Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all had wonderful delish dinners. Luckily, Deirdre´s parents paid for us to have a fancy meal at a restaurant downtown Quito, which is probably the last of those until Christmas. Luckily, the $3 dinners I have grown accustomed to are just as filling, though in no way compare in taste.

I am thankful for so many things at this time: my family, friends back home, having the opportunity to travel with Dee, wearing the same clothes over and over, not wearing makeup, experiencing at least 20 new things/day, and for hostels and the new friends we meet at them, thoguh I am most grateful for my parents´support for my current adventure!

Anyway, I wanted to write a quick blog, since I´m off to the Galapagos tomorrow morning bright and early, and I´m sure I´ll have tons to write about after I´m back from that extravagant adventure. Our past 4 days in Quito have been fantastic. It´s funny because I still am not over how FOREIGN Ecuador sounds. I mean, who would have thought I´d ever be spending 2 1/2 weeks in ECUADOR?! hehe. So yea, it´s been really cool having a home base and just exploring and getting to know one city, instead of zooming around day after day. After spending a few days here, I´m starting to notice the smaller details, like how the 80 year-old indiginous people wandering around carry what looks like 50 lbs on their backs! Poor elderly of Ecuador! Also, it´s a HUGE pain to try and get change for a $10 or especially a $20 bill anywhere! I don´t understand why the ATMs give out bills in this amount if it´s nearly impossible to use them anywhere! Anyway, on Tuesday, we went on a mission to the Equator. It´s only 22 km outside of Quito, so how could we miss it!?  Lonely Planet suggested going to the less touristy museum instead of the Disneyland-esque one and we followed their advice. The museum we ended up at is the site of the actual equator (00.00 latitude calculated on the GPS), so I imagine it´s loads better anyway. In every other country where the equator falls (Kenya, Indonesia, etc) the terrain is all forest, whereas in Ecuador there are mountains. Therefore, in all the other places, the indiginous people had to build pyramids in order to calculate time and the calendar based on the sun, but in Ecuador, they had natural pyramids from the mountains. The indiginous people here created all sorts of monuments to the sun, which are in exact angles of 23 1/2 degrees, which they figured out is the tilt of the earth. Anyway, our museo guide walked us through multiple exhibits. Turns out that on the equator, you can balance an egg on the head of a nail (I did this and earned myself a certificate) and water falls straight down through a drain instead of swirling in one direction or another. Also, I attempted to walk heal to toe on the equator line with my eyes closed and arms out, and it´s extremely difficult to balance. I could actually feel the gravity pulling me from side to side-sort of a drunk feeling. The museum also included some Amazon tribe huts and homes and burial grounds. This one tribe uses bull testicles as a lunch box and dog skin as a drum top (supposedly it sounds the best). Poor perro! Another hut included a home for cuis (guinea pigs), which they eat for a delish snack. We also learned how to make a shrunken head- I took notes, since I´m sure this skill will come in handy very soon. Before we left, we managed to get our passports stamped at the Equator as well! Loving these passport stamps.

That evening, we took a Salsa lesson ($5/an hour) and I was pretty terrible, but it was seriously fun. I looked like an idiot most of the time, but luckily it was just me and Dee in the lesson, so it wasn´t toooo traumatizing.   

Yesterday, we took a 4 hour bus ride to Baños for the night with two guys we met at our hostel in Quito (Ravi (English) and Scott (Aussie)). Dee and I spent the evening camped out at Casa Hood, this hippie vegetarian cafe, at a table surrounded by cushions and pillows, and read for about four hours. I finished The Motorcycle Diaries and traded it in for The Time Traveller´s Wife, based on Katie´s sobbing recommendation in front of the Field Museum when we were in Chicago. At night we just chilled and played the card game shithead (kind of like the British version of the game Asshole), which Ali taught me in Oz, but I had forgotten how to play since then.

This morning we had pancakes for breakfast, which were pretty disgusting, and then rented some bikes for $5 for the day and went biking along the waterfall route through the mountains in Baños. We were supposed to go the full 3 1/2 hour route, but it started pouring so we flagged down a bus (they put our bikes on TOP of the bus) and headed back to Baños to catch our bus back to Quito. Today Dee started intensely teaching me Español and would only use Spanish words, so I had to use context clues to figure out the meanings. She´s a wonderful professor!

Basically, I´m lovin Ecuador (which gets it´s name based on the equator)  and the people are all soo friendly. This trend is continuing for all of the Latin people. Oh, well, except for the ones who keep trying to steal stuff from us! I think the other day on the street, a guy tried to grab my sunnies off my head and today the guy behind me on the bus pulled my day-pack (which was stupidly on the floor) toward him and opened it before I noticed what was happening. Lucky that A, I noticed, and B, there was nothing of value in there anyway. Definitely have to be on guard at ALL TIMES!!!!

Everyone keep your fingers crossed that I´ll get some good snorkeling time with the penguins and marine iguanas of the Galapagos! Back on the 30th!

xoxo