Monday, April 3, 2006

Today was supposed to be the big day, finally leaving the Mariscal and getting to see the rest of Quito. Alas, it was not to be. I woke up vomiting last night and was so tired this morning from my disrupted sleep that there was no way I was going to leave the hostel early enough to beat the afternoon rain. I don't know what could have made me sick. Michael ate the same things I did and he was fine. Maybe it was the mango lassi I had with lunch. Oh well.

But there's lots of good news. 1) Whatever it was was just a passing thing and I'm fine now. 2) Smelly McPeesaver and his young companion have checked out of the hostel. 3) When we finally did leave the hostel at noon, we ran into Sam and Sepi from the Moonlight Lady.

They were just coming from e-mailing an update to the group and letting us know they were in town, but running into them made things so much easier to coordinate. (I think it's so amazing how the Moonlight Lady group is still e-mailing each other with updates.) Anyway, we made plans to meet them for dinner, and then Michael and I went over to the Magic Bean for breakfast. The Magic Bean is a pricey tourist restaurant, but it has wi-fi. ...Which was not working today.

After we ate, Michael went to the Basilica by himself and I went to the room to write but ended up playing Sim City. It's funny how fast a day can go by when you're doing pretty much nothing. In the end, I had just enough time to rush to the Internet cafe and post a blog entry before it was time to meet Sam and Sepi.

We had dinner at an Argentinian restaurant - giant raw steaks and red Chilean wine. We ordered two bottles, but between the discussion and the mind-changing, the waiter decided we had ordered one bottle of wine and four glasses of wine. There is so much room for problems when ordering something that you can't just point to on the menu. But seriously, why would we order four glasses of wine and also a bottle?

It was really nice to have dinner with people we know, kind of like being at home. If we were more sociable, we could be having dinner with people from hostels all the time, but no matter how nice they were, they'd be strangers. But after the Moonlight Lady, Sam and Sepi are like old friends.

They're not even supposed to be here. They should be in Peru with their friends from the US, but they're stuck here trying to get Sepi a new passport. The US embassy has not been very hospitable, apparently. Michael and I tried to visit our embassy in Panama City, just because it was so close to us.

I don't know what we thought, that there would be some kind of welcome, some kind of "hello, fellow Americans, come in and have some free coffee!" Or something. But no. Nothing. The embassy was not the least bit interested in us and our greedy curiosity. In fact, we were not even allowed in. Nor do they seem to be particularly interested in helping Sepi get a new passport.

They were not very nice to Sepi at all. Also, the embassy was short on not only Americans, but also English speakers. Though they did have someone who spoke to Sepi in Farsi. Sepi is fluent in Farsi but because she was so flustered and expecting Spanish, she had no idea what the woman was saying until Sam stepped in.

But she seems to have finally filled out the paperwork to their satisfaction and is expecting the passport Thursday or Friday at the earliest. In the meantime, they're going to do some mountain climbing in preparation to summit snow-capped Cotopaxi. Very ambitious. I hope to be able to climb the steps of the Basilica tomorrow.

TIMES VOMITED (Megan): 9

 

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Orange room.

Me in the window of the Backpackers Inn, Quito.

Glamour shots are extremely popular down here.

Quito. Is that a bouncy castle?

Does anyone really enjoy the seesaw? Quito.