Adventures Abroad: 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.