the music never stops

So host family gets better by the day.  They have really opened up to me.  They just told me I’m getting fat, that I must have been sick when I came for the site visit because I was skinny then.  Seriously though, they really like me and I really like them.  I’ve been talking about when I’m gonna move out and get my own place. They don’t understand this, and they don’t want me to go.  They said they wanted to put a chain around my ankle so I’d have to stay.  They wanted to know who I would laugh with if I lived alone, I think they really want to know who they are going to laugh at if I don’t live with them.  I tried to assure them, I would still hang out to laugh with or be laughed at. 

Today my host mom and I sold the cookies we made at the first cooking class I gave the other day, along with some other goodies she’d been brewing.  We made all our money back and even few extra dollars to start a cooking class fund.  Her birthday was the other day, my sister-in-law and I made a cake.  But her other kids came for the weekend, so we made another cake and I made spaghetti. There could be some truth to the weight gain.  It’s funny because peace corps people say you gain weight eating Ecuadorian food, but I’m gaining weight cooking for myself, after almost three months of not being able to, my food apparently tastes really good to me.

Also today, I saw a cow get inseminated, a cirque du soiel style clown troupe, a kid riding on top of the plastic cover thing they put on the back of trucks, and what a cocoa plant looks like for the first time ever (after years of working with chocolate).  Then host mom and I won second place for what I guess was a contest broken down in themes, for our use of panela (basically brown sugar—either in brick form or loose). 

Oh the best part of host family experience is the ongoing conversation with my host mom about my religion.  I don’t have one, I don’t believe in god.  She cannot wrap her head around this one.  A few weeks ago, she told me that it was fine that I don’t believe in god, but that here I would be catholic.  Tonight she suggested that I get baptized, I think so I can have name, and maybe a place in heaven.  I tried to ask her if there would be any value in that seeing as how I don’t give any credence to it… I’m not exactly sure what her answer was or what it meant, so I guess the discussion will continue.

Since my town is still celebrating it’s birth we have just concluded another weekend full of partying and insanely loud music all the time. They don’t have any norms or rules about appropriate times to turn it down, so the music stays on and loud until 6 or 7am for about an hour break and then starts up again around 8.  Currently now, 13 hours into today’s jam-fest, I am enjoying what they joakingly call “corta veinas” meaning, slit your wrists music.  My sister-in-law explained yesterday there is an entire genre devoted to music to cry to. I’m hoping it might stop soon, but I’m not holding my breath.