Today was an exhausting day. We started our morning at 6:45 am to prepare for our first day of school. We had breakfast that included yogurt, fruit, and freshly squeezed orange juice it was delicious as always. We then started our walk to school. It was about a 25-minute walk and not too hard to find. We started the morning with a two-hour class covering intercultural communication. Intercultural communications is defined as two cultural groups coming together with different experiences and perceptions. This class directly relates to our stay in Ecuador with our host families as we are trying to view their culture in a different perspective, as they are more than likely doing the same as well. It is sometimes difficult to view their culture with the perspective that it isn’t wrong but rather different. It is easy for us to say, “oh that’s not how we do it, so it must be wrong.” This is considered ethnocentrism. We also talked a lot about identity. This plays a huge role in the Ecuadorian culture. In my previous journals I mentioned how women were in charge of all the cooking and cleaning and this goes a long with the identity that women were given in Ecuador. Most of the women have an ascribed identity meaning they were born into the title of the home keeper. It is important that we study identity and understand our individual identities and how they differ from person to person.
After our class lecture, we visited a museum called Museo de Culturas Aborigines. This museum had artifacts that dated back to the beginning of Ecuador. It was interesting to see the changes across the Ecuadorian lifespan. This also related to identity in that because of the artifacts found over time, it can help describe why Ecuadorian people do things the way they do.
After the museum we got to go home for an hour and half lunch break. We were so thankful that Katie’s dad picked us up so we didn’t have to walk back for our already short lunch break. We had a lunch full of fruits, vegetables, soup, and rice. We then returned to school by our 25-minute walk. We started our second session with a visit to the Banco Central archeological site. This again was a museum of colonial artifacts and also related to identity and what we were talking about in class. We ended the day with a city tour of Cuenca. Our guide showed us good spots to eat, shop, and hang out. We walked through a local market and we saw how the vendors prepared their meat and it was absolutely disgusting. There was raw meat hanging all over the place just out in the open air, definitely something you wouldn’t see in the US.
After our tour concluded we continued on our walk home. It’s nice to have three of us to walk together it makes the time pass faster. I just feel bad for the girls who have a forty-minute walk by themselves! We had dinner at 7:10 pm so it was not too late. I am exhausted from today and all the walking we did hopefully tomorrow will be more relaxed.
