According to Shakespeare, women are fickle

And when it comes to decisions like this, I definitely am. In the past 20 hours I've gone from wanting to go to Spain, to Guatemala, to Cusco, Peru, and now I'm back to Ecuador. It very well might change again, but I'm looking at this as a "go with your first instinct" kind of thing. Back in December, I wanted to go to Cuenca, Ecuador, but after coming back from South Africa the idea was intimidating. But sitting on your butt for two weeks can also give you perspective! I couldn't sleep last night either, but my late hours were spent reading a novel rather than trying to figure out my life. Or at least the next 4 months of it.

In the end, I really do want to learn Spanish more than I want to travel, and I think that will be best done by a combination of being in a place that isn't overrun with other Spanish students, and where I can hopefully do some volunteering. I am also beginning to think I'm not even going to learn as much Spanish as I was pessimistically thinking before, which might mean it doesn't matter as much how much of an immersive (spell check doesn't think that is a world, but I think it gets my meaning across), or it might mean I need to totally be immersed if I want to learn anything. In terms of volunteering, most programs have you working with kids. I don't really like kids, so that doesn't sound fun to me. At all. But I found an organization in Cuenca where you work with women who are in jail, and that sounds much more interesting to me. I don't know whether I'd be able to do anything based on my lack of Spanish abilities, but it is promising to me that there's even a possibility of something slightly policy/criminal justice related.

I don't think my plan of leaving by next week is going to happen. But I also need to just pull the trigger, so maybe it will. In the meantime, I ought to be using the Spanish CD I got from the library rather than searching obsessively on the internet for my Spanish-learning Nirvana. But gosh, surfing the internet can be so fun....

A funny Google experience: I googled, in Spanish, the name of the organization working with the jails (or maybe it was the name of the jail?). I got some articles in Spanish and had Google translate them for me. And the article didn't talk about Cuenca at all, but it did keep talking about a river basin. So I thought the article was of no use to me. Hmm, my theory has just been shot to hell because I had decided that cuenca means "river basin", but an online Spanish dictionary doesn't know what cuenca means. Oh well. Ah, here's a (clearly) better online dictionary confirming that cuenca means basin!