day 15

i love saturdays in ecuador...

i woke up and walked to the school b/c as i was leaving my classroom yesterday, the native ecuadorian schoool teacher, johan, came to me and said the band kids would be marching at the airport/military base here tomorrow and i could go with them and the other teachers...ok. so i roll out of bed like 10 minutes before i'm supposed to be there, throw on some shorts a tshirt (b/c i only had one clean one left) and put on my flipflops b/c it was pouring outside and didn't want to have wet shoes. little did i know that the rest of the teachers were in like dress pants and a tie type of clothing, but hey, i'm foreign so it was no big deal. a bus from the military base picks all 30 or so of the little kids in the marching band and the teachers, probably should hold about 20 poeple or so....and don't forget all 20 of the drums and the xylophones... and we head to the military base which is about a 4 minute drive. we get there and turns out this is like an airplane exposition and there are a bunch of military booths set up, a stage, galo and his plane that he and the guys are building was there, all of galo's model airplanes (galo had his own booth and won a trophy for the best exposition) they had singers and dancers and the marching band from my school was awesome...no offense to class of 2003 band members of chouteau high school, but these 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th graders definitely put you to shame.

so this is like an all day event, right...one of my student's mom comes up to me (she speaks a little english) and says that her husband is a pilot for the military and if i wanted to i could go on a flight with some military people that needed to go to coca, ecuador (about a 45 minute flight in this double prop hold about 25 soldiers and myself cargo airplane). they said it would take 8 hours to drive there. so i went. and i got to see the top of the jungle and the napo river from about 6500 feet in the air. they also let me sit in the cockpit with them and the pilots introduced themselves to me and explained what all of the instruments were and in what direction a few key cities in ecuador were. it was pretty sweet. the father of the student, nay is his name, did not go on the flight, but when i got back to the base he said that if i wanted to go anywhere in ecuador to let him know and he would do his best to find me a flight that i could hitchhike on for free. around 4:30 galo closed up his booth, we brought everything home, (three soldiers pushed the airplane that is partially constructed without wings all the way home) and i went to go play basketball. church youth was held tonight, which has people from the age of 17 to 32 attending, it's more like the cool young adults. and then we went to the bbq place around 10:20 tonight and had a small burger and fries...

you might be wondering, what was all the p90x talk yesterday. well, just hold your horses (scott) i'm goin on the roof right now at 12:03 am to go workout for an hour. and i'm goin to the market at 7 am tomorrow in puyo with johnny and his wife ieda (the owners of the bbq place) before church tomorrow. so i wanted to post this before i do that b/c i know that i wouldn't want to write anything after i go and try and stop my heart with this dumb workout video....