First day in Quito - 10. September 2010

After a good nights sleep I woke up and it didn't take too long before Blanqui, the mother of the family, came to my room and told me that desayuno (breakfast) is ready. Of course the first thing I ate in Ecuador was a banana. The family I stay with lives in a nice three-story building. The family lives in the first floor and the second floor is rented out to students or travelers like me. We get breakfast and dinner served at the family table but don't eat at the same time as the family. After breakfast Blanca showed me the way to the language school – an easy 30 minute walk. After that I had to kill a few hours before my class would start at 2pm. I walked around the Mariscal neighborhood which has a lot of cafes, bars, hostels and stores.
Although it doesn't get that hot in Quito (22 deg C), the sun is very strong. So walking around in the midday sun wasn't the smartest idea. For a few minutes I enjoyed the cold of an old church. A lot of people used their lunch break to go to the church and pray, leaving when their blackberries rang.
I headed back to the language school and got introduced to my teacher Adriana. Since I never studied Spanish, we started with the Alphabet. I felt like a little school girl, saying A, Be, Ce,... I learned some basic grammar and vocabulary and started to get tired after three hours. You can learn a lot in four hours if you are the only student in class. After class I walked back to the house. It's not recommended to walk around when it's dark (especially not, if you are a single white woman) and I just made it back to the house before it got dark. Since Quito is very close to the equator, days are equally long all year and it gets dark before 7pm. When I got rice and beans for dinner, I knew I arrived in South America. I'm quite sure that I'll eat more rice and beans in the next few weeks than I had in my life so far. I talked to my German roommate for a while about Ecuador and volcanoes before going to bed early.
Amazingly enough I managed to not take a single picture on my first day in Ecuador.