Ok, so we're leaving Manta tomorrow morning for a stop over in Guayaquil before flying to Galapogas for a week long boat tour around the islands.

I thought i'd write a list of things we'll miss and some things we won't as we move on ( in no particular order) :

What we'll miss:

- Living in a coastal town where you can surf every day
- going surfing every day!!..
-.....in warm water
- Nelly's awesome cooking - the food where we've stayed has been amazing
- Learning to converse in another language - I've really enjoyed our nightly chats with Camila - our host.
Also, it's been nice to get over the simple and lightweight pointing / sign language conversations you tend to have on holiday and really understand a little more about what locals think of their town / country / government etc and also what the culture is like
- our room where we're staying and having a swimming pool in the garden - we've been so fortunate
- saying hola / buenos dias to the usual suspects going about their daily routine as we walk to school
- the mangy dog outside our house that I thought was dead for the first week until it started walking round a bit this week
- Mocca - the coffee shop we go and do our homework in every night after school
- Eating fresh fish most days - muy rico!!!
- watching the ecuadorian approach to safety on the road:
- seeing 12 people get out a 4 door saloon - 3 in the front, 5 in the back and another 4 in the boot!! + babies!
- seeing a married couple on a motorbike - no helmets on and the mum breast feeding their baby as they rode round the streets
- the variety of completely bodged together cars all in wild and wonderful shapes dues to necessary customisation to keep them going - I saw a taxi with no doors the other day but a lowered suspension and fat tyres! - bad ass!



What we won't miss

- the pollution - oh my goodness! - you never feel clean and your lungs don't feel right + there's this ever changing festival of smells everywhere you go
- getting up at 5am in order to go surfing everyday...
- ...and the rooster that woke us up every hour before I eventually get up
- parsing verbs for hours every night + irregular verbs and all the exceptions to the rules!!!
- talking in the present tense! - learning spanish has mainly been in the present tense to get us started so it always sounds like I'm giving a commentary on my life to whomever I talk
- carbohydrates and sugar! - It's so easy to get fat here - no one eats vegetables (except Nelly where we live who cooks them beautifully) and often meals will have both rice and potatoes with meat or fish
- clouds! - it's permanently cloudy here and...
- ...humid! - it was 87% humidity this tuesday

...this is what I shouted excitedly to my surf guide this morning. Today was breakthrough day - conditions where relatively small (2-3 ft) but completely clean waves. I had the mini-mal / longboard and I just got clean-faced wave after wave after wave. The particular spot on the beach break meant that 20 yards to my left was a righthander and 20 yards to my right was a lefthander so I just swapped and changed all morning practising my left and rights.

It was just awesome. all of a sudden surfing made sense and it was so peaceful on these glassy faces.

I'm completely stoked today. It's made such a difference to my boarding being able to go everyday

So today is the start of the second week learning spanish.

After a spectacularly unsuccessful weekend that involved me losing not only the watch I love but also my wedding ring and both Lou and I (plus seemingly every other non-latino in Manta!) getting horribly burned on a cloudy sun day and also generally feeling sick - me with sinuses on saturday and lou having stomach issues....

..its been nice to just to get up, surf, have breakfast, do some email, go to school, say hi to the usual characters who hang out on the route to school, come home, do homework, go to bed - routine!

never really gone away before and actually 'lived' somewhere. It's nice.

The subject of this blog are some of the keys things I've noticed Ecuadorians love!!

for the last two days on the surf wagon we've had absolute quintesential 80's electro rock - and what a cheesefest it was - drum machines, synth's, guitars and van halen solos - the works. The musician in me was weeping as we worked through: 'Foot loose', 'She's a maniac', 'the Heat is on', 'the eye of the tiger' and a dozen other far cheesier, lesser known 'hits'.

I am currently making an iTunes mix of some rock tunes from the last 10 years!

ok, secondly, no one in the whole country eats vegetables! We've asked a few people why and the locals just say 'eagh!' I no like!' - fair enough I suppose but they LOVE rice, potatoes and pasta. It kind of explains why there are so many slightly 'portly' people here

thirdly, you may have not heard of a lada but it is a east european car that was available in the late eighties / early nineties. Growing up my dad loved cheap eastern europian cars - many many skoda's in the main - not great, a bit comical but very cheap. We also had a lada in the mix of many years of skoda's. I have to say the 'lada' has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It was as heavy as a tank but about as protected as a robin reliant, it guzzled gas, had zero acceleration and you could barely steer the thing - and it wasn't even that cheap. it was a happy day when the lada died. I've often wondered since what happened to all the lada's once we had a full European Union and they disappeared from british roads .....

...turns out they all came to Ecuador! Everywhere you look there are these pitiful machines. but somehow they seem to work here - I saw a pickup version today and thought it looked really cool!! Actually many old cars look quite cool - they are well into pimping their ride out here! fully loaded old datsuns, toyotas and of course, lada's are everywhere!

anyway, some useless observations for anyone reading this - nothing else to say except I rather like a life of surfing and learning spanish and Lou likes to sleep! - Manta is treating us well :-)

New Year's eve started with a surf from 7am - 9.30am with 'Ruben' my surf instructor for the fortnight we are spending here. The waves were pretty poor to be honest but it felt great being in the line up again.

After surfing I walked home, had some breakfast then we went to our spanish class - 4 hour session - one to one!

It was brilliant!

I must admit though, 2 hours in I was loving it, 3 hours in, still doing ok, 3.5 hours in and I plateau'd - my brain couldn't take any more and shut down and I became a mute. Despite a dismal end to the lesson, I noticed for the rest of the day I could understand a little more of what people said and I at least know how to read a bit better now.

After spanish we went back home and chilled out in our host families pool before having a sleep 7-9pm.

at 10am We went out with Camilla to her traditional Ecuadorian family meal. She had relatives come down from Quito and so there were about 20 of us all celebrating new year with a big meal at midnight!! New Year in Ecuador, and Manta particular, is amazing - people throng the streets for hours and whole families are out and about from babies and infants through to grandparents. There is also a tradition where you make effigies of people or situations from the past - some time celebrities and sometimes family members. Ecuadorians spend days making these effigies and there is a prize for the best. However, no matter how good they are they all get burned at new year as a symbol of forgetting the past and moving on. And so what happens is at midnight everywhere in the city there are fires with these effigies burning and fireworks and bombs(!) - fish bombs from the trawlers so there are big bangs every where - it's all very amazing and a huge cultural change from being in england.

After the celebrations and the meal we stayed and talked to Camilla's family for a bit - I understood way more than I did the previous night so felt like the lesson must have gone well! - and then we went out in Manta to the bars and clubs. We ended up having a drink in one which was made into the shape of a boat and, so it turned out, run by rock fan - all sorts of classic tunes playing on the sound system - metallica, ac dc, led zeppelin. we talked to him for a time and also a very drunk but happy Venezualan living in Manta. They both thought lou was beautiful and the bar man asked if she had a sister! We went home at 4am and people were still out in the street throwing fireworks, dancing, singing, laughing, it was just such a good night.

We arrived in the industrial fishing port of Manta saturday night to find we are staying with a lovely family in a great house just 10mins walk from the beach, right near the main street for shops and night life and they have a pool in the garden!!! Definitely got the general feeling we've landed on our feet. Camilla is our host and has two sons and a lovely wider family who we have visited as well - they were all very welcoming. Her son Paul speaks very good english which is a great help. On sunday we've just chilled out, gone to the beach and back and then attended mass at the catholic church in the evening with Camilla - just like church at home - singing, a preach, say hello to some people, have communion and go home - moi bien!