Cartas de Aventura: Chapter 7: Street Clowns and Stolen Tours

On the way home from class today(two weeks ago now) I got to see some of my first street clowns of Ecuador. I arrived at the corner of the crosswalk and noticed a girl with an interesting green and orange outfit with a shaved head and only bangs. She slipped an orange rubber nose on and began to flip her bowler hat over and over, making it dance between her hands. I marveled at her skill and glanced at the light, waiting for it to change. Across the street, near the stopped cars, there stood a man in the perpendicular crosswalk juggling clubs for tips.

Later in the day six of us met up to explore some local Incan ruins in town. We saw them on the map and it looked like it wouldn't be too hard to find. We found the ruins alright, but it turned out that you had to enter the museum to get to the ruins out in back of the museum. We walked in and were waved over to the information desk. The man behind asked us in Spanish, "Are you from CEDEI(our university here)?" We answered yes, but were quite confused as to how he knew. We decided it was because we were in a group and we were all obviously gringos. They told us to just wait a moment, so we waited while they fetched a tour guide, which was nice of them, but really we just wanted to see the ruins outside. An hour into our interesting, yet arduous tour through the museum, in which we learned about a variety of indigenous tribes from all over Ecuador throughout the ages, we discovered we had been in the right place at the wrong time and stolen another group's tour reservation. They joined us for the rest of the tour, though for the duration we had a fit of giggles at the thought that we had managed to steal a tour. At the end of the tour the guide brought us outside and we did get to see the Incan ruins we had been seeking since the very beginning. They were pretty neat, and there was a botanical garden with a large collection of diverse plants.