Travel Email 1
?How does it feel, to be on your ow?, no direction at all, like a rolling stone?

Hola Mis Amigos y Familia!

Alive and Well here in Quito Ecuador. Have to say I could live here and be pretty happy. Beautiful weather up here in the Andes, good transit, people are friendly with no touristo hassles and everything is stupidly cheap for such a great city. Best highlight so far was the other night in a small little local bar dancing Salsa to fantastic music with the locals.

I{m slowly working on my spanish (slowly). The most important phrase Ive learned so far is: ?No hablo espa?ol, Nuestros cuerpos pueden hacer el hablar para nosotros.? (Translation at the end)

Things have been good we ve done the touristy stuff like go to the center of the earth. Thats right o degrees on the equator, pour water on one side goes clockwise other side counter clockwise. Bunch of other neat museums and info right in the area.

The most ?o? tourist experience was probably yesterday. We had wandered sightseeing through Old Town and everywhere we looked were riot police on top of a lot of regular police and some army. We wondered why until we saw a small protest march pass us. It seemed like overkill for the march but there was more. We were taking a cab when we couldnt get through because the police had blockaded all the roads back to our area of town. So we got out and walked. We were going by the university and saw a crowd of people, looked like part of a protest. After a few more steps my eyes started watering and I figured we were walking into tear gas. Yup sure enough a couple of steps later our noses and throats were burning and we were forced to turn around and circle back. We hit an even rougher patch of tear gas and then got through. We got around to the other side and got a better view of what was going on, now that we were no longer upsind of the tear gas. When we were there it seemed like only a small demonstration, a couple of hundred people. As we started watching they seemed to mainly be standing around with the odd person running up picking up a rock or something and throwing it. Then the police fired rounds and rounds more of tear gas, we witnessed something like 15 or 20 cannisters just while we were watching for a few minutes. More and more tear gas, it starting coming closer to us though again at this point we were upwind. Some were thrown back but the protesters mainly just backed away. Then the police charged into our view as they came in to try and clear them out. There was little to no hand to hand violence while we were there but we didn{t stay for the whole thing. I have the newspaper today and Emily and I are going to read it and try and find out more details.

That{s been about the most exciting thing to happen. Other than we went to the Guyasamin museum that houses a bunch of his artwork. If you don{t know Guyasamin is fantastic Ecuadorian painter who paints these amazingly distinct and expressive works. Definitely worth checking his stuff out.

Generally I have to say if things are half as good the rest of the way as they are in Quito, this trip is going to be a breeze compared to Tanzania.

Oh your Six Degrees/Small World moment: In Tanzania I met Tom and Bronagh. Tom and Bronagh were from Winnipeg but recently moved to Toronto. This Christmas I went to visit them and stayed with them at their place on College and Markham. The? the other night I met a girl from Toronto who grew up and lives on College and Markham. TJ this girl seriously lives up the block from you! Crazy aint it.

That{s about it. Tommorrow we{re leaving Quito and making our way South to experience swimming in waterfalls, bathing in hot springs, horse back riding, climbing a couple volacoes and paragliding!

Love to everyone, I hope you{re all well!

Love Charles
p.s. Did you k?ow the Houston airport is the ?George Bush Airpot?. Makes me want to vomit in my mouth a little.
p.p.s translation to above is roughly, ?I dont speak spanish, our bodies will have to do the talking for us?


Ryan: in the Houston airport I got my hands on the TSN Fantasy Baseball mag 2004. Yay!