To really update you I need to backtrack to Justin´s blog yesterday. About the time he posted his blog, we found out that our flight to Houston was going to be delayed over two hours, putting us to arrive in Houston about thirty minutes after our flight left for Quito. Not exactly optimal. Our options? Continue as planned, spend the night in the Houston airport and fly out on the Quito flight the following afternoon = vomit. Second option, go home and try again tomorrow = double vomit. Third option, sprint madly back to the check-in area and switch our flight from Continental to a Delta flight leaving for Atlanta in twenty minutes. Obviously we chose to sprint, and I must say that watching Justin sprint ahead of me was quite possibly one of the most amusing sights I´ve seen in a while. Unfortunately, our luggage was not on the same sprinting wavelength, so we had to leave it to fly it´s lonely way out to Houston on our delayed Continental flight.
Here we are in the Atlanta airport, slightly worse for the wear. Justin is using this magical thing called Skype to call our preceptor, Dr. Espinel, and our homestay mom to let them know we´re going to be late. We don´t get ahold of Dr. Espinel, and Sra. Lalama had no idea we were coming....correct that, no idea we were coming this week. Fortunately, she´s very gracious and tells us someone will be in Quito holding a sign bearing our names.
Up to this point we´re also convinced that we will not see our luggage until the following night. Justin´s most concerned about not having his toothbrush. Take another look at my face in the photo, and you can see that I just don´t care. Miraculously, I believe that the gremlins in the B´ham airport decided to put our luggage on an earlier flight to Houston, so it somehow magically made the connecting flight to Quito.
Now that I´ve officially re-exhausted myself, lol. So, anyways, luggage in hand, we were ferried by Luis (my homestay "father¨) and his sister-in-law Chiqui to our home for the next two months. I was given a room downstairs with Luis and his family, and Justin was given a room belonging to Luis´s mother, Anita, who lives upstairs. We had quite a nice talk with them that night, and I sank greatfully into bed around midnight.
This morning Luis´s wife, Vanessa, made me a delicious breakfast, and then Justin and I headed off to the local mall to buy a phone and a better map of the city. After that we spent an hour or so using the bus system to get us down to the University of San Francisco in Quito to meet up with Dr. Espinel. Without the help of a gracious exchange student from Wisconsin (thanks Anne!), who knows where we´d be right now. USFQ has a beautiful campus, which was a breath of fresh air after the clogging traffic of the city. We toured quite a bit of it in our effort to find Dr. Espinel´s office. Directions given in Spanish our difficult enough to start with, but she neglected to mention that in order to get to the particular part of the third floor of this random building we needed to get to, we had to first stop on the second floor, take a back hallway and find another stair case to take us up to the correct part of the third floor. Did you get all that? Neither did we...for about an hour. However, we eventually found Dr. E´s office, and he was incredibly nice. My hands are just about to fall off, so I´m going to let Justin fill in any other details and other pictures. It´s been a crazy day, but bring it on, Ecuador :)
Here are some pics from the campus :) Qué bonito!
So far, so good - aka we're still alive! Check this out - here are a couple of pictures of the place where I'm staying (Jennifer actually is staying in a separate room, complete with the requisite photos of luggage littered around the floor to prove that I'm actually staying there. The house itself is rather large, with space for four adults and one child, in addition to several visiting students. And Jennifer and I each have our own room and bathroom, so we couldn't have asked for more comfort! Plus our homestay folks are beyond awesome. 
