Virgins and Vampires

Hoooooooola! I have some random pictures, so I'm going to post them in this random post. Hope you can keep up with the randomness. Enjoy.














This is a fruit. It is called a granadilla I think. It is super weird but awesome. You eat that weird greyish goo on the right. The seeds are in there, and some other goop. Once you get past the fact that it looks really odd, its very tasty. Yum. I ate a lot of them in the amazon.




















Here I am in front of the Virgen del panecillo. It's a statue of a virgen. It's on a hill in the south of Quito, and you can see it from pretty far away. The statue is pretty random, but it's kind of cool.















This is me on a grumpy day. I just woke up this way. Felt a little ill. But I'm better now.
Okay, no. This picture is from Halloween. I was Morticia from the Addams family. I was going to be an Ecuadorian soccer player, but my friend's host family decided I should be something more elaborate. So this is what I ended up as. It was pretty fun.















I know I've told some of you about how there are vendors who sell stuff on buses here. I decided it would be fun to buy everything they offered on the bus for one day. This is what I ended up with: Three packs of assorted candies, a notecard with looney toons on it, cookies, and chifles (chips made from plantains.) There were a couple things I didn't get: a newspaper and some other food that was really large and would get crushed in my backpack. It was kind of a fun experiment. Anyway, that's about enough randomness for now. Have a great weekend!!

Riobamba

Hello! How is everyone doing? Getting excited for Thanksgiving? I know it's been a while since I posted. And it's been a while since I actually went on this trip, but better late than never, right? I went to Riobamba, a city south of Quito. From there you can take a train through the mountains on what is supposed to be one of the most beautiful routes in Ecuador. I went with my friend, Chris, and we had a few difficulties in the trip, but it ended up being successful.

Since it is "winter" right now in Ecuador, they don't use the usual train, but instead this weird bus/train. There weren't any tickets left from Riobamba, so we took a train/bus down what is supposed to be the most interesting part of the ride. It's pictured above: the "nariz del diablo" (nose of the devil). It's an impressive land formation, and the tracks going down it zig-zag, so you go backward and then forward. There's sometimes when you look down and cant see the path, only the drop off.















To make it more interesting, you can sit on top of the train. This is actually a picture of people getting off the train, but you can see people on the top. It was quite a process to actually get to sit on the top, so we were pretty excited when we finally got up there.































Another attraction of this train is that it de-rails often. We made it almost the whole trip with no problems, but at the very end we slid off the track a little. You can't really see it very well in this picture, but I promise it happened. We had to walk back to the station. Overall, the trip was quite an adventure. We spent a lot of hours sitting down in various forms of transportation. It was a good time.

La Amazonia

Hello!

I know it's been a while since I've posted, but here's a quick overview of the Amazon. We went to a place called Tiputini, where they do a lot of research and such. It took a long time to get there. We had to go on two motorized canoes. Here I am on one.
















We finally got there, and it was pretty neat. It's very beautiful. Everything is so green! I was surprised by the temperature. It wasn't nearly as hot as I thought it would be. The trees provide a lot of shade, so that keeps the temp down. It was extremely humid though. You hardly had to move before you were dripping with sweat.















We saw monkeys, huge spiders, frogs, strange insects, and birds. It was neat. There were a lot of large trees. Here I am being a "mujer de la selva" (woman of the jungle) hiding bein














I didn't think I would swim because there is a lot of scary stuff in the water. Piranhas live there, and anacondas, and a whole ton of parasites and stuff. But I did it. The water in the river Tiputini is very cloudy. It looks brown, and you can't see more than a foot down. That's kind of good because then I couldn't see what weird creatures were swimming below me. But it's also a little scary. I just tried not to touch the bottom. Here I am swimming. I think that's me on the left. It was a nice trip, if a little short.