We made it to Quito last Sunday night after flying all day and are enjoying our stay. (Luckily, we were able to upgrade to first class, thanks to all of John\u00c2\u00b4s frequent flyer miles, which made the trip much more enjoyable.) We go to class from 8:30 – 12:30 (class is one-on-one with an instructor). My instructor is great, but unfortunately, her mother passed away yesterday, so I am without a teacher today (I\u00c2\u00b4ll make up the time next week when Inez returns). John also likes his instructor, Jaime.<\/p>\n
Quito is beautiful and surrounded by incredible mountains – it has taken a few days to get used to the high altitude.<\/p>\n
We have been spending our afternoons having lunch and doing our homework at a little restaurant nearby, The Magic Bean. <\/a> The weather\u00c2\u00b4s great, so we sit outside.<\/p>\n We went on a city tour on Wednesday night with a group from the school – it was fun to see other (nicer) parts of town. We went to a beautiful spot high above the\u00c2\u00a0city where they have a huge statue of an angel <\/a>– it was foggy at times and quite beautiful and mysterious. We also visited the old historic part of town with buildings and churches built in the 16th century – it\u00c2\u00b4s a designated historic site with UNESCO.<\/a><\/p>\n Last night John went with some of the guys from school to a soccer match – I stayed in the hotel because I wasn\u00c2\u00b4t feeling great (something disagreed with my stomach). He had a great time and said it was a lot of fun.<\/p>\n We have spent some amount of time dealing with hotels.\u00c2\u00a0 It turns out that our first hotel has a live jazz band most nights, so we escaped to another hotel which is a lot nicer and quieter…although this morning I moved us to another room because of the street noise.<\/p>\n We\u00c2\u00b4ve gotten cat reports from our sitter – evidently Noodle is not being very friendly, which surprises me, but hopefully he will warm up. Flavia, of course, is not to be seen. We miss them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We made it to Quito last Sunday night after flying all day and are enjoying our stay. (Luckily, we were able to upgrade to first class, thanks to all of John\u00c2\u00b4s frequent flyer miles, which made the trip much more enjoyable.) We go to class from 8:30 – 12:30 (class is one-on-one with an instructor). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3722,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/3722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}