Several things have happened within those two weeks, and I've made plenty of observations about lots of things. So here you have it. Irene Duba on sickness, mood swings, food, cell phones, and school.
First: I was sick Wednesday-Friday last week. Apparently it happens to a lot of people who come to Ecuador for the first time, since the food and water is so different. Still, needless to say, it wasn't fun. All Thursday and Friday I was stuck in bed, and if you are/have been an exchange student, you know that being alone with your thoughts isn't always very uplifting. Being alone certainly brings out the homesickness, which is not helped by feeling crappy. Also, there's a whole different attitude about being sick here. It's treated as both a bigger and smaller deal. If I were at home, I'd just sit in my pjs either lying in bed or watching tv until it passed. However, after just a day and a half of being sick here I was taken to the doctor to get blood drawn for tests, and I was given pills to take every day. At the same time, though, my parents were setting up outings to the beach and to get ice cream for me. In the midst of my illness. Very different. That's all I really have to say about being sick, except that it sucks (which I kind of already covered).
Second, mood swings. Another exciting thing about being an exchange student. I think having crazy mood swings is part of the culture shock. One bit of culture shock is the irritability stage, which is one of the moods that I swing to, if I may extend the metaphor. I can be hanging out on cloud 9, then at the drop of a hat I'll be down in the dumps, feeling homesick and pissy. It's definitely weird. And the strangest things get to me and bring me down. We can be just riding along in the car, perfectly content, and my friends will sing along to and English song on the radio or Hector will honk at a bicyclist. I normally don't care about these things (since they don't matter), but sometimes I'll just feel like yelling "you don't know English! Stop pretending you do! These are MY songs." or "is it really that hard to slow down for them?! At least we Americans have a little respect!" or something. And it's not that big of a deal. Again, weird.
Third, food. It would really, really, suck to be a vegetarian here. When I was sick, I told my parents that I didn't want to eat chicken or meat (which are mutually exclusive here, for some reason) and we went to three different restaurants and I finally had to settle on chicken soup (which, by the way, I later realized had noodles in it, so I felt okay with eating it while I was sick). You might be asking, "why didn't you just eat at home?" Because we never, ever do. Thursday and Friday I wouldn't have eaten anything, much less gotten out of bed, other than going out for lunch. About the food itself, it's all kind of the same... meat or seafood with rice and sometimes beans. This is kind of random, but still on the subject of food: one thing that kind of bothers me about food culture around the world is that it's kind of widely accepted that American food is worse than every other food ever. When exchange students come to the United States it's totally okay for them to say that they miss their food. However, if I said that, it would seem kind of rude and xenophobic. By the way, I'm not necessarily saying that I do miss my food, though I wouldn't mind a little variety here and there.
Fourth: cell phones. As I think I mentioned earlier, everyone has blackberries. Or, at the very least, everyone has a cell phone. My English teacher (from New Jersey) put it best. He said "I've taught kids who can't afford some necessities, but they still somehow manage to have a cellphone." By the way, I hope you were reading that in your head with an accent. And I hope when you got to the word "taught" you imagined it being said hilariously, because it was. Oh, New Joisey... Anyway, cell phones. In addition to everyone having one, everyone is always using them. I guess it's not rude here, but I'll be sitting at lunch with my parents or in the living room with my friends and everyone but me will have their phones out. It makes for a lot of awkward situations. Sometimes, when it goes on a really long time I take out my phone, even though I don't have anything to do on it and just kind of stare at and press a few buttons in order to fit in. That's not even a joke, by the way.
