09-08-12

Hola amigos!

After months of planning and tearful farewells to friends and family in England and Italy, we're finally in South America! We left from Heathrow to Amsterdam early on Tuesday morning, ran through Amsterdam airport to make our connection and arrived in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, 11 hours later- but since Ecuador is 6 hours behind the UK it was still afternoon here. It´s one of the highest capital cities in the world and we're feeling it- if you move too fast you have to stop and take a deep breath, and it doesn't help that parts of it are very hilly! We found a nice hostel in the old part of the city, there are lots of beautiful colonial-era buildings and baroque churches, and there is a very laid-back atmosphere. Everything has that ramshackle, tumbledown look to it that I expected, but it's very clean and all of the people we've met have been extremely friendly. As for the Spanish, at the moment Adele understands a bit more of what people say than I do, and I can say a bit more than she can, so as long as we stick together we can normally make ourselves understood {although not always- yesterday we ended up with two tortillas full of tripe, which wasn't what we thought we'd ordered}. We're going to stay here until at least the middle of next week because we've signed up to do a short Spanish course, before we head down to the village where we're going to be volunteering for 3 months. We're both very well and really enjoying it so far, although I still have to get used to the time difference (which is why I'm writing this at 7am!). Will be in touch again soon, hope everybody at home is well and enjoying the end of the Olympics, and hopefully a nice summer!

Love Ross

PS Stuart, no spiders to report as of yet