One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned since living in Ecuador is that friendships, even ones you think are forever, sometimes fall apart. Sometimes one person is more to blame, and sometimes it’s just a natural effect of being far away from each other. Maybe those relationships can be revived in the future, or maybe…
Home. What is home? Living in Quito has made me question the definition of home, reworking it to encompass my experiences abroad. I have often wondered how long it must one be in a place to be able to say one lived there. For it to feel like home. Is three months enough? Is 10.5?…
Having been teaching since October, it dawned on me yesterday that somehow, I still haven’t written about what it’s like to be an ESL teacher here. For a blog about my experiences living and teaching abroad, this seems like quite the oversight. I suppose I’ve been focusing a lot more on my personal experiences and…
Family and friends joked that when I moved to Ecuador, I would end up bringing an Ecuadorian guy back to the States. That’s because my big sister, who lived in Quito from 2011-2012, did exactly that. When I came here though, dating wasn’t exactly a top priority for me. I was busy adjusting to living…
My parents worried that if I moved away from California, I might never come back. In hindsight, their fear seems comical. Living away from home has given me a deeper appreciation for the people and places there than I ever could have imagined. It has also made me identify as patriotic–something I never would have…
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, or as we call it in Ecuador, Día de la Mujer. Yesterday, I went to a production of the Vagina Monologues here at a lovely rooftop bar. Against the stunning backdrop of the historic center and the green misty mountains of Quito, American women (and a couple of Ecuadorian women)…
I hated reading as a child. My parents, both English teachers, did their best to coax me into a reading habit. They were people who, when my six-year-old self came downstairs in the mornings on the weekend suggesting we watch TV or play a game, told me to grab a book and join everyone under…
In a few weeks, I will reach my exact half-way point of my service in Ecuador. As with so many other periods in life, it has simultaneously flown by and felt like so much more than a few months. Many of us, I would say, are in or recently out of what we call a mid-service slump….
I was mugged. I knew it would happen. For anyone who stays in Ecuador for an extended period of time, it is an inevitability. Yesterday, Lauren and I met a friendly American tourist who asked us if we had been mugged yet. Strangely enough, we were mugged three hours later. I’ve had things stolen from me…
Ecuador will always have a special place in my heart. It´s the first country I visited outside the US (when I was 17!), it’s the place where my sister lived for a year, the country that my brother-in-law is from, and it is the first country I have stayed in for an extended period of time….