Heya!
Ciarán hat gerade diesen Blog eingerichtet. Glaube, dass es ne ziemlich coole Idee is, um alle Leute auf dem Laufenden zu halten und mit allen in Kontakt zu bleiben.
Jetzt haben wir nur noch einen Tag vor der Abreise und ich bin immer noch nicht wirklich aufgeregt, frag mich wirklich, wie lange des wohl noch dauert…..
Das nächste Mal, wenn ich was schreiben werde, werden wir schon in Quito sein und dann wird es bestimmt viel Interessanteres zu berichten geben.
Bis denn

The last few days have been pretty crazy, trying to prepare everything and sayin bye to everyone, on top of that I think a few vacines in quick sucession, a few drinks and lack of sleep have conspired to rob me of my health. After takin it easy for the last few days in Germany though I’m now better and ready to go.

The journey looks like it will be shit, all together I think it will take 19 hours. We leave tomorrow at around 7:30 German time.

So we have landed and we´re settling in, we both felt a bit dizzy from the altitiude the first day and the journey was hateful (Iberia are a shit airline). To my surpirise we´re not in Quito but a small town on the outskirts called Fajardo near a bigger town called Sanconquil. We live in a house with 2 other girls from Germany and the house whilst a bit bare is liveable. The poverty is pretty shocking here though, stray dogs everywhere and its so dusty and dirty. The Spanish lessons are great, the guys come to our house and give us a 4 hour lesson each day but before that we are supposed to volunteer for 4 hours at a local school. Marianne is at a different school than me but we´re not far apart. I think the volunteering could certainly rival anything I have ever done before for the Paris Hilton Pointless Award so I told them I´m not doing it and I have cut my hours. The school no hate me but I don´t care. Anyway we´re both safe and well and we´re going for a tour of Quito tomorrow

After a trip to the Internet on Sunday me and Marianne realised how shit our school was and how much we were being ripped off so we hatched a plan to escape our personal hell and are now soldiers of fortune on the run from the authorities for a crime we didn´t commit. It was pretty stressful leaving Fajarado and one of the German girls now hates me with a passion, she thinks I was leading Marianne up the wrong path, she even said that in front of me, lucky for her my German isn´t good enough and I just smiled at her.
We did a runner early the next morning to Quito and shaqed up in a cheap B&B until the dust settled. It´s not really that bad but we did send an email to the School organisers threatening to sue them. Today we left hiding and signed up for a new school - it seems way nicer and despite Marianne´s initial hesitation we´re now way happier. I also contacted the Irish Consulate, they seem really nice.
I´ll have some pictures up soon.

Since Ive been in Ecuador I have unfortunately been forced to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to browse the internet (internet cafes rarely have anything else). I can´t tell you how annoying this is after a long time on the vastly superior Mozilla Firefox or Safari (for Mac Users). Anyway one of the things I discovered is that this blog design dosnt work brilliantly on Internet Explorer and to see it as intended I suggest you use Mozilla Firefox. Like I said you should be using it anyway cos its so much better and easier to use.

We have moved again, we´re now in an apartment complex that is a bit weird, run by devout Catholics and could be the set of a horror film. On the plus side its spotlessly clean and really quiet so all in all we like it. Our Spanish lessons have started and Marianne knows loads more than me already, but thats not cos Im stupid I just need to apply myself (story of my life)………
Im trying to do a deal with the owner of the Spanish school - ill do some web design in return for lessons so I have to negotitate with him tomorrow. Im so shit when it comes to talking about money, forget Spanish thats what I really need classes in.
It was the election here at the weekend. It was a bit strange, all bars were closed for 3 days beforehand. Cant have anyone being drunk in the polling booth and voting is compulsory. There was a military curfew apparently after dark but we werent out anyway. The election was inconclusive and will now go to a second round between Chavista Rafael Correa and the man who buys popularity, Alvaro Noboa (hes a billionaire banana magnet that goes round giving out money and wheelchairs at his rallies in return for promises of a vote - you couldnt make that up)

