It has been a few weeks since I've last added a post.  School has been going pretty well.  We just finished up our MAP testing.  The students will take the test in the middle of the year and at the end of the year again.  I have been keeping pretty busy.  Every Tuesday, our bike group rides up into the hills.  Wednesday is soccer day.  It's fun to play and every game I get a little closer to being in soccer form.  Last weekend, we went to a soccer game.  It is called the clasico.  There are two professional soccer teams in Guayaquil.  The clasico is when they play against each other.  The stadium was enormous!  The atmosphere was very interesting.  I have a few pictures and a short video of the experience.  This weekend, we had a guy's night which was a lot of fun.  Thanks to a few friends, I tried sushi for the first time here and they showed me the most wonderful thing.  The video stores are amazing.  DVD's (pirated of course) cost 3 for $5. There are even some places that charge $1 a piece.  You can find anything and everything that you could ever want, including movies that have not been released to DVD yet.  I'm really excited for the next couple weekends.  This coming weekend, I've decided to take a trip to Cuenca.  It is a colonial city in the mountains.  I plan on walking around, checking out a soccer game, and most importantly, trying cuy.  Cuy is a traditional indigenous dish that people have eaten for years and years.  Cuy is guinea pig, that is usually roasted.  The weekend after Cuenca is the big biking trip down Volcano Cotopaxi (the highest active volcano in the world) and Laguna Quilotoa.  I'm really excited.

Saturday had me wondering if I was part of some new Jurassic Park movie.  I went into Guayaquil to see some of the attractions.  The first place that I started was the Iguana Park.  It was pretty surreal. Iguanas were everywhere!  I've seen iguanas before, but never this many and never this up-close and personal.  They would walk around and not pay any attention to the people.  Pigeons would land on them, which didn't seem to bother them one bit.  They were all over the place.  The trees were completely full of them.  They definitely weren't small.  There were some pretty large and in charge iguanas.  


















After I had my fill of iguanas, I walked to the Malecón.  It was the third time that I had been there, but the first time that I actually spent some time there.  It is the boardwalk that runs alongside the river.  There are playgrounds, lookouts, and lots of food.  If you follow the Malecón, it leads you to a very colorful neighborhood called Las Peñas.  It was pretty cool.  To get to the very top, you walk up more than 430 stairs.  The view from the top really shows how big and spread out Guayaquil is.  After doing all that, it was time for a well deserved beer and ceviche!


Everything else is going well.  I'm adjusting more and more to the school and the curriculum.  Still not quite fully adjusted to waking up so early.


It's about a month away, but I can't wait for a trip that we planned for October.   We're going on a bike tour outside of Quito.  We'll start at 15,000 feet on the slopes of Volcano Cotopaxi and bike down to about 7,000.  We'll also be going to a crater lake that is supposed to be amazing.  That Saturday, Ecuador plays Uruguay for World Cup qualifying.  I am really hoping that it works out for us to go.


If you have time, check out my youtube video of my photos with voice over.  CHEERS!





Here is the link to my photos from this weekend (same as the slideshow):
Guayaquil Pictures