Guinea pig lunches and walking on the equator. All in a days work in Ecuador!

Colourful markets of Quito

COUNTRY: Ecuador
PROGRAM: GapBreak
PROJECT: Teaching & Care Work
WRITTEN BY: Lauren Gaudion

I´ve only been in Ecuador for 16 days now, and have already experienced it all... The culture, the food, the language barrier, the altitude sickness (or food poisoning - unsure what the cause was), etc. Although some of these experiences have made me homesick, they are what I wanted and expected to happen! It lets me know that I am going hard and getting the most out of my trip.

So far after my arrival, the original ´Quito gang´ have shown me around the huge city, running 100km long and 7km wide! On my first day we took a 40c bus ride up to Mitad del Munda and were thoroughly enjoyed straddling the equator and eating guinea pig for lunch (a very interesting meal, might I say).


The following Tuesday Holly and I began our Spanish classes at the academy. Although Holly remained fairly ritarded at Spanish after 20hrs in lessons, I managed to learn quite a bit surprisingly! Now I´m finding it (slightly) easier telling the taxi driver how to drive me to my destination. Although I would love to continue learning the language, I´m too broke to pay and extra however much for more lessons, so I´ll just stick to talking to the taxi drivers and my host mother (who knows no English whatsoever).

The weekends have been successful so far in travelling around Ecuador. My first weekend we went to Baños - a beautiful town surrounded by waterfalls and mountain scenery. There were a lot of tourist attractions we indulged ourselves in, such as white water rafting, canyoning down waterfalls, dune buggy and motorbike riding. We also let a little bit loose with the nightlife which was incredibly fun. I never realised how much better Ecuadorian nightlife was compared to Australia... we were given free drinks, the music was so happy and Mexican, and the atmosphere was the livliest I´ve ever seen!

Altogether Baños was simply amazing.

Last weekend we spent two days in Otavalo. We arrived on Friday and the markets were already quite large, but Saturday morning we woke up, looked out our windows and there were stalls all over the streets! I couldn´t see a road for the cars to drive on! We spent basically the whole day shopping, buying gifts for our families and friends back home, while also deciding to splurge a little bit on ourselves (Sam buying three ponchos for herself). Mainly we all bought llama products (scarves, ponchos, socks, slippers, beanies, etc.) just because they all felt so soft and fluffy!

Holly and I started our work placements this morning. We´ve decided to try out a medical clinic for children who suffer some sort of incurable disease. Surprisingly I wasn´t as traumatised as I thought I would be. There are some children who can barely do anything for themselves which is quite heartbreaking, but all of them are very cute and friendly towards us. I enjoy the work we´re required to do, that being feeding, playing with and generally taking care of the 15 or so children. I´m looking forward to working there more and getting to befriend all of the cute little toddlers.

For now that´s about the gist of what we´ve been up to here in Ecuador, but indeed there will be much more to come from the ¨Quito 6¨! Ciao!