Friends

'We are having a lot of fun making new friends! Since we have been here for a few weeks, we are now further immersed in the culture and everyone wants us to be with them all the time. Our house, their house, taking us places...its a lot of fun. (We are not using our names on the blog so...) Bunkin has made lots of new friends and they are eager to learn English while she is eager to learn Spanish so she can communicate with them. I find myself sitting and talking for hours in Spanish, which I previously thought would be an impossibility. They are patient with our Spanish😊

We were asked to give parts on the meeting last week. We were willing to help so we did so, but were very nervous.

The weather has been nice until yesterday. It is suddenly very hot and sunny. Since there is no air conditioning, we rely on the fans. They are great if you are sitting around doing nothing, but when you have to do housework, cooking over the stove, and laundry, it's sweaty. There is a washing machine we use for our clothes, and we hang them on the line to dry.

When you are outside, you have to have shade. In service we use umbrellas for shade, but it's still hot.

Last night we walked home in the rain after soccer. We were soaked and dirty, but we had fun.

It was already dark. Since we are on the equator, there is 12 hours light and 12 hours darkness. So  the sun rises about 6:30 am and it gets dark about 6:30 pm. I'm ready to go to bed at 8:00 since it's so dark! We are way out on a peninsula so there is not a lot of light from the city.

There have been a lot of visitors here to the Hostal from the bigger cities. Cojimies is a vacation town for Quito. There was a family from another city and we went on an all day boat ride with them to see the other little islands. We also hung out with them at the beach and had a lot of fun. There were two sisters here that were visiting Quito that were from California that spoke English. It was a nice break to speak English. We had fun with them. It made us feel better that they were fluent in Spanish and needed translation here because they use words here in Cojimies that the sisters did not know. One of them told me that the way we are taught Spanish at home is very formal and they don't speak that way here. So that adds another layer of difficulty but it's okay. If we ever go to Spain, we will be set😀

This is our friend Alejandro. He is going to school to be a cardiologist.

He hangs out with us a lot and he is going to take us next Sunday to another town to see a waterfall.

The two girls on the left side next to me are the girls from California. The sister in the green dress is our dear Nelvita whose Hostal we stay in. She takes very good care of us!! 

We also had a great visit with our good friend Jordan. We went out in service and ate at the beach with him. Our neighbor let us borrow his "dune buggy" and we had a fun ride on the beach as well.

Thank you so much for all the comments. They are really encouraging to us!! So please leave a message if you have time!