Santa Lucia Lodge Quito

... there before getting some information before strolling a street further to McDonalds. We haven’t visited McDonalds since Buenos Aires and so it seemed like a special treat to Jody and Niamh to have a Chicken Burger, $1.60 each. It looked like a reasonable size burger too. We grabbed a taxi to the Plaza San Francisco to a place where we had previously visited for a menu de dia. Christie and had a menu de ...

... is, if you know how to negotiate. As we only had two hours there before all the students, Maria, Emily and I were to go to a restaurant and then on to other sites, I decided only to buy something I’ve wanted for a long time, the pan flute, and then to come back to the market on a later occasion to spend some proper time there. The rest of the day we went to a waterfall, to a music shop to see how they make the commercial instruments and to one of the many big lakes that ...

... had a view of all of Quito, we also saw several Andean peaks poking up from behind the hills in which Quito is nestled. After the requisite pictures, we began our descent, thankfully arriving on terra firma safe and sound.
What we expected to be a 20-minute climb for some nice pictures turned out to be a 5-hour adventure.

Stay tuned for our next death-defying adventure! Next time, probably not in a church.

Hasta luego!

... 10 days, into and out of the heat and cold. In any case, we'll go and see what happens.

I'm very cheered by the fact that all over the world, day after day, there are people performing the same 'beginning of the day' chores, the sweeping and/or washing of their abode, either at work or at home. This activity transcends class and culture, and since we've been in South America, gender. Can you believe it? I had to come to macho South America to ...

... your passport from the Center of the World.

But to see the indegenous equator, you need to visit Inti Nan. It is a reproduction of a pre-Inca shrine on a hill, (about 1000 yrs. old) directly in line with the Inti Nan. When checked by satellite (14 of them), this is the true equator. There are samples of native work and artifacts. Also some unique things you can do only on the equator. They have this bucket of water they drain ...

... were cutting it fine owing to the 25 minute wait for the taxi) three-wheeled 'tuk-tuk' type contraption powered by a little old Ecuadorian dude's legs. We arrived just in time for our 9.15 bus only to discover that it was, in fact, a 9am bus. Curses.

This debacle necessitated a two-part bus journey, the latter part of which was notable two things. Firstly, for being probably the best bus in Ecuador - not a difficult feat, but welcome ...

so, justin and jennifer are leaving early tomorrow morning to head back to the states...there graduation from med school is this sunday! so, as a last horray, we got ice cream in the old town. first we went to their favorite ice cream place. then we went where i wanted to go...heladería san agustín. the alvarez ...

... needed to get a bus to take me past the new city to the part of town just before the airport. I still wasn't sure about the buses and which directions they were going. So I took pot luck and hoped that I got on the right bus. But the bus took me somewhere not even close to the bank. I figured that I would more likely find the bank that I needed to get to, by walking there instead of relying on a random bus. So I took out my map and worked out where ...