So we´re both pretty ill at the minute, the typical travelour´s sickness…. You never know why you´re sick, perhaps it was the food from “Caféton Cubano” where we had a really delicious Cuban Sandwich (as we wanted to pay the woman wo works there disapeared in the bathroom and only returned ten minutes later after we´ve heard her vomiting very loudly and violently in the bathroom…. guess that´s kind of normal here and by no means the worst food experience we´ve made here, i mean, in most cases you don´t get to see the kitchen…) 

The rainy season has started in the meanwhile and i guess this does not help either: we always carry our rain jackets with us, because you never know when it´s gonna rain next time, and once it starts, it won´t stop for a long time. So I´m having a cold at the minute and Ciarán is pretty sick, too, mi pobrecito! But the good thing about the rain is that Ciarán feels pretty homely with it, the rain makes him feel as if he was in Ireland !

Ecuadorian people use to say that most gringos here always ill. Probably we just kind of gotta accept it, unless our organisms get used to all the germs here quite quickly.

This morning I heard the funniest thing - In our apartment block the owners have a laundry service, which we used once but haven’t again because its a bit expensive so we usually take our clothes to the local laundrette instead. So, this morning the owner told Marianne that we should use their service as everyone else does because we could catch “the AIDS” from our clothes after they have been washed in a laundrette. She went on to warn that if we persist in this foolish money saving laundry experiment we may end up “very sick”.

Whilst this news did come as something of a shock we’re hoping that it should at least cheer up the Vatican and much of Africa - Its not about the condoms stupid! Just buy a nice Zanussi!

Sorry for the delay everyone, I have been working to try and build a little thing to integrate our photos on flickr into the blog but I havent really had the time yet. You can however go to our Flickr GringoBlogo account directly and see our photos.

Last weekend we’ve been to the cloudforest in Mindo, a little village west of Quito. It was really good fun to do tubing (racing down the river on big black tubes) and see the butterflyfarm; although by the time we got there, most of the butterflies were already having their butterflysleep and butterflydreams….

Oh, and it was amazing to literally have breakfast with humming birds, there were thousands of them! No, i don’t mean we had humming birds for breakfast, but with them! People there feed them some kind of sugar solution using a birdfeeder. The humming birds were only one meter away from our breakfast table! 

We stayed in a cabaña with big glass windows all around it, so you felt like you were sleeping open air in the middle of the beautiful nature. Our bathroom though had a really big whole in the ceiling and big glass windows, too… 

We visited the waterfalls, too: after we have walked for about one hour we arrived at a river, two men were taking us over the river in a weird construction consisting out of a rope and a cage which was opened on the sides.

Then we were hiking for up the mountains in the deepest jungle for ages! The “path” was really narrow and wet, because it had rained a lot and the there was loads of humidity. There were no ropes or any other safety precautions. The signs they’ve put up were totally misleading because they did not say the distance to the waterfalls in the right order, so when we thought we’ve always made it there appeared another sign saying it was still ages away….

After a lot of other really dodgy rope bridges and about three hours we arrived at the waterfalls! There was one pretty mental slide out of thick concrete, at the end of which followed a 4 metre freefall into ice cold water. We both touched the ground and Ciarán hurt his feet.

There were two different places from which you can jump into the waterfalls, one is 12 metres high, the other one is 4 metres high. I consider jumping from the waterfalls was actually safer than the slide, because the water was deep enough…

It was really good fun to jump, although we only had the guts to jump from the 4 metre one….. 

Oh, and we discovered our new favourite Ecuadorian food: Platanos (fried cooking bananas with melted cheese and onion!)!As greedy as we are we eat a lot of the Ecuadorian food here, because it is sooo cheap to eat out here! Think we both took on weight since we arrived, but this still needs to be scientifically proofed!