Ecuador 2011

I did a study abroad in Ecuador through COST (Consortium for Overseas Student Teaching). I spent three months teaching at a private school in Quito. Yes, they spoke English. The school consisted of two sections, a national and an international. I was in the international middle school. There the students had almost all native English speakers as teachers. The students were bilingual; sometimes they even spoke three or more languages!

Fortunately for you I wrote a blog as I was experiencing the wonderful country of Ecuador. Now I don’t have to try to remember all the details over three years later.

Here is the link to my Ecuador travels (including the Amazon Basin and the Galapagos!): Click Me!

Check out the baby marine iguanas in the picture below. They blend in so well with the lava rock :) Also, I am rockin' mis "gafitas de Barbie." 

Family Vacations: Age 12 & under

I was fortunate enough to have a family which loves to bond through vacations. We have gone to various beach locations. For instance my mom used to love packing up the car with my grandmother, my older brother, myself, all our beach stuff, and plenty of VHS tapes to play on out 13” TV from our kitchen and heading 8 hours south to St. Augustine, Florida. Honestly, I think she only loved the St. Augustine part and maybe not the other parts. We took this voyage at least five different summers.

My dad on the other hand had a bit bigger budget and was able to take my step-brother, half-sister, brother, myself, step-mother, and sometimes even a friend or two to various beaches in Florida.  One year we went on a Disney Cruise through the Caribbean. Not too long after that we all headed to a Club Med in southwestern Mexico.

Then another year or two after that we got my dad’s siblings involved. My dad has a twin brother and a sister who lived out west. So my step-mother, dad, brother, step-brother, half-sister, my two cousins, my aunt and uncle, and I all flew out to Colorado one summer. There we met up with my other aunt and uncle and rented an RV. We drove from Denver to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. I don’t remember how long we were gone. I do remember seeing Old Faithful, buffalo, and going to a rodeo. Then there are various other shenanigans which happen when you take kids from early high school age down to toddler age to stay at RV campsites. One of my favorite parts of the trip was when we took a trail ride along a mountain trail and saw some amazing land features. The best part for one of my aunts was during that ride we literally saw a deer and antelope running alongside one another. “Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play…”

Of course as we kids grew up and got our own lives we began to take more vacations with other people’s families and less with our own. Other parents and siblings seem to always be way cooler, except when they are in-laws (unless you have amazing in-laws like I do, obviously). Now we wait for holidays to roll around before getting together.

These were the days before digital cameras and definitely before camera phones. Remember those days? Yeah, me neither.

Umm, What?

Needless to say, traveling can be fun, adventurous, and mysterious. One aspect of travel that adds much mystery is language. During middle school and high school I had studied Spanish and a little French. While in Russia after I graduated high school all that studying and practice was useless. Every written, spoken, even unspoken word made me feel so isolated but as much as it pushed me out of my comfort zone, the curiosity of it all it pulled me right back in. I was so intrigued by this world or words and body language I did not know or understand. Of course after the trip when I went to college I immediately enrolled in elementary Russian courses.

Foreign language can add much unneeded discomfort to a trip. There are the obvious reasons such as getting lost more easily and the emergency status of not knowing how to locate a bathroom. However, understanding the language can help you not only avoid those situations but can also open a window into that place's culture.

Many of you may have heard how the Inuits have numerous words for "snow." That's a pretty obvious example of how language reflects the culture. What's better is words that their meaning and history can explain the mindset of a people. In Russia to say "to marry" is "жениться" (zhenit'sya). "Woman" is "женщина" (zhenshchina) while "behind" is "за" (za). So you can see how "to marry" in Russian came from "the woman behind." This comes from the longtime belief of the woman standing behind her man and the man being in control. *I learned this example from my Russian language professor who was Russian herself.

I'm not trying to say words such as compound nouns illuminate a society. I'm saying understanding words and how, why, when, and who uses them can help give a foreigner a leg up on not feeling, well, so foreign.

Here is a link to another blog I found via Pinterest that takes a more linguistic view on the subject: Click Me!
(the site is also where I found the picture)