Manejando y Comiendo

I found myself awakened by Daniel (Cavanaugh) telling me to wake up sometime early last night (actually about 4 AM). We needed to start packing and getting ready to leave... with no power. This sort of thing wouldn’t normally bother me, except that I needed a shower, and no electricity means no hot water, and for a Floridian in freezing cold Quito, this is a nightmare. The electricity was soon fixed, and after eating breakfast, meeting Justo, our new compadre, we packed the bus and headed to church. We did the normal routine of sing a song, introduce ourselves (i.e. public humiliation by lack of Spanish skills), violin and piano duet, and skit. We did Andy’s bad day. In this skit I am brutally beaten by the “bad boys,” but I know it’s all a ploy; they just wanted a skit where they could show their true feelings about me. John took a little much liberty in this skit. We did that twice, then changed and started on our new adventure:We drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we stopped for the bathroom and we drove and we drove and we ate lunch and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we ate candy and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we sang songs and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we planned our program and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove…That went on for 6 hours.We are practicing our kung fu skills due to the fact that a man jumped on the bus and stole one of our driver’s phones as we were parked asking for directions. What a nice welcome to Esmeraldas. We got all packed away in our hotel rooms, and had some down time to work on the program for this week. Now, back to the team:We took showers, and headed out to dinner to meet the pastor and some people from the church. We were entertained by a traditional dance, it was AWESOME! If you can imagine all the awesomeness of Latin culture, and African culture, put together into a song with dancing, you can almost get a picture of how cool this was! Next awesomeness came in the food. It was the most amazing food that we have had so far on this trip! We came to the recognition that the table was best described as an image. Imagine a conveyor belt with plates on it. That side is the girl’s side, the plates run from that side into a gaping mouth of one of the guys. The plates were then stacked and all that was left were little pieces of bone. We also received a little welcome package with a bunch of AWESOME bracelets in it. I have a feeling I am going to like it here, not only because of the amazing food, but also due to the fact that we are in a WARM climate, and at SEA LEVEL and the people are GREAT!Nathaniel, for the team!