I don't look Latino

SURPRISE!!! I bet wveryone at home is thinking, wow, that's really funny. Who would have thought Kate with her white skin and blue eyes wouldn't look Latino. Well I don't, and it appears to be attracting a lot of attention. The fact that I am at least half a foot taller than Ecuadorian women is probably part of it as well.

In general I can have a predisposition to worrying about the worst while hoping for the best. Which is kind've how I have ended up in Quito at an immersion language school for 2 weeks, staying with a host family that doesn't speak English and hoping that the 7 of 10 weeks of laguage classes I attended in London would be in some way useful. I was also not entirely sure that I didn't need a visa to get in here until the woman had put a computer print out perilously close to my 'DO NOT STAMP' page.

So I arrived on Friday night and discovered I would be staying with a woman named Venus (pronounced Vanoos but it took me 3 days to work that out) and began signalling in sign langauge immediately. After night of sleep and a sleep in to compensate for my 3am start, I managed to struggle downstairs in time to go to the mall. Anyway, I have managed to establish that her bird's name is Coco which is a start. We'll see.

After 5 days I have managed tof igure out how to have a warm shower.

I also signed up for a 'culture' course meaning I have lunch with teacher every day. Which means I am eating a lot of Ecuadorian food and using my 15 Spanish words to attempt to string coherent sentences together, while worrying that the lettuce will kill me, as the Lonely Planet guide suggested it would. But since I've seen Cuy cooked on sticks, whole pigs displayed on the road side and have eaten pretty much everything put in front of me because 'mi gusta mucho' is one of the few Spanish phrases I know, I think the lettuce will be the least of my worries.