¡Me gusta Quito!

This is the ´Company of Jesus´ church. I´m not sure what that means but he said on good friday this church starts a city wide bell ringing concert!

I arrived in Quito last night just as the sun was going down. Since it is on the equator the sun sets and rises at exactly 6pm every day of the year. Also it is one hour ahead of Kansas City time because they do not observe daylight savings time. My roomates name is XiaoTing (pronounced Sh-ow) she is awesome and doesn´t know any spanish...we are having lots of anventures. We have already noticed how we always seem to be in the back of every line, bus, airport, la academia, church tour, the street, lunch...always in the back. We think it´s because we talk alot and are always looking around and taking pictures. We are not staying at a house like we though but an apartemento with our ´mama´ (Paola) she is 32 years old and mas bonita (very beautiful.) Xiao and I share a room and the apartement is so cute, Jessica Lewis could call it precious. Para Desayno (for breakfast) we ate the latin american version of coco puffs and hot tea. She gave us an apple for the road and we all walked to shcool together. This wasn´t much of a trip seeing our mama works there and we live 20 feet from the academia!!!

Today we took a placement test then took a massive tour de Quito. We saw the oldest church in the Americas, soooo beautiful. At another church he said there was over one ton of gold in the altar alone! (They still have mass every day.) We also saw the President of Ecuador standing on his balcony, and visited his house. All the school aged children are running around everywhere in different colored uniforms. This made me miss camp. I keep tryign to wave at the children but they just stare at me and look angry. I am determined to get one to wave back! haha


Right now we are in ´Gringoland´ a place for young people, lots of bars, discotecas, restuarants, etc. Wednesday we are going to the tallest active volcano in South America. It overlooks Quito. I got pretty tired walking around because of the altitude but that´s a small price to pay for living in such a pretty place.

Oh yea...some policemen asked to take pictures with us today. It cause quite a commotion and all the citizens were coming and getting in the pictures secretly. It was hilarious.