Life in the Mountains

I feel like Ive been writing a lot about my weekend adventures and neglected my everyday life. So this blog I will talk a bit more about what I do everyday and what life is like here.

Every morning my host mom and I go running for about 30 minutes in Parque Itchimbia, the beautiful park by my house. On Tuesdays and Thursdays my mom drops me off at the Univeristy 5 minutes away on her way to work. On Mondays and Wednesdays I have afternoon classes so I just flag down the bus that passes our house on the way to the University.

CLASSES
Last week was "mid-term week" here. For my Recursos Flora mid term grade we had 4 or so "labs" and a "test." The labs involved using microscopes to observe flowers of various families and then drawing and labeling different parts of the flower. To my surprise, I received better grades than my native friend who sits next to me. The big mid term exam was about 7 questions long. One question had a "yes or no" answer. One of the questions was purposefully nearly impossible. All the questions didn´t require more than a sentence to answer. I had studied and again pulled off a grade higher than most of the other grades I saw. My native friend who sits next to me seemed pretty impressed with my overall mid-term grade (12.2/15). I explained to him how the testing/grading systems were a little different in the U.S. and he was impressed (appalled?) with that as well...


While these classes require relatively little homework, I still learn a lot. Desarollo Sustentable is really challenging because there is a lot of passionate environmental ranting. Fast talking + technical language = very hard to understand. I spend class trying to figure out what he is talking about.

Our mid term grade for Desarollo Sustentable was completely based off of our participation in a class debate. The debate topic being: The political environmental positions of northern countries versus southern countries. I defended the northern countries. The two other gringos of the class were defending the southern countries.

One thing that I had understood from previous lectures was how Ecuador viewed the U.S. from an environmental perspective. The prof was constantly talking about the U.S.´s excessive consumption of energy and other goods, the amount of CO2 the U.S. produces, and how they didn´t sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Citizens of Ecuador are very concerned about global climate change because it would affect their climate, lives, and environment. They live a lot closer to the Earth here than we do in the U.S. and some changes would be a lot more devestating to them than to U.S. They say Quito has recently seen some of the coldest, longest "winters" with more rain than ever before. The glacier on the volcano, Cotopaxi (see below for pics), has also receded a significant amount supposedly due to global climate change.

However, while they worry about global climate change, they don´t really have the power to fix it or drastically change it. They are not the ones pouring tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. All they can do is look at the U.S. and other developed countries and well...blame them.
Being United Statesians in the class, I feel awkward sometimes. I study the exact same topics at U of R, but we´re all in the same boat there, "ya. okay. okay. we pollute a lot. we should change. we know. we´ll get around to it." Having a classroom of peers thinking "wow, they should start caring more and change" is a completely different experience.

So, in this debate I had to defend Northern, developed countries against developing countries suffering the environmental effects of our development. I was terrified a. cuz I´m arguing to a bunch of people posed slightly against the U.S. and b. cuz i can rarely understand everything they are saying.

However, I was happy to defend the U.S. and let them know that we are not bad intentioned, are making efforts to change, and they reek benefits, like cell phones and technology, from our development. I thought I made some pretty solid points during the debate...if they understood what I was saying. I always tried to be one of the first ones to speak to avoid repeating someone else´s argument that I hadn´t understood. Hopefully I didn´t sound like too much of an idiot. Students in the class still talk to me so I guess I didn´t offend anyone too much. Both the prof and students were all really nice and understanding throughout the whole debate. It turned out to be really interesting. I think it was eye opening for a lot of Ecuadorians that had to defend the northern countries as well. Woohoo!

My other classes are also pretty chill.

NEARLY ROBBED in QUITO
Two of my classes are at the IES Abroad center in a building about 15 minutes away from the University. One night at 6:30pm I was waiting on a street corner close to the IES center for my bus to take me home. Two of my friends, Benjamin and Liz, passed me on their short walk home. About a minute later Benjamin came running back, gave his backpack to me and said "I was just assaulted at knife point and Liz took off running." Then he left to go find her.
About a block after they had passed me, two youngish guys had approached them from the other direction, grabbed the front of his shirt, held a knife to his chest, and demanded his phone and threatened to cut him. The girl, terrified, sprinted across the street and soon realized that thieves had gotten the phone they wanted and were now following her. A random lady driving by saw her running away from these guys, stopped, and told her to get into the car. She did and the car pulled up to the street corner where I was holding Benjamin´s backpack. Benjamin saw her, quickly returned, took his backpack and returned to the IES center to report the theft (calling the police is useless). Liz told me to get into the car and wanting to get out of there, I did. At the time, I didn´t realize it was a random car off the street. Its probably a lot more risky getting into some random car than it is walking down the street. But we we´re really lucky and the wonderful young lady drove us to Liz´ house and refused payment. She not only had saved Liz from theft but left us her card and told us to call if we needed anything. She was a saint.
At Liz´ house, we were both shaken up and cried. However, we decided that that was part of living in Quito and should accept it as part of our experience. We hear about stuff like this all the time and they were not the first IES students to be assaulted.

MOUNTAINS

Two weekends ago some friends and I rode this gondola called, TeleferiQo, part way up a mountain and then hiked for 6 more hours to conquer Roca Pichincha. Like on any mountain here, the altitude knocked the breath out of us and generally humbled our athletic abilities. It was great.

Beautiful, beautiful Páramo with incredible views...when the clouds parted.



The snow on the mountain was crazy. The plants were covered in snow and still a vibrant, bright green. They are incredibly well adapted to survive in the cold.



We almost lost hope of reaching the top. However, we made it and made a celebratory snowman!! Please note the...amazing... view behind us (clouds)



On our way back, a random gust of wind cleared the clouds to show us the peak we had hiked to! No more than 5 minutes after this picture was taken, we were engulfed in clouds again.




Last weekend some friends and I hired a guide and climbed up to the first glacier of Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. It takes 6 more hours of hiking in the glacier to reach the top of this volcano.

Hiking through volcanic ash to the refuge.



Beautiful views and the start of the snow. Our friend Paul from England didn´t bring proper hiking boots and literally could not walk on the icy slope.



At the first glacier. We all played with pick axe and helped global warming chip away at the ice. That´s our guide on the left there.



The heavens cleared up for a second to show us the peak of Cotopaxi.



Then it started to thunderstorm and hail. We were kinda bummed cuz we were suppsed to mountain bike down the mountain. Eventually we decided the percipitation wasn´t too bad and thunder sounded far away, so we biked in the rain.