CONGRATULATIONS DILLON AND CAROL! ya know this is the first family wedding i've missed and hopefully the last. i heard it was an awesome ceremony and i know everyone had fun... hello we are the murphys so we always have fun!
i'm going to start with what happened laaaast weekend because as ush, i'm a little behind on blogging. yeahyeah typical...
aliceann's friend from college, mika, and mika's mom, nini, were in town last weekend so we decided to hang around quito. but even though we didn't travel anywhere doesnt mean we didnt have an adventure... i swear, craziness follows us. friday night we wanted to listen to a bongo drum band, but upon arriving at the club, we were informed that it was $5.50 to see the band. $5.50?! really? obvi that is waaaay too much to pay for a concert so we went to a dance club called next level that we had gone to the night before. good dancing, good music, etc. but here's where it got interesting: we left the club a little before midnight, expecting an empty street (the street in front of next level is alwayyyysss empty!)... but no. there were probably 300 people on the street, 100 guys with AK47s, and 100 policemen evacuating the club across the street. a bomb threat maybe? it's ecuador so who knows. anyway, we are just standing on the sidewalk observing the craziness when this drunk guy completely face plants in the middle of the street! he slowly sits up, showing everyone his bloody face and teeth-missing mouth. i was really scared for this guy so of course i had to be shannon save-the-world murphy and went and helped the guy. i tried communicating with these guys around the bloody guy, but no one knew him, no one knew what had happened, it was all a mess. after getting his blood on my arms (there's a possibility i have AIDS now) and the other guys wiping the blood off his face, a nice man in a suit said we should try to lift him into the back of the police truck to take him to the hospital. please note: yes, there are still about 200 policemen on the street right now. not one of them has come over to help. soooo as the guy in the suit is lifting the bloody/blackout drunk man into the back of the police truck the police start driving away and the suit guy and bloody guy go tumbling into the street! can you believe that??? if this is not the perfect example of the corruption and laziness and worthlessness of the ecuadorian police, then i dont know what is. so that was a great start to the weekend! hahaha.
saturday was pretty relaxing... i took a walk, bought 5 DVDs for $3, chilled at a friends house, and went to la ronda to enjoy canelazos and $1 empanadas with friends.
sunday was also a fabulous day. the melos (just in case you are confused at the relationship... pia is monica's aunt, sofia and ale are gaby's aunts but younger than gaby! they live in quito and im just so happy that they do) invited me to an art exhibit and lunch. the exhibit was for the IB art students at sofia's school. sofia really hated all the artwork, but i thought it was pretty darn good for high schoolers! afterwards we went for sushi lunch at a place called Noe. being a vegetarian, i've always said i hated sushi aka i was just really scared of it. but i think sushi might be in my top 3 favorite foods now! i had a delish veggie soup with tofu, then vegetable sushi rolls, anndddd sofia insisted that we get the cheesecake with toblerone pieces on top, and you know i didnt complain. ahh it was such a great meal and i love hanging out with the melos so i think i might try to make this the weekly sunday routine!
on to this past weekend...
while the murphy fam was wedding-it-up in chicago and my UNC friends were dancing the night away at dance marathon, i was experiencing probably my favorite ecuador trip thus far in baños. preface: at our study abroad orientation, they told us we could not visit baños because there is a volcano erupting. after consulting lonely planet and seeing the volcano has only eruped 3 times in the past 12 years, we made a group decision and decided thursday night that is was okay to travel to baños (p.s. baños means BATHROOMS in spanish...?). so after a very delish meal at aliceann's abuelita's downtown cafe, we hopped on the trole and travelled south! and once again, as per usual, we cant disappoint - we encountered some travel problems. trying to make the 2:30 bus to baños, we arrived just in time, got all of our tickets, and bought 2 tickets for our friends cole and liz who said they were right behind us. well, when 2:35 rolled around and cole and liz called to say they were 4 bus stops away, it was panic time. the lady at the desk said she would hold the bus 6 more minutes and if they didnt get here in time we would have to go without them. so dilemma: wait in the terminal for our friends and hope the bus doesnt leave before it says it will, or screw our friends and hop on the bus? good friends rule! we waited and literally with 20 seconds to spare, liz and cole came sprinting into the bus terminal and we made it! 3.5 hours later we were in baños!
