Hola from Ecuador, De donde Quito y me gusta Quito! I have been here for almost a week now and have been religiously trying to learn Spanish. I have been doing 4 hours solid learning a day with my tutor Monica and there is so much to take in! Tomorrow I movein with an Ecuadorian family, I was introduced and taken to their home the other day and they are really nice (two girls in their twenties and the mum and dad). The house is pretty big so I am moving in with an Aussie guy from the hostel and another girl. I am going to continue with some more tuition from Monica all throughout next week. Since I have been here I have not had time to do much in terms of activities as my lessons do not start until 1.30 in the afternoon, they finish at 5.30 and my day is more or less over! Tomorrow however a group of us are being driven to Cotopaxi for the day so It will give me a good chance to break in my new ugly boots. I think I was being slightly ambitious when I said I wanted to climb Cotopaxi as you have to be a pretty advanced climber and give youself a few days to get used the altitude, you can go temporarily blind if you attempt to ascend when you are not fully acclimatised...dont really fancy that actually! We can walk hike around the base of it though which can take a good six hours. Next on my list is to go to the "Centre of the earth" which is a few hours from here and you get to stand on the equator..should be interesting! Aside from that its learn as much Espanol as possible, oh and hopefully a trip to the famous Otlavo market to pick up some bargains! The food here in fact everything is unbelievably cheap, had a vindaloo and all the trimmings for 4 US dollars the other day, yep still spicing up my palate! It gets really cold at night here so I have become accustomed to wearing the traditional poncho which I quite like! Cant wait to start doing all the hikes and seeing lots of nature indigenous to Sudamerica as they call it here! No more news for now, going to have a wakl around some of the museums now, oh and the architecture here is amazing, some as the churches are as old as 15000s and they are so well preserved! Enough of my babble Aidios amigas XX