The past two days have been quite eventful and full of stories. Yesterday our journey began at the airport in Winnipeg. Things did not have a great start considering three of us were literally minutes away from being left behind. Sure, your thinking we showed up to the airport late, in this situation that was not the problem. The problem occurred through West Jet and lets say things began very stressful. What happened was that Chris (Who you will here a lot of in the first couple of days, also know as "that guy" for reasons to come) plane flight became changed by accident. These implication arrive again later in our journey but I will get to that. Toronto was breeze and we were off to Miami.
Our trip from Miami to Quito includes our encounter with a secret celebrity and once again confronted with the problem of one of our members being left in Miami. We will begin with the later. Chris (see i told you) had extreme difficulties in Winnipeg but eventually things were straightened out and he was on the plane with us. Miami he finds out that his ticket had be put up for resale. So 8 of us were fine with tickets and Chris at the moment did not have ticket and the plane was full. This was due to the secret celebrity that I was talking about but that is still to come. So after about an hour of conversations between American Airlines and West Jet is determined that West Jet has put the ticket up for resale and eventually things were straightened out and Chris was again joining us in our journey. Now to the plane so it turned out that tomorrow night being Friday there is a big concert in Quito. The plane was filled due to the singer, their entourage, and back up dancers. I guess this is where I can fill you in on the celebrity. Are you ready for this, the secret celebrity was....... Miley Cyrus. Not my cup of tea but still pretty cool to end up on the same flight.
After landing in Quito it is now 10 pm and the rest of day was spent for rest. I really did not have the opportunity to see Quito at this point so until today I had no thoughts about the city.
Today we woke up to an email sent from the Canadian Consulate with a warning that Ecuador is going through high volcanic activity and for 7 straight days a volcano has been emitting ash up to 7 km in the air. It turned out that the volcano is not a direct affect to Quito but the ash in the air will affect our weather patterns for the next week which include severe thunderstorms.
After that little excitement I had an excellent day and Quito is absolutely fantastic. I am sitting at 9700 feet of elevation, that is about 9000 feet higher than Winnipeg. I thought I would have issues with the elevation but really I have adapted quite quickly, besides the odd shortness of breath and feeling great and the excitement is brewing.
Quito is a very beautiful city and everything about it so far has far exceeded expectations. The best part of today was that I was introduced to my school and am very excited for Monday to arrive. The students are awesome and full of energy and the program offered for the amount of resources at the school blew me away. I was expecting a lot worse and it really eased my nervousness that I was experiencing. Today the school had a show of their programs and we really saw what the school had to offer. Some the examples include textile classes, technology classes in which they build computers, and music and dance classes. The greatest thing that I saw today was how they taught students to read text. They had a karaoke machine and the student would sing and read along with the words. This was a perspective I would have never thought of using. My school is called Inca.
After visiting Calderon school we proceeded to seeing another school that the program would be working with. This took up majority of the day we did manage to get in a little sight seeing.
Tomorrow we will be visiting the other two schools in the program and at night we were invited to attend an Ecuadorian ballet. Not too sure what to think right now but as the saying goes when in Rome. I have a feeling I will be using that motto for a lot of the trip. O yeah remember Miley, well she is playing a concert at a soccer stadium next door and we have seats on top of our hotel in which we will be able to catch a free concert. Not my typical Friday night but it is part of my Ecuador adventure.