baños is a quaint town (a little bigger than mindo) known for its outdoor activities and cool nightlife- which we did not know before going there. so we walked around the plaza and eventually found a hostal - hostal carolina (how ironic!) - for $7 a night. we had an awesome american dinner at this hippie cafe, sat on the rooftop terrace of our hostal, then went downtown to enjoy the strip of nightlife. crazy cool clubs with awesome music, fun bars, and street performers who encouraged us to dance and play their instruments with them. you know i have no musical talent, but performing with that street music group was definitely a highlight of my trip.. i felt so cool! and i think it was a good move on the band's part to include some gringos because i think we attracted the most attention they have ever ever received. for real, people whipped their phones and cameras to record a bunch of gringo girls dancing and playing the drums in the ecuadorian street band.
saturday we woke up early, ate a delicious breakfast and perused the baños market. it was the first time i've met any vendors who would not bargain their prices! i tried to get a $2 bracelet down to $1.50 and the guy was not having it one bit. after the market, we headed to the center of town to get organized for our canyoning adventure! what is canyoning you ask? oh just repelling down 150 foot waterfalls for 4 hours for $16. yep it's true... we all climbed in the back of a pick up truck, picked up our wetsuits and "watershoes" (they werent watershoes at all, they were definitely blue keds) and met our canyoning guides at one of the largest waterfalls i have ever seen (yep, right about the time carol and dillon were saying their "I do's" and my dance marathon friends were wanting to give up, i was just flying down the side of a waterfall)! after suiting up, we began the decent down to the bottom. we would hook our ropes to some metal clips and repel down the side of waterfalls - i cant describe it any other way. the first waterfall was dinky, the second we slid down like a slide, but the third was awesome! i'm pretty sure it was 150 ft tall or more and because it was so tall, we couldnt really repel so we just basically slid down a rope until we reached the bottom of the waterfall... it was sooooo fun! and after hiking up an unpaved trail and crawling under a barbed-wire fence with our canyoning instructor, we got to go down the last waterfall a second time. so all in all it was 100% worth the $16! after canyoning, we basically repeated friday night: good dinner, hangout on the terrace, and going out in "downtown" baños. dont worry, i did indeed have another jam sesh with the ecuadorian street band. oh and just to let you know: upon arriving home from canyoning, completely disgusting from wearing old wetsuits and dirty keds all day, we discovered that our hostal did not provide towels therefore, we had to go out in public, unshowered and smelling like moldy old life preservers... typical gringos in ecuador.
