8/25

On my flight to Atlanta, I sat next to a man named Fred that was born in a small Texas town, but now resides in Florida, where he owns his own jewelry business. I knew far too much about him when we landed. He did show me pictures of his dogs. White German Shepards. I never knew they existed, so that was kinda cool. When we landed, the wheels on the planes weren´t turning right, so we had to walk down the emergency stairs, then walk back up to our airport gate. I thought I was going to need ton of time to get to my next flight, but it was only a five minute walk. It seemed too easy. I met Sean right away, and I took an empty seat next to him on the plane. The flight to Ecuador was nice, except the landing was frightening. There was a lot of turbulance, and it seemed that the pilot was accelorating toward the mountains. We circled around and around where we needed to land, and I thought for sure the plane was going down. Apparently, this is how planes land in the mountains, though. So, if you´re traveling to Quito and you think your plane is crashing, it´s probably just landing.

There was a man holding up a sign with my name on it, when we landed. He drove Sean and I to our first hostel in the ¨Gringoland¨, or more politely ¨Mariscal de Sucre¨district of Quito. Our hostel was really cool and I loved our room. We had an awesome breakfast for only $2 each, which I lovingly took pictures of. It´s just what I do. Sean has actually since requested that I not take pictures of our food before we eat it. Whatever. I had reservations at another hostel, so after our first two nights in ¨Hostel La Galleria¨, we went to ¨Casapaxi¨. I´m really happy that we´re at this new hostel because we are the only renters there right now, and we have an entire house to ourselves for less than $12 a night. The owner is Italian. She worked in Africa for a few years, doing something for the Italian government, and has since lived in Quito for the past 15 years. She´s awesome. There´s a lot of African artwork around the house. The only bad things about this hostel are that its oven doesn´t work (but the burners do), the shower is often cold, and there´s no internet access. To use the internet, I just have to walk down the block, though and use a computer at an internet shop. Easy. There´s also awesome bread at a shop just around the corner from our hostel.