Ole! :(

This past weekend was certainly an experience.  Amber and I went to our first and probably last bullfight.  Amber won´t write about this, because she does not want to remember it.  I thought it was fairly cruel but interesting and exciting too. Also as a warning, I´m about to describe everything that happened, which involves bulls being killed and an injured horse.   Our friend's uncle, Guillermo Albán, is an internationally famous matador and he saved some tickets for us.  The fight was in the city of Riobamba, which is about 3 hours south of Quito.  In much of Ecuador, they´re not allowed to kill the bull in the ring. They just take the bulls out back and do it.  However, in Riobamba, the matador still can make the kill in the ring.  Here´s the breakdown of the bullfight we saw.  7 bulls who have had little contact with humans their whole lives are caught and brought to the ring.  The first bullfighter was from Portugal and he fought the bulls while on horseback.  He pretty much did everything the matadors did but from a horse.  There was one matador from Spain and two from Ecuador.
 The bulls weight was announced (ours were between 970 and 1015 pounds) and then released into the ring.  It ran around pissed off and people with capes would distract it.  The matador would also have the bull charge at his larger cape, but unlike the other people who used the hold-the-cape-and-get-the-hell-out-of-the-way method, he would stand his ground as the bull went by.  After about 5 minutes of this, the president of the bullfight would have his trumpet players play a short song to signify to move to the next round.  Now the Picadores come out.  The Picadores are men on heavily armored, blindfolded, and sedated draft horses.  Their job is to jab the bull in the back of the neck with a lance to tire it out, straighten its charge and lower its head.  The horses were hit very hard by the bull and sometimes fell over.  One horse was knocked over and gored in the neck.  The horse got up on his own and walked out, but we don´t know its fate after.  The trumpets play and it moves to the next round.  Now there are guys with two decorated, long hooked spears who´s job is to go up to the bull, jab the spears in its back and get away before being killed.  These guys were the most impressive in my opinion.  Trumpets play and now it is the matadors main event.  With a smaller, red cape and small sword the matador has the bull charge the cape as he shows off his bravery and control over the animal.  The bull come within inches of the matador, but he doesn't get hurt.  He does this for a about 5 or so minutes and then the trumpets play again.  The final stage.  The matador changes to a larger and heavier sword.  He continues to have the bull charge the red cape as he waits for the right moment to kill the bull.  When ready, the matador holds the sword out and lunges at the bull.  If he his his mark, the roughly 2 1/2 foot sword is thrust completely into the bull, piercing the heart.   The bull then stumbles around for a bit and falls over.  Sometimes its clean, sometimes its pretty gruesome.  Its usually not dead yet, so someone puts a knife through the back of its head.  One fight lasts around 20-30 minutes.  This whole thing is then repeated.  Each matador gets 2 bulls each.  The audience had a lot of control over the fight.  If someone does something they don´t like, they whistle and yell until they stop.  If the audience really likes a bull, they yell and whistle before the kill and the bull gets pardoned.  This happened to one lucky bull while we were there.   The ranking of the matador is based on the ears and tail system.  Depending on his performance, either nothing, one ear, two ears, or the tail is cut off the bull and given to the matador.  No ears is terrible, one is okay, two is better, and a tail is the best.  After the fight, we jumped down into the outer ring to go meet our friend's uncle.  He didn't win, but he also had some non-ideal bulls for bullfighting.  We then drove home and got back to Qutio around 1:00 in the morning.    Here´s the Youtube of the fight.  Seriously, don´t watch this if you don´t want to see bulls die.  Or at least read the description to know which parts to skip.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98emN9QDqwA 
     On a happier note, I ran a 7k run in Quito the next morning which was run by the university we work for.  I finished in 40:41 seconds, which I think is pretty good for not practicing and being at 9,000 ft above sea level.  We then ate at the pancake house.

Interesting fact:  Visible from the town of Riobamba is the talles volcano in Ecuador, Chimborazo.  It is 6268.2 meters above sea level. What makes it unique though is it is the farthest point from the center of the planet.  Because the earth is not a perfect sphere and bulges at the equator, the top of Chimborazo is farther away from the center of the earth than Mt. Everest.  

