En vivo

So I’m just going to get straight to it. No point in trying to segue between Australia and Ecuador or cover the 7-month interim split between Durham, New York, Vermont, Scotland and the Outer Banks.

So I Made it. I did had to spend an extra day in Quito waiting for my bag to show up (it got left in Miami). I stayed at a pretty nice ‘hostal’ in the touristy section of town, ‘mariscal sucre.’ It cost a whopping $7 per night. The restaurant underneath was always packed at dinnertime with locals having romantic candle-lit dinners.

Mariscal Sucre (or ‘New Town’) is not really that special it just has all the flashiest bars, restaurants and hotels y entonces it is the best place to get robbed.

I spent my free day wandering through the city toward ‘Old Town’ which is the unique spectacular section, a relic of the colonial Spanish era.

On the way though while passing through one of the large city parks, I encountered a crowd of 100 or so spectators surrounding a cement court on which I assumed would be played some sort of soccer. To my surprise an intense game of 3-on-3 volleyball commenced. The players looked as if they had just finished a day at the office with their khaki pants and button-down shirts.

On my way back through some three hours later I found that the crowd had tripled in size and vendors were selling ice cream and chicken on a stick. Even la policia were among the audience gasping and groaning with the ebb and flow of the game play.

Here are some cool pictures of Old Town.

I’ll have plenty more chance to explore the city more properly, so I’m not going to bother really explaining what these buildings are for now.

Oh and I made it up to La Hesperia. The place is awesome and the trip here was quite the adventure. Next time I ride the bus I’ll try to get some pics of the hombres trabajando cutting steel rebar without gloves on the edge of a sheer 2,000 foot cliff face.

A pretty weak first entry, but I hate to post walls of text without at least a few pictures, and I have not been very good about taking them on my first day at the farm.

More to come soon…