A lil bit of my world

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to GRANDPA and IAN!
I'm a couple days early, but I won't be here this weekend, so I wanted to tell you have a great day and I'm thinking about you, Love you!

On another note, I'm leaving in about an hour to go to Canoa, which is supposed to be a gorgeous beach in northern Ecuador, in the providence of Manabí (also home to what is considered Ecuador's best cuisine, seafood, yum!). Map included for you, of course. I think it's about an 6hr bus ride and we're taking a nite bus back Sunday night, to arrive Monday morning just in time for classes! That should be interesting...

Last night was fun, to change the subject again. Raq, Kathleen, Ann, Liz, Bethany (another BCAr), Pablo (the Chilean), and I all went to a tango concert. It was in Teatro Bolivar, which was absolutely gorgeous. It was the theater's 72nd anniversary, tho 6 years ago there was a fire that nearly destroyed it. Apparently, the Pizza Hut next door had a gas leak which sparked the blaze, but our friendly Kansas-founded pizza place has til now refused to pay for the damages. Nice. So instead they're restoring lil by lil and taking donations for events like the one we went to, which was great! My camera is still out of comission, so I don't have pictures, but I'll try to find one maybe. Anyway, it was about two hours of live tango music, with a couple that danced every few numbers (I want to learn tango next, it's so dramatic), and the audience knew a lot of the classics so everyone sang along.

In other news, Ann and Raq are more or less dating the German (Miguel) and the Chilean (Daniel), while Kathleen and I are both avoiding the calls of the guys we met at La Bunga last week, haha. And in other other news, the political situation here is very interesting right now; the people are calling for the president to step down and there are massive protests in front of the Congress and the Supreme Court every night. I don't have time to elaborate at the moment, but here's a link that gives a brief synopsis http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/04/15/ecuador.congress.reut/index.html
First, I have to give a disclaimer about the fairly exasperating tone of this article though, which is apprently written mainly to assuage the fears of people worried about their South American investments (after all, why else should we be concerned about the political happenings in a 3rd world country??:P). It gives basic information about the situation though, and if I can I'll try to give a more, I don't know, human portrait of what's going on when I get back. From my own brief persective, I think the mobilization of so many people across the country in order to produce political change in a corrupt government is really encouraging. Right, more later, I'm off to Canoa!