i havent given up on blogging! i just took a bit of a break. what happened well i dont really know. what i am going to do though is rather than go day by day with all the details from my life i am just going to recap on some notible memories. right now i am in an internet cafe and i dont have too much time so i think i will only talk about what i have been doing this week.

QUITO- the reason for coming to quito was to go to the french embasy to get pepes visa to go there. if i havent mentioned this already pepe has a girlfriend from belgium that he wants to go visit. one of pepe and my mutual friends offered pepe a visa to go to france. a visa to go anywhere inside the european union gives you the freedom to travel anywhere inside the continent (which includes belgium). so monday night we headed by night bus to quito. the bus was 8 hours nonstop through the night. everyone i talked to said how awful the trip was but i didnt find it that bad because i slept the entire way. when we got there we had an hour to check into a hostel and go to the consulate. we did that and then evelyn (she came too) and i waited outside the embasy for about an hour for pepe to come out. when he came out he didnt have a visa or even his ecuadorian passport. the embasy had told him that he would have to come back on friday to get his passport and visa (if they decided to give it to him). so we elected to stay until friday night waiting for the passport and having a good time in quito. later tuesday we met up with my friend from argentina aniko (i met her in cuenca and we keep crossing paths). aniko and pepe went out on the town tuesday but evelyn and i stayed in the hostel resting. wednesday was far more interesting. we got a late start but after we were actually doing something we headed to quitos historic center. there we toured around the various plazas and cathedrals. i went into one cathedral which i think was called san marcos and it was by far the most incredible cathedral i had ever been to. the entire place was made with gold. everything was beautiful inside- art work, the cusufixes, the chapels- everything. then after that we went to an ecuadorian history museum. i know only a little bit about ecuadorian history (this museum didnt help that much) but all i can say is that poor ecuador has some bad luck. first of all it was conquested by the spanish and one of the last notible things that happened was when ecuador lost a war with peru (ecuador lost most of its jungle in this conflict). the last touristy thing we did was we went to the top of some mountain to look out over the city. at the top of this mountain was a statue of the virgin mary. below us quito sprawled out endlessly. it look as though quito stretches so far out that it falls of the high altitude valley it is situated on. wednesday night we bought food at a grocery store and cooked and ate in the hostel. thursday we set out to go to one of quitos most famous tourist attractions-el teriferiqo. its this tram that hauls toursist high up into the mountains surrounding quito. the view going up once again was stunning but once we arrived at the top everything was covered in fog. the four of us hiked around enough to enjoy the andes and then we returned back to the hostel. at the hostel we arrived just in time to watch a really important soccer game. the game was the semi finals of a club cup (meaning not national teams) played all throughout latin america. a team from quito played and beat a team from san lorenzo argentina. once the final goal was scored and the people of quito realized that their city was in the finals the city exploded. people broke out of bars to party in the streets. the streets were full of people singing, people cheering, people drinking and riot police. it was a good night. friday morning was the moment of truth for pepes visa. aniko and i went with him to the embasy and when it was all over pepe came out shaking his head. he didnt get his visa. i was stunned, angry and dissapointed. i couldnt beleive that they didnt accept him, the embasy didnt even give a reason. moments later pepe tearfully called his girlfriend and said that he probably wasnt coming. we thought of everything we could do, all the people we could call for pepe to get another invitation to go to europe. we unfortunately didnt come up with much. however later that afternoon pepe and i went to the american embasy to see if we could get papers to fill out for the visa and the invitation. we didnt get any papers but a website where we can fill out all the material. dissapointed we havent done much today. pepe and evelyn are planning to return to guayaquil tonight. aniko is going to some town in the middle of nowhere and i am hopefully going to spend the night in quito and then go to quilotoa. quilotoa is a crater lake high in the andes, it looks cool. maybe in the next couple of days there will be some result on pepe going to europe but we will just have to wait and see.
-mark