Nachos and Futbal

Before I left for Ecuador, some people were confused as to what kind of food I would be eating here. Just because they speak Spanish does not mean they eat Mexican food. I had a great illistration of this in my phonetics class today. We were supposed to find pair of words that were similar in pronounciation. One girl came up with Macho y Nacho. The professor said no, we couldn't use name brands and nacho is a name brand for a type of chips. We spent about 10 minutes trying to explain to her what nachos are and convince her that no it isn't just a brand name. She had never heard of nachos before as a food outside of the context of bags of chips. Obviously she's never been to a Mexican restaurant. Finally one girl came up with the example that there is a brand of milk here called leche (the Spanish word for milk) but not all milk is brand name leche. It was quite interesting.

The big talk around school now is the soccer game on Saturday. It's a World Cup qualifying game. Ecuador vs.Uraguay. If Ecuador wins, they'll go to the World Cup games in Germany in 2006. It's a huge deal here. Right now general admission tickets are (or were) selling for about $30, which is quite a bit of money here. (To give you an idea, Myriam was telling me this morning how expensive it is to go to a doctor, $35 for just seeing one) I don't think I'll actually go to the game mostly because I doubt I can still get a ticket now. Not to mention, I would need to go at about 8am to get a seat. The game starts at 4:00. Rumor is that they sell more tickets then seats, so if you don't get there early there might not be room. I think I'm just going to try to find a sport bar kind of place to go to with a bunch of friends. I'm really not sure if I'll be able to sit though a whole soccer game especially since I don't really know any of the rules beyond the basics. But I still want to buy a jersey.