Feb. 4 - How do you meet another Gringo???

There were two goals for today, get a warm sweater and make my way to Riobamba. The first problem with this was that today was Carnival, and as such nothing was open. I wandered around the Mariscal Sucre in search of an open store that would sell fleece. When I found one I approached the only sales person who spoke English, to find out he didn’t work there. He was a Canadian helping his friend (who was as big as me) find a fleece large enough for him. With our broken Spanish, we managed to find sweaters large enough for both of us.

So, finally warm, I headed off to meet Scott, one of the people who I would be travelling with for the next few days. One nice thing about Ecuador is that it is really easy to find another “white guy”. There are only a handful of us around. So, needless to say, I managed to find Scott with relative ease. We hopped into his truck to make our way down to Riobamba to meet Tom.

On the way, Scott told me about himself and the work of "Free the Children". Tom helped Scott with this project while he was in Ecuador (the reason for Scott joining us on this trip). He also spoke a lot about his experiences in Ecuador so far. Once we reached Riobamba we tried to call Tom to no avail. After we finished dinner, we learned from the waiter that the city code for Riobamba was 03, not 02 as we had been dialing. With this information, we got through no problem.

After meeting Tom at the bus station, we headed over to Julie’s house, where we were going to stay for the rest of the week. Upon arrival, Julie invited us in for some tea. There was a lot of catching up to do between her and Tom, none of which I understood (a common theme this week which makes me think I need some more Spanish lessons). I didn’t have to worry too much as we headed off to bed early since we would have to leave by 5 to get to tomorrow’s meeting on time. So far I have been getting up before 7 every day while on vacation…..I don’t even get up that early for work back home. It just ain’t right.