Riobamba or bust!

I’ve been in Ecuador for two weeks now, and a few things have become routine. First and foremost, a two-course lunch is only supposed to cost $1.50; only spend $2.00 if you really want to splurge. Second, you can expect to see a few forest fires every day, smoking away in the dry mountains. Third, automobiles always have right-of-way – if you question it, the bus will certainly win.
This is not to say that life in Ecuador has become exactly predictable. Last Thursday, me and three other volunteers left Quito and hopped on a bus to our teaching placement four hours away in Riobamba. Little did I know that a bus ride is more like a mobile shopping mall. At the moment the bus slowed to let off a passenger or pay a toll, a vender of some sort would leap onto the bus, chanting advertisements and waving his offering, from dried banana chips to clearly rip-off perfume brands. You can imagine the consequences of a bus full of passengers all applying generous perfume samples at the same time. Whew!
Arriving in Riobamba a tad more fragrant than when we left, all of us volunteers were thrilled with what we found in the city. Our directors had told us that many volunteers were initially disappointed in their placements, and we had consequently spent the bus ride peering anxiously out at the crumbling concrete settlements we saw in the countryside. It turned out, though, that Riobamba was full of restaurants, discotheques, parks, and thankfully all sorts of ice cream shops, but was still small enough where a cab ride to any place in the city was only a dollar. Clearly, it was a place where we could spend a year.
During my second day in Riobamba, I paid a visit to the director at my teaching site, a sprawling university known as ESPOCH that’s located near the outskirts of town. I was delighted to see that I had a large, sunlit classroom, complete with a whiteboard and projector screen. Planning a curriculum may be a bit of an adventure, however. The assistant director scrawled a few notes for me in Spanish about what I might teach (I’ll certainly need a Spanish dictionary, a magnifying glass, and perhaps a Private Eye to help me decipher exactly what it means), but it seems that my students will be at my mercy in terms of lesson plans. With only four days of teaching per week, however, I’ll hopefully have time to be creative!