Hot dog!

Halfway already?

Indeed I am over halfway through my Ecuadorian journey, and it’s pretty hard to believe. Time has absolutely flown by, and with spring break next week the second half of my stay is undoubtedly going to go even faster.

Last weekend I laid low in Quito after a busy few weekends. On Friday a few friends came over, and we attempted to make brownies. Sadly, however, we couldn’t really figure out how to work the oven. After 4 hours of semi-baking they emerged burnt on top and goopy/funky tasting in the middle. We even asked my host sister how to work it (my host mom was still at work) and she had no idea. She had no idea how to work her own oven. I think that speaks to the amount of work she does around the house (nada). Brownies aside, we had a nice night of chatting, watching a movie, and eating the best hot dogs on this side of the equator. Right by my house there is this tiny little hot dog place that is seriously famous throughout Quito. It is only open after 4 pm, but is open into the wee hours of the morning and is ALWAYS busy. The dogs themselves aren’t really that great, but they pile on so much crap that they end up being the perfect fix for a late-night craving. I don’t even know all that they put on them –some combination of tomatoes, onions, ketchup, mustard, a special sauce (my friend’s host mom told us it was pineapple apparently) and to top it all off, potato chips. It’s amazingly bad for you and amazingly delicious all at once. I’m not even a big hot dog fan, but these things are irresistible. And best of all, you literally just stand on the sidewalk eating them with all the other hot-dog lovers.

Saturday we checked out this cute little movie theater near my house called “Ocho y media”. It’s really small and has this bohemian-Madisonian feel to it, so of course, all of us Badgers absolutely loved it. It has a cute little café and two small movie theaters, and shows both mainstream and indie films. It’s probably the first place I’ve been to in Quito that really made me miss Madison and all of its cafes and college campus feel.

School is picking up a bit, as all of my professors are trying to squeeze in exams and papers before Semana Santa (Holy Week—spring break). I had two papers due last week, and I have a test and a presentation coming up on Tuesday. Classes aren’t as difficult as Madison, but they aren’t a walk in the park either. I still have a ton of reading for all of them as well as tests and papers on a regular basis. Considering I’m not working down here, however, I feel like I have a lot more free time than in Madison. Last week I decided to get my lazy butt in gear and went to volunteer at the church I have been going to. They offer English lessons for people in the community for 25 cents, so I volunteered as a teacher. It was actually a lot of fun, and I’m hoping to make it more of a regular thing while I’m here.

I leave on Thursday for Peru (yikes!), so lots of preparing will certainly be happening this weekend. I’m going to be hiking and camping for four days with four other girls that I met down here, visiting Machu Picchu, and exploring Cusco for a few days. It should be a blast, and totally different than any vacation I have ever taken. Definitely pray for safety and strength, I’m certainly going to need both next week. J

Moms and Mindo are super lindo!

Sorry for the lack of updates, it has been a crazy couple of weeks.

Two weeks ago my mom came to visit for a few days, and we had a great time exploring Quito and just spending time together. She got in late Wednesday night, so we pretty much went straight to the hotel and crashed. It had been raining in Quito for the past five days, so I hoped the weekend would bring better weather. Not so much. It rained Thursday and Friday, as well as Saturday night. We did, however, still manage to do pretty much everything there is to do in Quito. We explored the beautiful old town—including eating the best fruit salad I have ever had, sipping a beer in a café on one of the plazas, and walking through a beautiful old church. In a brief moment of nice weather we went up Quito’s western volcano, Pinchincha, in the Teleferiqo (a covered ski lift type thing that takes you up the side of the mountain). The views from the top were absolutely gorgeous. We also walked through one of Quito’s biggest parks, La Carolina, and explored some botanical gardens. And of course, we did plenty of shopping. It was a great weekend.

