Student Teaching in Ecuador: March 2011

For our four day weekend a bunch of the student teachers and I went to Baños, Ecuador. It’s one of the towns that we’d heard about since before we even arrived in Ecuador because there’s so much to do and see there. We had a long list of things to do before we arrived in Baños, things like: white water rafting, repelling down waterfalls, visiting the active volcano Tungurahua, etc. So, I had been pretty pumped for this trip for a long time because all the outdoorsy things we had planned were right up my alley.
This four day weekend was in celebration of one of Ecuador’s holidays, Carnaval. We knew this when we planned the trip, but we had no idea how crazy the town would be for the holiday. There were people running up and down the streets 24/7 with bottles of silly string type stuff spraying anyone who got close enough. We also had to watch out for the people on rooftops armed with water balloons and the drive-bys of silly string sprayers. So it was pretty crazy in the streets of Baños, which was kind of fun at first but after getting sprayed for 2-3 days straight, I was ready to start throwing rocks. Only kidding... but seriously. ha.
I liked Baños a lot because of the variety of things to do there. Hopefully I will get a chance to go back and see the town again before I leave. And hopefully the volcano will be more active the next time we go because we didn’t get to see any activity from Tungurahua. And it is actually pretty common to see the volcano spitting out spurts of lava at night, but we weren’t lucky this time
Here’s a bunch of pictures we took while seeing the town..

This is overlooking the town of Baños, you can see it’s surrounded by tall peaks on all sides.

This is Amy, Kendal, Evan, me, and Stacy at the twin waterfalls.

This is at a hostel that overlooks all of Baños. It’s a really expensive place so we didn’t stay there, but my homestay family told me it was a must see and they were right.

This is one of the incredible views we saw while just riding around Baños in a taxi.

This is me and a Burmese Python.

This is a group shot right after we went repelling down the three waterfalls, which was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

This is me repelling down the biggest of the three waterfalls. Probably a 120 foot drop to the bottom.

This is the biggest waterfall we saw in Baños, and we actually got the chance to swim there also.

This is at the waterfall Pailon del Diablo, which is one of biggest attractions in Baños.

This is part of the 5th grade class that I am student teaching with. Here, we were finishing up a unit on Greek Mythology and each student had to present a Greek character by acting the part, dressing the part, and knowing details about the particular Greek character. They competed against another student who had the same character to see who the REAL Greek character was and who the imposter was.