Started the Spanish lessons yesterday morning - four hours of intensive one-on-one tutoring, in the morning. Had conversations in Spanish that I can't do in English, let alone construct sentences in Spanish for, such as what does the UK import and export, produce, cultivate, etc, going right onto what my normal routine at home would be! However, I felt that I didn't do too badly considering I've only ever done one term at school a long time ago. My pronuniciation when reading isn't too bad, although the odd "g," gives me a bit of trouble as well as "J" and the very Spanich "rr"! When written down, I can usually figure out the meaning using both English and my basic knowledge of French, including understanding the structure of the sentences.

Felt much better the first day of school, which is probably just as well with having to listen to Spanish, construct Spanish sentences including trying to conjugate Spanish regular and irregular verbs. I've had to try to absorb the two different ways of conjugating "futuro" tenses to describe my activities. It's very like doing French classes at school! Glad the altitude sickness seems to be well and truly gone today. I've also been given Spanish homework to do (!), all about what my routine usually is, in as much detail as I can manage... However, having talked to another student, I can only be thankful I wasn't given six pages of it!

After lunch, I had a short orientation tour of the nearby area plus a short wander with the two other volunteers for my conservation project before it was back to the school for a lecture (in Spanish, of course!) at 5pm, all about the economic and political situation in Ecuador. I think I understood perhaps about 50% of it for the first half of the 50-minute lecture. Then, I got tired and most of the summary about Peru, Brazil, etc, went straight over my head, I'm afraid.

Today (Tuesday 10th Jan), at the Spanish school, we spent a lot of time going over the differences in usage of the two verbs ser and estar "to be." I feel that I struggled more because I was trying to use the conjugations of verbs, genders, singular and plural forms of yesterday's adjectives as well as trying to include today's new words and verbs in understandable sentences! Despite how clear the teaching was about the differences, I can see that I still need to do more work distinguishing when you use either (and its conjugations) , upon being tested! This afternoon, it will be a dance class but in between I have managed to go to the local "supermercado" and just beat the rain which later became quite a spectacular-sounding thunderstorm, with heavy rainfall.

Just got back from a 90-minute dance instruction on the merengue! Great fun but when done properly (ie. with the teacher), it's very close and ultra-fast. I've been to a few salsa and merengue classes/social events before, but never seen it or done it that fast before! Wow! And apparently, you can get cheap 1-2-1 dance classes in Quito and Anya (my fellow volunteer) is very keen to find out more.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon's supposed to be cocktail-making for $3 but I've just gotten my name down on the list. I kept forgetting, in the morning breaks, to put my name down as I kept leaving my pen in the classroom. Should be quite fun; don't know if we get to make enough to get drunk on, like a certain wine club I used to go to at work! There, I had to quite often give away some of my 4 glasses of white wine and/or the other 4 glasses of red wine that was routinely tasted (or depending on who you were, drunk with enthusiasm!) per tasting session.

This weekend coming up, the school is organising a weekend trip to Mindo, in the cloudforest with optional activities like ziplining (also known as canopying), which is what I had hoped to do at some point, so I'm well up for that excursion! The following Saturday, Monika, my hostess and project representative, is taking us to Otavalo market, which is the biggest artisan and most well-known market in Ecuador and is also another trip which I had intended to do. So, all in all, the next two weeks look well set up!