What you need after a week of tests is HOT POT!! Lucia, a Chinese girl in Sarah’s class, invited Sarah and her boyfriend (me), and her Korean classmate, Adriana, and her husband J.C. to dinner on Friday night.

While I was expecting a bit of alienation and awkwardness as a result of not being in the Asian train of thought, what I got was quite the opposite. It was an evening of wonders. Firstly, the company was great and the atmosphere was relaxed and humorous. Second were the amazing discoveries we made.

The first was Hot Pot. Hot Pot is a Chinese meal, where plates of raw food cover the table on which you are about to eat. Then there is a crock-pot of spicy, boiling soup in the center of the table. When everyone sits down to eat, we all start putting that we want, such as bacon, sausages, lettuce, different mushrooms, vegetables, and whatever else you can imagine, into the pot to be cooked. Meanwhile you mix up a peanut sauce in your personal bowl, which you add a little soup to, to make it spicy and thin. Then, after a few minutes when the food is cooked, you start chop-sticking the boiling soup for bacon and broccoli and wild mushrooms, which you then put into your bowl. The food, now covered with sauce is ready to go, so you eat it. This process of adding and subtracting food to the soup goes on for two or three hours, at which point we started talking about techniques competitive eaters use to stretch their stomachs so they can eat more.

The Second wonder of the night was brought on by a little bit of YouTube.ing. Looking at strings of videos on YouTube can easily ruin a night, but not that night. That night Sarah and I were introduced to a Russian singer named Vitas. Vitas is famous for having an incredibly high voice when he wants to. During the song his voice is more or less normal but when the chorus comes you see just how high he can go, and its not a joke. The first video we watched of Vitas was a video in which he was dressed in a fine suit and backed by an orchestra. I thought he must be well respected in the music community for his talent, and respected by others for his good looks as well. This idea was instantly thrown into confusion in the next video. The next video showed standing on platform shoes a foot high, wearing a glittering, white, bell-bottomed jumpsuit which covered his shoes, and singing one of his odd songs in the midst of a bunch of alien characters, straight from a disturbing children’s show. I wont bother describing his body language and facial expressions, I only recommend that you go and watch one of his videos immediately. Its funny, but I’m not trying to make fun of him. I really like the two songs but it is very, very odd.

Ok that was just Friday, our weekend was great too. We headed down to Mindo again. Its not that I don’t like Quito but living in a big city get stressful for me and it relieves the stress if I can get out of town for a weekend. Mindo is the perfect place to go. It’s a really small tropical town where you can hang out and explore the cloud forest. I like it because its warm, its small, and its crowded with birds, orchids and other life. Luckily we didn’t have to watch Yeti or some other terrible movie on the way down the windy road. On the other hand we didn’t get a little plastic cup full of coke so it goes both ways.

Oh another bummer of the weekend is that upon leaving I found that I had lost my binoculars, which were given to me years ago buy Dale Zimmerman, and which had never failed me in three trips to South America. I had thought about buying a new pair since that pair was about fifty years old, but upon loosing them I found that I was attached to them in a way that I’m not usually attached to a possession. I didn’t dwell on it for long but it did make me quite sad.

The day we got there Sarah wanted to canopying, which is zipping down a cable stretched between two mountains high above the forest. In all about ten bucks gets you a tour of 12 cables. The fear of the first cable quickly wore off, and we were soon more thrilled by the view that being suspended high above the forest. I spotted a few orchids along the way and we got some amazing views of Toucanets which are fairly common in the area. Hanging in my harness I managed to get some great photos, which are hopefully on this page.

We had also heard about a bird watching guide, who runs a hostel in Mindo. We stayed at the hostel for the night to feel out what the guided trips were like and how much they cost. It turned out to be 25 dollars for both of us, which at the time seemed quite reasonable. It turned out to be more than reasonable, when our Guide, Irman, knew every single bird by sight, sound, and was able to call in many kinds. Additionally, he helped in the making of the bird book in which I marked all the birds he pointed out, and he is a good friend of the authors. An early morning five-hour walk provided views, of about 45 species, including two types of toucan (photo is a Crimson Rumped Toucanet,) a Quetzal, a Potoo (don’t ask me how he spotted such a well camouflaged bird, and sleeping no less), two species of Barbet (the photo is a Toucan Barbet), a Motmot (photo), and a Cock-of-the-Rock. Another plus of the trip is that we met a couple from Sweden, who had never been birding before and were very exited about it. We hung out with them after the trip and exchanged emails hoping to see them next time they were in Quito.

Action Shot

Louis:
Originally planning to go to a town called Papallacta, we once again made the wrong choice of bus stations, and once again we resigned to going somewhere else. We chose a jungle town called Mindo, which is about three hours away. We had initially wanted to save a few days for Mindo because it seemed like a cool place to hang out and because two three hour bus rides is a little lengthy for a day trip. Seeing that we were leaving at 10:30am we realized that we would only have about three hours there (which was later cut short by a half hour stop in another bus terminal.) The long winding road, which descended 2000 meters into the foothills, was beautiful but was a little tough to focus on with a horror movie called Yeti, playing twice as loud as it needed to be. Just as the terrible movie ended we reached our stop, got off, and hoped in the back of a truck, which took us down the road a few miles to Mindo.
Mindo is a small town, which is sustained almost entirely on eco-tourism. The town offers guided tours, canopy zip-lines and tubing trips down the small river. The town is surrounded by some awesome cloud forest but for our two hours I was happy to just walk within town and look for all the hummingbirds Mindo is famous for. Bird wise, we did see some really cool stuff, including Squirrel Cuckoos, Groove-billed Anis, and a Water Tyrant. While I had my binoculars pointed into the trees Sarah was dog-watching. Every dog that walked by was apparently cuter than the last, and the awwwwes flowed freely. After walking around for an hour or so we stopped into a restaurant owned by an Italian man, which made some great pizza. Then back to the bus station we went, where we had a bit of a problem. There were a total of three more busses leaving Mindo for Quito that day, and there was no space left on the one we planned to take. I asked about the other two and there were two seats left, but inconveniently they were on two busses, which left an hour apart. We considered taking the two seats but it seemed really inconvenient. We were also considering skipping school and staying the night, when the bus driver offered to let us sit on a ledge near the front of the bus so we went with that option.
The drive back up to Quito was nicer in a couple of ways. They didn’t play the worst movie I had ever seen this time, there was a little airflow instead of sealed windows, and we sat next to a German guy named Jonas, who was cool. At the end we exchanged phone numbers. We bought a used cell phone but we still need to get a new sim-card so we can call the US. We also ran into a French friend from class on the terminal. We got home at 6:30 or so and it seemed like bedtime. That’s a problem here. The day is twelve hours long at all times -dark at the same time and light at the same time. For New Mexico in the summer that is a very short day and for winter it is a long day. Having left solidly in the NM summer the days seem short here and it’s a little odd to have it get dark at six. It is also odd to think that the seasons are reversed here (not that the seasons are at all like the seasons in NM) but we got temporary relief from that having crossed over to technical winter when we crossed to the Northern Hemisphere to get to Mindo. The Equator has always been a huge thing in my mind, and this isn’t the first time I have crossed it but driving by the monument really got my mind going. At a certain hour on a certain day of the year they say, that the top of the volcano Cotopaxi is the closest point on Earth to the sun, but I felt pretty close, driving in the wrong bus, across the waist of the world.