44 Days in Quito

I guess I am just about on schedule, having been here for a month and change, to find the stars beginning to dim from my eyes, my open mouth begin to close. (Thankfully, I'm also finding I have a little more air in my lungs...)

In case you were wondering, the simple act of moving to a different country has so far not fundamentally changed who I am has a human being. Dishes still pile up in the sink. I still often avoid taking my vitamins days even though I know it only takes 10 seconds. I have more than once let myself fall asleep on the couch in front of Netflix at 7:30pm. I still sometimes delay grocery shopping until I am rummaging through the freezer wondering how I could potentially make a bag of frozen blueberries into a dinner.

Yes, I am the same person, but I've also noticed my perceptions about Ecuador start to gradually change,

The eucaplytus and palm trees that I found so novel and captivating when I arrived are starting to be just "trees."

The boxy, cinder-block architecture and hand-painted signs that line my bus route to school no longer seem exotic and Latin American. They're just buildings and signs.

It no longer crosses my mind how sweet and quaint it is that the school bus picks me up on the corner every morning to take me to school. Now it's just transportation. I used to find it titillating that the bus driver leaves the door open has he chugs down the block to the next pick-up. Now it's just part of the morning routine.

Getting in a taxi, not only am I able to effectively communicate where it is that I want to go, I can orient to the extent that I would have a clue if the driver were bringing me in the wrong direction in an attempt to abduct me.

This is certainly not to say that things have become boring or hum-drum. There's still plenty of newness to keep me occupied.

For example, I did spend about 15 minutes in the cleaning aisle of MegaMaxi, wondering which of the many colorful and intensely perfumed products people might use to clean their floors. I thought about texting Nicole, but then I said, NO! I will do this on my own! And persevered reading labels until I found one that clearly had the words "floor" and "clean" in it, and that didn't make me gag from the scent. People here seem to really like heavily perfumed products.

This was only after another quarter of an hour or so that I spent at the ATM, trying to activate my bank card for the first time. The problem was that I read so slowly in Spanish as I was trying to parse out the instructions, the machine kept spitting my card back out at me, figuring I must have changed my mind about my transactions after all this time.

I have also figured out how to pay my bills, and in fact it is extremely convenient: Bertita, my landlord and neighbor pays them for me, along with her own, and I reimburse her. Perfect! And I have learned to fry empanadas (granted the are pre-made supermarket ones, but I don't let that dampen my feeling of accomplishment.)

And I am trying not to lose track of the super-saturated colors of the blossoms on the trees --  hot pink, deep purple and vibrant neon orange. These were stunning to me when I first arrived, and I intend to continue being stunned by them.

Socially, I am slowly but surely starting to make new friends. It's actually an odd thing, to have to go and make all new friends at the age of 30 (well, thankfully not ALL new, because I still have Nicole.)  But it's a strange sensation to be surrounded by perfectly lovely and pleasant people who have no idea about your past history or anything much about you, other than they, like you, decided to move to Ecuador this year.  I guess I had kind of forgotten what it feels like to have to actively pursue relationships with people, and to do the work of getting to know someone. It feels strange, knowing that I have so many friends and family at home who know me and understand me and love me deeply and unconditionally, and here I am dipping my toes into little friendship pools, making the perfunctory jokes, finding polite topics of conversation, searching for common ground.

My work life, however, feels like it's becoming pretty solid. For the last month I've been totally immersed in school and all the work of setting up a classroom, carefully building piece by piece my little ecosystem designed to help my students thrive. There's a lot that goes into it, but the good news is that I think we're starting to reach homeostasis, where the kids and the room can function on their own. Boundaries have been drawn, expectations have been set, and we can start to shift our attention as a class from the basic understanding of how we do things to the more interesting task of what we're setting out to do.

One of the focuses of our international curriculum is teaching the students to be balanced. This is an interesting task for someone like me, who has a tendency to throw myself into my work and focus on nothing else, almost as a coping mechanism... especially here, in a world where everything is a little different and strange, where there is so much I don't understand, where even basic errands still require quite a bit of forethought and planning, and inquiring, and looking up words in the dictionary... it has been comforting to focus my attention on what I do understand - grading rubrics, charts about place value and order of operations, behavior systems, learning objectives. My dear old friends, comfortingly the same on this continent as they are back home.

But now I feel like I am ready to start venturing out of my safe school zone and exploring the world around me a little more. I want to set up routines so I can enjoy my life here, not just my work.

And with that said, time to go meet Sarah for dinner!