Baños and Cuenca

This past weekend was a 5 day holiday weekend for us, so we took advantage and traveled south.  Thursday morning we began our venture on a 45 min bus ride to the south bus terminal in Quito.  From this terminal, virtually every city in Ecuador can be reached.  We bought tickets to Baños.  Baños is a city about 3 1/2 hours from Quito.  It is famous for its hot springs.  When we got to Baños we found our hostel, a microbrewery, and some pizza.  Microbreweries are very rare in Ecuador, but pizza is not.  A 16" pizza was only $5.50.  We had a terrible time sleeping Thursday night because the people in the street never slept.  We later learned that this was because of a 7 hour religious pilgrimage walk from Ambato to Baños that happens every Holy Thursday.  There were thousands of people sleeping and partying on the sidewalks.  The next day, we climbed up to the statue that overlooks Baños.  We counted over 680 stairs.  After this, we started for the hot springs.  Our guide book had crappy directions and we ended up on the wrong side of the river.  Feeling frustrated, we overlooked our frugal ways and hired a cab to get to the baths.  Best 2 dollars we've spent so far.  The springs consisted of 7 different pools ranging in temperature.  We started with the hottest.  It smelled like pee and iron because the water came directly from the rocks in the floor of the pool.  The water was also yellow an murky from the natural minerals.  After we got over the smell, it was pretty refreshing.  We tried a few other pools which were cooler and smelled less, but we ultimately favored the pee pool.  A local treat of Baños is taffy.  There are many shops where people are pulling taffy on wooden pegs mounted on the doors.  We tried some fresh off the peg.  Another popular treat is to suck on pieces of sugar cane.  We bought a bag and chewed on them in the park.  Later that night we had canelazo, the traditional Ecuadorian hot drink, and watched another thousand people walk down the street toward the church singing and carrying a coffin with Jesus inside.  This night was a better night sleep because we changed rooms and there were not thousands of people sleeping in the streets.  
   The next morning we woke up and started the journey to Cuenca, a city more to the South. We tried to buy a bus ticket straight to Cuenca but that was not happening. We had to buy a ticket to Riobamba (about 2 hours away), wait in Riobamba and then continue the rest of the 7 hours to Cuenca. We were really glad to get off the bus that night. We picked out a hotel from the guide book called Hotel Pichincha. When we arrived it looked pretty nice from the street. We when found our room we realized that we had checked in to an insane asylum.  The floors creaked with every step, there was a random closet with metal bars outside our room, the room had no windows to the outside but it did have a nice creepy sink and mirror in the corner, the bed was metal, there was a small door leading to a space in the wall inside the shower and last but not least our pillows weighed 8 pounds each and John´s pillow felt like it was stuffed with balls of cat fur and corn kernels.   Not wanting to spend time in the eerily silent room we wandered around the city. After seeing the massive old cathedral and another pretty church we set out to find something to drink. We just kept walking down a random road and don´t you know... we happened on another microbrewery. What are the odds? This bar had 4 different homemade beers and they were cheap. We did not order the 1.25L beer, but if we had it would have only been $4. We sat in neat hammock swing chairs and enjoyed the drinks. After we were done we headed back to the hotel. Despite the fact that John didn't quite fit on the bed and the fact that every move resulted in a thousand squeaks, we actually slept alright.  In the morning we woke up and went to Easter mass at one of the churches that we saw the previous night. Even though we didn't understand it all it was still a nice mass. Afterward we set out to quiet our rumbling tummies. I turned down many places because they just didn't seem right. Finally we happened upon the market. On the top floor we discovered rows of ladies making breakfast. We settled on a plate of rice, pork meat and skin (for John), a hard boiled egg, potatoes and hominy and a raspberry juice. Two plates and the juice came to a whopping $2.50. We took a couple hour walk around the city to help us digest. Our walk took us past other churches, the river and lots of interesting markets. We ended up back at the first market for lunch. This time John had pork that was pulled directly from the roasted pig sitting on the counter, potatoes, and a coconut juice. Then we walked around more. Sometimes we just sat in the park and watched people too.  Since it was Sunday there was not much open and we were back to the hotel by 10. On Monday morning we had breakfast with the rice and egg lady again. Taking the advice from some people at work, we booked a flight back home instead of trying to endure the 12 hour bus trip.  Totally worth it and we got to see Cotopaxi from the plane.

Interesting fact:  When people in Ecuador describe a person's height with a hand gesture, they always keep their hand perpendicular to the ground with their thumb pointing up.  They only describe the height of animals with their hand parallel to the ground.  It could be seen as offensive to describe a person's height with a parallel hand.  

We got really high...

...about 14,400 feet high to be exact. On April Fools Day (which is not celebrated here), we attempted to climb the closest mountain to us in Quito.  The mountain is called Rucu Pinchincha. It is about 15,400 ft tall at the summit. To start the hike many people, including us, ride the teleferico to almost the top, about 13,450ft. The teleferico is a cable car that takes you from bottom to top in under 10 minutes. We planned to start the climb around 8am. Well, we arrived at the bottom of the teleferico to discover that it did not have any power at the top, but rest assured that the electric company had been called. We decided to wait it out. While waiting we met a really nice family from St. Augustine, Florida. They were in Quito for the week with their two young boys. I remember thinking that it was really cool that they took their kids to interesting places abroad instead of the usual Disney Land or Myrtle Beach. We ended up waiting around for about 3 hours. Then finally the line for buying tickets started to move and we were on our way up the mountain. At the top of the teleferico we took some pictures (one of a llama) and got a really nice view of Quito. It was hard to believe that even though we were seeing a hugh chunk of the city, it was not even close to seeing the whole thing.
    Now the hike.  We finally got on the trail around 12:30pm (a very late start). We climbed up and down the man and dirtbike make path. We reached the rock part about 2 hours later. From our view on the rocks we could see the ash slide (made from a past eruption). Unfortunately we could also see a gigantic storm moving in on us rather quickly. It started to hail lightly as we decided to turn around and forego our summit attempt. The hail steadily picked up both size and frequency. We happened upon an overhang with other hikers just as the hail got really bad. While waiting out the storm in the ¨cave¨ we got to see some really neat horizontal lightning and hear some close and very loud thunder. It took about 45 minutes for the storm to pass. We made our way back to the teleferico. I (Amber) fell more times than I care to remember on the slippery and muddy trail. My pants were about 5 pounds heavier at the end of the hike because of the mud.
   We are looking forward to the next time that we can make this hike, and make it to the top : ) I have a few pictures of the hike on my facebook page...more to come when we make it to the top.

Interesting fact: Any bus in Qutio, and maybe even Ecuador, costs 25 cents per ride. No matter how long you ride or where you are going. We can literally get a bus from one end of the city to the other for 25 cents...and Qutio is 22 miles long. Pretty much the buses are always crowded...but it is totally worth it.