(Sunday, July 11, Day 25)

"The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps."


Phrase of the day:
Espera, tu dijiste que tienen shwarma!?!... Wait, did you say that they have shwarma!?!

Yeah, best find to date! But we'll talk more about that later...

On Friday, we had a day-long trainee soccer tournament here in town. It was a good/interesting time. In the morning there was a panel of current volunteers who answered a lot of questions for us, and that was helpful. But then we had to walk in our teams in front of the judges, who were the head trainers here in Ecuador. They were just checking out our uniforms to see who had the best uniform... it ended up being Los Pinguinitos de Cayambe:
That's right! That's my team. I didn't actually choose the outfit... I was all about pink with headbands... but this was good too. And naturally, because they love their reinas here so much, each team had to have one of it's own. So here are a few:
Finally soccer actually?... nope, haha. We then had to yell a cheer for the judges to hear. The winning team went all out and performed the haka... an ancient war dance that was started by the Maori tribew in New Zealand. The All-Blacks (New Zealand Rugby) have been performing it before matches for ages now, so if you'd like to see, just type it in Google or YouTube. They also ended up winning the tournament, so I guess their war dance worked:
Sadly no pictures of the matches; it was raining during the afternoon as always. But my team played really well and everyone tried really hard. We lost 2 games and won 1. I was happy. I ended up refereeing about 5 or 6 games too, so that was fun.

Now to more important things... shwarma! After arts and crafts (super boring... we made invitation cards for 3 hours for a host family appreciation day coming up), I ended up at a new food court. And they have shwarma and kabobs! Naturally I ate tons; One chicken shwarma and one lamb kabob. The owner is definitely not from the M.E., but he cooks pretty well nonetheless, and that's all that matters. You definitely cannot compare it to Northern Virginia (the classic Lebanese Taverna for Rajib/Cesar, Ravi Kabob for Karrar, Kabob Palace for Josh, Shamshiry, which I still have yet to try!, for Shereeny, and lets not forget about Lebanese Butcher for everyone!!), but it is good for sure. And finally no potatoes in a meal!! After my shwarma adventure, some of us ended up an Irish run restaurant/bar in town. I have no idea why or for how long the Irish have been in this small town, but I'll go back next weekend and find out. Their food is super expensive, but they are still in business, so someone must go. ($2 for a hot chocolate!... but then again, they actually serve hot chocolate!). We were there to watch Germany beat Uruguay. Hopefully you watched; it was exciting.

Sunday I got to sleep in to 7am! Yeah, I'll take what I can get for sure. After running some errands and doing who knows what, I went to see some motorcross event with the host family. It was just as you imagine... dirtbikes going up, down, and around a track. EXCEPT tons of spectators love standing pretty much on the track! Really, who thought that would be a good idea? Thankfully no one got hurt, but there were some close calls. I didn't take any pics because it was pretty dusty, but I did notice that all the police here are either in trucks, or on these:
Hopefully at least Willy liked that, haha.

Lunchtime... can anyone say round 2 of the shwarma spot? I only ate one today, but got ice cream afterwards. They even have tv's at this food court, so about 20 of us watched the World Cup final there. And no, ice cream really isn't as inexpensive as I had hoped! It's usually 50cents for one pansy scoop, so I get at least two.

And yup, don't forget, they use the US dollar here for currency. They do make/design their own coins though. OH! and if you were wondering where all the gold-colored Sacajawea dollar coins went... they've been found! Seriously, I see them more than one-dollar bills.

Hope everyone enjoyed his/her weekend! (Yeah, I still remember some grammar! Don't mind the spelling though, my Microsoft Word expired, so I don't have spell check in Notepad).