Night Out

Hi friends! Well into my first week here, I am getting settled and starting to get into the flow of things. However, Quito is not a very safe city, so I have spent pretty much all of time so far this trip on the school campus where I live and work. It's a nice campus right in the city - there is a soccer field I can run around (makes for a boring run, but better than nothing), school facility, and dorm that I live in with a few students. I was starting to feel a little bit like a prisoner at the school, not being able to experience the culture outside the school's fences and security guards until last night.

Last night I went out with a bunch of Ecuadorian friends that I met at my summer job in Yellowstone. They took me to a touristy place called "La Zona" where there are a lot of discotecas, restaurants, bars, and tourist shops. Then we went to the Historical district downtown. The street are narrow and stone and the buildings are really tall, beige, and deocrated with overhanging porches and flowers. There are South American hippie types with gnarled hair and bohemian clothes wandering the streets, playing musical instruments and selling little trinkets. We stopped into a restaurant and ate Empanadas Vientos (it has cheese itside... it tasted just like the white Nasonville Dairy cheese curds we buy at home) and drank Coladas - a typical drink in Ecuador that is made of fruit chunks, corn flower, and sugar. The kind I had tasted like "horchata" (mexican rice water) and the other kind (colada morada) was purple and tasted like gelled fruit cocktail. The food was good, the sights were cool, the fellowship was good - it was a fun night.

Two of the friends that took me out, Francesca and Wandember, invited me to go to their home town, Santo Domingo, this weekend, because it is a 5 day weekend for a national holiday. This afternoon I will leave school a little early to head south for the weekend where I will see a new city, see more Yellowstone friends, and get deeper into the culture. Adventure time!