I was still absolutely shattered when I got up, now that I've started to catch up on sleep. think the teacher was a bit impatient and annoyed with me for not being faster on the uptake. We discussed the day before at the market, Saquisili, and went through the preferred indefinite past tense. I'm beginning to find Spanish is a very logical language but you have to be very good at listening because some of the conjugations of the verbs are very similar and if you miss one syllable, you don't know when something happened or is going to happen. You also have to be very good at spelling, as words can be very similar, such as llevar (to carry or bring - and which, confusingly can be conjugated as llave or llavo) is very similar in spelling to llave (a key).

During the morning break, I finally managed to rent a mobile phone from someone in the volunteer office. After the morning break, I was then asked to look up Oswaldo Guaysamin, an Ecuadorian painter and ended up having to translate a short bio on him from English to Spanish, which woke me up. Somehow, willy-nilly, I'm absorbing some knowledge of the culture through these Spanish lessons, including about the different indigenous and ethnic people (even if I don't or can't remember everything).

After lunch, I met up with Fiona at the Plaza Foch to take a taxi to the corner of calle Bolivia and Avenida America, to catch the bus to the Mitad del Mundo (the centre of the world). My teacher had recommended going to indigena museum Inti-Nañ…campino del sol, which means the centre of the world or the path of the sun. The bus was crowded and the trip takes about an hour (for $0.40!). At the Mitad del Mundo, there's a monument and various buildings including the planetarium and an insectarium, which showed exhibited some butterflies and insects from various places, including Ecuador. It also had some large, live insects, known as "four horns," from Ecuador.

The indigenous museum Inti-Nañ is about 50 metres away and of the 2, Inti-Nañ was the most interesting and more relevant, as it is where zero latitude and zero longitude crosses and is what is used by GPS. It also had exhibits from boa constrictors and a 100+ year old shrunken head of a 13-year old (shrunken with the skull removed). The shrunken heads were apparently worn like a necklace by the shamans in the belief that they got the power of the shrunken heads.

There were also demonstrations with water, showing the rotation of the earth, as well as other interesting demonstrations, like walking head-to-heel along the equator line, with your eyes closed (as if you're being tested for drunkenness by the police, not that I know from personal experience!)

I did feel, at the evening meal at home, that I understood much more of the (Spanish) conversation that I've done before but still don't feel that I know enough or can really converse with confidence at all in Spanish. I don't know how much I can improve this last week...