Outdoor adventures in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, with some occasional reflective storytelling.
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?…
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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…
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In light of the barrage of recent somewhat depressing or downright depressing blog posts, I wanted to bring some humor to the blog again. Back in December, I authored my first “Things Ecuadorians Like” post, and I figured since it’s been over a month, it’s high time for part 2 in the series. Enjoy! Being…
Read MoreEcuador 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.…
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At 6:21 my eyelids flicker open. My alarm, set for 7:45 am, is at this point a hopeful dream. The rays of sun streaming in through my thin lilac fairy curtains push me out of sleep and into wakefulness long before I am ready to leave my subconscious. The sound of the news comes into…
Read MoreI prefer deep conversations. I like conversations that stimulate your senses and make you reconsider what you thought you knew. Discussions that leave you hungry for more knowledge and a greater understanding of the world around you, that you vividly recall months and years later. Even as a child, I preferred serious conversations to surface level chats. I still…
Read MoreAs the month of June gains speed and the days slip away I am reminded of the fact that I will be leaving everything I’ve known very soon. Summer, it seems, is going by faster each day, and as I continue making preparations for my departure reality is setting in. Today, I found out my…
Read MoreIt happened. This morning, approximately 2 minutes after my alarm went off, I received an email notification from WorldTeach telling me I was accepted to the September 2015 Ecuador program. After their email about notifying me by early June, I was stunned, to say the least. Right at the moment I had more or less…
Read MoreThroughout my youth, my parents, teachers, and friends used a variety of adjectives to describe me. Curious, my dad would say, thinking of the millions of questions I asked. Adventurous, friends might add, referring to my constant activity and trip planning. Industrious, my teachers would include, remembering my prolific and analytical essays. One word that no…
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Elizabeth Seeks 