South America

We have officially arrived in South America, taking the flight yesterday from San Jose, CR to Quito, Ecuado. At the airplane gate I reunited with Sao Mai and we took off towards South America in what was probably the most expensive flight of my life- at 5 USD a minute.

Its great seeing SM again after almost a year, she hasnt changed a bit, and now with her addition and that of Monica- SM's friend from Sweden - we feel more like a travelling circus. We were surprised to have Monica waiting for us outside our departure gate mostly because she was meant to arrive 5 hrs after us that day. It turns out that she arrived the day before we got there and had been waiting for us ever since.

Monica's half Chilean and half Uruguayan and is very cool as well, of course. Now the only problem is that when anybody asks us where we're from it takes us about 3 hours to explain- with more than 7 nationalities between the 4 of us.

So we found a great hotel in the middle of the old town of Quito that reminded me so much of Alpine rifugios, with the same dusty smell, the cold creaking floorboards and the little breakfast room with pine cones scattered around. The only difference is that this was in the center of the center of the massive 3 million inhabitant metropolis of Quito, which we have all been very pleasantly surprised by since it has a wonderfully colonial old town full of theatres and museums and little piazzas that are hidden throughout the mazes of cobblestone streets.

We already did a lot in our first afternoon- we ate a lunch of Morochos (warm sweetcorn porridge in a mug) and pan con queso at a screeming lady's street stall, we then walked around the old town where we ran into a protest in front of the president's house because the govt didnt give the soccer leage their funding, and there we got to see the Ecuadorian president come out on the balcony above the protests to wave and observe. We also saw 2 people get arrested infront of us (the city is teeming with policemen, it seems like theres more of them than actual inhabitants). We also met a girl that plays for the Ecuadorian national soccer team and ate a huge dinner of grilled pork with rice & beans at a hole in the wall that reminded me of the good old bun cha days of Hanoi.

We slept extremely well, me under 6 layers of heavy blankets, as Quito is almost 3000 m up (which also helped explain why we were short of breath after climbing the stairs). And today we are intenet to buy ourselves a car for the rest of our trip.