This morning, I asked the man working at my hostel when the buses run from Guayaquil out to Montanita, where my Spanish immersion program was starting. He told me every half an hour, so I decided not to worry, but found myself anxious just sitting in my hostel room and I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I decided to pack up and grab a taxi to the terminal.

When I got to the right window to buy my boleta (and yes, I had to ask three times to find the right one), I found out that the last bus left 15 minutes ago… and the next one left at 1 PM. According to my watch it was just past 10 AM, so I decided to suck it up and sit in the terminal — I had my gigantic Dora and didn’t want to shlep it around the city with me for 2 hours of sightseeing, so I grabbed a smoothie for breakfast and sat reading and people watching. At 12:20, I went to the bathroom and on a search to find my bus port (there were 110 bus ports in a gigantic 3 story, mall-like building) only to discover, after a quick glance at a clock on the wall, that it was in fact 11:20 AM and that I’d set my watch wrong. Typical Rachel. I practically laughed out loud at myself, walked into a super market to buy a quick snack, and confirmed with the cashier that it was in fact before noon, not after.

So I spent another hour reading, then got to my bus too early. I met a sweet girl from Alaska named Chloe, who coincidentally was also on my flight down from Miami, and she sat next to me on the bus. We commiserated about how delayed our flight had been (in addition to the 3 hours extra in the airport, we sat on the tarmac for another hour and a half before we took off) and how glad we were to finally be on a bus to our destination. She was looking for Spanish schools once she got to Montanita, so she came to mine and they had a vacancy, so she and I are actually roommates in a six person room. Our third roommate is Bruno, a 26 year old from Denmark, who had been in Columbia for two weeks prior to heading into Ecuador.

The three of us went downtown to check out the beach, find dinner and grab fruit for breakfast tomorrow. And now we’re relaxing with the other dozen or so students at the cabanas — a beautiful open area with a pool, kitchen table and lots of lounge chairs with dozens of hammocks hanging from palm trees and underneath thatch huts. Tomorrow I have a 7 AM wakeup call so I can be at the school for my Spanish placement test at 7:40.

And so it begins!