Foch Lunch; Peach Arepas; Bus Cama

I just want to be clear on one thing: Wilma makes the best breakfasts ever. Breakfast in Ecuador is a bigger meal than back home, and so is lunch (but dinner is very small). The first time Wilma made ham and cheese croissants, eggs, oatmeal, freshly squeezed juice, coffee, and fruit salad with yogurt and granola for the same breakfast, I thought she was crazy. Now, it's normal. Just a heads up. 

After showering and spending some quality time with Yana the dog, Emily came over from Sonya's house at about 11. Sonya was Emily's host mom when Emily lived in Quito, just like Wilma was mine. Emily, Wilma and I had some pretty interesting conversations about all the incredible things Wilma saw when she had her brain injury... About 4 years ago Wilma was in the hospital for a week because of a brain aneurysm, and her brain was on overdrive. She remembers floating through the streets of Paris as if it was real life, swimming in gorgeous underwater caves, and also seeing a poor Chinese man die in front of her eyes. The brain is so interesting. She said she felt like an art genius like Van Gogh because she could have painted the most vivid imagery.

Emily and I went to the Foch and had a cute little lunch at a place called "The Magic Bean." It was quite good! Since I knew all the touristy spots in Ecuador I got a free coffee from a tour agency in the same restaurant area, so that was fantastic. We met a girl from Germany who was working with the tour agency and she, like us, was visiting Ecuador again after living here for about a year. We're not the only ones who were pulled back by this country!

The conversations I had with Emily were fantastic. She is the kind of friend who I know I can be 100% myself with without any judgement whatsoever. I don't need to explain the reasoning behind my thoughts because she understands how I see the world, and she sees it largely the same way. Whereas it can be frustrating trying to explain certain things to people who don't see the same things I see when I, for example, drink a cup of coffee (ie. fair trade is never free, coffee beans always have a carbon footprint, corporations largely control natural resource extraction in Latin America, modern-day slavery is real, etc.), and it can probably be equally as frustrating for people to hear me go on about these things when they'd rather talk about less depressing things, friends like Emily just... I don't know... get it. Instead of being frustrated by my rants, she joins in, and then we laugh, and then move on. I'm not left with the same not-so-great taste-in-my-mouth that I'm left with when I feel like I can't explain myself, or I can't paint the picture I have in my head for somebody who doesn't have the same hyper-critical colonialism-is-everywhere lens like Emily and I do. Obviously we don't only talk about these things, but we talk about everything. I guess I'm just trying to say it's refreshing to be around somebody who I can talk to without thinking twice about what I say. Conversation just flows. I feel this way with a bunch of the friends who went on the Trent-in-Ecuador year abroad, and with people in my Trent classes too. Also just in general, Emily and I have a lot of the same interests and she is a super chill gal who has fun stories! She visited the branch of the organization she worked for in Ecuador (Mision Scalabrina) in Bogota, and told me all about it. We laughed about people thinking she was her friend's kid's mother, too. It was just a fun afternoon eating lunch, getting lost in the Foch area, and casually making our way through the artisanal market and back to Wilma's house on the bus, chatting the whole way. 

Carol's mom's name is Sandra, and she is from Colombia. When we got to the house, we went to the first-floor apartment (where I lived last year) and chatted with Sandra for a while, sharing stories over canguil (popcorn), coffee, and homemade arepas (almost like tortillas?) with maple syrup and peaches.

​We're going to the beach! Carol got home, and so did tio Nelson. After a frustrating 2 hours of them not deciding what to do, Emily and I rushed to her house to pack her bag for the beach, then picked up Carol, then rushed to the Quitumbe bus station. Long story short (misinformation, misunderstanding), our bus was supposed to leave at 8:45 PM, then at 10 PM, then we actually left at 11:45 PM. For this part I wasn't frustrated at all because I had fruit and biscochos. We paid an extra $5 (big spenders) for the "bed bus" with the reclinable bus seats and it was totally worth it. Somebody even brought us iced tea and vanilla cookies. I went to sleep happy. ​