Ambato Shore

This week appears to have been the start of the annual festival in Ambato called The Festival of Fruits and Flowers (I am somewhat uncertain about whether it has actually begun because depending on who you ask, the festival either started in the beginning of February or will begin to coincide with Carnaval in March). The festival in Ambato is so named because of the prodigious amounts of fruits and flowers that are supposedly produced in Ambato during this season, although I admit that I am not impressed with the displays of either so far.

One of the events I went to this week was a concert in one of Ambato's parks, and I was excited to try Ambato's signature fruit that I have still not eaten yet called guaytambo. To my dismay, there wasn't fruit of any kind being offered on the streets (not to mention that I didn't see any flowers either). Based on what I saw a lot of that night, I propose that this celebration be renamed the Festival of Street Hotdog Vendors and Boxed Wine.


We Have a Situation

During the concert I alluded to earlier, there was one guy in the crowd who caught my attention almost from the start. He was quite a distance from me, but I noticed him because he was standing on an elevated surface and wearing sunglasses and a tight v-neck shirt. His outfit was complimented by the fact that he kind of looked like The Situation from Jersey Shore. The resemblance became even more striking when he started pulling up his shirt and rubbing his abs at people walking by.

After seeing him flaunt his body at a few innocent passersby I decided that I urgently needed a picture with him, so I pushed my way through the crowd and asked him if he would pose for a photo with me. In what had to have been the best possible response to that request, he asked me "Shirt on or off?"

La Situación

After the picture he gave me two high fives and started waving his shirt over his head.

I'm a Cool Teacher, but my Students Aren't Bad Either

Pretty much the only positive part about teaching at SECAP is that almost all of my students are adults so they like to plan activities together and we sometimes hang out after class. On Friday, my class planned a trip to a recreation center in a nearby city called Salcedo. The place was surprisingly nice, and for four dollars each we got to use swimming pools with water slides, a hot tub, saunas, volleyball courts, and a soccer field for the whole day. Afterward we ate lunch, and my students didn't let me pay for anything the entire trip.

With some students at lunch.

One of my students from last semester who couldn't continue English classes because she just started medical school even showed up, and it was nice to hang out with her since we hadn't seen each other in a while.

"Damn right I like the life I live." -Adriana's baby

Adriana, a student of mine, brought her baby on the trip. I forget the baby's name, but she was kind of a boss at one point when she fell asleep drinking out of her bottle so I took a picture.



Talking with Personality

A frustrating part of learning a language is how proficient you need to be before you can actually show your personality around other people in a non-native tongue. For instance, my personality is expressed mostly through bad puns and one-liners. Unfortunately for me, humor requires a high degree of facility with a language because you need to be able to respond quickly to other people to make a joke and you need to know what kinds of things a certain culture finds funny. So unless you have no personality to begin with, being yourself while speaking a foreign language takes a lot of time and practice.

This weekend when I was driving around with my students, one of the people in the car was a friend of the driver who didn't know me. She asked how much Spanish I spoke, to which one of my students replied "Teacher knows how to make jokes in Spanish!" That was an interesting comment to me for two reasons:

First, it supports the claim that conveying personality (especially humor) denotes a high level of language proficiency because my student was using the fact that I know how to make jokes as a measuring stick for how much Spanish I speak. Second, that was the best compliment I have ever received about my Spanish because he didn't say anything about how well I am able to articulate ideas; he said something about how I am able to convey my personality in Spanish, which is reassurance that my Spanish has been improving in an important respect since I have been living here. After all, who cares if you can speak a foreign language fluently if you sound as interesting as a spelling bee champ when you talk.

Another unrelated but funny part of that car ride was when the person who wasn't my student kept calling me "teacher" because that was what everyone else was calling me and she didn't know my real name.