Quito Corazon!

Yay for the weekend, and not doing school work!  Oops. 

This weekend has been quite full.  On Saturday, we got up relatively early and headed for campus to meet with about twenty other GAIAS kids and go to Otavalo.  Getting there was a bit of a challenge, simply because it took three different buses and almost three hours.  The scenery was beautiful though, so that mostly made up for the trip.  On Saturdays, the main streets of Otavalo overflow with vendors trying to sell all manner of things to tourists and Ecuadorians alike.  Haggling is expected, usually.  There was only one instance where a woman looked at me like I was crazy when I tried to haggle with her.  We wandered around the market and managed to lose almost everyone else.  It was incredibly difficult to stay together in the crowded streets, but we managed to at least stick with one other person most of the time.  After successfully spending most of the money we'd brought, Katie, Miranda, Maureen, Scott and I took a taxi up a nearby mountain to go to Parque Condor.  In the rehabilitation center for injured or abandoned birds of prey, there were all sorts of hawks and eagles and even an Andean Condor, the avian emblem of Ecuador.  The free flight show was amazing as well.  Birds of all sizes, from peregrine falcons to gray hawks, were allowed to fly around an outdoor ampitheater and over the city below us. 

Then, we walked back down the mountain to El Lechero, the magic tree situated on a hill by itself.  The view was great, although I'm not sure how much magic we felt. 

The trip back was even more arduous than the trip to Otavalo had been.  We took a taxi back to the bus station in Otavalo and got the bus to northern Quito.  Then, we managed to miss the bus to Rio Coca, the main bus station in Quito.  We walked a little ways (there were seven of us at this point, so it was less sketch than it sounds, although it was dark by this time).  Then, we decided to catch a taxi to Rio Coca.  From there, we took a bus to Cumbaya.  In Cumbaya, we stopped to get a drink to end the night on a high note.  We asked for Pilsners, the most popular beer of Ecuador.  The waitress brought us five enormous bottles of beer.  We drank every bit of them.  Finally, I took a taxi home in the dark by myself.  It was a bit disconcerting, but the driver was nice and I made it home safely. 

Today, I was able to sleep in a bit.  Then, I got up and headed out to meet some friends to go to un juego de futbol (soccer game).  Mateo, one of the buddies, took us.  It was great!  The crowd was so much better than it ever is at soccer games back home.  We all bought Quito jerseys to wear for the game and joined in on the cheers as best we could.  Our favorite was the song "Oooooooh, Quito Corazon!  Corazon! Corazon!  Quito Corazon!"  Over all, the game was a lot of fun.  Afterwards, I hung out with Katie and Miranda at the hotel where ten of the girls in the program are staying.  We attempted to climb the mountain behind the house and failed.  Now, I'm home and facing a mountain of article reading.  : (  Not super excited.  I guess studying abroad has to contain some studying. 

Papallacta

So, the last couple of days have been pretty boring.  We started classes on Wednesday, so the last three days have pretty much been going to class and eating lunch on campus with everyone.  I have two classes.  One is Techniques of Marine Research with Luis Vinueza.  He is really cool and very laid back.  He lives on Galapagos, so he has told us much about the islands already.  I have also sort of been taking a free Spanish class in the afternoons, but the class is being taught at a much lower level than I think will help me.  We are pretty much back at the very beginning, although moving quickly.  I may or may not stick with it. 
Anyway, the fun returned today when all the marine ecology kids decided to go to Papallacta (a town with thermal springs) after class.  All ten of us caught the bus into the Oriente (the western area of Ecuador).  Eventually, we got off the bus and realized we had no clue where we were going.  There were signs to Papallacta, but no indication of how to get there.  So, a couple of the guys went to ask some people at a tire shop.  We ended up hiring one of them to drive us to Papallacta in his pick-up truck.  And yes, there were ten of us, so six people rode in the bed of the truck.  I did so on our return trip to Cumbaya (Carlos took us the entire way in his truck).  So, we made it to the hotsprings, but not before it had started raining.  Rain here is freezing cold, so we were all shivering by the time we got into the warm water.  It felt amazing!  On our way out, we met the other GAIAS kids coming in.  They went on a field trip today to an alpine forest and hot springs, which apparently meant they ended up at Papallacta.  We eventually made it safely back to Cumbaya after our impromptu trip across the country. 

