Tuesday, March 22, 2005

day one of my rabies vaccination

i'll get to that in a minute.

i forgot to mention the other day in the museum (i really don't like the sound of german and there are always german people in the cybers chatting away) - every museum here has a religious art section - sometimes they're very neat and when i had a guide in the one in guayaquil she explained how you can chart the colonial progress through the little flourishes artists put in their works. well this one had a picture (another german just came in!) of jesus, bleeding at the last supper, but stomping on grapes inside a large barrel - a group of disciples were gathered about the bottom of the spigot and were drinking the wine that was been created - laced with jesus' blood. the oddest painting i have ever seen.

- this connection is horrible by the way - it seems that you pay more for bad connections because it's pretty much a standard 2 bucks the hour here (3 times what i pay in guayaquil), and it's like a 56 modem... it's taking forever to read my mail at the moment.

anyway, saw robots a couple of nights ago - a pretty funny movie and a hit with the ecuadorian crowd. the moment the one robot started doing britney spears i thought the foundation was going to cave in from the guffaws. the theatre was in a mall that's located at the edge of the largest public park i've seen in ecuador and quite possibly canada as well. it's a km and a half long, bounded by 10 story buildings and absolutely teeming with people. la carolina it's called and houses a museum, a series of futbol fields, a race track for go-karts and expanses of green grass that's much more similar to the grass back home than that you find in guayaquil.

what else...? arrived in baños yesterday in the afternoon - an incredibly beautiful spot if the town itself is not much to see... i went to about 10 different places looking for a room - they were all promising the same thing but with vastly differing prices. i chose a place with a greater ecuadorian feel to it (lack of gringos milling about) - turned down the expensive place where the american woman who showed me around reeked like alcohol.

oh! before i took off from quito i visited this (more germans!) lebanese place where i had some of the best falafel i've ever had and definitely the best tabouli.

another fun thing is that i found a skating rink in quito inside the mall... i had a lot of time to kill before the movie so i wandered about the mall and found this tiny rink overflowing with people doing awkward but energenic loops beneath banners from all the nhl teams. this is the closest i've been to hockey in almost a year.

oh yeah, the rabies.

so i rented this bike today and took off to do this trail that leads to río negro and passes by a bunch of waterfalls along the way. it's glorious - i went through one tunnel of about 100 meters in absolute darkness and though i was gonna soil myself (that's not the glorious part). the mountains are almost vertical expanses of green, trickles of waterfalls lining the banks ever few feet it seems. by this time i had met up with a group of women from the states who were visiting a friend of theirs working in quito. together we took this car acros the valley floor to the other side (i'll write more later). wow.

anyway, on the other side we walked down a bit to find this bridge but instead found a dog, and it bit me...

but i'm fine - been to the hospital, had it cleaned out and have been started on my 7 shots (not painful at all!).

my time's up!

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