The Teleferiqo-very touristy, but with views of the city that can't be beat

This past weekend I journeyed to Mindo with three friends. And while it wouldn’t be difficult to write an entire book about our three day excursion, I’ll try and squeeze it into a few paragraphs.
The adventure began Friday afternoon when we reached where we thought the bus station was, only to find it had been moved all the way to the north side of town a few months earlier. Our bus was scheduled to leave in 10 minutes, and there was no way we could make it there on time. We decided to go anyway, however, on the off chance that there was another bus to Mindo that night. Sadly, we had missed the last bus by about half an hour. When we reached the bus window, there was an Ecuadorian woman talking to the ticket agent about getting to Mindo. She had missed the bus as well and was trying to figure out another way to get there. After her little chat, she turned to us and asked us if we wanted to come with her to Mindo on this indirect route she found. She said she really didn’t want to go alone, but knew how to get there. What help she thought four gringas would be I have no idea, but the proposal was there nonetheless. Horror movies flashed through my mind as I pondered this woman’s proposal. She looked nice enough—like a mom, actually, so we threw our arms up and thought what the heck, let’s do it. We hopped on one bus that took us to a roundabout on the very outskirts of town, where we got off to hail another bus. The woman said we just needed to get on a bus headed for Los Bancos, a small town a little west of Mindo. Within 15 minutes a bus passed and we got on. Two hours later (by this time it was dark) the bus dropped us four girls, our new Ecuadorian mom and a nun literally on the side of the road. Waiting there were a few camionetas (trucks). The two Ecuadorians got into the front of one while us four girls piled into the back. Yes, we literally rode in the back of a truck, hitchhiking style. It seemed a little more legit than hitchhiking, since the trucks were waiting there to take people down to Mindo. The nun also made us feel a little more comfortable. I mean, nobody would hurt a nun, right? We rode in the back of this truck for about half an hour and finally reached Mindo. It was crazy, probably pretty dangerous, but definitely an adventure.

Mindo is tiny, really just one main road, so it wasn’t hard to find a hostal. One of our friends had gone to Mindo the past weekend and recommended we stay with a guy named Santiago. Turns out Santiago basically runs Mindo. We only had to ask one person and they immediately knew Santiago and his hostal, which sat at the end of the main road. The hostal was clean and super cheap, and Santiago basically took us under his wing for the weekend. He hooked us up with ziplining, tubing, hiking to a waterfall, and great food all at the rates Ecuadorians would pay (if we were alone in finding these excursions we probably would have paid a lot more than we did). He shuttled us around town and called us his “hijas” (daughters), and I swear everyone in town knew who he was. He also had this beautiful black lab called Negro that loyally followed him everywhere, and was definitely one of the healthiest looking dogs I have seen in Ecuador. Santiago told us that he was actually a vet, but since there wasn’t a high demand for his services in such a small town he was also certified as a guide. Guide, vet, basically mayor of Mindo by my estimations.

Ziplining through the canopy in Mindo-an awesome experience

While ziplining and tubing (and by tubing, I mean 8 giant black tubes tied together and thrown down a river with seriously Class 3 rapids—this was no lazy river my friends) were a blast, probably the biggest “adventure” of the weekend was our hike on Sunday. Santiago gave us directions to reach a waterfall, told us to eat a big breakfast, and sent us off on what turned out to be at least a 12 km hike. We literally hiked up one side of a mountain and down the other to reach this “waterfall” that really wasn’t all that impressive. The hike, however, was beautiful and it was nice to get some exercise. We even crossed a river on a device similar to the one in the picture. (The one in the picture was abandoned, and probably not really safe to use. Since it was a weekend of doing unsafe things, we thought we would go ahead and use it anyway.) On the way back, however, it began to rain pretty steadily. Most of our friends had told us that Mindo is pretty wet, but we had beautiful weather on Saturday so we didn’t really prepare for the downpour that Sunday afternoon brought. We walked for about 2 hours in the rain and finally reached our hostal, soaked to the bone. We had just enough time to change, grab some pizza from a great pizzeria in town, and jump on the bus (direct this time) back to Quito. Two hours later we were back on our home turf after one of the best weekend trips I have done so far. It’s a good thing someone is watching over us, however, as we never would have even made it to Mindo in the first place without a little blessing from above…