I took the trolley to get there, it was my first time using it, a bit nerve racking but I felt accomplished when I ended up in the right place. The taxi ride from the trolley stop to La Plaza de Independencia, where I was meeting Claudio, was incredible in itself. It seemed like every 10 seconds I wanted to stop and take pictures.
Anyway, I met them at the plaza which they had already walked around, so they watched the football match (Ecuador vs. Uruguay 0-0) while I wandered around for a bit taking pictures and looking like a real tourist. Stephanie knew the downtown area better than we did, so she sort of gave us a tour. We went inside some churches, looked at lots of statues and of course, I took lots of pictures. All the streets are narrow and its all built on a hill so it is tiring to walk around but everything is so cool to look at. Most of the buildings are old and have traditional looking fronts, then inside each block there are there small courtyards, some with fountains, the others, rather boring.
There are shoe shops everywhere, and when I say everywhere I mean it. Literally every other shop is selling fake American shoes, most cost $4! We must have gone into about 6 looking for the right Chuck Taylors, fake of course, for Stephanie's brother. Somehow nowhere had the right ones.
After that we got food and went home. Some of the pictures are on the flickr link in the last post, the rest are on facebook.
So tonight the other exchange students and I had Spanish class in a part of town called "Gringo-landia" because its full of gringos and tourists like us. After class the school had organized for us to have a salsa dancing class. So we walked for about 15 minutes from the school and went to this rickety looking bar on the side of the street. Inside there was a tiny dance floor and a bar. Some other older girls from all over the place were taking the class as well so we took up pretty much the entire bar. Anyway, its so mush harder than it looks, and tiring too haha. I am not very good, well, actually I'm terrible, but we all were so good times were had by everyone. Sorry no pictures, but we have the class every Thursday so maybe next time.
Haha funny story. So we were walking back from the salsa class to where we could all take buses / taxis home and we were all very wary of our surroundings because there are a good amount of pickpockets and muggers in gringo-landia at night. Walking down the street towards us was a homeless man who was hobbling and kind of stooped over, we thought nothing of him. But when we was about 5 or 10 feet in front of us, he jumped out at us from under his blanket, yelling and stomping his feet. He scared the hell out of all of us, and then he just went hobbling along downt he street laughing histerically at. It must have been funnny to watch, he certainly got alot of enjoyment out of it. We were all shaking afterwards. Damn hobo.
here is the link for pictures again:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30226544@N02/
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