Day 30: View of the City

Even on a free day there is no time to rest.  Today a couple of us decided to forgo a few more hours of sleep to visit the Teleferiqo early in the morning.  The Teleferiqo is a chair lift that brings people to the top of mount Pichincha, where you can look out at the city of Quito.  We took a taxi half way up the mountain and then bought our tickets for the lift.  The ride up was around ten minutes and the view the entire way up was amazing.  When we got to the top the air felt much thinner and far colder than before, but perhaps it was also the gorgeous landscape that was taking my breath away.  Apparently, there was bandits along some of the mountain trails so we only walked around the lift area.  But even that short hike was hard, and we stopped to catch our breath many times.  After taking in the beauty of the mountains and city below we rode back down the teleferiqo and caught a taxi back to the hotel.

With three reflections and a few blog posts due, many of us ended up spending a majority of our day working to catch up on our work at the hotel.  It was the first time we had reliable Wi-Fi in a while and so you may have noticed a flood of new blog posts.  After working through much of the day we had our final group dialogue dinner at a restaurant called Spieza.

At Spieza the food was amazing, we had ceviche, empanadas, barbeque pork, and a delicious merengue type dessert.  Even more delicious was the fact that it was all paid for by the school.  After all the food was eaten Jean and David surprised us by announcing that tonight’s dinner was also an awards banquet.  Each one of us received our own award either for being adventurous with new cuisine, or being always eager to learn, or for even things as random as being the one to fall off a boat.  It was hilarious to hear each of the awards, and see the accompanying pictures on the award certificates.  After dinner we returned to the hotel for some final work before retiring early for the long day of editing ahead.