First days in Ecuador

After a lovely week of seeng friends in Santiago and arranging my things(thank you Kaisa for a place to stay) on Sunday morning at took a flight to Ecuador. Since I only booked to flight a few days before I wasn´t sure if the guys from Aiesec, the organization who arranged my internship, had received my email and had time to come get me from the airport and organize my accommodation. So very with some anticipation I got of the plain outside to the beautiful hot breeze. At least I finally escaped the winter!! It´s never cold here!
Luckily there were some people receiving me at the airport and found out that I will be staying with the family of Lorena. The family is great! In the house live Lorena´s mom, dad, sister, brother and Sandra a girl who works at their shop. The life here is very different and the last days have been a bit of a culture shock. Mostly in a good way though. I´ve been adopted to the family and teach the girls some English, while they correct my spanish.
Gyayaquil is the biggest city of Ecuador with a population of nearly two million. It´s close to the cost and there should be some beautiful beaches just a few hour a way. Hopefully will go there this weekend. The city is quite dirty and not one of the prettiest, but very lively and the people are friendly.
My work will start next Monday in the Fundacion Huancavilca, which is in a poor part of the city and they work in different areas to strengthen the community. We visited it briefly on Monday. The area is very poor, hadn´t really seen anything like that before. Tomorrow I will go and meet everyone and probably will have a better picture of my work. I am really looking forward on starting work there.
Since a had the week of I wanted to go and do a bit of tarvelling. Lorena´s family has two shops and tehy needed us (me and Lorena) to get some cheese from the Sierra. It is a familys friend who has a farn there and we could stay in their house. So got up before four Tuesday morning and took a bus to teh countryside. Went trough loads of bana plantaciones (now I know where the Dole bananas come from) and got to this beautiful village Pallatanga in the middle of thees greend mountains. After a huge breakfast went up the hill about an hour to the farm. Again the people were so nice, altough a bit more shy than in Guayaquil. Spent the whole day in the farm made some cheese and cooked lunch out of vegetables straght from the fiels. The best corn I´ve ever tasted. And the señora cought a chicken from outside, cut it´s trought and made a great soup out of it.
There´s a lot more indigenous people living in the Sierra, than in the city. For the señora there were working a girl and her husband. She is 20 years old, had two children of less than two years and was working with the baby in her back. Everywhere in the village there were children. I also learned a little of their native language Quichua.
Now am back in Guayaquil and spent the morning in the roof of the house washing clothes and studying spanish. Have to be getting back to the house now for some lunch. They eat so much here and every where I go alwasy have to eat something.