El Oriente y la Costa

(Just for the record, I somehow didn´t see comments from my sicky post on jan 16. so I´ve responded if you want to check it out.)

Finally left Quito!!

Carnaval weekend:

Went to a place called Sucua which is in the province of Morona Santiago. About a 7 or 8 hour bus ride from Quito. Stayed in a hotel for $7 a night. Went with a group of 10 including myself. 9 gringos 1 ecuadorian. Went to two different rivers, hiked a crazy mountain, saw something in the tarantula family that was poisonous and blue, met an amazing ecuadorian family, ate some traditional indigenous food that I can´t remember the name, a club in the neighboring town where my friend was randomly given a free bottle of tequila from the dj or something-maybe he liked her dancing, water fights in the street with little ones, water fights in the river, getting bombarded with water balloons as we drove by sitting in the back of a truck (perfect targets), getting bombarded with smelly spoiled things as we drove by sitting in the back of a truck. Fun fun minus the smelly things. The hiking part was amusing because it was like...this is what people imagined me to be doing...hiking a mountain in the jungle with traditional indigenous paint on my face, and seeing blue spiders. haha. some REALLY incredible views out there.

El Oro:

Last weekend I went to the South of Ecuador to a province called El Oro (Gold). It was my host mom´s birthday and she wanted to go visit family out there. my host sister is on vacation right now so I missed classes Friday and Monday. El Oro is a lot farther. It was like a 12 hour bus ride. Going was fine cause we went at night and I just slept but coming back was terrible. We left at 10:30 am and got back around 11:30 pm. El Oro is coast. So I´m glad that now I´ve experienced the coast and the jungle but I didn´t really have a good time. I didn´t really like my host mom´s family that much. We didn´t do anything that was that fun for me. We went to Peru which was cool. It was just the frontera though so there´s like a big market there. I bought sunglasses and a purse. Other than that, we went to a relative´s birthday party. a 10 year old. that was okay. there I was able to meet some people my age and have some good conversation. but i didn´t really do anything else besides get bitten by mosquitos lol. the bugs actually weren´t that bad. everyone was saying how they must not like my estadounidense blood. So not sure it was worth it but also not sure I had a choice. If I had said that i didn´t want to go or that I couldn´t miss class I think they all would have stayed cause I don´t think they would leave me alone in the house.

anyway, thats all for now. I definitely need to continue travelling and getting to know the country. There are some really beautiful places here. Also, even though Galapagos is expensive I think I need to go. It´s probably my only opportunity and it´s got to be worth it. Daddyyyy...