From Miami to Guayaquil

I arrived in Miami (a first for me) on American. Met another interesting young man on the plane. Darren was going to a 2 day conference there. We chatted, me about traveling and mentioning visiting Doug who was a Buddhist monk living in Plum Village in the south of France. Later he was reading his business book (I can´t remember the title) and he leaned over to show me a line in his book that mentioned PLUM VILLAGE!! He said it was such a small world! He´d never heard of PV until a few minutes before!! More coincidences! He said he´d been to Miami before because his parents live in Ft. Lauderdale but now were home in CT for taxes. I said where in CT did they live? He said Middlebury! He went to Pomperaug High School and Memorial Middle School (for those who don´t know, this is Region 15 where I taught for 15 years! But I was at P Elementary School in Southbury) Small World!!! He gave me his card and asked me to send him this blog site so he could follow my trip!!

Anyway met up with Betty who´d flown in from St. Paul in spite of the storm there (she had to wait for de-icing as did I). We were to fly on LANEcuador which was about a 20 minute walk for me after collecting my luggage around the horseshoe terminal! When we went to check in, they informed us their partner American Airlines was doing our flight and we had to go ALL THE WAY BACK around to AA where I´d just come from! Oh, well! We were going to be sitting on a plane for a long time!

The flight was crowded but uneventful and we left at 4 pm and arrived at 8:30 pm. After getting luggage and going through customs, we were happy to see a guy there with a Susan Bachman sign held up! He taxied us to Dreamkapture hostel who had our twin bed room with AC!!!! Because it was 89 degrees when we arrived from the snow!! We had a beer (they had actually fed us a meal on the plane!!) and went to bed.

Guayaquil is a port, industrial city that is mostly a jumping off place for Galapagos visitors. In the reading I´d done, there wasn´t much at all to see so we had Monica in the a.m. arrange a van to drive us 3 hours up into the mountains to Cuenca - 3rd largest city here and a UN historic site! There were 3 young Ecuadorian women from Cuenca returning home with us. Today is Maundy Tuesday so is a holiday at the end of 2 weeks of Carnival!! The city was pretty closed up when we arrived. The drive was breathtaking with many switchbacks up higher and higher into the Andes. Pretty soon is was all in the clouds and we didn´t get too many views. Hopefully tomorrow when we head down we´ll see better views.

The owner at Dreamkapture stored our luggage and recommended this Casa del Barranco. We have a lovely twin room with private bath for $44 (they use American currency in Ecuador). We headed down to the Plaza by the beautiful 3 blue domed cathedral to find the around-the-city tour bus.

We ran into many Westerners (we had heard many ex-pats live here). We stopped two women for information - one was from Haddamm CT and the other a Canadian. They were studying at Simon Bolivar language school for a month of immersion and doing a homestay. They loved it and highly recommended the program! To think about for next year! As Cuenca is lovely, cool, looks very much like Puebla in Mexico - wrought iron railings, picturesque old city!

That´s all for tonight! Buenos noches! Lent begins tomorrow! I´m giving up NOTHING!! :)