What’s different here

- the food – half of your plate will be filled with rice, every lunch and dinner, usually along with meat and potatoes. Interestingly, they have soup really frequently, and you put popcorn in it instead of crackers – it’s pretty good. Fruit is common, especially in juices, but the juice is weird and thick.

– the weather – in the sierra where we are now, the weather is absurdly consistent, with sunny and 70 during the day, and about 50 every night. It’s niiiice. The other regions will be completely different. I’m kinda hoping I’ll be placed in the sierra.

– it’s incredibly diverse here, not only topographically. We think of the US as really diverse, but on a daily basis in the small town of Cayambe, I see even more diversity than I did in Boston. There are dozens and dozens of ethnic groups in Ecuador. I never expected that.

– greetings matter a lot here. Formality is very important depending on who you talk to, and you are expected to greet everyone when you enter a room, throughout the day, every time.

– when you wipe, you put the toilet paper in the trash. For real. The sewage system can’t handle it.

– volcanoes – some of them are active, and they’re huge and beautiful

– crime – sad but true. A lot of people here don’t have jobs or money, so you gotta watch your back for thieves. It’s pretty common.

– dogs – the more dangerous the area, the nastier the dogs. only in the smallest towns are dogs as nice as you’d like, and even then most just roam the streets. it’s a little sad.