sunday we woke up early again because we had a lot of fun activities to squeeze in before our bus ride back to quito. we had an awesome breakfast at our friends' hostal down the road... i know i always describe the breakfasts as "awesome" or "delish" but honestly i have not had a bad breakfast yet! eggs, bread, juice, hot chocolate all for like $3, so whats not to love? after breakfast a few of us rented go karts. the others were skeptical because they thought we would just be riding around the crowded little streets, but they were wrong. we got to drive on the baños highway (dont worry mom, it wasnt an I-95 type highway but we still were riding in between trucks and cars)! after a little bit, we got out and took a quick trip to the zoo. we saw cool monkeys, sloth-type things, a bear, and a jaguar! if i were a zoo animal, i would definitely pick the baños zoo as my home - all the cages were outdoors in the lush green canyon with the beautiful sun shining above. oh, and i would really like to be a monkey at the baños zoo because the animals had found a little hole in the cage, were escaping, and swinging from tree branches in the middle of the zoo! so ecuador. we drove our go karts back, did a quick spin around the plaza that included driving the wrong way down a one-way road, and then returned the karts after an hour.... for a grand total of $5 per person. how cool!?! with a couple of hours to spare before our bus departure, we did what we came to baños to do - puenting. lonely planet describes it as "an innovation in freefall insanity; bungee jumping without the bounce" and that's exactly what it was: insanity! puenting crudely translates as "bridging" but its really swinging along a rope tethered to two bridges. it was a little eerie arriving to the bridge and looking over the sides at the ravine we were going to be jumping into, but my friends and i all knew we werent leaving baños without puenting. not seeming too afraid, all my friends voted me to go first. so i suited up in two harnesses, tripled checked that the guy had tightened every strap and buckled every caribbeaner, and took a deep breath. i climbed on the white chair then swung my legs over to stand on a 2x2 platform overlooking the terrifyingly deep canyon below me. with the extreme wind, i couldnt really hear what the instructor was saying but all of a sudden "uno, dos, tres" was loud and clear so i dove off the platform! it was the biggest rush i have ever felt for sure. free falling for probably only 2 seconds, but swinging back and forth for 30 seconds or so - it was awesome! the scariest part was once i had stopped swinging, i was literally just dangling hundreds of feet below the bridge and above the canyon waiting for the instructor to reel me in. all of my friends jumped too, and only one of them had to be pushed! yayyy for crazy gringo friends :) and the best part? we talked the guys down from $20 to $10/person. each person actually only had $10 left at this point in the weekend, but it felt great to bargain that well hehehe. so whoever comes to visit me... we are going to baños and puenting for sure! we had a 4 hour bus ride back to quito then about another hour on the trains to get home, but i still cannot get over how great the weekend was.
i am just so blessed to be here in ecuador for the semester and so thankful for everything i am learning, the people im meeting, and the experiences i am having. a big thank you to my parents (aka the bank) for letting/allowing this all to happen! love you.
i hope everyone else had a fabulous weekend as well and stay tuned for next week :)
mucho mucho amor,
shanaynaynay
la plaza in baños
view from a treehouse!
go karts!
oh hey cool cat at the zoo
there i go....
i'm still alive!
friends and i on the terrace of the hostal... cool views all around
canyoning!
i'm going to start with what happened laaaast weekend because as ush, i'm a little behind on blogging. yeahyeah typical...
aliceann's friend from college, mika, and mika's mom, nini, were in town last weekend so we decided to hang around quito. but even though we didn't travel anywhere doesnt mean we didnt have an adventure... i swear, craziness follows us. friday night we wanted to listen to a bongo drum band, but upon arriving at the club, we were informed that it was $5.50 to see the band. $5.50?! really? obvi that is waaaay too much to pay for a concert so we went to a dance club called next level that we had gone to the night before. good dancing, good music, etc. but here's where it got interesting: we left the club a little before midnight, expecting an empty street (the street in front of next level is alwayyyysss empty!)... but no. there were probably 300 people on the street, 100 guys with AK47s, and 100 policemen evacuating the club across the street. a bomb threat maybe? it's ecuador so who knows. anyway, we are just standing on the sidewalk observing the craziness when this drunk guy completely face plants in the middle of the street! he slowly sits up, showing everyone his bloody face and teeth-missing mouth. i was really scared for this guy so of course i had to be shannon save-the-world murphy and went and helped the guy. i tried communicating with these guys around the bloody guy, but no one knew him, no one knew what had happened, it was all a mess. after getting his blood on my arms (there's a possibility i have AIDS now) and the other guys wiping the blood off his face, a nice man in a suit said we should try to lift him into the back of the police truck to take him to the hospital. please note: yes, there are still about 200 policemen on the street right now. not one of them has come over to help. soooo as the guy in the suit is lifting the bloody/blackout drunk man into the back of the police truck the police start driving away and the suit guy and bloody guy go tumbling into the street! can you believe that??? if this is not the perfect example of the corruption and laziness and worthlessness of the ecuadorian police, then i dont know what is. so that was a great start to the weekend! hahaha.
