what's a cheetah?

Hello everyone! I just realized that I haven’t updated in a couple of days. Life has been good here. This Sunday I went with my host mom, Noralma, and a whole bunch of her sisters and brothers (because she has a lot) to some restaurant in the countryside to eat lunch. Afterwards, we went to someone else’s house to spend the afternoon there. The house was GORGEOUS. It has a huge courtyard and two little houses, so people can throw big parties there- there is a stage thing for live music and a large dance-floor thing, and also have a place to spend the night. It was cool. The family that lived there also owns a four-wheeler, so all of the kids (all of my host-cousins and I) spent the afternoon riding around on that. By the end of the day, I was COVERED in dust. It was gross, but definitely worth it.
School so far this week has been okay. Today I was at school all day (7 am to 1:30 pm), and we only had one 40 minute class. The class was math, too, which is undoubtedly the easiest class in the world. Saturday is ‘Flag Day’ in Ecuador, so the whole school was practicing for some presentation that we will do on Friday. As far as I know, all I have to do is walk behind someone and do whatever they do. Tomorrow I don’t have classes because it is the Patron Saint of Portoviejo’s special day. And then I only have to go to school on Friday from 7 to 10:30 for the presentation thingy, so that will be good.
Today during school the class I am in and one other class randomly got on a bus and went to another high school to watch plays in English. It was weird- I had no idea that we were going anywhere until the other exchange student in my school, Lizzie, told me what we were doing. It was fun though! It was really hard to hear anything, so Lizzie and I mostly just sat there and talked, but we could understand the play from our school since we saw it the day before as well. I ALSO wore the wrong thing to school today- apparently we were allowed to wear our pants, and I wore the ugly skirt. :(

Yesterday at school, someone came up to me and asked me what a 'cheetah' was. I wasn't exactly thinking straight, and I absolutely COULD NOT remember what it was. So I told her that that wasn't a word in English. As soon as I got into the car, my neighbors (who speak little English) reminded me that a cheetah is a big cat that is really fast. I felt a bit dumb. :)
I have good news! I have found a place where I can run! There is another exchange student who lives VERY close to a sport-complex thing, so I take a taxi to his house every day at 5:15, and then my taxi picks me up from his house again at 6:45. It has been working out really well so far- there have been other exchange students coming with us, and it’s been a lot of fun! It has also been great to be able to run again. The place we go running is HUGE. There is a pool, a gymnastics center, a baseball field, a weight-lifting center, a rock-climbing center that is being built, and probably a whole lot more too that I just haven’t seen yet. There are also kids that live there who are from other countries who come here to train! So I guess they have good trainers or something. I thought that was kind of neat. We see them running every day, and there are also some who high jump. There’s a cat there too who is really cute.
Tomorrow is Ricardo’s birthday, and we are having a birthday party for him at our house sometime in the afternoon. I will let you all know how that goes tomorrow!
LOVE, Kirsty
I just uploaded more pictures to my Flickr page, so you are welcome to check those out!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/estoyenecuador/sets/72157622121121932/