A Night On the Town

So after the Internet cafe where I wrote the last entry (if you are checking this on Wednesday morning and havent since Tuesday morning, you should read this entry and the previous one!), I met up with everyone at 7:30 to tell them that the movie I wanted to go see was at 9:00. I expcted many to prefer to stay in and rest after such a long day, but everyone immediately said they wanted to go. And since it was in a mall, they all wanted to go RIGHT NOW.

So off we went, waiting for a relatively empty Trole at the station. We sped southward and found that the mall itself closes at 8:00, but that the movie theater in the mall stayed open. So we bought our tickets and went on in.

¨Cuando me toque a mi¨is the name of the film, a recent Ecuadorian production that has won some awards at film festivals. It´s basically about Quito, and the students recognized the very steet our hotel is on - although the hotel doesn´t appear, for the characters to have walked from where we saw them in one take to where we saw them in the next, they would have had to pass right in front of it. The huge church they saw driving in from the airport, the big plaza where we go for the Internet cafe, etc - they picked them all out. There´s no fooling this bunch.

And many of them understood A LOT about he movie. It´s a somewhat difficult piece to follow - I myself found that I liked it more at the end than I had during, because I could see what they had been trying to get to and retroactively make more sense of some of the juxtapositions and transitions. We discussed it a lot on the way home in the bus (the trole stops running at 11:00).

During their dinner break, Matt, Ernesto and Shyam made yet another fast friend in a restaurant, joking about being the three musketeers...It´s a great story, they´ll have to tell it to you. I´m just so proud of this group, proud to be associated with them and with the strict, active attention they´re paying to this new and exciting environment. They are squeezing every drop they can out of this experience, you can see it in their eyes every time they come back from some time on the town.

Parque Carolina tomorrow, followed by shopping at the mall, I think. It´s time - they´ve earned it.

Hasta mañana...