the love of adventure: week of welcome JUNGLE style!

I apologize for the lack of blog...but I was in the remote jungle of Ecuador where there was no internet!! This adventure would take a million words to describe so I will day by day go back and write about the excursions. Our days were jam packed!! The pictures will help show all the incredible things we saw and got to do. I felt so so so so so humbled by the places that we got to go and the quality of all the hotels that we stayed at. I kept wondering how the program had money to pay for like 5 star hotels but I forget that South America is A LOT cheeper and we got group deals! The first day of our trip we went to Quito and I was with the two leaders of the trip Lisa and Christian. We are all like family now. :) We hung out and waited for the first 2 girls to arrive in the airport. They were my roomies one short little cute asian, Florence and one tall awesome funny girl, Jenny. We bonded like no other and throughout the week we roomed together. It was so great we all counted on coming back to the room at night to wind down together. We are all soo different and together its a hilarious trio. Definitely sistas!:) We talked about everything from boys to God. There are a lot of people on my team that are kind of on the fence and really spiritual but not sure what they believe. Pray that God will use me and other believers on the team to be a sweet fragrance, an aroma of Christ's life. Pray that we can love like Christ and that it will be apparent that we are living for a God that is greater than anything on this earth.

The first night, Jenny and I explored the hotel and went swimming in the giant pool and hung out in the suana, hot tub and steam room. :) SOOO nice.When more of the group arrived we met them and went up to the 7th floor of the hotel for some food and drinks. Its great how different we all are there are people from Illinois, Boston, New York, Minnesota and more! I am however the only west coaster!!:) yeah yeah. The next morning we had an extravagant breakfast buffet with fruits, bread, eggs, sausage, potatoes, cereal, granola, homemade yogurts and so much more. We were treated like royalty the entire week. This was an orientation of exotic wonders. We headed out to see Otavalo. Its another city where there is great shopping and a better taste of people from the indigenous culture. While we were there we shopped went out to great meals, and had tours of how they make certain yarns- for scarves and panchos, tour of how different musical instruments are made and than we continued on the Quito.

In Quito we were privileged to see Guayasamin's art museum and house. He is an extremely well known, world traveled artist. His museum displayed the pain an suffering of people from around the world. And he started painting as a protest against unjust treatment of his people. I was thoroughly impressed and inspired by his work. I bought a few copies of his paintings and plan on learning more about him. After seeing his museum and his house we went to see the city of Quito and some cathedrals.
( I will fill ya more in later and update with more pictures!)Tonight all the other students were picked up by their host families it was so exciting. Even though I already knew mine it was still exciting to be reunited and to see them. I'm glad I already know and love their little family. The group was really nervous but excited on the trip home. Our bus ride back from the jungle today was 9 hours! But we made it and I need to shower and hit the hay. Miss everyone from home!:) Hope all is well and can't wait to hear about Loma stories, A town stories and just to hear from anyone from home!:)