Surprise!

We've had an eventful couple of days. I explained Enrique in my last post, and he is always full of surprises! In the last post I mentioned we would be attending a ballet, which we did. On Friday night, we went to a cultural building to watch the ballet. Now when I say ballet, it's nothing like anything you might be thinking. It was just in a big room with fold down chairs. An announcer talked for a while about the ballet, although I couldn't understand anything he was saying, and then the dancers started. It was more of a traditional dance I think with the women and men wearing traditional clothing. It was very neat. After a portion of the ballet, the guy talked again for a while and they taught us how to do the dance. So we stood up and followed along with the dance for a while. After this, Enrique surprised us again by having them announce us being there and they welcomed us as Canadian guests. During the show, we heard a lot of noise outside on the streets. We look and Enrique is motioning for us to come quickly so we all jump up and run out of the ballet. It turns out Friday was the March of the Saints!

We were told about the Cucurucho by Meghan and since this parade only happens once a year, we considered our minds bloooown! The picture to the left is the Cucurucho marching through the streets. Interesting hey? Enrique, being who he is, ran to the front of the parade and made them stop marching so we could catch up and take pictures. Just stops a holy parade. Oh Enrique! The parade leader didn't like this but Enrique didn't care and did it again!
They marched through the streets to the Church of San Francisco followed by hundreds of people! Enrique took us to the top of some other building so we could overlook the last part of the march. We had an unbelieveable view of the city from the roof of the building and were able to watch the end of the march without being in that huge crowd of people. Our minds were blown again!

After that, we went down and were able to get a picture with a couple Cucurucho, thanks to Enrique, and then walked through the church. The church reminded me a lot of the ones I saw in Israel, with such tall ceilings, amazing detail, and gold everywhere!

 This is a picture of us in the Church of San Francisco. Amazing right? What a ridiculous night. So hard to explain! After the church, we walked down streets lined with shops and little pub type things. There were lots of people and it was great to see some of the culture. We went into one tiny pub, which was the size of my bedroom at home, literally. There were about five or six other people in there so the 9 of us and Enrique squeezed ourselves in there. There were two young guys playing guitar and singing. Everyone was singing along, and we wanted to but we didn't know the words! We had a traditional drink - it's like juice with cinnamon and some sort of alcohol in it served hot. It was delicious but very very strong. Side note: The area we were in at this time used to be really bad with a lot of prostitution and drugs but the government put a lot of money into cleaning it up to have it be an area for people to walk around and have fun I guess. Hard alcohol wasn't allowed for this reason but this traditional drink was allowed so you saw many people walking around drinking it and it was the only thing served in pubs.
They were very welcoming us and they cheers'd us for being from Canada and were just all around very friendly. We had such a blast in that little pub. Once we were back at the hotel we invited Carlos over and played some drinking games. He taught us one they play here, which is basically categories with a couple different rules. Overall, Friday was a fantastic day. It felt like a week with everything we did and saw! Yesterday we had a fairly relaxed day. We went to the Basilica, which is an old church with two clock towers. You can climb all the way to the top of the clock towers. Unbelieveable! I will post pictures next time. So we spent the day walking around the various levels of the church, walking across some scary planks used as a bridge from one spot to another, and climbing some steep steep stairs. Even though I'm scared of heights, I braved it and I am so glad I did! The view from the top was amazing, plus the experience itself was a lot of fun. After the Basilica, we walked down the streets to the area by the Cultural Centre and went in and out of shops just wandering for the afternoon. We came back to the hotel from some down time and then went out for supper to La Boca del Lobo (the mouth of the wolf). Its in "gringo" area so things were in English but it was a neat little pub. Gringo is the term used for tourists here, which usually has a negative connotation but we use it amongst ourselves when we're acting really touristy. The food in Ecuador is amazing! The fruit and vegetables are soooooo fresh and delicious and everything has so much flavour. There were five of us that missed our graduation dinner in Canada so we were considering this our grad dinner. We cheers'd a lot and overall had a great time. We're very loud in Ecuador, since most people of soft spoken, but we like to have a good time! Now today we've had a relaxed morning and are going to the Principal's house from the school that fed us the fish. She invited us for lunch today so we'll be heading there soon and then the rest of the day will be preparing for the schools tomorrow! I'll probably blog less as I assume the week days won't be as exciting as the past couple days! I'm looking forward to the school experience, but I'm extremely nervous. I'm picking up a few words a day of Spanish but I'm still having trouble understanding it! I guess we'll see how it goes..