Author: Hannah
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Po Po comes to town
Po Po means grandmother on your mother’s side in Cantonese. So that’s what my mom, Candace is called. She came to visit us for November & December. We had planned a trip to Bolivia to see the Uyuni Salt Flats, La Paz, and Lake Titicaca; however, we had to cancel our trip due to the…
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Ultimate Frisbee
Our Sunday mornings are usually spent at Parque Paraíso. I play Ultimate, and Riki watches our three kids, plus often three extra (older kids). When my mom was here, Riki played for two weeks, and even bought cleats. Ultimate is so fun! It’s hard on an aging body, but so far I have not sustained…
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Princess (phase?)
How does it happen? How do young girls decide they like princesses? I mean, I know, media, Disney, but we’ve been trying to limit those influences. Jade has seen 4 movies so far in her 4 years of life: Incredibles, Incredibles 2, Monsters Inc, and Moana. She doesn’t watch any tv or videos on youtube. We’ve…
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Piano recital
First piano recital, after which he said he wanted to keep taking piano forever. Then 2 weeks later he decided he wanted to stop taking lessons. But he did play while we sang Cumpleaños Feliz to Jade.
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Chimborazo
On Sunday evening, Riki and I had the opportunity to attempt to summit the volcano Chimborazo, Ecuador’s tallest volcano at 20,534 feet. The summit of Chimborazo is also actually the closest point to the sun (closer than the summit of Everest), because of the bulge at the Earth’s equator. I wasn’t too sure about our…
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El Paro Nacional
El paro means strike or stoppage, and it comes from the verb parar, to stop. It began on Thursday October 3rd, the day after President Lenin Moreno announced a “paquetazo” that stopped gasoline subsidies, cut government workers’ vacation in half & cut their pay as well. The paquetazo was created to comply with the International…
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School ends and begins again
Tomu and Jade had an end of the year celebration at the Pumapungo Museum. Jade was overjoyed to wear the white dress they required, and was bummed that we only rented it. We found out in July that their school was closing because of a lack of funding from the Ministry of Education, so we…
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Comings and Goings
I guess part of the expat life is making new friends, saying goodbye to them, and then making new friends again. Of course our Cuencano friends are still here, luckily! 🙂 June was a rough month for us, as first our Alaskan buddies moved back home on June 10th, and then our friends Steph &…
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Colonias vacacionales
In English: summer camps. Tomu and Jade had July & August off from school, and after about one week, we were ready for them to go back to school! 🙂 So we looked into some summer camps to get them out of the house for some time each day. The first one was on a…
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Quito & Mindo
We went on a quick 5 day trip to Quito & Mindo, which is a 2 hour bus ride west of Quito. We opted to fly to Quito rather than do the 8-10 hour bus ride. Riki had visited Quito in 2007, but the kids and I hadn’t been yet. We figured it was worth…
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