Fifth: School. Yesterday was my first day of school. This week is just kind of a test week for me, and then I have Spanish camp four out the five five days of next week, so I think the hope is that I'll learn Spanish enough to actually understand class in the next two weeks, and I'll start actually participating in class the Monday after next. This week, though I'm kind of testing out different grades, so yesterday I hung out with a bunch of 9th graders, and today some 10th graders. I believe tomorrow I'll go see what 11th grade is like, but I'm not sure. What I've discovered about school so far is that there are only four or five classes a day, and lots of breaks in between. It's kind of like, and hour on, hour off, hour on, lunch and recess, hour on... and so on. The only classes I understand so far are math and English. Since math is the only class I actually participate in, everyone thinks I'm a some math superstar now. Like, I'm so good at it that I choose to join in with that class and ignore the others. One thing I have learned in school, though, is that teenagers are very, very hard to understand. They talk really fast, and then after I inevitably ask them so go slower, they still slur their words and use slang. So basically they all think I suck at Spanish. A teacher came into the class and asked someone if I spoke Spanish, and someone was like "un poco" and this kid gave her a look and was like "nada." I have sort of made some friends though. Also, most of the guys introduced themselves to me or wave when they see me, since I have blue eyes and "blonde" hair (anyone who doesn't have black hair here is blonde). So, although I'm guessing it's at least partly just skin deep, that's kind of nice. I pretend they're my friends too.
Bonus sixth! Even though this post is already crazy crazy long: Scary stuff. After our Rotary meeting on Monday night, all the exchange students and I went for a walk through town. Marcus, from Alaska, was telling us about how one night he was walking home from something with his brothers, and they came upon a street cop. As they approached, he blew his whistle really softly twice. Marcus didn't think anything of it, but his brothers told him, "okay, now we have to be really careful, because that was a corrupt street cop and he just alerted the muggers that there are people coming." So, naturally, we were all like, whoa. But we kept walking and talking and eventually stopped thinking about it. BUT. Then, we saw a street cop (I'm not even kidding). And Marcus was like, "guys, I think that's him," so we turned the corner before we got too close. However, when we came to the next corner, he was there again! We decided to just walk past, since there were five of us, and there was no whistling or mugging. So that's good.
WELL! That might be the longest blog post in the history of the world, but I hope you enjoyed it! I'll be back later with more about my actual life and less about general stuff.
Irene
First: I was sick Wednesday-Friday last week. Apparently it happens to a lot of people who come to Ecuador for the first time, since the food and water is so different. Still, needless to say, it wasn't fun. All Thursday and Friday I was stuck in bed, and if you are/have been an exchange student, you know that being alone with your thoughts isn't always very uplifting. Being alone certainly brings out the homesickness, which is not helped by feeling crappy. Also, there's a whole different attitude about being sick here. It's treated as both a bigger and smaller deal. If I were at home, I'd just sit in my pjs either lying in bed or watching tv until it passed. However, after just a day and a half of being sick here I was taken to the doctor to get blood drawn for tests, and I was given pills to take every day. At the same time, though, my parents were setting up outings to the beach and to get ice cream for me. In the midst of my illness. Very different. That's all I really have to say about being sick, except that it sucks (which I kind of already covered).
Second, mood swings. Another exciting thing about being an exchange student. I think having crazy mood swings is part of the culture shock. One bit of culture shock is the irritability stage, which is one of the moods that I swing to, if I may extend the metaphor. I can be hanging out on cloud 9, then at the drop of a hat I'll be down in the dumps, feeling homesick and pissy. It's definitely weird. And the strangest things get to me and bring me down. We can be just riding along in the car, perfectly content, and my friends will sing along to and English song on the radio or Hector will honk at a bicyclist. I normally don't care about these things (since they don't matter), but sometimes I'll just feel like yelling "you don't know English! Stop pretending you do! These are MY songs." or "is it really that hard to slow down for them?! At least we Americans have a little respect!" or something. And it's not that big of a deal. Again, weird.