saturday was pretty relaxing... i took a walk, bought 5 DVDs for $3, chilled at a friends house, and went to la ronda to enjoy canelazos and $1 empanadas with friends.
sunday was also a fabulous day. the melos (just in case you are confused at the relationship... pia is monica's aunt, sofia and ale are gaby's aunts but younger than gaby! they live in quito and im just so happy that they do) invited me to an art exhibit and lunch. the exhibit was for the IB art students at sofia's school. sofia really hated all the artwork, but i thought it was pretty darn good for high schoolers! afterwards we went for sushi lunch at a place called Noe. being a vegetarian, i've always said i hated sushi aka i was just really scared of it. but i think sushi might be in my top 3 favorite foods now! i had a delish veggie soup with tofu, then vegetable sushi rolls, anndddd sofia insisted that we get the cheesecake with toblerone pieces on top, and you know i didnt complain. ahh it was such a great meal and i love hanging out with the melos so i think i might try to make this the weekly sunday routine!
on to this past weekend...
while the murphy fam was wedding-it-up in chicago and my UNC friends were dancing the night away at dance marathon, i was experiencing probably my favorite ecuador trip thus far in baños. preface: at our study abroad orientation, they told us we could not visit baños because there is a volcano erupting. after consulting lonely planet and seeing the volcano has only eruped 3 times in the past 12 years, we made a group decision and decided thursday night that is was okay to travel to baños (p.s. baños means BATHROOMS in spanish...?). so after a very delish meal at aliceann's abuelita's downtown cafe, we hopped on the trole and travelled south! and once again, as per usual, we cant disappoint - we encountered some travel problems. trying to make the 2:30 bus to baños, we arrived just in time, got all of our tickets, and bought 2 tickets for our friends cole and liz who said they were right behind us. well, when 2:35 rolled around and cole and liz called to say they were 4 bus stops away, it was panic time. the lady at the desk said she would hold the bus 6 more minutes and if they didnt get here in time we would have to go without them. so dilemma: wait in the terminal for our friends and hope the bus doesnt leave before it says it will, or screw our friends and hop on the bus? good friends rule! we waited and literally with 20 seconds to spare, liz and cole came sprinting into the bus terminal and we made it! 3.5 hours later we were in baños!
baños is a quaint town (a little bigger than mindo) known for its outdoor activities and cool nightlife- which we did not know before going there. so we walked around the plaza and eventually found a hostal - hostal carolina (how ironic!) - for $7 a night. we had an awesome american dinner at this hippie cafe, sat on the rooftop terrace of our hostal, then went downtown to enjoy the strip of nightlife. crazy cool clubs with awesome music, fun bars, and street performers who encouraged us to dance and play their instruments with them. you know i have no musical talent, but performing with that street music group was definitely a highlight of my trip.. i felt so cool! and i think it was a good move on the band's part to include some gringos because i think we attracted the most attention they have ever ever received. for real, people whipped their phones and cameras to record a bunch of gringo girls dancing and playing the drums in the ecuadorian street band.
