September 27th:

L-I-G-A! Campeón! Sunday we went to a fútbol game- soccer, as you Americans call it. Quito's club team, Liga, played against Guayaquil's club team (3rd largest city in Ecuador, I believe), Barcelona. Liga won 4-0, but the two teams are rivals so the fans were still intense. There were SO many policemen at the game, and throughout the whole thing they were stationed in between the different fan sections (I'm assuming so that people didn't hurt each other.)

October 4th:

This weekend we went to Mindo, a town a few hours outside of Quito. It's known for being in a cloud rainforest; the area is perpetually in the clouds, so the vegetation and wildlife is very special here, apparently. It's not tourist season, so the town was very deserted. At points it was actually a little creepy, like a sort of ghost town.

Our first hostel ended up having termites, but the hostel we switched to was much nicer- little cottages right by a beautiful river. That first night we hung out in the room for a while before checking out the only club in the entire 2-block town. It was full of men over 30, so we didn't stay too long. The next morning we headed out to go zip-lining. 13 lines through the mountains and valleys- it was SO much fun! Next up was hiking for a little in search of an all-natural water park.After it seemed as if the hike would never end, we finally stumbled on what can only be described as a watering hole. That is what it looked like, with all the people sunbathing and swimming, sliding down the water slide and jumping of cliffs… yes, jumping off cliffs! The cliff was 45 feet high, and we jumped off into the water below. I will tell you this: it was absolutely terrifying. Not so much the actual jump, but the anticipation of it. Also, because it was 45 feet high, there was enough time to think about what you were doing as you were rocketing through the air (which means the jump itself was still semi-scary). The second time was much easier. We all jumped too- it took a while to convince ourselves, and we were basically all physically shaking, but it was so worth it.

On our way back we discovered the most amazing chocolate shop. They just opened a year ago- the owner is from Michigan. He said that it's been a slow start because Ecuadorians aren't quite as interested in shelling out a lot of cash for expensive, high-quality chocolate. And high-quality it was! They make it from scratch there, as in they take the beans and dry them and roast them and grind them etc etc. The people working there were so nice too; they gave us huge amounts of chocolate samples for free while we were waiting for our brownies to bake. The brownies were expensive, even for the US- $2 each. They were also huge though, and fresh out of the oven, warm and gooey- probably some of the richest and best brownies I've ever tasted (sorry, Mom!) The workers loved us because as soon as we bit into them (there were probably about 6 of us sitting there) we all just began moaning. "Mmm… oOo… so good… ahhh… wowww…uhhh…MMMM" was basically all that could be heard for the next 10 minutes or so.