Orientation Day 1

We had our first (of four) days of orientation today, and since it was held in IES' Quito headquarters rather than our college campus, we had to drive a bit to get there. On the way up, we had the radio playing and got quite an interesting slew of songs, with Justin Bieber followed by a Shakira song in Spanish followed by the Ghostbusters theme... Two songs later, we got the Ghostbusters theme again!

I was wiped out from getting home late last night and the subsequent insomnia due to my excitement at being in a new country and meeting several people in my program. Basically, I ended up with 3-something hours of sleep (they wanted us assembled at 8:15, so we were up early) and it was barely enough to make it through 6+ hours of extremely slow, rambling descriptions of the program. There were a few high points to the discussion, though, such as the lecture about gender roles, homophobia, and racism in Ecuador, although it unfortunately had to be squeezed into about ten minutes since everything else had taken so long and it was the last thing before lunch.

About 7% of Ecuador's population consists of Afro-Ecuadorians, who live in conditions that have been compared to those in the USA pre-Civil Rights Movement. There's not a lot of job opportunities here for them and we were told that Afro-Ecuadorians typically either go into sports or become security guards. True to stereotype, there was a large black security guard at the door of the silver jewelry shop where our host grandmother worked, which we stopped by in the afternoon after our orientation ended. Apparently, discrimination also exists against the indigenous people, who can get most of the same jobs as mestizos (the majority), just for half the pay. Homosexuality is widely discriminated against as well, and it was illegal until 1998. But I suppose at least there is progress in the right direction, albeit slow.

We ate lunch today at a fantastic restaurant--it had a view overlooking the entire valley, which houses the university we'll be studying at, as well as all of the homes we are staying at. The view was amazing, but of course, my camera picked that exact time to run out of power, so I didn't get any photos for myself. I'll try to steal someone else's photos later.

As an aside, there are three other U of R students here, although they are all in the Quito program instead of the Galapagos one. One is even BCS, but embarrassingly enough, I didn't know any of them.

One thing that I've noticed is that most of the graffiti in Quito consists of legible phrases, not scribbly tagging like in the US. I don't remember most of the phrases and they don't mean that much to me, the non-Spanish speaker, but I was interested to see that most of them were trying to communicate something very specific, if seemingly irreverent, to the world. Again, photos later.