Third, food. It would really, really, suck to be a vegetarian here. When I was sick, I told my parents that I didn't want to eat chicken or meat (which are mutually exclusive here, for some reason) and we went to three different restaurants and I finally had to settle on chicken soup (which, by the way, I later realized had noodles in it, so I felt okay with eating it while I was sick). You might be asking, "why didn't you just eat at home?" Because we never, ever do. Thursday and Friday I wouldn't have eaten anything, much less gotten out of bed, other than going out for lunch. About the food itself, it's all kind of the same... meat or seafood with rice and sometimes beans. This is kind of random, but still on the subject of food: one thing that kind of bothers me about food culture around the world is that it's kind of widely accepted that American food is worse than every other food ever. When exchange students come to the United States it's totally okay for them to say that they miss their food. However, if I said that, it would seem kind of rude and xenophobic. By the way, I'm not necessarily saying that I do miss my food, though I wouldn't mind a little variety here and there.
Fourth: cell phones. As I think I mentioned earlier, everyone has blackberries. Or, at the very least, everyone has a cell phone. My English teacher (from New Jersey) put it best. He said "I've taught kids who can't afford some necessities, but they still somehow manage to have a cellphone." By the way, I hope you were reading that in your head with an accent. And I hope when you got to the word "taught" you imagined it being said hilariously, because it was. Oh, New Joisey... Anyway, cell phones. In addition to everyone having one, everyone is always using them. I guess it's not rude here, but I'll be sitting at lunch with my parents or in the living room with my friends and everyone but me will have their phones out. It makes for a lot of awkward situations. Sometimes, when it goes on a really long time I take out my phone, even though I don't have anything to do on it and just kind of stare at and press a few buttons in order to fit in. That's not even a joke, by the way.
Fifth: School. Yesterday was my first day of school. This week is just kind of a test week for me, and then I have Spanish camp four out the five five days of next week, so I think the hope is that I'll learn Spanish enough to actually understand class in the next two weeks, and I'll start actually participating in class the Monday after next. This week, though I'm kind of testing out different grades, so yesterday I hung out with a bunch of 9th graders, and today some 10th graders. I believe tomorrow I'll go see what 11th grade is like, but I'm not sure. What I've discovered about school so far is that there are only four or five classes a day, and lots of breaks in between. It's kind of like, and hour on, hour off, hour on, lunch and recess, hour on... and so on. The only classes I understand so far are math and English. Since math is the only class I actually participate in, everyone thinks I'm a some math superstar now. Like, I'm so good at it that I choose to join in with that class and ignore the others. One thing I have learned in school, though, is that teenagers are very, very hard to understand. They talk really fast, and then after I inevitably ask them so go slower, they still slur their words and use slang. So basically they all think I suck at Spanish. A teacher came into the class and asked someone if I spoke Spanish, and someone was like "un poco" and this kid gave her a look and was like "nada." I have sort of made some friends though. Also, most of the guys introduced themselves to me or wave when they see me, since I have blue eyes and "blonde" hair (anyone who doesn't have black hair here is blonde). So, although I'm guessing it's at least partly just skin deep, that's kind of nice. I pretend they're my friends too.
Bonus sixth! Even though this post is already crazy crazy long: Scary stuff. After our Rotary meeting on Monday night, all the exchange students and I went for a walk through town. Marcus, from Alaska, was telling us about how one night he was walking home from something with his brothers, and they came upon a street cop. As they approached, he blew his whistle really softly twice. Marcus didn't think anything of it, but his brothers told him, "okay, now we have to be really careful, because that was a corrupt street cop and he just alerted the muggers that there are people coming." So, naturally, we were all like, whoa. But we kept walking and talking and eventually stopped thinking about it. BUT. Then, we saw a street cop (I'm not even kidding). And Marcus was like, "guys, I think that's him," so we turned the corner before we got too close. However, when we came to the next corner, he was there again! We decided to just walk past, since there were five of us, and there was no whistling or mugging. So that's good.
WELL! That might be the longest blog post in the history of the world, but I hope you enjoyed it! I'll be back later with more about my actual life and less about general stuff.
Irene
Wow that story about the cop is freaky... but otherwise sounds like you're having a good experience so far!
ReplyDeleteYeah, it was pretty scary, but I'm not really sure how real the danger was. There's really no way to know if it was the same cop from before or he was corrupt to start out with.. Other than that, yeah. I am having a ton of fun, and I love it here!
ReplyDelete