Dos Foreign Females

      Hello everyone! We are finally starting to get settled in to life here in Sucre. On Sunday we we went to meeting, which thankfully is only a couple blocks away  (or a 10 minute walk). We met lots of brothers and sisters in the Congregation America . It's brand new but has so many people, in fact, Sucre has started two new congregations in the last two years so its really growing here. There is a couple from Switzerland, France, a couple from California and Mexico (the wife didn't speak much Spanish but had seven studies which gives us hope) and a very sweet sister who talked really slow so we could understand and kept reassuring us that we will learn really fast. Jimmy,the Ecuadorian elder who showed us around our first day, gave the talk (which we followed pretty well). He always asks us if we've been eating and wants to make sure its enough so we don't get sick (its nice to have brothers and sisters here to look out for us). 

        After meeting we tried to go in service but it started raining like crazy so one of the elders texted us and said service was cancelled (we were dressed and on our way to the plaza to meet already). So, we decided to go to the market and splurge and buy dulce de leche cookies and peach soda. Both of us were pretty worn out so we just curled up on the very uncomfortable couch in our apartment and watched the Superbowl in Spanish (Go Ravens!) and ate our snacks.

        Mondays they don't have service here; Since Monday is usually a missionary day off, the congregations have adapted to fit their schedules. Since we didn't have service, we decided to take a tourist day and just go explore the city. First we met up with a sister from Colorado in a Dutch cafe who has been here three years (we brought her an English yearbook from Bethel). We chatted over good coffee (our first in way too long), cheesecake, and crepes. She filled us in our where we could find the cheapest food and told us that a sister coming in April is looking for a place to stay so we might have a roommate for a while. 

After that we still needed to find some things for our apartment like towels, an iron, and coat hangers so we decided to go the large markets that were pretty far from our house. 

This is the first market we went to. It was mostly clothes and shoes so we didn't end up buying anything.

This is the next market we went to, El Mercado Campesino. It was huge! You could find almost anything there and thankfully, we did find an iron and coat hangers after an extensive search and checking the prices with lots of venders to make sure we weren't getting taken advantage of for being tourists. After that we had a long walk back and stopped for lunch at another Dutch place (there's a lot of Dutch places here and we haven't figured out why) to cool off for a while. We are still a little wary of the local food and how it's prepared so we are sticking places that we know don't use the tap water. After that we that we decided check out some of the museums around the city. They didn't allow cameras so we don't have any pictures but we went to an archaeological museum and saw mummies and also went to a art museum. The art museum had the original pieces of art but they were not protected at all, so we could reach out and touch them (not that we did) and no one would care. 

Afterwards we walked back home to drop of our stuff and get our second bed moved in. Yay! Now we have a bed in each room and even cable in each room. 

Since we still had daylight to burn we decided to go to El Parque Bolivar. Here are some pictures:

Isn't it pretty?

                         I wish we could have spent more time here but we fled pretty quickly after we discovered that there we lots of groups of teenage boys who far far too eager for a chance to soak the gringas.  We will have to come back sometime when its not the week before Carnival; We are pretty sick of being targets for water balloons and water guns although we have been able to dissuade some boys in our limited Spanish (at one point Elena was able to grab a rogue balloon and yelled at the boys "Que paso?!"-the most threatening thing she could think of in Spanish at the time, much to the amusement of locals who laughed to see white people try to defend themselves ).

                       In total today we must have walked at least seven miles, lots of it uphill in the sun, so we are pretty tired and a little burnt. Tomorrow hopefully will be our first day of service here (finally) so we are looking forward to that and will have to tell you all how it goes. (Sorry for the over abundance of commas. Elena was proof-reading and told me I "over comma-sate" and was pretty thrilled by the pun).  We will post pictures of our apartment later, now that we have all of our furniture moved in and most of our stuff put away/