Last night I finally moved in with my family! Clemencia y Luis are my parents, I have a little sister, Estefany, and a little brother, Nico. Yesterday was Nico's 15th birthday (Estefany is 18) so as soon as I got to the house we all left to go to my "aunt's" house for his party. One of the girls from my group, Julie, is living with her... so I guess we're cousins. They wouldn't even let us speak English to each other, which is great but brutal. I was exhausted last night from all of the Spanish. Oh I have two dogs- a yellow lab(ish) named Spunkie and a beagle(ish) named Agustina. Somehow, Agustina makes Tiki seem calm; it's bizarre. I have my own room, including a bed bigger than my bed at home home... oh they also gave me a cell phone that a previous student left with them and saved me around $50! The number, including country code, is 593083192965, which probably only applies to my family. Oh and Liz lives about 50 yards from me, in the same gated/guarded community! It's very convenient. We're so close to the airport that it is honestly terrifying watching the planes go by. We're also really close to Diego apparently which is also awesome. All-in-all I am soooooo happy with my host family! Everyone seems really nice but genuine, not forcing fakeness down my throat. My parents don't speak ANY English so it's finally the real thing ahhh

This morning was the first day of our language and culture pre-semester course. It starts at 9 so my papa, Liz's mom, Liz, and I left a little before 8. It is about a 5-10 minute walk to the bus stop, a 10 minute ride, then a transfer to another bus which is about 25 minutes and that bus stops right by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. We rode the last bus without our parents, but there were a lot of other people from our group there at the same time. Tomorrow we all fend for ourselves. During orientation we had several talks about safety/security and using our "spidey-sense." So as soon as Liz and I sat down on the last bus this guy switches his seat from one side of the bus to the seat right behind us. We immediately looked at each other and said spidey-sense, but of course we both had our bags securely on our lap so it wasn't a big deal. Less than 5 minutes later I felt something on my hip/love handles and I looked down and the guy had reached his hand between the wall and my seat! As soon as I looked down he pulled his hand back really fast but I saw it, and it was so terrifying in that horror-movie-hand-with-no-arm sort of way. And now all hopes of naps on that bus have vanished and my paranoia has increased tenfold. Ugh.

The culture portion of our class is from 9-10:15 and we have a different person, often a professor, presenting almost every day. After a little break we have the language portion from 10:30-1:00. We are divided into 4 groups based on our Spanish level. The time is split almost 50/50 between conversation and grammar. There are only 4 of us in my group and our profesora is Claudia. She's awesome. For the first time I don't feel like an idiot when I'm corrected (which is a lot). I think having such a small group helps too. We did a lot of introductions, en espanol, of course and a couple exercises. She also taught us a new phrase "tirar con" which means to fuck with. Hahahahaha. I already got a homework assignment for tomorrow. Yay!