Another week, another adventure.

This week's adventure is brought to you by my host family, but indirectly. As you may have guessed by now from my posts, I have the best host family ever. They are always giving me little presents, taking me places, and making sure I'm happy. Well, weeks ago I mentioned to my host dad that I wanted to get a tattoo to commemorate my year in Ecuador. When I told him, I was thinking I'd wait until I got back to the States because I didn't know what I wanted and because I was afraid of the cleanliness of tattoo parlors here. However, it turns out that, among all the other connections my family seems to have, there is also a tattoo artist in the family.

Another volunteer and I went to meet him about a month ago. Emily had a vague idea of what she wanted, but I didn't. I knew I wanted something Ecuadorian, but I hadn't really found a symbol that I liked. Andres suggested a couple different things, and I decided on an indigenous cross. Emily and I had to leave pretty soon after that, since I had to get to work at 4, but we planned to come back in a week or so to see the drawing and for Emily to get her tattoo.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I finally got time to go back on Wednesday to get my tattoo done. (Finances and long holidays prevented me from going earlier.) I really like my new tattoo, and am happy I got it done here. It's on my back, across from my chalice too. I'm considering asking Andres to touch up my chalice one, since I don't like how it healed with some light spots. But that will have to wait, again for monetary reasons. (For those of you wondering, this new one was $70.)

As for the rest of the week, I've pretty much just been teaching. There was a power outage for a few hours yesterday, but CEC has a generator so we still had classes. However, I had about half of my students because there was a big soccer game in Quito. (I'm going to be honest: I can't remember if it was against Peru or Paraguay.) I was also planning on going to Ambato this weekend, but I'm simply too tired, and decided it would be better to just stay and chill in Quito. But next weekend, I hope to visit Tena in the Oriente, so I figure it's a good idea to just relax this weekend. :-)