first full day in playas

abbi and i are just wrapping up the first full day together in the town of playas. surprisingly enough i am far more tired from spending the day here, than all my travel time to get here put together.

communicating with the locals is far more challenging that i thought it would be. literally no one here speaks english. abbi and i spend alot of our time in challenging conversation trying to tell the locals what we need/want/want to go. i thought our broken spanish would help us but it is clear that spanish lessons are clearly extremely important before or during a trip to ecudaor. alas, we have the time or money to do so and we are forced to stumble through the communication process. once again i am shocked at abbi's abbility to survive here for over a week without company.

we woke up late today to the sounds of the roosters down the street. im not too sure how healthy they are as their calls sounded really horrible. i guess their vocals worked though, as we had no choice but to get out of bed.

we made some coffe and toast for breakfast (in a frying pan-mom its nothing compared to shrimp in foil with and iron and pasta in a coffe pot but...) and got ready for the day. this entialed showering in our cold shower while washing our socks and underwear by hand under the icy spray from the shower head. we washed the dishes from last night and decided it was time to buy some minutes for our cell phones (which turned out to be a huge, expensive ordeal that took almost 2 hours to sort out by the way) and some fresh  water from the man down the street. it cost 1.5o for 15 litres of drinkable water. we dont dare drink the water from the tap!

we proceeded to take a visit to down town where the locals couldnt keep their eyes off us. we are clearly out of place. i actually had to take abbi to a store and buy her a long sleeve blouse because a dress with no sleeves was attracting too much attention. i wanted to take pictures while we were there but i knew that standing on the corner of the busy street of this very poor town would seem offesnsive to the locals and just draw more attention to us.

it was 2:00 by this time and we thought we should probably have some lunch. it's so hot here that it is easy for forget to eat. we got back to our little apartment and dove into the salsa we made last night. the sun was shining bright so we decided to go down to the beach and take it in. we packed our salsa and chips and beach stuff into a bag and off we went.

the waves were huge and very loud at the beach, we walked quite a ways down to where the general poputlation hangs out and decided to find a spot where we could have some privacy and eat our lunch in peace without getting harassed by the beach vendors. once we had settled into our spot it didnt take too long before 2 very young boys came and sat with us and began chatting us up. i had no idea what they were saying, abbi stepped up and became our semi-translator. it was entertaining to say the least but they were very sweet and patient with us. after an hour of trying to understand each other they got up, kissed us on the cheeks and were on thier way.

we went back to our house shortly after to make dinner. we invited carmen, the lady who lives upstairs, to join us. we ate a home cooked meal. i like cooking as it makes me feel at home. we had pasta with a fresh tomato and garlic sauce topped with some local chorizo. i know, i ate the sausage, you just cant be too picky about what you can find to eat here or you may go hungry. once again, it was a very entertaining/challenging meal while trying to communicate with each other but  nice to spend time with a local and she was so grateful that we had invited her over for dinner.  it was a pleasure to have her for company.

now we have cleaned up dinner and are ready for bed, all this lost in translation stuff seems to be exhausting. tomorrow we catch a 3 hour bus back to guayaquil for the night before we fly to the galapagos. 

i've included some pictures from our adventures today, nothing too exciting, just tryin to keep pace with the laid back style of the locals.

ciao for now xoxox