At the Alemans

Well my hostal the Magic Bean decided that one week was enough for them to want my business and magically terminated my acount. I think they knew somehow that it was that night that i was going to try to sneak onto the roof to reclaim the underwear that had become stranded after i tried doing my own laundry in the shower. I had been watching and planning about this fallen comrade/boxers over the past 5 days, trying to decide when was best to launch my assault, but magic bean knew even better and struck first.

Luckily, Alvaro Aleman, the professor i am working with, offered to take me in, and so i am living it up in his basement!

Big couch, down comforter, meals and maids!

I am helping pay my way by fixing all the computers in the place and creating monstrous, frankensteinian, super computers that we are using to edit the kids stuff out of the cadavers of the old.

They have awesome half- albino, lungs-on-the-outside, mexican, cave salamanders called, Axolotls (or as Kitty calls them, Smilemanders, cuz they are cute!) These things are totally neat and very playful! One of them bit me already! Plus their names are Andy y Ondy.

You can't really see it in this picture but they are cute! Here is an example from the web

Salafact!: These weird salamander things live in volcanic pools in mexico. They usually spend their whole lives in this underwater larval kind of state, and never metamorphose into the adult form unless they are exposed to really hot temperatures. So when volcanoes are about to erupt and their water heats up, they all lose their gills, grow real big and hop out onto land. So if you see a herd of adult Axolotls running by you might want to follow!

The Alemans have been helping me with my spanish, introducing me to really terrific ecuadorian and international music, and telling me about all of these AMAZING ecuadorian traditions that i will chat all about in a later post. Tomorrow and Viernes, y sabado, y Domingo i am pretty much going to be holed up here working on editing kids stuff.