Justin McCandless

I just got my pictures off of my camera (without destroying my memory card this time) so I thought I'd post some of them. These pictures span from my trip to Baños de Ambato to a quick visit to San Francisco cloud forest to my host brother Renato's graduation. And note that this time around you can click on the image for the giant version.

This is the mountain town of Baños in Pichincha in northern Ecuador. The picture was taken from the balcony of our hostal that I spoke highly of in a previous post. The whole town is surrounded by massive mountains like that. And yes that sign says "Karaoke".

This waterfall is visible from all parts of the town. Right at the base of it is las Piscinas de la Vírgen, the hot springs I mentioned before. You can see the pipes that take water from the waterfall and bring it over to the springs, making shower type things. Really cool place.

Cuy. That's the cute little fluffy animals that we gringos call guinea pigs, but as you can see, in Ecuador they're not pets. I still haven't tried this yet... The pic is from some place in Baños.

A waterfall during my crazy hike in Baños. You can see how we're hiking on the other side of that canyon from the highway like I was saying. This was before we got higher up near those clouds and it started to get freezing and wet.

Standing near the house in San Francisco cloud forest, looking out towards the highway to Zamora. This is cloud forest halfway between Loja and Zamora, which is in the Amazon.

And here's the house. This is the really nice visitor house that Arcoiris runs that I go to every once in awhile with work. It's a good place to hike, you can see a trail a bit in the picture. I still need to hike around here more if I can get a chance though. I was there the other night and saw some fireflies which was cool, it's a lot different there at night.

And here is a picture of me and my host family and my host brother Renato's graduation. My host sister Conchita is not in the picture (I believe she was the one taking it), and I also have an older host brother named Max who lives in Quito most of the time and was not here for the graduation. The graduation was interesting, and the actual ceremony (where this picture was taken) happens in the morning and is a lot like a typical US graduation. They have a few valedictorian type students who give speeches, the teachers also talk a lot, the dress is the same (minus tassels I think), they throw their hats. Oh, wait, Clark County School District, I forgot that we didn't do that because it's dangerous.

Anyways, there is then a second ceremony at night which we do not have in the United States. It's basically like a high school dance, but family comes at least for the beginning part where there are a few more speeches by teachers and stuff. Then it turns basically into dancing (which the people here in Ecuador do for pretty much all occasions anyway). So at about that point I grabbed some chow to go and booked it out of there...

But yeah, I heard later that this graduation dance thing is fairly new, and was done as an attempt to make Ecuadorian graduations more like graduations in American movies. Which is pretty funny. I think they're confusing high school dances and graduation a bit, though maybe they're getting it somewhat right since there really was no graduation party other than this.

Ok, I have a bunch of things I want to post in addition to this, but no time. I have a full memory card, so maybe I'll get some more pictures when I can get those pictures off. And yes, I did say I had just gotten a bunch of pictures of my memory card at the start of this post, but I filled it back up again by the time I finished writing this.