Checking out the Town

So I have been down here in Quito for about a week and a half now. So far I have been extremely busy with classes. The first four days was just extremely intensive Spanish training. 5 straight hours for 4 days  of straight Spanish. After that my Spanish is a little better, but I still can't hold a conversation with anyone. I can catch a lot of what the native speakers are saying, but it takes me a little while to reply.
My first actually weekend here was pretty good. I was checked out the city a little, but due to the altitude I still get tired really quickly so I didn't stray to far from where I'm stay. Just down to one of the giant parks down the hill from the house. It was one of the coolest parks I have ever seen. Had just about everything in one place, well everything except a baseball field, which was kind of disappointing, but a million soccer fields, basketball courts, miles and miles of running trails, tennis courts, volleyball, a huge skate park and BMX track as well as horse trails, vendors upon vendors upon vendors, it was just crazy. One of the coolest parks I have ever seen.
Since then I have been in my English teaching classes from 8:30 in the morning till after 6 at night. Long days, but I think I'm actually starting to figure it out. Even though my first teaching experience with an actually class full of people that can hardly speak English felt like it didn't go very well. I by far underestimated how much they knew and my lesson was to easy. It was suppose to be 20 minutes but they flew through everything I had planned and I only made it through 15 or so minutes. My second attempt went much better. I filled the whole 30 minutes and it seemed like my students enjoyed it as well as learned something. I thought I did much better.
This weekend I ended up going down and checking out the Centro Historico, or old town to us gringos. It was definitely an interesting area. Tiny streets, huge churches, cathedrals, plazas and palaces. It was a cool adventure even with the rain trapping us in a tiny little sandwich shop for almost an hour. Good thing that sandwiches were so good. Wondering around checking out all the history and culture was pretty awesome. One of the main reasons for this whole trip. I especially liked the cobblestone pedestrian streets lined with little shops selling everything you can imagine. I could wonder those streets for days and still not see everything. The Bisilica del Voto Nacional was especially cool. Apparently it is the largest of its kind in the Americas. To bad we got there 15 minutes to late to go up to the top of the tower. I really wanted to see that view. Will probably have to go back there sometime just to check out that view.

The Bisilica Del Voto Nacional

This place was really tall

Not only did this place have regular gargoyles but pairs of different animals including Turtles

Armadillos

Monkeys and many, many more

The Adventure Begins

So this trip has been along time coming and it has finally arrived. After so much anticipation and hoopla, it didn't have the best of starts. On the way to the airport the nervous finally got to me and I puked in the cell phone parking lot at Sea-Tac. After that I felt much better and said my final goodbyes to my dad and brother, got checked in, through security in no time and caught my first flight with no problems. So here's where the plan started to go wrong. The plan was to fly to Denver have an hour and a half layover, from there to Miami for a two and a half layover and then on to Quito. But that's not exactly how it work out. In Denver I had to go recheck in and was informed after waiting in line for the whole hour and a half layover that I would be going through Dallas Fort-Worth on the way to Miami, which would get me into Miami to late for my flight to Quito. After finally getting my boarding passes for my next flights I had to run to the flight barely making before they closed the door. With that flight being delayed because of having to rebook everyone on different flights I missed the flight that the lady tried to book me on from Dallas to Miami so I could make the Miami to Quito flight. So I had to take another that the airline screwed up again due to all the people that got rerouted through Dallas, but it was kind of cool watching a huge lightning storm over the Gulf of Mexico from above was pretty awesome. After all this I ended up having to take a flight that got me into Quito after 9pm. This was probably the coolest flight of the four, I watch Havana Cuba as the sun went down over the horizon, followed by Panama passing bellow us before climbing even higher up and into the Andes Mountains and into South America. Exhausted and ready to collapse I finally made it to Quito to find out my back missed more connecting flights then I did and wouldn't show up till the next day. So to tired for an hour cab ride into town and to my host families place, I caught a cab to the closest hotel that wasn't a hole in the wall. The next day I caught a cab into the city, on some of the twistiest bumpiest roads I have ever seen, thinking the whole time that these would be great for some kind of rally style car. Now actually among Spanish speaking Ecuadorians I have felt extremely cut off, but being eased a little by some of the fellow students and learning Spanish more and more. On the plus side my bag finally showed up two days after I did and I can put on some clean cloths and charge my laptop.

 Tried to catch the lightning storm over the Gulf

Sunset over Cuba