Life in Ecuador

Hi humans!! It's my second day in Ecuador, and I am very overwhelmed ... in some good ways, and some not so good ways. The flight to Ecuador was a lot easier than I thought. I have never flown internationally and I get confused really easily so I was very nervous about finding my gate, getting through customs, losing my bag, etc. But it was actually just very easy and very boring. I sat next to a little girl on my flight from Miami to Quito and she made me a beaded bracelet and then gave me a cough drop. I guess we really hit it off. She's such a good friend. But then I spit out the cough drop and left it on the seat when she wasn't looking because it tasted like gross cherry flavor. I'm so ungrateful.

After I landed and was waiting in the customs line, I started talking to an old guy who came to Ecuador with his wife for only TWO DAYS!! I asked why so short and he said that it would've cost him a couple hundred dollars to cancel his flight so they just came anyway. They live in Venezuela but are moving to Ecuador permanently in a few short months. Not sure why I'm telling you about his life story because it is very irrelevant. BUT, it is really good that I started talking to him because I was confused on some of the forms we had to fill out for customs, so I asked him to explain them to me. There was one question that asked if you were carrying over $10,000 with you, and if you were you had to tell them how much you had and then go talk to one of the officials. Well, being the smart person I am, I marked the box that said "yes." The guy was like "whaaaaa?!?!" ... and I said "What? I have more than $10.00".  WOW am I glad he noticed my mistake. It would have been very bad if they thought I had over $10,000 on me. oops.

Yesterday was our first full day. We woke up late so we didn't get to eat breakfast here at the hostel. So we got ready and walked down the street, ready to explore the city. Well we got one block away, saw all the different buses and tons of people, and turned right around. It was so intimidating. I just pictured us getting on the bus and never having any idea how to get home and then sleeping under a tree or in some alley way. I'm dramatic. So what. But there was a little panaderia on the corner so we stopped in to get some pan dulce, since we both love it. And we needed to get some change because we only had paper money. One of the ladies behind the counter was one of the people who had picked us up from the airport in the taxi the night before! She recognized us and was so sweet. It was fun to see a familiar face already. Ali got a piece of pan dulce, and as we were walking up the street to go back to the hostel I all of a sudden felt so nauseous. My feet and hands were all tingly and I just felt awful. She gave me a bite of her bread and I had to spit it out. So we walked back to the panaderia and bought a huge bottle of water. Once we were back in our room at the hostel and drinking water I felt a lot better. Quito is at a really high altitude, so I was just having some altitude sickness. We also hadn't eaten all day. We had dinner on the terrace that night and got invited to go clubbing with everyone. The hostel has a party bus that they take to this area called La Mariscal, which was explained to us by the taxi driver as "gringo landia" ... basically all white tourists go there. It actually looked cool, but we didn't want to go party with everyone, we wanted to do something way more hardcore ... READ! We are trying to read our books as fast as possible so that we can throw them away and have lighter backpacks.

Today was a craaazy day.  We ate breakfast on the terrace at our hostel, and then had a 2 hour spanish lesson.  The lesson went well and our teacher was so nice. We knew that we had to register our visas either today or tomorrow, so we actually asked our spanish teacher if she would go with us. No one at the Ministry of Migration (or whatever its called) speaks english, so we needed someone to translate for us. She said yes, and then we set out on the craziest day ever. We took a taxi to the Ministry place, where Jacki our spanish teacher pushed her little self through all the crowds of people to the very front and talked to the guard. He gave us a slip of paper saying everything we needed. So then we walked to get copies of all our documents, then we went a million places trying to find the international bank, then we made more copies, then we went back to the Ministry who was apparently in a "state of emergency".  But Jacki was awesome again and pushed through all the crowds and talked to the guard who wasn't letting anybody in, but he let us in and we got them registered! Only to be told that we have to come back again on Monday and pick up the registration form and our passports. So annoying. That whole process doesn't sound very long or crazy, but it took us about four hours total and we had to go all over the city. If Jacki hadn't come with us we probably would be booking our plane tickets home, given up on Global Learning Term, and switching our majors, because we would never have been able to go through that process with no knowledge of spanish or Ecuador. Praise the LORD!!!

I wanted to upload a couple pictures but it isn't working! Maybe later. Goodbye people!