Quaker Juice

I was definitely a little surprised when I came out of my room for dinner the other night and saw a glass of light brown liquid sitting at my place, but heck, chocolate finds its way into the weirdest things here, so I wasn’t concerned. That is, until I asked what it was and the response was…. “jugo,” or juice. Juice? Really? En serio? You’ve got to be kidding me. This stuff’s the color of oatmeal! No fruit in the world yields juice that looks like this. “What type of juice?”

“Kwah-kair.”

“Kwah-kair is a type of…. Fruit?”

“No, no, una compania de avena.”

“An oats company? Kwah-kair…. Kwah-kair…. You mean, Quaker?”

“Si! Kwah-kair!”

I had in front of me a glass of Quaker juice.

I want you to know I’ve been really good about trying everything here. Like, really good. However, I’m not excited about trying everything, and this was one of those things that I just was not looking forward to. In fact, I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t pretty skeptical about how this would turn out, how much of this stuff I could choke down, and whether it would stay there. But let me also tell you that it was completely delicious.

I guess that Quaker juice consists of finely ground oats, water, a little bit of sugar, and the natural juice of any other fruit you want. This batch of Quaker juice happened to be a mixture of oats and naranjilla juice (naranjillas are a sweet type of citrus fruit grown here in Ecuador), and it didn’t last through the following morning. It was that good.

In other news, I finally got the pictures of mi familia up. If you haven’t checked back to my last post yet, where I told you I’d put the pictures when I could…. They’re there. Check out the Morillos.

This weekend is the second excursion. We're going to Otavalo, an indigenous village in the mountains two hours from Quito. We leave right after school tomorrow, and we'll visit the largest indigenous market in South America, an indigenous textile factory type thing, some woodworking shops.... we'll also see some BEAUTIFUL scenery. But the key to the weekend is we're going to be broken up into groups of 2 or 3 students and the groups will be living with indigenous families for Friday and Saturday nights. We'll be back to school Sunday around 5:00, just in time for us to all head to Mulligan's for the Super Bowl. I'm excited for this trip, but it also means that I won't have Internet access from tonight until probably Monday morning.

I'm officially done with Spanish 250. The oral exam was Tuesday after school (I pretty much dominated) and the final was this morning, and it was sort of intense. We went straight from the 2-hour final into our new classes, which for me was Spanish 302, a class that focuses entirely on conversation and discussion in Spanish. That's good for me, but the downside is that 302 does absolutely nothing for me as far as getting credit towards anything at Ohio State.

Cultural notes of the day: Unlike in the US, where the kitchen or the living room are the center of the home, here it's the parents' bedroom. It was kind of hard to get used to being able and encouraged to just go into Cris' bedroom whenever I want, but the TV, DVD player and computer are all in there, and it's definitely the hang out place in the house. Very different from the US. Also, most families here from the middle of the middle class and higher have housemaids. That's something that we think of as something for people with huge houses or exorbitant amounts of money, but here it's absolutely common to have your maid come 3-5 times a week to help clean the house, do laundry, wash dishes, etc. Again, very different from the US.

Remember, I won't have computer access starting tomorrow and going until Monday.... just saying.

SHOUT-OUTS GO TO: The men of 2020. And Horse.

From Ecuador,

Andy