Happy Halloween! - Blogabond

During each teaching cycle, each class has two movie days. I had the pleasure of having my first movie days yesterday and today. With the holiday, I thought it was only fitting to watch a Halloween type movie, however still school appropriate--my students are 14+ in age. In my afternoon class yesterday, we watched The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (which still warranted screams from my youngest pupil); this morning we watched the original Frankenstein movie--and I must say, I prefer the book. I also shared some candy with my students and some history of our tradition--they were a bit more reluctant to share about theirs--Day of the Dead, but I know some will be celebrating it old style this weekend, or at least spending time with family.

Backtracking...last weekend I visited one of the must-see tourist attractions in Quito: El Panecillo (little bread loaf), where the Virgen de Quito statue is located. You can see the statue from the center of the city and it helps to orient us, knowing the statue is always south. However, once there, we realized there is still a large portion of the city south of this statue!

Virgen de Quito

The statue is also much bigger in person. Obviously it has to be big, but she is massive. One serious Virgin of the Apocolypse. With Meadhbh and Ayla I ascended into the statue, taking in the history of the statue's construction through old photographs and written statements. There were also beautiful stained glass windows throughout the bottom portion of the statue--Earth. Though you couldn't climb inside the body of the beast or of the virgin, the views from the top of the world were wonderful. However, in my rush that morning I didn't bring my camera, so i'll pass some pictures along from my friends once I have them. Visiting el Panecillo for the views of the city was wonderful, and it was a gorgeous, clear day too. Perfect, really.

view of the city from Panecillo

Getting to el Panecillo was not difficult, though not something we were entirely sure how to do either. So we rode as far south as we could on the Trole (which was really far--20 minutes further than I'd ever been before!) and took a 10 minute taxi ride to the top of the hill--it's a good idea not to walk up the hill because there have been many accounts of robberies and wild dog attacks. We thought we'd avoid that adventure for the day. When we left, we hopped on a bus headed to Mitad del Mundo and had the driver drop us off in el Centro Historico before hitting the highway. It worked out perfectly. I love that we're now comfortable enough to just go and not worry so much about how exactly we have to do things--we just figure it out as we go along.

One more thing, I've added a few photos from my canyoning adventure in Baños earlier this month. See my photo website for more shots of this day. We were very lucky that our guide had a waterproof digital and could document this awesome day. So cool. Though for some reason my facial expressions are sometimes unfortunate and odd--usually because the guide was saying something to me or I was reacting toward him in some way--we were very much like siblings in our interactions...it was unusual, and pretty cool. Anyway, check those out later if you're interested. =)

written by

Theresa on October 31, 2008 from Quito, Ecuador

from the travel blog: Adventures in Teaching and Living in Ecuador

Send a Compliment

comment on this...