Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Playa! (Freedom, reading – NOT for school, and spending time con mis amigos)

Once finals were over, and after mother’s day (which I spent with my host family out in the ‘campo’ having a picnic and going swimming) I went to meet Zack and Elizabeth at the beach! We were staying in Puerto Lopez again at the same hostel, and we met our friend Galo who works there. The first day at the beach we went to Los Frailes and hiked around to the beautiful beaches. The water was much lower than it had been when we were there before, so the waves weren’t as big, and we were able to walk to some caves that had been half underwater before. We also (mostly Elizabeth and Zack) built a sand castle, which was washed away right after we had taken a picture of it. We had an awesome dinner at Bellitalia like we had the last time, along with Galo and a friend of his (Joanna, I think).

The next day, we went to a small town south of Puerto Lopez called Las Tunas, which had a huuuuge beach that we played Frisbee on and went swimming for a little while. As we were getting off the bus we had met a group of Canadians who were building a retaining wall on the other side of town as part of a community development class. We went with one of them, who was an older student in her 40s or 50s, to her host family, which was very welcoming, and the host mom offered to make us batidos (smoothies) yumm. We spent a good amount of time just sitting in the shade talking with the woman, who had actually lost her eyesight about 3 years prior, and then later talking to some of the other volunteers who were more around our age. We went back to Puerto Lopez, and I was planning on going to another beach (Canoa) to meet other friends, but Galo had told me that it was really difficult to get there overnight, so I ended up just going home with Zack & Elizabeth to Quito.

It was a perfect, very relaxing way to spend my time after being done with finals :)

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