New hostel

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Hola!

So today we moved into our new hostel in new town, it´s called Dos Palmitas. The price ended up being a little more than we were told before ($20 for the three of us when we were told $6 each) but we were too tired to argue about it. It´s got nice hardwood floors and cable tv, but the bathroom is a one room shit shower and shave type deal, and I´m pretty sure they don´t have hot water. So that will be interesting. I´m at an internet cafe 2 blocks away that is open until 8pm, and the hostel is in a restaurant with $1.50 breakfast and $1 beer. It also has a kitchen and fridge we can use to make our own food and a dining area outside the room, so I think we have all our bases covered.
Yesterday we went on a tour to Otovalo with stops at Cayumbe and and a waterfall and had lunch at a restauant overlooking a gorgeous lake that was formed when a nearby volcano erupted and melted a glacier. The countryside was so beautiful, I was pretty much snapping pictures the whole way. The market at Otovalo was really cool, although I find haggling a bit tiresome. I bought a necklace for Amanda and a chessboard with handmade pieces for Erik. When we got back to the hostel it was dinner plys all you can drink for $12, so everyone was a bit rowdy. I didn´t actually do the all you can drink deal as I wasn´t hungry, but I had a couple beers with some ppl and the terrance and ended up going out. We started at an Irish pub called Finn McCools, which was not super busy and reasonably priced ($2.25 for a pint) but the girls wanted to go dancing so after a bit we moved on to a club that I don´t remember the name of. It was pretty fun, and we ran into Mark there, who is this guy that was staying at Secret Garden when we arrived and walked around with us in new town on friday when were were looking at hostels but had since moved to another hostel. Pretty funny since he´s the only person I know in Quito other than the secret garden volunteers. After awhile we moved on to a club called Scorpio, which was where half of the secret graden crew had ended up. It was pretty much a big cement room and they were playing salsa music. I jokingly started salsa dancing with Nancy, and two Ecuadorean guys interrupted us and we danced with them for awhile, speaking broken spanish while they tried to teach us how to actually salsa dance. We got home about 3am and had to get up at 8am for our spanish lesson. I´ll definitely not be doing that again, it was pretty hard to concentrate while I was that tired.
We´re going to a party at Nadine´s tonight, she´s a GOSA volunteer from 2 years ago who now lives in Quito. Should be fun, apparently it will be a good mix of gringos and ecuadoreans. Vashti gets in at 11pm, so we´ll be leaving the party early to make sure we´re at the hostel when she arrives, since I´m not sure if anyone will be awake to let her in and we only got a key to the room, not to the front door.
I still haven´t figured out how to get a calling card that works with the payphones here, but that is my goal for Monday afternoon. Almost everything is closed here on Sundays, it´s weird. Less so over here in new town (aka gringo land) but definitely in old town there were only a handful of places open.

Anyways, miss you all! If you want me to send you a postcard leave a comment with your address.

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Comments

[Erik]

Yay
Sounds like a lot of fun! Make sure you take loads of pictures.

[Alisa]

I love those non-north American bathrooms! At my apartment last year I had to shower over the toilett and beside the washing machine. This apartment is luxury, I have a glassed-in shower! It sounds like you are having a great time. You are making my ffeet itch :)