bananas or potatoes?

Here are some pictures! The first is la playa Crucita!
The second is of people cleaning fish at Crucita. See the little girl? Yeah, she's cleaning fish! :)
The third is of Claudia (my host sister) and her boyfriend Emilio at Crucita.
And the fourth is of me at Crucita.
There are more pictures posted at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/estoyenecuador

Today was good. I LOVE my family. My host mom’s name is Noralma, and she is SO SWEET. I feel totally comfortable around her. My host dad’s name is Leonardo. He doesn’t speak English, so it is more difficult to communicate with him, but he is funny. Today he wanted to know how the lemonade at a restaurant that we went to was made so he told the waiter that I was American and I wanted to know. :) The waiter told us! Oh and he calls me Kris because Kirsty is too hard. My host sister’s name is Claudia. She did an exchange to California two years ago, so she knows English very well and knows what it’s like too. She is 19, so we are very close in age as well. She goes to the university here in Portoviejo, but she is on vacation for the next 3 weeks I think. She speaks Spanish around me almost all the time, which is good because that will make it easier (??) for me to learn. My host brother’s name is Ricardo, or Ricardito. He is 4, and he is SO CUTE! It’s hard to communicate with him because he doesn’t speak English, and his voice is harder to understand because he’s a little kid. But he’s still really funny.
Today I woke up and ate cereal, which is different. The cereal is the same, but the milk isn’t. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I think it’s milk with no lactose. So like a milk-imposter. Haha but it’s not bad- just different. I don’t think I mentioned this, but my family owns a small butcher shop that is like 1 block away. Noralma works there every afternoon, and the boy who works there for them comes and has lunch at our house every day. Ooh I got the internet on my laptop set up today too. I tried to figure out how to do it myself, but that didn’t work, so I asked Leonardo (my host brother who is in Clear Lake- I guess he’s actually Leonardo Jr, since my host dad is named Leonardo too). He helped me for a while but we still couldn’t figure it out, so he asked his cousin to come over to the house to figure it out. So he came over and it took him about 30 minutes to figure it out but it works now! I skype-d my mom and dad for the first time (not counting the times we ‘practiced’ talking from upstairs to downstairs). For lunch, we ate ceviche, which is alright.
This afternoon/evening we went to see a beach called Crucita. It was high tide, so there wasn’t much of the beach to see, but there were tons of people! My family also showed me the place where the fishermen bring all of the fish that they catch to be cleaned and then taken to the tuna or sardine factories. It was very smelly but the birds really liked it. We drove up to a little place on top of a hill that looks out over Crucita and it was so pretty! We couldn’t see very far because it was cloudy there. BUT that is a place where you can go hang gliding! Like, you just run off the edge of a cliff. I’m not so sure about that. We went out for dinner a bit later. It was REALLY GOOD- I had some sort of breaded fish and I really liked it.
I don’t understand plantains. Sometimes they taste like potatoes and sometimes they taste like bananas. I think it has something to do with how ripe they are, but still, that’s weird. I like them best when they taste like bananas. The restaurant that we went to had really good limonada too, which is TOTALLY not lemonade. It’s made of limes and it’s better. This was when Leonardo used me to ask the waiter how they made the limonada- apparently they cut it into slices and then put it in a blender and used the juice.
Right now we are watching the Miss Universe pageant because Miss Ecuador is from Portoviejo (she was one of Noralma’s students at some point in time), and she was supposed to be a favorite. But she didn’t make it into the top 15. :/ oh well.