dead or dying

Wow, it's been a while since I've written anything in here. Mainly because I'm convinced that barely anyone reads it and partly because there's never really much to write except silly stories about my various students or trips to local stores or restaurants. Speaking of restaurants... Annabel, Lainey, and I stumbled upon this AMAZING restaurat yesterday called Mar Roja. They have mostly seafood and also some chicken and steak dishes. I had breaded corvina and it was seriously one of the top three fish dishes I've ever had in my life. SO GOOD! Lainey had a kind of soup/stew with shrimp in it. I tasted a bit of it and the shrimp seemed so fresh I felt like I was eating straight out of whatever body of water it came from. Anyway, yes, it was fantastic. We always complain about how Loja really lacks in terms of dining options. We always go to the same maybe 4 or 5 places so it is always a treat to find a new place.

The weather is so unpredictable here, which I may have said already. For a couple weeks it will rain every day, then be sunny a couple days, then rainy again. It's been sunny here since Wednesday and even though winter was supposed to have started at the beginning of may, it is HOT here when it's sunny. I guess I'm not complaining because I hate rain, but because I'm from Wisconsin, I always wish it was a little bit cooler here during the day.

Teaching is still going fine, though I'm pretty sure that if I ever have children, I will be paying someone to take them off my hands from the age of 6 through 8. Nine years old or more, fine, but earlier, I can't take it. Is taking care of small children as hard as being their English teacher? It's like I have an hour a day of sheer torture. Those little brats are malicious. Some of them, of course, aren't bad. And they are all cute when they're sitting still and listening to you teach the differences between prepositions of place such as next to, between, and in front of. But the second you turn your back, forget it. Oh well, I think I can handle six more weeks of those little buggers. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE my teen class. My students are AWESOME. They are hilarious, they respect me, and just in general have really fantastic personalities. They asked me the other day how to say "I will miss you" and "I miss you" in terms of me leaving at the end of June. I will really miss those kids. I am still angry that I'm five and a half years older than the oldest student in that class because I wish that either I was younger or they were older so we could hang out outside of class. Oh wellllllllllllll.

I'll be home in 44 days. June 30th. I like Ecuador, but every day I feel a little more ready to go home. Most of that excitement has to do with the apartment I live in. The place is a pig sty, made exponentially worse by the fact that the men working in other parts of the building sawing tiles and wall apart send their dust into our apartment. There is literally a layer of dust on everything in the living room, kitchen, and guest bathroom. When I open my bedroom door in the morning to go make breakfast, the whole apartment is cloudy with dust. It's the dust, and the fact that my roommate's cat has (well, had) fleas. Thankfully, after she had him neutered, she got him so flea medication so the fleas are no longer on him, but they are all around our apartment. There were seemingly hundreds in my room. They are tiny, but you can feel when they are on you because their bite stings. And they are hard to kill by just squeezing them between your fingers. I bought some flea killing RAID insecticide spray today and since I sprayed every square inch of my bedroom, bedding, and bathroom earlier this afternoon, the only fleas I've seen are the ones that are dead or dying on my bathroom floor. None whatsoever on my bed, thank goodness! Fleas are gross and because I knew they were crawling around my room, I constantly felt itchy when I was in here.

I am grateful for lazy Sundays.

Hope you are all doing well!