Chapter 3: Hacienda de Fantasmas y Plantación de Rosas

  The third day of our trip started early.  We collected our luggage and piled back into the bus.  Halfway through our ride to our first stop it started to rain, which made me realize I shouldn't have had the cup of tea with breakfast. I really had to pee. Eventually we arrived at the rose plantation, where they both grow a variety of roes and also cut them in preparation for shipment around the world. I took a multitude of pictures of the roses as we took our tour. I will put those pictures up here as soon as possible, check back!

   A little ways down the road from the rose plantation there was an hacienda hotel that we got to take a tour of, surrounded by gigantic Eucalypti trees.  walking up to the hacienda felt like approaching a house from a fairy tale. Everything about the house was...amazing. The place was built in the early 1500's and renovated since then. Weddings are held there and they aren't incredibly expensive either from what our tour guide told us. The kind of crazy thing was that although it was a very historic building, they had no problem with us touching anything or sitting on any of the chairs and such. Possibly because its been renovated and operates as a hotel now, but it was odd as that was a completely different protocol to the one usually found in historic sites in America.

                            (The Haunted Hacienda, I wanted to get a shot of it without the bus, but alas)


   After a lengthy tour of the grounds they served us fresh hot chocolate that was delectable. While resting for a bit our tour guide told us stories about how the hacienda is supposedly haunted. For example multiple guests have reported hearing heavy military boots walking by the bathroom in the middle of the night, even though there was no evidence of anyone being there. After consuming our wonderful chocolatey beverages and listening to ghost stories, we discovered a bust of Alexander Humboldt upstairs.  Apparently he stayed at the hotel once upon a time and is also a fairly important figure in South America, though I'm not entirely sure why.

                                                         (His Humboldt-ness)


  Lunch was fresh vegetables and potatoes and fresh cheese at a small place with its own garden and pastures for goats and llamas.  The establishment was run by a small group of Saraguran indigenous people. The hostess brought us outside when we had finished eating to show us how to make tints for dying cloths. There are small round bugs that live on cacti similar to potato bugs. You squeeze them to release a red tint, then add lemon juice to change the color. Before leaving they showed us a cultural dance that we got to be participate in. It consisted of marching around in a circle to the beat of a bass drum with bells clad on our shins.

   With our tummies full and our bodies tired from dancing we set off for our hotel that was about an hour away. The hotel was also an old hacienda, on the side of a huge valley.  In the distance on the rare occasions when the clouds part, you can see Mount Tungurauwa, the nearby volcano.

  Dinner was a three course meal of more Queso de Locro, chicken with fresh vegetables, and a chocolate mousse for dessert. For two hours after dinner we played mafia in Spanish so we could practice our Spanish and also so our bus driver could be included.  It was a ridiculously fun time: I pretended to be a private investigator, fireman, and lumber jack in different rounds.

   In each room of the hacienda there was a lit fireplace in the corner, but ours had died out by the time we got back. We tried relighting it, to no avail. Even without the fire we all sat around on two beds, completely exhausted, talking about nothing and everything.

Chapter 2: Journey to the Middle of the Earth

   Our first day in Quito consisted of so many things. Among those things were an awesome continental breakfast, a trip to an outdoor museum, lunch in an Ecuadorian mall, and a tour through the center of the city.

    Me and my roommate Ross had an interesting time finding the part of the hotel where breakfast was served.  He thought it was near the lobby, I thought I had heard someone say the seventh floor.  We didn't find any food in the lobby, but we did get to practice our Spanish with the concierge by asking, "Dondé está el lugar de desayuno?" He replied in English, "7th floor"

  After breakfast we all piled into the bus for an hour drive just past the city limits to the outdoor museum celebrating indigenous culture/history and also it has the line that demarcates the global middle of the world, the actual equator. At the museum the tour guide  told us about the ancient peoples of Ecuador and also had us do a variety of activities, like showing how water would drain differently north and south of the equator due to the Coriolis effect.  I learned that when water drains directly on the equator, the water does not spin at all, it simply falls straight down, who knew? There was also a challenge to try to balance an egg on the head of a nail directly on the equator. Your balance is increased by putting one foot on each side of the equator that way you are pulled equally in both directions, or something like that. Anyway, the point is, after two tries, I managed to do it successfully! Each of us who managed to do it got a certificate for our accomplishment.

