Pensamientos de Sudamérica: Arrival!

Estoy en Cotacachi, Ecuador. After a couple life threatening taxi rides I have arrived in the place where I will spend at least the next week and a half or two weeks. My flight got in on time Monday night, and after about 20 minutes of waiting, and about 20 different taxi offers, Goldi and Aaron arrived to pick me up. I feel as though I should preface the next few sentences by stating that they hold no element of dramatization. As we told the taxi driver where we needed to go, he proceeded to drive somewhere around 70 miles an hour down a main street of Quito to the tunes of and American 80´s music mash up that he put in the cd player as soon as we got in the car. He then proceeded to run 5 or so consecutive red lights, sans a decrease of speed. We had no seatbelts. But don´t worry, he gave ample warning by beeping his horn through each of lights. Hello South American cities. I think I probably should have been fearing for my life at least a little bit, but I figured I should just sit back and enjoy the lack of traffic cops who would ever think of pulling us over. So that´s what I did.

I could tell stories for hours about my first two days here but I´ll try to keep things short and sweet. Goldi´s parents condo is beautiful. Food is about a doller a meal. Everyone is friendly and willing to help. Life is good. I am crossing my fingers that hiking some of the eight gigantic volcanoes around is in my near future. After that, it´s off to learn how to grow my own food. I´ll send some pictures as soon as I can. I have to find somewhere that I can upload them to the internet first. Keep in touch! I would love to hear about all of your lives while I´m here. Email me whenever. I can´t guarantee there will be a prompt response, but I´ll get around to it at some point in time, when internet availability permits.

Here are a few pictures of my first days here.