When making my decision to live and teach abroad three years ago, a major concern for me was language. How will I communicate? How will I get what I need? Will the locals understand me? How will I make friends? Learning the spoken language is obviously one of the most essential steps in getting to [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Quito’
La Vida: Teaching English in Quito, Ecuador
First off, thanks Rob for the recent guest series on various volunteer and development opportunities. Your experiences and incites were concise and objective, great advice to the budding idealist in Latin America. While reading your entries and others on the site lately, I have been deeply consid[...]
Mindo’s Green Revolution
“Han escuchado la historia de tourism en Mindo?” Have you heard the history of tourism in Mindo? “No.” Ok, well….. It’s a story of deforestation and reforestation; of destruction and rejuvenation; of changing perceptions of land use; and of ecology. Last week when I visited Mindo (a smal[...]
Ciclovia Vigilantes
“Ladrone, Ladron, cojelo, paralo!” I was on my cell phone coordinating a bike outing with several of the new teachers here in Quito when I saw a gruff man, have stumbling, half jogging across Rio Amazonas. Then people started yelling, breaking the early-morning silence with pointed commands: [...]
Homecoming
I expected re-entry into the US to be somewhat difficult when I came back from Ecuador. Standard wisdom says it’s harder to come back home than it is to go abroad. Certainly that was my experience when I lived in Japan—it was difficult getting used to the tightly controlled chaos that is Tokyo. [...]