Oh, and on a sidenote: we had soup and tomales tonight for dinner and it was amazing!  The tomales are pretty much corn and chicken cooked together inside a giant leaf.  Yum!

Head in the Clouds

Today was our last day of freedom before classes officially start for the semester.  We took advantage of that and took the bus from the station near USFQ to the Rio Coca station in Quito.  We then took a taxi (with a nice Ecuadorian man negotiating the price for us) to the teleferico at the base of the Pichincha volcano.  The cable cars take you about 13,400 feet up the volcano, where it feels like you can almost touch the sky.  We got up there and then hiked up a trail that goes even higher up the side of Pichincha.  Eventually, four of us got waylaid by a bunch of horses while the others continued up the trail.  We discovered that it only cost $10 to take a ride, so we forked over the money and went horseback riding up the volcano.  We rode until we could clearly see Ruca Pichincha, the oldest of the three craters of the volcano.  It was one of those unexpected surprises that make a day fantastic! 
After sadly saying good-bye to the horses, we continued up the trail a bit.  Then, the clouds moved in, covering parts of the trail in front of us and also behind us.  It was incredible walking through them and watching them swirl around you.  Then, as happens so often in the afternoons here, it started to rain (apparently it hailed farther up the trail).  As we listened to the steadily approaching thunder, we decided that rather than continuing upward and risking being struck by lightening we would go back down to the teleferico.  Everyone made it back safely and we rode the cable cars back down to Quito altitude.  Finally, the ten of us took a van back to Cumbaya and somehow scrounged together enough money to buy lunch (it's difficult when you are told not to carry much money but have no clue how much you'll spend each day). 

GringoLandia

Llamas!!!!

The GAIAS UNC students at the equator

Jacinto, the dog in our house

Today is my birthday.  I turned 22 today, far away from home and my family.  It was hard.  This may have been the most difficult day I've had yet in Ecuador.  But it just serves to show what a great group of people I am here with.  Rikke and I went to the campus this morning to meet a group of other students and go into Quito.  We ended up not being able to meet up with the people we'd been trying to meet up with.  Instead, we found Erick and Gale and the four of us took a taxi into the Old Town.  We stopped at El Parque Eljido (I think I spelled that right), where there was a sort of market/ art fair going on.  Then, we walked through the city and enjoyed the day.  We ate lunch at this little restaurant inside of a cultural center and then got cake and coffee for my birthday at a bakery down the street.  At this point it started hailing, just to show how crazy the weather is here.  It can go from freezing in the mornings and evenings to super warm during the day.  And then, of course, there are the occassional freak hailstorms. 

As for the title of this post, GringoLandia: Yesterday when we were touring the city, we walked into one of the churches (one with gold almost everywhere on the inside) and passed some Ecuadorians heading outside.  As we went by them, I heard one of them exclaim "Gringo Landia!"  There were about 22 of us, so this was probably an appropriate response to the crowd of gringos he met.  It was funny. 

