Dancing on the Volcano

Today, our 2 weeks in Quito are coming to an end, we are heading for the Amazon Jungle for 4 days overnight! I am looking forward to seeing spiders, anacondas, piranhas, monkeys, parrots, and pink dolphins there!! My friend Flora arrived here yesterday and is joining us in the jungle!

The last week in Quito was rather quiet, the whole city was preparing for the football match against Brazil for days. We were lucky to meet the Brazilians at the Sheraton Hotel, we met there with an acquaintance of Tömmi's brother who works at the German Embassy. Superstar Neymar even managed to smile ;)

On Saturday, we went to the massive Indigenous Market in Otavalo, where we naturally bought 2 alpaca sweaters!! We will need them in Patagonia. In Otavalo, we felt like in Smurf land: the indigenous people are soooo tiny, even Tömmi and I stand out :-D but even though they are only a few feet tall, they have an enormous charisma and probably know much more about life than we could ever learn. Afterwards, we drove to a once sacred Inca waterfall, if the Incas knew today that masses of tourists are crowding there, they would probably summon an earthquake.

Our language school friend Roger from Zurich and I finally tried Cuy (guinea pig without a 'chen', because these are huge animals here) on the way home ... WELL, I can't say more about it yet.

Speaking of earthquakes: the whole city just shook! We still don't know how strong the earthquake was, but it felt pretty intense. The house felt like it was swaying about 3 meters left and right! We are fine, although you can hear some sirens outside, as far as we can see the city from our rooftop terrace, there are no major damages. Tömmi was, of course, sitting on the toilet during that time :-D

It's time for us to escape to the Amazon, although we would have liked to stay a little longer with Alicia and Galo!