saturday we woke up early, ate a delicious breakfast and perused the baños market. it was the first time i've met any vendors who would not bargain their prices! i tried to get a $2 bracelet down to $1.50 and the guy was not having it one bit. after the market, we headed to the center of town to get organized for our canyoning adventure! what is canyoning you ask? oh just repelling down 150 foot waterfalls for 4 hours for $16. yep it's true... we all climbed in the back of a pick up truck, picked up our wetsuits and "watershoes" (they werent watershoes at all, they were definitely blue keds) and met our canyoning guides at one of the largest waterfalls i have ever seen (yep, right about the time carol and dillon were saying their "I do's" and my dance marathon friends were wanting to give up, i was just flying down the side of a waterfall)! after suiting up, we began the decent down to the bottom. we would hook our ropes to some metal clips and repel down the side of waterfalls - i cant describe it any other way. the first waterfall was dinky, the second we slid down like a slide, but the third was awesome! i'm pretty sure it was 150 ft tall or more and because it was so tall, we couldnt really repel so we just basically slid down a rope until we reached the bottom of the waterfall... it was sooooo fun! and after hiking up an unpaved trail and crawling under a barbed-wire fence with our canyoning instructor, we got to go down the last waterfall a second time. so all in all it was 100% worth the $16! after canyoning, we basically repeated friday night: good dinner, hangout on the terrace, and going out in "downtown" baños. dont worry, i did indeed have another jam sesh with the ecuadorian street band. oh and just to let you know: upon arriving home from canyoning, completely disgusting from wearing old wetsuits and dirty keds all day, we discovered that our hostal did not provide towels therefore, we had to go out in public, unshowered and smelling like moldy old life preservers... typical gringos in ecuador.
sunday we woke up early again because we had a lot of fun activities to squeeze in before our bus ride back to quito. we had an awesome breakfast at our friends' hostal down the road... i know i always describe the breakfasts as "awesome" or "delish" but honestly i have not had a bad breakfast yet! eggs, bread, juice, hot chocolate all for like $3, so whats not to love? after breakfast a few of us rented go karts. the others were skeptical because they thought we would just be riding around the crowded little streets, but they were wrong. we got to drive on the baños highway (dont worry mom, it wasnt an I-95 type highway but we still were riding in between trucks and cars)! after a little bit, we got out and took a quick trip to the zoo. we saw cool monkeys, sloth-type things, a bear, and a jaguar! if i were a zoo animal, i would definitely pick the baños zoo as my home - all the cages were outdoors in the lush green canyon with the beautiful sun shining above. oh, and i would really like to be a monkey at the baños zoo because the animals had found a little hole in the cage, were escaping, and swinging from tree branches in the middle of the zoo! so ecuador. we drove our go karts back, did a quick spin around the plaza that included driving the wrong way down a one-way road, and then returned the karts after an hour.... for a grand total of $5 per person. how cool!?! with a couple of hours to spare before our bus departure, we did what we came to baños to do - puenting. lonely planet describes it as "an innovation in freefall insanity; bungee jumping without the bounce" and that's exactly what it was: insanity! puenting crudely translates as "bridging" but its really swinging along a rope tethered to two bridges. it was a little eerie arriving to the bridge and looking over the sides at the ravine we were going to be jumping into, but my friends and i all knew we werent leaving baños without puenting. not seeming too afraid, all my friends voted me to go first. so i suited up in two harnesses, tripled checked that the guy had tightened every strap and buckled every caribbeaner, and took a deep breath. i climbed on the white chair then swung my legs over to stand on a 2x2 platform overlooking the terrifyingly deep canyon below me. with the extreme wind, i couldnt really hear what the instructor was saying but all of a sudden "uno, dos, tres" was loud and clear so i dove off the platform! it was the biggest rush i have ever felt for sure. free falling for probably only 2 seconds, but swinging back and forth for 30 seconds or so - it was awesome! the scariest part was once i had stopped swinging, i was literally just dangling hundreds of feet below the bridge and above the canyon waiting for the instructor to reel me in. all of my friends jumped too, and only one of them had to be pushed! yayyy for crazy gringo friends :) and the best part? we talked the guys down from $20 to $10/person. each person actually only had $10 left at this point in the weekend, but it felt great to bargain that well hehehe. so whoever comes to visit me... we are going to baños and puenting for sure! we had a 4 hour bus ride back to quito then about another hour on the trains to get home, but i still cannot get over how great the weekend was.
i am just so blessed to be here in ecuador for the semester and so thankful for everything i am learning, the people im meeting, and the experiences i am having. a big thank you to my parents (aka the bank) for letting/allowing this all to happen! love you.
i hope everyone else had a fabulous weekend as well and stay tuned for next week :)
mucho mucho amor,
shanaynaynay
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