Éstoy en Ecuador!

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I realize that this is kind of lame to write after the first day, but I´m off to the field research station tomorrow morning and then probably won´t be back to internet land for 3 weeks... so here is the run down of my first day. How exciting. I flew in late last night, shared a cab with some lovely girls from the UK, stayed at a drab hostel because the good one was full, but had a phenomenal sleep after a full day of flying and about 20 min of sleep the night before due to mad anxiety about sleeping through my flight. This morning I woke up, had breakfast on the terrace with an incredible view of Quito and then heard some live music coming from afar, so had my first walk-about through the city in search of this Ecuadorian-battle-of-the-bands-hopeful. I eventually found them practicing on a church so I creeped for a little while but then thought I was making them uncomfortable so I continued on my journey.

I´m supposed to be bringing rainboots to this field research station tomorrow morning, and so I was on a mission because I was told that as long as you have normal sized feet, you can find them here. This, however, is a dirty lie. I walked around town for probably about 4 hours on a quest for the mythical rainboots to no avail. I asked about 30 different people, who directed me to 30 different stores, none of which had rainboots... so I admitted defeat (2 months of soggy feet from planting have prepared me I think) and met up with a group of people from the hostel on their way to this touristy cable car that takes you to the top of a hill for a view of the city. I was down with being carried somewhere, so we missioned it up and it was totally worth it... Quito is substantially larger than I imagined and its right in the middle of all these Lord of the Rings-esque mountains so it was quite beautiful. Quito plus this car takes you to 4100 metres though, so going on the hike at the top was brutal with un-altitude adjusted lungs! I felt like I had never walked anywhere in my life. All in all a sweet first day here... the people in the new, lively hostel are awesome and I´ve been totally overdosed on information for future adventures. I´m off on a bus tomorrow morning, but I hopefully will have more exciting rainforest stories and photos when I return to meet up with Andrea in Quito.

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