Don't Worry, There's Caution Tape To Hold Us Back

I had alfalfa juice today. I'll give you until the end of this entry to guess whether or not it was as good as the Quaker juice I wrote about last week.

I had a sweet weekend rolling around Quito, and to quantify the sweetness, there are over 150 pictures on my camera from this Saturday and Sunday alone. I don't know when those will get up, but maybe tonight? We'll see. Check back soon for some sweet pictures.

Saturday morning instead of heading to the Orchid Exposition, Abuela Joven (that means young grandma... she has problems with age) woke me up early and said that it was a cloudless, sunny day, and perfect for the Telefériqo, which is the cable car system that takes you up to the top of Mt. Pichincha. We went and picked up Courtney, a girl from my group also skipping Baños, and headed to the mountain. The views of the city and the mountains both in the car going up and from the top of the mountain were absolutely incredible. It was one of those moments where it was simply impossible to capture the scenery with a camera--of course, I tried, over and over, but for those of you who really want to know how beautiful it is on top of Pichincha, you really just have to do it yourself. For those of you who are interested, but not THAT interested, I'll put up a lot of pictures. In any case, it was incredibly cool to be on top of Pichincha, 4,100 meters up, to overlook the city of Quito with the sun shining, and to be several thousand feet above the planes coming in for landing. And then once we passed the huge sign that said "WARNING--Don't leave this area! If you do, you're responsible for yourself and accept all risks," it was really cool to be on the edge of a cliff overlooking a beautiful valley, separated from certain doom only by a single strand of caution tape. I didn't spend long there, but I had to get some pictures....

Saturday evening, Abuela Joven came home and told me that the 6 1/2 year old daughter of one of her sons has to learn a poem in English for some competition in between her elementary school and some other local schools, and she wondered if I would be willing to go over and make sure her pronunciation was good. It was amusing to me to hear exactly which words she had trouble with. She did great, with a few exceptions. She couldn't say words like "noisy," "it," and "won't" to save her life. Though I guess for a 6 1/2 year old reading an English poem, if those are her only problems, she's doing great. After we got done correcting most of her problems (we never managed to correct "noisy"), they took me out to show me colonial Quito at night. Really cool. The oldest street in Quito, built by the colonial Spaniards, is now a pretty popular place to hang out on Friday and Saturday nights, and it was really cool to see the original colonial-style buildings housing art galleries, discotecas, and coffeeshops.

Sunday morning after church, Abuela Joven, Mateo, Courtney and I again decided to forgo the Orchid Exposition based on reports of 500 people already waiting in line outside to get in. Instead, we drove to the Mitad del Mundo--the Equator monument. It's referred to as Mitad del Mundo (middle of the earth) because referring to it as el Ecuador in a country called Ecuador would be unnecessarily confusing. So we went to Mitad del Mundo to see the huge monument erected in 1936 by the Spanish and French and get our photos taken on the Equator. Fortunately, we had already been tipped that this huge monument to the Equator, and the amusement-park type village that surrounds it, is actually..... not in the right spot. I believe another French team came here in the mid-1980s with GPS systems, and realized that the huge, celebrated, built-up-for-tourism monument-village dedicated to the Mitad del Mundo is actually about 200 yards south of the real Equator. We got our pictures taken at both the fake, touristy, classic photo-op monument, and also the smaller, real one. Just to prove the authenticity of the second smaller place, they did demonstrations.... a tub of water drained right on the line went straight down without any swirling, but 10 feet south of their line it swirled clockwise and 10 feet north of their line it swirled counterclockwise. Yeah, I took videos. It was sweet. I also got my passport stamped from the Equator. You know you're jealous.


In the Telefériqo car, looking back at the station








Courtney is very safe here. After all, there's caution tape.






From the top of Pichincha... note the tiny little chapel in the bottom left.


The Church of San Francisco


La Virgen de Quito seen from the plaza in front of the Church of San Francisco


Imploded caldera of Mt. Pululahua




This sign is completely incorrect.


Straddling the REAL Equator.


The sunset over Quito Sunday night.... perfect ending to the weekend.

And I know you're probably sick of all the pictures featuring the dadgum mountains. You are definitely just gonna have to deal.

In other news, I forgot to mention that a large group of us went to the park to play some soccer last week. It was pretty fun, but it was torture.... because we got there, and a large group of Ecuadorians were trying to play baseball. I wanted soooo badly to play with them, to go over and show them how it's done. It wouldn't have been hard either, because they were about as good at baseball as we were at soccer. The irony of the gringos playing soccer and the Ecuadorians playing baseball was huge.

Also, to whom did I promise I would smuggle back some hot Latino chicas? Even if you didn't mention to that to me before, just let me know if you're interested and I'll see what I can do.

Alfalfa juice is disgusting.

SHOUT-OUTS GO TO: My parents, and Horse.

From Ecuador,
Andy