Mi fin tiempo en Quito

March 8th 2010

What a weekend. Its Sunday night right now and I am SO exhustanted. Its 8:00 and I am ready to sleep. While after I eat dinner that is. Where to begin…
So Friday, after a loooong day of classes, yes I have classes here, with tests and papers, although I know some people are judging me for never doing school work… was Taylor’s, my cousin who lives below me, 21st birthday!

Her family is amazing and got her a ridiculously huge thing of flowers, party hats balloons, a huge cake! The works! It was so cute! I came down to help them decorate while taylor was not allowed out of her room…Finally, we some of our friends arrived they let her out! It was quite the party; we sang, danced, pushed her face in the cake, spanked her with the belt 21 times, drank wine, and ate lots of food! After the party we headed out to dance for the rest of the night!
The next day Kelly and I ran pretty much to the other side of Quito to watch our friends’ track meet

Well first I never wrote about last weekend which was definitely worth writing about so first you shall get a small glimpse at last weekend before I elaborate on this weekend… (That was my cliff hanging so HAVE to read to the end to hear about this weekend).

Anyways last weekend we decided to go Mindo, Mindo is a city a lot like Banos, in the mountains but very jungly as well, with lots of adventure things to do…
So myself and 5 others were going leave at 8ish and take a bus…BUT somehow our Ecuadorian friends we met at the beach during carnival, enter the situation and offered to drive us…

So the next morning we all met around 8:30-9ish and walked to a busy street where our “friends” were going to pick us up… after about 30 minutes of sitting on the sidewalk , we started thinking the bus would have been a better choice, also we were sitting next to a busy car repair shop and I’m pretty sure everyone working there was very confused why 6 gringa girls were sitting on the curb in front of their shop, probably thought we had nothing better to do… anyways about 40 minutes later, after many difficult to understand phone calls, ONE, TINY car shows up, with 2 of our friends… that leaves 3 seats for SIX people!

We had already committed to waiting for over an hour for this car, so we decided to just get in and said they had to find another friend with another car… after many unsuccessful phone calls we were on our way… Mindo is 2 hours away which is a VERY long time to have EIGHT people in a very SMALL car… but its Ecuador, you can make anything work…

We stopped in some little town for some famous food that “the whole world knows you have to stop if you go to mindo” So the guys bought two plates for us to share… then we were on our way!
We first took a cable car across the mountain to go explore and swim in some waterfalls…

Then we went ZIP lining! 10 ziplines for 10 dollars! When we got to the ziplines we were all freezing and soaking due to the pouring rain.. So Edison one of our Ecuadorian friends who drove us, bought us all empanadas and coffee which hit the spot!

We then all suited up in our harnesses and hit the zip lines! First normal… then superman… then butterfly (upside down, hands out, guide behind) then bat, completely upside down by yourself! It was so exhilarating!
We all packed back into the cars while the boys bought us some road snack for the way home… part of the reason we wanted to go with guys in the first place was to be forced to speak in Spanish the whole day, so on the way home we all shared first kiss stories in Spanish it was quite amusing…
The boys made us promise we would go out with them that night, so we got home showered/changed/ate and headed to a discotecha… its nice having Ecuadorian friends who not only have cars (so we don’t have to take taxis) but also just know where to go…

We ended up staying out until 4-4:30ish… which taylor was not happy about because we were suppose to go on a family trip at 8 the next morning…
Due to all my college training I can function on very little sleep, so at 7:30, three and half hours after I hit the hay I was up again headed somewhere with the whole family, dog, grandparents, aunts, uncles and some cousins…

I am still not completely sure where went.. but it was this huge mansion thing being restored, which they tried to convince me that my grandparents owned , to which im still not sure if they were lying or not… regardless it was super sweet and we took about a billion pictures which if I ever get internet on my computer again I will put up… it was kind of fun to be the only American with a group of Ecuadorians that big…
After we headed to lunch in cotocachi, which I had no clue I would be living in soon….
Anyways back to this weekend…

So Friday was Taylor’s birthday… Saturday Kelly and I ran to the track meet and then decided to take a bus home… unfortuatly we were in new part of town and I kind of just assumed I knew what I was doing … so kel got off the bus at her street and stayed on hoping the bus would coutinue on and go past my street but I was so wrong… before I knew the bus was headed towards the airport and we were in some tunnel thing were you can’t get off the bus.. by the time I finally got off the bus I was on way other side of airport.. normally this wouldn’t be a huge a problem but the fact that I was suppose to be home no later than 3 for a family party at my house and it was 2:55 did create a problem… so my only option was to run.. normally I love to run but running on busy quito streets is not the most fun..

Anyways I made it home within about 15 minutes, dripping in sweat to my host mothers disdain but luckily they hadn’t served lunch yet..
Again I got seated at the kids table but it was ok because my cousin was fun to talk to and taylor was there too, we had a special soup they normally serve durning holy week which was delicious!

After lunch everyone rested for a bit and before long my mom told me to get ready for loco hora .. I thought she was kidding but she was right on…
Before long all the furniture was moved out of the sala and everyone had masks on face and whistles in mouth… my uncle was even going around spraying silver hair spray on people…

Everyone danced CRAZY (hence the loco) for far more than an hour… grandparents included… I was laughing for pretty much two straight hours, finally around 7 or 8 the craziness began to settle and I was able to rest for about an hour before going out with Ecuadorian friends to dance the night away once more…