Week Four: Making Mom Proud

Mom this blog is for you…I just wanted to let you that I’m probably going to eat more veggies in the next three months than I did all four years of college. In fact, I’ve been eating all sorts of new things, so I thought I’d share some of the typical foods we eat for each meal and some of the new things I’ve tried.

Typical Breakfast Foods: Boiled bananas, ham & cheese sandwiches, toast (which I burnt to a crisp the second week I was here…and of course everyone thought it was hilarious) mixed fruit, yogurt (you don’t eat it with a spoon, you drink it out of a cup)…oh and I almost forgot ‘fruity loops’ 

Typical Lunch Foods: (the biggest meal of the day) There are two essential staples for lunch here: soup and rice. We also usually have some type of chicken, veggie salad and juice (which is always made fresh, Yum!)

Typical Dinner Foods: more often than not, we have fried rice with ketchup, mayo and hot dogs mixed in…As you can see, the theme here is rice. I’m a fan of rice, so all is well.

I’ve decided that everything tastes better in Spanish…the Spanish names for things are so much more fun. For instance, one night when I asked what we were eating and they said “hígado” I thought “mmm…that sounds good”. That night I discovered that liver isn’t half bad.  Some other foods I’ve eaten for the first time here are beets, chicken feet, all kinds of fun fruits, and a bunch of other stuff that I have no idea what it was.

They call me “llena” here (which means ‘full’ in Spanish) It’s one of the closests words to my name.   During the first week I was here, one of the seminary student (who had just learned my name) tried to explain to me that I was like the moon…(he meant like a “full moon”) yeah…that one took me a little while to figure out.  

I wrote my first paper in Spanish…I had to look up a lot of words and I may have made up some stuff…but hey. The paper was supposed to be about our time in college and we had to present it in class. I decided to try to explain why I camped out in the parking lot of ‘Chick-fil-A’ my freshman year of college... My professor thought I was talking about “Chifles” which are fried banana chips- a popular snack here in Ecuador. But once she figured out that I got 52 free chicken sandwiches out of the deal, she decided that one night in a parking lot was more than reasonable. 

Last Saturday I went with my roommate to children’s event at her church. It's a fairly small church but they had about 150 kids from the neighborhood show up!  It would have been utter chaos in the States, but even though most of the kids came without their parents, they were really well-behaved.  It was a lot of fun, although I didn’t totally understand what was going on…Well, tomorrow we’re headed to the jungle…I’ve heard rumors about some of the fun things we get to try in the jungle, but I won’t ruin the surprise…;)