Foreign Fun

Living in Ecuador, I should probably be speaking Spanish, reading Spanish, and eating Spanish foods. Yes, yes, I do get my fair share of empanadas, so the third category is probably covered (minus the shawarma I had for lunch and the pasta my host mom made for dinner, of course). My two hour Spanish class that I have four days a week, combined with the challenge of communicating with my host mom, definitely helps me brush up on my vocab and verb skills. Believe me, within the first few days I was already an expert on Spanish words regarding showering, brushing my teeth, and other household necessities, such as "Can you ask your dog to stop yapping at me every time I walk in the door?!?!" That last bit may have been a slight exaggeration, but the feeling isn't too far off.

The one part of the aforementioned list I haven't really covered yet is reading Spanish. Reading a language may be more important when you're just working for a decent grade in a 4-credit class at school, but living in Ecuador shuffles my priorities a bit, and puts a lot more weight on the speaking part of Spanish. Anyway, that's my excuse for reading books in English I enjoy instead of attempting selections from the local biblioteca.

I knew living alone in a homestay would give me

much more free time than living in a dorm, so I came equipped with the best: an Amazon Kindle. Besides my teddy bear and my alarm clock, it's probably the most useful thing I managed to squeeze into my suitcase. After finishing the one physical book I brought along (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest), I eagerly downloaded Vaclav & Lena, a book I started during the summer and never got the chance to finish. I finished it in about two days, with the help of a couple long bus rides into different parts of Ecuador. It's a story of two Russian immigrant children growing up in Brooklyn, and their lives both together and apart, until the time they are seventeen. The boy's ambition to be a magician makes it fun, and the ties they have to each other, to Russia, and to America, makes it especially appealing.

Maybe it was my college essay entitled "A Date with Dostoevsky," or maybe it was reading Chekhov in high school AP English, but for some reason I can't get away from Russian literature. Vaclav & Lena may have taken place in Brooklyn, but it definitely contained it's fair share of borscht and memories of Moscow. My next inescapable venture into Russia is Anna Karenina, the most recent download on my Kindle. If I'm really going to make this a year of adventure, why not invite Tolstoy along for the ride? The incredibly slowly moving "percent completed" on the Kindle may be intimidating, but I think the long bus rides and hours in the rainforest will give me the time and interest needed to power through.

Besides reading foreign books, I also can't seem to help listening to foreign music. I don't just mean the usual Beatles and Kooks songs that are always on my iPod, but the one song I haven't be able to avoid lately: "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" by Michel Teló.

Don't be fooled by this track's #1 placement on Ecuador's current top 40 - this winner is 100% Brazilian. I suppose it's still South American, but the Portuguese lyrics are less than simple to understand. However, the translation assures me that Michel Teló isn't exactly attempting any deeper meaning to the catchy tune. From the bus to the bar to the cell phone of a random person walking down the street, "Ai Se Eu Te Pego" is always playing somewhere, and therefore always stuck in my head. Next step: the dance.