Picturas!

Greetings! I finally figured out how to upload pictures, so to start let me explain a few of these:

This is a shot from the first plane ride. I just thought it was cool.

Here is a picture that tries to capture the sunset over the Andes from my flight to Quito. I don´t know if you´ll be able to really see what it is, but I thought I would at least try.

Again, this looks really dark on this computer so I don´t know if it will work, but this is a shot of Quito from the air when we flew in. The city is laid out like a long, narrow rectangle because of the mountains on either side.

This is part of my room. As you can see, it´s very nice and quite well furnished.

Another shot of my room. My bed is HUGE!

This is the view from my window this morning. As you can see my house is pretty close to the mountains. In the mornings there are usually a lot of clouds that hover around the mountains. It can be quite stunning.

This is a shot from the roof of our house looking the long way down the city. It is quite sprawling and goes just about as far in the other direction!

Well, that´s all the pictures that I have the time and patience to upload right now. Things here are going pretty well. I´ve had some quite intense spanish classes, about six hours per day, which are really tiring me out. So far I have been pretty lame. I basically get up, eat breakfast, run, rest, eat lunch, go to spanish school, come home and eat dinner and go to sleep at like 9:00. I´m so cool...

I was able to run again yesterday, which went pretty well, around 7:20 pace for the same loop. Again, it went ok until the half mile relatively steep hill at the end of the loop. That is pretty killer. I doubt I was running much faster than 10 or 11 minute pace there.

Lo que bueno is that we have the whole weekend free, so Benedicte and I are going to get to know the city a bit. I think we might go out to a club or bar tonight and then go to the big shopping mall area tomorrow. I need to buy some warmer clothes!

Yesterday, we toured the hospital where we are going to be working. It is very, very poor and disorganized and clear that they could use some help. However, since they are pretty unorganized, it´s unclear exactly what we are going to be doing. We start on monday, so I guess we´ll see then.

I think that my spanish is actually improving quite a bit, even over just a few days. I can basically understand everyone, it´s just difficult for me to speak. Hopefully my speaking will get better so I can really start to communicate with people.

Ok, well I´m going to try and go run again. I will try and update again in the next few days.