We don’t have any internet connection right now, so I’m writing this hoping that I can post it soon. On Friday we took Robbie, Joanna, Wilson, and Johana’s friend out for lunch (they eat lunch late here, it was about 3:30 I think). The meal consisted of fritada (platter of potatoes, plantain, avocado, pork, corn), morocho, quimolitos, cerveza, and manzana.
Then they went to Alice and Wonderland at a movie theatre that was inside a mall, so Kev and I walked around the mall for a little while. We laughed about Sunglass Hut being called "Sunglass Hot" here, then we decided to grab a beer and strangely enough ended up at TGI Friday’s. Over a glass of the Ecuadorian beer, Pilsner, we listened to some live music, a girl singing and a gentleman playing jazz guitar, they were truly amazing musicians. After that we met back up with Robbie, Johana, and three of her friends that had met her at the movie. They got some ice cream before we said goodbye to her friends and went back to their house to pack. Robbie and Johana (and their awesome dog, Aragorn) helped us get our tickets ($8 for a 6 hour bus ride) and we made it to our resort, Green 9, in Same after a just a little bit of bus confusion that was a little scary...
We got on the bus in Quito at 11:45, falling asleep shortly after that, and waking up again not having a clue what time it was. We were stopping at a transit station and there were busses all around us. We were getting our belongings together to get off because we assumed this was Esmeraldas, our destination, when we noticed that only half of the people on the bus were getting off. Then we thought maybe this was a rest stop along the way, but when those people never got back on the bus and we were driving again, we freaked out a little bit because we were pretty sure that we were supposed to get off at that stop. (The bus driver never announced anything, and we had assumed that there would only be one stop, Esmeraldas.) So we were back on the road, arguing about whether that was our stop or not, and finally went up to try and ask the driver. A man sitting in the front attempted to help tell us that we in fact did miss our stop, and told me that it was about 20 minutes to the next stop. We got off at the next one with no clue where we were, thinking that maybe we could find a cab to take us to Same. There was a very nice woman that spoke English and saw that we were confused, so she helped us walk down about a block to get on a bus back to Esmeraldas ($0.80 per person). While on that bus a man got on with a live (more like half-dead) chicken and was holding it by the feet. We laughed about how we’d never, ever, see that on a bus in the US. Finally, we were back to the transit station that we were intended to be at in the first place. We told the driver that we wanted to go to Same, and he put us on another bus. This is when we realized that we were headed in the same direction as before, when we missed our stop, but it was in fact the correct way to be going. So we told the driver “Casablancas” which is the area our resort is in. We were dropped off in front of a road with some security gates, they let us through, and we walked a little bit to finally see “Green 9” and get to our destination around 9:30am.
Basically we walked around, slept, bought a bunch of water just to realize that it was carbonated (oops), ate some food (Ecuadorian version of burger and fries) at a little bar on the beach, realized how terrible that room-temperature pina coladas are (we can’t drink anything with ice in it), slept more, went to the resort restaurant and had some delicious pizza (the pepperoni is basically just sliced ham) and went to sleep.
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