Plaza Grande in the center of the Old Town

My Arrival in Quito

Okay, so our plane didn't get in until almost midnight (Ecuador time) on Thursday.  At that point we had to go through customs, which took forever.  Then, I found out that my host family couldn't come pick me up.  So, it's almost 2 AM and I've been traveling all day and the GAIAS representative has no clue what to do with me.  She ended up taking me to a hotel, where I spent the night by myself (Mom, don't freak out).  It was a bit scary to be in the middle of a strange city and alone at a hotel, but I was tired enough that I watched a bit of tv in Spanish and then went to sleep. 
The next morning Eugenia (the GAIAS rep) came to pick me up and took me to USFQ for orientation.  The 44 GAIAS students and the rest of the international students spent almost all day listening to people tell us how dangerous the city is and then what a great place it is to visit.  Eventually, I stopped taking them seriously.  It was also pretty difficult to stay awake during some of the talks later in the day, as I still hadn't recovered from my harrowing journey to Ecuador.  I was very glad to meet Rikke, the GAIAS student from Norway, during lunch (a 3 course lunch that I probably shouldn't have finished).  She is staying at the same house as me.  At the end of the day, I met Dolores, our host mom.  She took us home and showed us the house and where we would be staying.  It's a beautiful house and we have a little house off the main house to ourselves.  The main house is pictured above.  We also met Alejandra, Dolores' daughter.  She seems very nice and speaks very good English.  Dolores, not so much, but that should help us practice our Spanish. 

Today we were taken on a tour of the Old Town in Quito and also to La Mitad del Mundo (the equator).  It was very interesting walking around the city and seeing the gorgeous churches everywhere and all the people.  We had fruit juice at a small stand (passion fruit and strawberry for me) and at lunch at El Buho.  Again, there was a whole lot of food that I didn't end up being able to finish.  I did manage to eat dessert, though.  Torte de tres leches.  It was yummy.  The equator museum was cool.  Our guide took us through some history about the native peoples of Ecuador and demonstrated what happens at the equator.  We got back to USFQ around 5 and I somehow managed to get passport photos taken at a store nearby.  Then, we got frozen yogurt before Dolores and her boyfriend came.  Now, we are relaxing at home, where we have wifi!  Even though it is only around 7 pm here, I feel like bedtime is going to come very soon. 

Reasons

Sometimes it seems like the desire to go to Ecuador appeared out of the blue.  When I learned about study abroad during orientation as an incoming freshman, the places I wanted to visit were South Africa (because of all the amazing animals there) and Australia/ New Zealand (for the animals and also the amazing landscapes, as seen in LOTR, for example).  The reason I decided to study abroad in Ecuador and, more specifically, the Galapagos Islands is actually very simple, though.  I took a class on the Galapagos Islands last year in order to satisfy that annoying Beyond the North Atlantic general education requirement.  The class was a lot of fun and I found the places we talked about very interesting.  The Galapagos Islands are a place we've always learned about in biology classes as one of the birthplaces of that science.  Eventually, I decided that there was probably no better place for a biology major than those islands, certainly especially true for marine ecology (which is the program I am taking classes through).  I can visit those other places later in life (I hope), but for the perfect place to be both a tourist and a student I can think of nowhere better than Ecuador and Galapagos.

The Beginning

Well, it's the night before I leave for Ecuador.  This whole thing seems so surreal, like it can't possibly be happening.  I decided that I wanted to study abroad and started the application process at the beginning of March and now, three months and a ton of paperwork later, it's about to begin.  I'm so excited about getting to live in Quito and the Galapagos Islands for four months and experience the culture and the incredible environmental atmosphere of the area.  I'm also freaking out a bit on the inside.  I've never been away from home for this long and I've never really traveled much on my own before.  It's a big step, and one I feel ready to take.  However, that hasn't stopped me from worrying about every little thing I can.  I've worried about getting through customs and about whether or not I've brought everything I needed to (I have two bags and my backpack, all of which are packed full, so I sure hope I have everything I need).  I've worried about whether or not my host family will like me and if I'll be able to communicate effectively with them.  I've worried about pretty much everything you could think of to worry about when taking a four month educational journey to another country.  I suppose I just need to step back, take a deep breath, and let God take the reins.  Not overthinking every little thing would probably help too.  Anyway, I'm going to try to blog about my trip along the way (hopefully I can actually get internet over there).  We'll see if it works.  :)   Tomorrow at 1-something I will be on a plane bound for Miami and shortly after that on one headed for Quito.  I will meet my host family at the airport and get settled in to spend the next four months in Ecuador.  As I've told all my family and friends, I'll be home for Christmas.  And now I have that song stuck in my head.