Greetings from Quito!

I have now been in Quito for almost two weeks and the time has absolutely flown by. My sister Priyanka has a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to attend Public Health school in Quito for the year, so am living with her for a month while I take language classes and volunteer before I head off to study abroad in Argentina. My days here are pretty packed, starting with a 20 minute walk to take the Trolé bus to language school in the morning. The public transportation system in Ecuador is convenient and fairly easy to figure out, but RIDICULOUSLY BUSY during peak travel hours. I had one slight incident getting my foot stuck in the door as it closed ... but for the most part my travels in and around Quito have been okay. After a 10 minute Trolé ride, I arrive at my language school, La Academia de Español, where I take one-on-one Spanish classes for four hours with a 30 minute "pausa" in which we go up to the terrace and have coffee and snacks. The view from the terrace shows a typical street in Quito with the greenery and hills in the distant background. I have a great professor named Fernando who, despite having no top teeth, is a phenomenal Spanish professor! Even when we are just having casual conversation, he pays close attention to how I speak in order to help me correct all of my grammar mistakes and vocabulary slips. After 4 hours at school and lunch with my fellow classmates, including Amit and a few other great students, ranging from their 20s-50s, I head to my afternoon of volunteering/interning. I am working at CEMOPLAF (El Centro Médico de Orientación y Planificación Familiar) which is a clinic that provides counseling and medical services at low costs, mostly to women and children. I shadow a social worker who registers new patients and takes their sexual and reproductive health history. She also provides longer counseling sessions for women or couples seeking birth control and other reproductive-related counseling.. After my first few days just watching her, she has begun to allow me to register the patients and ask them about their health histories. Although it has been great for my Spanish, it has also been extremely challenging because they all speak extremely fast and I often end up stumbling over my words. The afternoons at CEMOPLAF are often a lot slower than the mornings, so I sometimes leave early, but usually leave around 4:30 and head back to the apartment where my sister lives. After an hour of homework, helping with dinner, eating with my sister and her roommate, my day is pretty much over.
I don't have time to do much traveling around Quito during the week, but we trekked to La Mitad del Mundo (The Center of the World) last weekend. There is one area with a monument (pictured on the left) with a beautiful view of the mountains and a row of provincial flags. About 200 meters in another direction, there is a smaller area with a little museum that is actually at 0 degrees latitude. At the museum, the guide demonstrates a number of "phenomenons" that occur at 0 degrees latitude, including water falling straight down when a sink is unplugged, an ability to easily (ish) balance an egg on a nail, and an inability to walk in a straight line with your eyes closed. I don't know how faithfully I believe in everything they showed us, but it was definitely pretty amazing to be standing on both hemispheres at the same time! Aside from classes and volunteering, this past week included a trip to La Mariscal, or what Ecuadorians refer to as "Gringoland," the part of Quito where there are a lot of hostels, bars and tourist-centered areas. I've tried to avoid it for the most part, but it was convenient this week as we were looking for a place to watch the inauguration! I am extremely jealous of all of you that got to travel to DC to see it live, but I did at least get to watch it with a lot of other cheering gringos supporting Obama all the way from Ecuador.

This past weekend I headed to Mindo, a gorgeous, plush cloud forest about 2.5 hours west of Quito by bus. We had a group of 8 traveling with us: me, my sister, her roommate Peter (another Rotary scholar), his friend, Amit, Hudson (who will be traveling with Amit in South America after a stint in Quito), a friend from language school, and another British traveler that we met at the bus station!

After arriving on Saturday morning we hiked up to zipline through the Cloud Forests! The $15 excursions gave us two private guides, and almost 2 hours of ziplining, in which we could either fly across by ourselves, or go across with a guide, allowing us to go over hands free ... or completely upside down! After ziplining, we visited a butterfly garden with a number of beautiful, native-Ecuadorian butterflies. We ended the night with a "Frog Concert," which was more like a night hike in which we saw a number of unique critters and heard a variety of frog songs.
We stayed in a hostel with great log-cabin style rooms and a garden filled with hummingbirds. On Sunday we went on a cable car ride and then hiked 45 minutes to a huge waterfall. After climbing up stairs and stumbling along rocks, we were able to get pretty close up to quite an amazing view.

I have now returned to Quito and will be here taking classes and volunteering for two weeks before traveling for a week with Jon Waldmann before we both head down to study in Argentina!