4 and 5. . .finally

OK so I have done (admittedly) a godawful job of keeping up with this blog. Especially because I'm currently writing this from Santiago, Chile and have finished with  Ecuador. Because of this, I need to finish the freakin jungle. Day 4 and 5 were pretty incredible, but can be summed up in 3 words: "bat cave" and "tubing."

Day 4. . .

We woke up to another 4 and some hours of class, which at this point has become more of an exercise than anything. Gustavo was trying really hard to keep us engaged, but when you have a sweeping view of the jungle, butterflies floating around, hammocks inches away from you, weird insect noises from every direction. . .it's a little difficult to keep up the attention per say.

Anyways, we hear about our adventure for the day. . .and we hear we're gonna go to a bat cave, and I'm not talkin Batman. We waded through small creeks, climbed slippery rocks, and scaled fallen tree limbs when all of a sudden, we reach a ravine that is just a massive black hole. Our guide tells us that we're gonna be climbing through it. . .and this is basically how he tells us to go through.

Guide: Ok, we're walking through this thing! Don't put your feet low, or else you'll get stuck and might break a leg in which case you're screwed. Don't put your feet high, because then you might get your feet stuck in the above crevice or you again might slip up. By the way, there's no light in here so you can't see where your feet are. Finally, there are bats flying above you, so if one hits you in the face (looks at Greg), don't freak out because you now know what it was at least.

bat cave, with gothem city just beyond

. . .Damnit. So we go climbing through this thing. . .my feet ended up being just fine, and I saw bats flying RIGHT above my head. Thankfully none blasted me in the face, that would have been the opposite of fun.

Day 5. . .

Class with the 'Stash, which again at this point was pointless. The adventure today was TUBING. Now my memories of tubing has been from Phoenix memorial day and labor day parties, which have been a 4 to 5 hour floating-down-the-river adventure with 20+ friends and a cooler of brewskis. This was obviously nothing like that, but even so. . .I never have had all the tubes tied together like they were, so it was kind of odd to be floating down the river connected to 7 other people. However, it was super relaxing even with the occasional dip in the river.

After about 20 minutes of floatin down, we land on an embarkment and take a small walk into an indigenous community. We got the opportunity to hear about how they make food, create some household items, and got to try chicha (fermented yucca plant). It was, in one word, disgusting. It's funny because I've had chicha before, but this kind was godawful. I was told later that it was because it hadn't been totally fermented yet, and that the way they got it to be in a mushy pulp was that they had to CHEW IT BEFORE IT GOT THAT WAY. GEWW. Oh well, I'm still alive so no big deal.

After some more gentle floating, we finally got back to camp, packed our bags, and slept for one more night. The next morning was another long bus trip back to Quito. . .but the jungle trip was an experience I won't soon forget.

day 3 - a big change

So we wake up to a brand new day, and to another 4 hours of classes with the one and only Gustavo. We eat another wonderful lunch and are told that today's the day we get to swim in a lagoon. YYESSSSSSSSS. It is sticky hot, the sun is out with a vengeance, and this would be perfect. Our guide, Fernando, takes us on a 30 minute walk on the way to the lagoon. On the way, we learn that the water that flows into it comes from Mt. Cotopaxi, the tallest mountain in all of Ecuador aka the water is going to be cooler than ice cold. Perfect.

So we arrive at the lagoon, and here is what I see. . .

The upper part. . .

. . .and here is the lower section. Beautiful!

That first part actually is a slide that you can go down into the second section. At first it looked like it was going to be something that was going to be a ridiculous amount of fun, but thats ONLY if you kept your butt up in the air while you were going down. If not, you get a huge section of rocks right in your rear as you go down. Luckily, I was the last to go down, so I got a fair warning beforehand. Swimming in the ice cold water was wonderful. . .such a fresh feeling. Not to mention the view of the water that flowed from the lagoon onward. . .

Jealous much?!

So we leave the lagoon, go back to the original camp, and pack up all our gear because we were leaving to go to another camp. Now this new place was described as a paradise for 3 reasons:

1. the view from the cabins
2. The hot water
3. electricity

If it was me, I would have added the bar that was in the middle of it, but I'll get into that later. We all pile into two different trucks and drive 45 minutes in the darkness to our new campground. Thankfully, the trucks didn't go a million miles an hour haha so it was much more accommodating. We got out of the trucks, grabbed our packages, and walked through a small path in the jungle to the campground.

The first thing I see was a massive table all set, with lamps set on a high set ceiling. On the left of the kitchen, there are two large sections of a few tables and hanging hammocks everywhere overlooking the forest and the river. You see, the whole campground is set right on the top and edge of a cliff overlooking the Amazon rainforest. INSANE. On the right are steps, leading to quaint, small cabins and bathrooms. We sit down to a delicious dinner and put our stuff in our respective cabins. Here is the view from when I open my cabin door. . .

Amazon rainforest? YES PLEASE.

So we decide after dinner to head to the bar in the middle of the campground, just to have a beer and take in everything. Little do we know that things are about to GET REAL. At the same time we are there, it just so happened to be the last night for another group of traveling europeans, ranging from all ages. . .friends from australia in their 20s, a family of 3 sisters and their mother, a few grown men from Germany. . .and they wanted to get bottles poppin. As we're all drinking our beers, these dudes plug their ipod in, take a few handles, and start chugging. People are taking swigs, dancing out of control, and playing music that I would have heard in a 6th grade mixer. While we were watching all this go down in front of us, we got a small introduction to the insect kingdom in the jungle. A spider showed up that was the size of my hand, which scared the crap out of everyone in the whole bar except for the bartender. He managed to trap the guy and let him walk on his arm. . .apparently this spider is harmless, but to be it looked like the spider that bit Peter Parker.

WHOA NELLY

So eventually the bartender places the spider on a branch, and it slinks away. The party music gets put back on blast, and people start dancing on the bartop. Everyone is vibin to the beat, and then we get another guest. . .this one came down from the ceiling crawling down. It was the biggest grasshopper I've ever seen. Now, I never thought I'd be intimidated by them. . .after all, the only ones I've seen are green and relatively tiny. This one, however, was MASSIVE, with a deep maroon color body. We pointed it out to the bartender, who shut the music off and walked up to it. . .he said he wouldn't dare touch it, because this was the kind that bites down deep.

Yep, thats an axe head that is smaller than the grasshopper. Sweet Jesus.

I mean, this thing looked like it should have been in a Godzilla movie and not in a rainforest bar. But there it was. It eventually sauntered away and the huge crew resumed their partying until the bar closed aka it ran out of booze. It was pretty entertaining to watch the whole group get down, esp to hits like "welcome to the jungle" and the closing song, the fresh prince of bel-air theme song.

Needless to say, sleeping that night was a tad bit difficult after seeing insects that big. . .but this was the rainforest, and I wasn't about to complain about a thing. Until next time. . .