to middle earth...wonder if i'll see frodo...

So we´re in Quito!  Took us a few hours from bus station to host family as a family friend picked us up and took us for a traditional ecuadorian drink called checha made from fermented maize, and ecuadorian epanadas. This restaurant was essentially in the front of someone´s house and to get to the loo we had to go past a bedroom (!) Loved it though and the fermented maize was actually really tasty.

So in Quito we´ve been staying with a host family, an adorable ecuadorian couple where the wife reminds me of my tiny mumita, and the husband is like an ecuadorian father christmass. Every day we come home he says "hola chicas" :D And we get breakfast, lunch if we want and dinner every day which is so nice to have to think about cooking.

And so the spanish classes begin again! Average day is rise at 7.15am, breaka at 7.30, leave house at 8.00am then half hour walk to school. Well the walk can be and has been a tad longer on the occasions we  got lost, one too many left turns :P

My teacher was so lovely, she was always encouraging me and saying that i was doing really well. I think she spoke too soon as in the final lesson i had to practice two different past tenses and it was the most painfully slow spoken spanish of my, and probably her, life as well. Oh, and yes! i know the past tense now! two even! one is when things have definitely ended and for dead people :p the other one is for indefinitely ending actions and things you often used to do. Deciding what past actions go in which tense is more like philosophy than learning a language. Think i´m going to stick with with definitely ending one and hope that no south american person thinks all my friends have died...

I was a bit worried about coming to Quito as it was our first south american city where we´d be independent and exploring by ourselves but knowing our homestay family were only a phone call away was such a comfort and though anisha and i look young and naive, we´re not, and we´re not stupid and won´t allow people to take us for a ride (unless they´re the yellow taxis with a number in the window, in that case it´s fine)

We´ve visited the museo de guayasamin and the sister museum capilla del hombre here in Quito. Guyasamin is this ecuadorian artist who was obsessed with suffering and depression and decided to make the world a better place through perpetuating this sadness in his art. Great. Not my cup of tea really, I´m more up for the "if the world is sad then try and make it better and paint happy things" type of approach though i realise raising  awareness through of art obviously is important and must be done too.

On tuesday (i think ) we visited quito old town using the ecovia (kind of liek the tube but with buses and above ground) for 25 cents one way, so cheap! Our favourite quotes for being out n about are "constant vigilance" and "is it secret, is it safe" (yes they are quotes from hazzer p and LOTRs respectively ) This meant on arrival in the old town we were of red alert, did not feel immediately safe. And when guide books say "such and such a place in ecuador is touristy" what they really mean is it´s fully  of ecuadorians! so for us it doesn´t feel touristy like we know it at all. We also expect there to be amazing signs to the local attractions but there aren´t and we often have to take a sneaky duck into a shop to check our trusty lonely planet guide.

But all was well in the end! We visited the government palace where an ecuadorian family we met in the queue thought it was amazing that we were from london and the souvenir photo they give for free at the palace, the family asked to be it with us and took it for themselves! very odd. :P We then went to a real working monastary called Monasteria de Santa Catalina. Here nuns hidden behind a revolving wooden door sell all different types of medical remedies and foods too, so I bought some skin streatment majig including almond cream, rose smelling cleanser and a tonic water all for under $4 (those nuns are raking it in !) Thinking was that if the nuns can´t help me, with God on their side, then no one can :P

On wednesday night we went to a salsatec with another girl staying with the family, and we met up with her ecuadorian friends. It was so much fun there! They played funky salsa all night and everyone was dancing: the girls were twirling and the men commanding the dance floor with firm hand placements and dominating footwork. And later strictly come dancing esque dancers got on stage and showed us commoners how it was really done. Clubing would be so much more sophisticated and enjoyable if everyone danced salsa :P

Hmm what else have we done...oh! we climed up this basillica (name escapes mw now) that is billed as the most hair raising site of Quito in the lonely planet guide. We climed up 3 floors stone steps and about 4 floors of thin iron bar ladders to get to the top of the basiilica with views over Quito. Was so scary! The health and safety reguations in britain would have had you in hard hat and harness from the ground floor. We had a delicious liquor coffee on the 4th floor overlooking the city before ascending the ladders to the bellfry tower (a     delapadated wooden ladder by the side of the stairwell was a comforting sight :P)

And finally yesterday we went to mitad el mundo, the middle of the earth! Bless the french, they put a monument in "the middle of the earth" in the 1700s but then recent GPS revelations have shown that they were in fact about 100ms off. Silly old school frenchmen using pythagorous instaead of google maps. Well anyway, to mark the real middle of the earth there is a museum hidden around the corner from the main middle of the world city.

Here we were told about some traditional eucadorian customs including the act of making shrunken heads. Important people or enemies would have their heads cut off, the skull removed, the skin boiled in water with a stone inside to keep the shape, for 40mins, then left to dry for about 10days. They also would sew up the mouth so that the soul would not escape. THese wud then we worn as necklaces or at the end of spears to show people what would happen to them should they cross that warrior. Brixton eat your heart out. And to our delight, the guide brought out a real shrunken head, 160yrs old hair and lashes still in tact.

So the the middle of the earth! I thought i would literally feel different but i felt exactly the same. Or in fact i did feel different, i felt bloody wet coz it decided to rain that day on the equator. Good to know i bring the rain. It was quite a novelty though to be able to stand in 2 hemispheres at the same time. The guide told us that at the equinox your shadow disappears completely when you stand on the equator as the sun is directly overhead. He also told us that the days are always 6am/6pm everyday, never longer never shorter. This meant that the old school native sunclocks they had only went from these hours, reality seemed to cease otherwise .

He showed us some awesome physicsey tricks that the equator exerts. Number one is water flows directly downwards on the equator, absolutely no vortex is seen. If the experiment is moved simply 50cm to the southern hemisphere the water drains clockwise, and 50cm into the northern hemisphere and the water vortexes anticlockwise. Couldn't believe that the earth's gravitional effects could be so evident over such tiny distances.

The second trick, sorry "experiment" was that balancing an egg on a nail on the equator is much easier than anywhere else in the world as the forces acting on the egg are exactly equally. So channelling the force of the chicken ovulation, I become the egg master and managed to balance the holy egg and recieved my certificate of mastership. Yes. The last trick was to show that apprantly humans are weaker on the equator than in either hemisphere. Something to do with forces again, (you physics people can write explanatory comments if you so desire). Not sure if this was true or just psychological, but then again i did balance and egg on a nail and water doesn't swirl here...*cue xfiles music, duh nah nuh nah duh nah nuh nah*

The same day we also went to see the ultima pequila of harry potter *wipes tear*. Despite missing the first few minutes and sitting so close to the screen that we were practically inside the film, nothing could detract from the harry potter magic. Freaking amazing. I had my furrowed brow look of sadness and concern throughout. Totes throughing a harry potter DVD release party, all are invited. Only outrage was to do with the subtitles: the spanish subtitles had not only translated all the english speech but the parcel tongue as well!! spanish speakers get to understand parceltongue! outrage i say : P

Anyhooz, Saturday we fly out in the eve for Lima, Peru. So our ecuadorian adventure is almost at a close...

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