Comments (0) Ok, so I can’t see the pictures until after the post is posted, which is why I can’t seem to figure out how to rotate them, even though they are rotated elsewhere on my computer. I realize that the last three pictures show up as unavailable, but if you click them, you can see them. They aren’t properly rotated because I have more important things to worry about. That’s all.
Besitos!
Alright, I’m not sure if these pictures are in order or if they’re rotated properly, but I think you can handle it.
I have a walk of about 8 blocks to get from my house to the bus station, Estacio Norte. I live almost directly west of the station, in the northern end of Quito (hense the bus station being “North Station”). However, the volcano Pichincha is to the west of the city, meaning that my walk home is uphill. These photos are an attempt to capture the amount of work I put into getting home, but unfortunately, pictures don’t show angles well. Just trust me that it’s super steep. The first two photos are looking up the hill. The photo showing lots of the city (hopefully the third picture) is looking east and downhill. The following picture is facing west up my road, past the steepest part, but shpwing how you can see mountains everywhere. The final picture is the front gate to my housing complex.
I don’t really know whether to call this a house or an apartment. There are three or four floors, but each floor is essentially a house with tons of space, multiple bathrooms, and everything you expect a house to have. So far, every other host-family home that I’ve been into has been the same idea. There is a gated driveway, a gated front entrance, another locked door to get into the building, then the door to our home/apartment/thing. There is a guard across the road and I think his job is to watch who comes and goes. Actually, there are guards everywhere in the city, but I haven’t seen them do much except stand in doorways with batons and/or guns. They give the appearance of safety but I’ve heard you can’t trust them because they’re only responsponsible to whomever pays them. So mostly I avoid eye contact.
Anyway, I swear the road is super steep.
These pictures are from my first weekend here, when we went to el Centro Historico de Quito (the historic district). We went to one big church and the basilica. The first picture is the first church, and the rest are from the basilica. A man working at the basilica gave us tour of the catacombs under the church where people are still buried. There’s space for thousands of people in the catacombs and people are continually being buried there. Then we climbed up the towers to see all around Quito. In the picture with the two square towers, we were under the clock on the left. Then we went over to the small, pointy tower where it looks like people shouldn’t go. It was a really nice day to see the city, it was kind of cloudy but we still had a really great view.
So apparently I didn’t knock on wood after that last post because I came home from our trip to the beach with quite the intestinal infection thing. It was not pleasant, but antibiotics work quickly and everything’s back to normal. As far as I know, I didn’t make any mistakes with food, I probably just got some fish that wasn’t super fresh or something.
Anyway, the Pacific Ocean is pretty great. I’d never been in it and we had a really great experience. It was cloudy off and on all weekend, but that was fine because when the sun comes out down here, you know it! They took us to a couple really beautiful resort-type beaches, hired boats to cruise us around and pull us around in big tubes (my arms are still sore) and found some really delicious coastal food for us (lots of fish and shrimp). The resort we stayed at was nice, we had a pool even though we didn’t really use it, and the lodgings were comfortable.
It’s really humid at the coast and even on the cloudy days I’d say it was 85 degrees at least. It was certainly warm enough to walk around in just a swim suit all day and be comfortable. The water was super warm, which is nice since Lake Michigan never quite gets warm enough for me. The salt water is kind of gross, you can definitely taste it, but it wasn’t bad enough to keep me out of the water.
On the drive home, we stopped at a place called Mindo, which is in the mountains, but not as high as Quito. It’s kind of a cloud forest thing with really lush plants and lots of birds. We had lunch there, but in a few weeks, I think a small group of us is going to go back to Mindo for a weekend for river rafting, zip-lining, and other forest things. After seeing it for an hour or so, I’m excited to go back.
In other news, hopefully tomorrow we’re going to the soccer (futbol) game. It’s the beginning of the world cup, Ecuador barely squeaked in, and they’re playing Argentina, I think. Our travel agent was going to be getting us tickets, but we still haven’t found out for sure because he, like everyone else here, thinks in South American time, which is to say they all just think that everything will fall into place at some point. We’re still stuck in US time, which means we would really like to nail down a plan. Either way, I hope it works out for us, it’s going to be really exciting. I’ll try my best not to get crushed in a riot.
Anyway, good night all. I miss you and I’m thinking about you all and wishing you could experience a little bit of the magic here in the mountains.
Hey everyone,
Sorry there’s no new pictures yet. I’ve been busy with things and not in the mood to fiddle.
Here’s what’s happening. Starting tomorrow afternoon, we have the first of three university-sponsored trips. We’re leaving the university and driving to the coast. We’ll be there until late Sunday morning. We’ll be at a hotel on or near the beach, swimming and lounging and hanging out. The university is covering all the costs and doing all the work for us. Actually, we’ve already payed for everythingwhen we payed for the trip, but I’m just going to pretend this is a free trip. We’ll get to try out all the local food (lots of sea food) and spend a lot of time in the sun very near to the equator. (Don’t worry, I have heavy-duty sunscreen) Because this is a university trip and we’re under their responsiblity, we won’t be going out at night. This is mostly fine with me, I don’t need to see every bar in Ecuador, but I also don’t want to be trapped inside. Either way, I’m sure it will be fine.
Also this week, we met with a travel agent (muy guapo) about a trip to the Galapagos Islands. There are four of us who want to go together so we went to see about tickets. It looks like we’ll be going for four days total (which includes travel time) but you live on a boat and they take you around to the different islands and guide you around. It’s going to be a little expensive, especially compared to our other trips, but this is probably the closest I’ll ever get to them, and probably the cheapest it will ever be, so I feel like I have to go.
Also at the travel agent’s, we learned about Mindo, a town on a river where you can tube down the river, climb into the canopy, take a zipline through the forest, and lots of other cool things, so we’ll probably do that one weekend. We also might (probably will) go rafting through the jungle one weekend, and climb Cotopaxi, one of the volcanoes here on a different weekend. Combine this with two other university trips (one to the jungle, one to a different place in the mountains) and I’m pretty sure we’ll be gone every weekend. In order to make time to see the actual Equator, we might have to go after school one day.
Mom and Dad, don’t worry, everything will be fairly inxpensive except the Galapagos, and besides, I’m in Ecuador. It’s a tiny country with a little bit of everything and we only have 9 weeks to see it all.
Just in case people were wondering, I haven’t been sick at all. My whole family drinks boiled water, even the dogs and the bunny, so I don’t have to worry about that. The food is good, lots of carbs, and my family is fairly Americanized, so things are different, but not outlandish. We eat rice every day, for meat we mostly eat chicken and sometimes tuna. My mama doesn’t eat beef, but the girls do so sometimes we have some, and they don’t eat pork at all. We go to the bakery often and the bread is Fantastico! They said that you need more carbs at this altitude because you use them faster. I don’t know if that’s true but I have a killer climb to get back to the house from the bus station, so I figure I can eat all the carbs I want.
This is getting long, but I imagine people have had some questions.
Besitos! Ciao!
Panorama theme by Themocracy