 

Sarah and I trying our best to balance eggs, it was hard!

  After the equator we headed to the center of Quito for lunch at the mall.  Lunch was tasty and we got another opportunity to practice our Spanish by ordering, but we ended up making a mistake somehow and ordered a bit more than we intended to.  On the plus side Inca Cola is delicious, it tastes a bit like cream soda.
 

  Our next stop was the La Basilica del Voto Nacional where our walking tour of Quito began. The Basilica is a mammoth cathedral that celebrates the right to vote in Quito. There are a myriad of gargoyles that festoon the ramparts of the cathedral. Each gargoyle is a different animal from the different regions of Ecuador; there were panthers, iguanas, large birds, turtles, sloths, you name it!  On the tour we saw the plaza central which houses a large green space surrounded by the local government, the national legislature and the president's palace.  On the steps of the capital building there were a group of protestors, but we were a bit confused as to what they were protesting.

                                                     The Plaza Central complete with Protestors

                                               The Guards outside of the President's Palace


  After a stop at a giant statue of St. Mary with wings we returned to Hotel Quito to rest. Except we didn't rest: a few of us went down to workout and I swam a few laps. It was really only a few because I got pretty winded, I think from the altitude.

                                                        (The giant statue of St. Mary)

  That night we ate a restaurant called Hunter's. I had Locro de Queso, which is a potato and cheese based soup with half an avocado in it, and also 3 empanadas that were super tasty!

edit:pictures added =p

Day One

Things that happened on the first day of our trip-

  On the first leg of our flight I met a nice woman and her daughter who were traveling in a group of 88 to Tuscany, Italy from Newark, Ohio. The trip was arranged through their chamber of commerce and the woman sitting next to me was in charge of all 88 people. Both flights were fairly smooth with only a touch of turbulence towards the end of the flight from Atlanta to Quito.

   In Atlanta we had a three hour layover between our flights so we put all of our bags in one spot and took shifts watching them as we each went in search of food. About five of us all went to TGI Fridays for a beer and our last real American meal before the flight.

   The flight to Quito was surprisingly productive, I finished Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk and started a second book and watched The Big Year a bird spotting movie with Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin-I found it quirky and entertaining. By the time we reached Quito we were all exhausted from traveling, but we still had to go through customs and find our guide who would get us to our bus. Customs wasn´t horribly rigorous, we only had to fill out immigration forms which is a very small piece of paper and some of us got randomly selected to send our bags through an x-ray machine. Our guide ended up being a very friendly woman named Wallis who works with our university in Cuenca. She took us to our bus which at the time I found to be excitingly reminiscent of the Knight Bus from Harry Potter with curtains in each window and comfy seats.

   As we drove to our hotel it was about ten thirty at night and there was a spooky fog in the city, creating a very cool effect. It reminded me of being on one of the islands from the Jurassic Park movies with shapes of buildings and palm trees protruding through the omniscient fog. Our hotel, the Hotel Quito, was amazing. it had a crazy balcony view from each room that we weren´t able to fully appreciate until the morning, and a lobby that was just crazy with its orange chairs and wide open spaces.

   Before falling asleep my roommate and I flicked through the channels on the TV to see if there was much of a difference from American programming. We were surprised to find the television set to CNN. We ended up finding a multitude of American shows dubbed into Spanish, like Family Guy and the movie I Love You Man. In our exhaustion, every line was hilarious.

Bienvenidos

  Welcome to my blog, I will writing here to recount my adventures, travels and various escapades while studying abroad in Ecuador. I hope this blog is informative, interesting and a guide to the country. Feel free to comment on any and all posts I make, and to tell anyone else you think might want to read about my travels. I'm excited and ready for a language experience as well as a lot of hiking and anything else that might come my way.

I hope you all enjoy,
Eric