marching bands and old friends (+ a cute hedgehog)

I should be working on my presentation for tomorrow (The Dilemmas of Development in the Lacadona Jungle: Social Movements, Environment, and Territory in Two Communities in Chiapas), but I need a non-productive break.  I'm currently hosting a friend that I met studying abroad in Chile (she was a compañera of mine)- it's kind of a funny story with her- I've never met up with her in the US!  She made a trip to Ecuador while I was in Chile teaching English last year, and she dropped down to Chile to say hi and visit friends and host families. She's back in Ecuador (opening her own Spanish school! awesome!) and has stayed with me on both sides of her trip- arriving in Quito for a night before heading out for a second flight to Cuenca, and now flying into Quito from Cuenca and waiting for her return flight to the US early tomorrow morning.  It's good to have company here, and it's always good to catch up with old friends.

This morning my studying at the university library was interrupted by loud drumming and trumpeting.  It was all in the distance for a while, but there came a point where it was futile to pretend to be concentrating, so I took a quick break to check it out.  Apparently it was a high school military band and it was way different from when we used to march around the Mac neighborhood with Mr. Obenour.  They were dressed up in uniforms, including pleated skirts and  knee high white boots for the ladies (with heels, of course- this is Ecuador here, women always wear heels, apparently even when marching to war) and smart pants and shiny shoes for the caballeros. They had some male pom-pom-erists, and they were way better at marching than we were in middle school.  But the weirdest thing is that instead of changing the marching cadence to signal that they were preparing to start playing a tune, they just fired a gunshot and after a very brief drumming introduction, the tunes started a-flowin'.  They also blocked a lot of traffic on a fairly busy street.  All in all, an interesting experience.  I was hoping that they'd march a bit further up the road to my apartment so I could take a picture, but they never made it that far...

May you all have fewer presentations in the next few days than I've had in the last eight days...(3- there- I snuck that in).  Just to get through the rest of the week, enjoy this image of a hedgehog getting a bath.  Aww.