First few days in Quito

Everything has been going well here in Quito the last few days. On Thursday I wandered around the Old Town and the University. I have some pictures that I´d like to post but I need a new cable to connect my camera to the computer. On Thursday night I meet up with a local that I met through couchsurfing.com and we had a beer. I´ll probably meet up with him again soon. I spent a good portion of the day Friday doing some research on the local Spanish Language schools. I visited 2 of them and now I just have to decide which one I want to attend. The plan is to start early next week. Typical cost for one on one Spanish lessons is approx. 6$ per hour. Thats for a program where you dont have to commit to a certain number of days and you can schedule the lesson time whenever works for you. Thats a bit expensive but I need to start learning Spanish quickly so I think I just need to get started rather than worry about saving a few bucks. I may even try a different school for the 2nd week just to see what works best for me. Last night, Friday night, I met 2 American guys in my hostel that just finished a 2 month long volunteer program in the jungle region of the country. Their task was to improve the water for some small amazon communites and they built many rain water collection tanks themselves over the last few months. Their tales of life in the amazon are amazing. Some of the communities required them to hike for 5 to 6 hours off the road to be reached and one required 9 river crossings at waist depth! One of the guys even had to eat monkey soup.....which had a monkey arm sticking out of the bowl...

Thats all for now....
Andy