Quito Runway and Stolen Chairs

Well, we're back for leg two of our Ecuador stay. This time around it was much smoother, easier and all around more enjoyable, as we were coming home, not going toward the unknown. All our friends, apartment, clothes, studies, kingdom hall, etc... were already here waiting for us. All we had to do was get on the plane (ha ha, for those of you who were around us before our departure, you probably know that's a bit of an overstatement) Anyway, wanted to throw out a quick note to let everyone know that we arrived safe. We arrived in Quito at 12am Wednesday (well Thursday I guess) and have been setting up shop since then. Augusta and the girls picked us up from the airport with a little help from Dennis and his van for the luggage. We ended up getting to bring 3 suite cases each without any fees by upgrading to first class, paying about the same price as the extra luggage and overwieght fees would have been. Sa-weeeet!

Dinner menu:
Appetizer: Smoked salmon and wasabi dressing salad.
Main course: Shrimp and rice with lentil soup and warm french bread.
Drink: Gin and tonic and later white wine.
Dessert: Some fruity cake that I didn't try with ice cream.

The flight was… I can actually say pretty dang enjoyable. Smooth sailing with a beautiful landing which is pretty rare for Quito. As some may know, Quito is a long narrow city built at the bottom of a valley in the Andes Mountains and in order to get down there and land on a fairly short runway, some tricky (sometimes terrifying) maneuvering is required. There are two ways to come into the Quito Airport. Both require a steep drop down into the valley. The pilots have to swoop down quickly as there is not a long distance between the top of the valley and the runway. The smoothest way is to fly down from North to South and land in that direction. But sometimes they drop down into the valley and have to make a 180 and turn around to land South to North. In the latter case, the pilot drops down to almost building level and we make a very severe, steep 180 around the buildings. The angle that the plane takes in order to make the turn is truly white-knuckle terrifying. However, this time we land very nicely except for the crash of 20 metal trays flying from the storage overhead where the attendants prepare meals and such. They just kept falling and crashing the whole way down. Of course they couldn’t get up to secure them, and it was a pretty loud crash. Then the plane lands, stops and in the silence we heard an “oops” from one of the attendants. It was kind of funny…

Hey, Hannah here-  Another thing that made the flight enjoyable was that I was able to witness to the woman sitting next to me for almost an hour.  Early on in the flight she asked what I was going to Ecuador for, and it was just that easy to get started. She had all sorts of questions and was very interested in the details of the ministry. Who do we go with? How do the people respond? What sort of challenges do you face?  And it was cool, she said, I imagine you haven't talked much with the indiginous people though. And I was actually able to say, as a matter of fact I have, I was even learning their language.  She was very impressed by the fact that witnesses will actually learn a new language to be able to preach to others, then give free classes so that other people can learn too.  She recently retired from a job where she traveled the world for the past 30 years, so she hasn't been home much to receive any calls from witnesses, so I was glad to have that opportunity to give a witness. (plus as you can imagine, a pioneer behind in her hours appreciates every chance to give a witness informally :)  Ok, back to elsie...

Anywho, so… we get home from the airport to find a hole burnt in the dining room table from a candle that Dennis left burning (hope he’s not reading this). He very kindly got the keys to our apartment to clean and dust the 3 month abandonment away before we got there. Unfortunately, he forgot about the candles and burnt a decent size mark into the table, which belongs to the apt owner. Not good for us… but it’s hard to get mad at someone who was trying to help you out. He even bought flowers to spruce up the place.

 Oh and on our terrace we have (well “had”) 2 white deck chairs, which Dennis says he washed down just before coming to pick us up at the airport around 10:30pm, but when we got home they were gone. My first rate detective skills deduce that we were robbed between  the hours of 10:30pm and 12:30am the night of Wednesday, May 12, 2010. Stolen items: 2 white deck chairs. Location: our terrace. Suspected perp: unknown thief with ability to climb the neighbor’s brick wall and jump over onto our terrace or possibly someone with a ladder who came in from below. We believe the suspect is highly organized because he left the items on the chairs neatly on the terrace shelf, lined up nicely. If anyone has any information on the suspect or crime in question, or knows someone who owns a ladder, is tidey, and had the ability to be at said location between said hours, please leave your information in the comment area. Thank you.

We are happy and excited to report that we have wifi in the apartment so please keep in touch via e-mail., IM, text, letter, blog comments, whatever you favor… For those who prefer calling, here are our phone numbers.
Hannah: 011+593-9539-6169
Elsie 011+593-8349-7353

So today (Saturday) was our first day back out in service. We were fairly nervous to get back into the swing of things, but it was a very nice day. Too hot of course, but nice nonetheless. We had a number of good first calls and it was nice to see everyone. Saturdays we meet next door, so it's quite convenient. Not like we could sleep in even in we wanted to. We forgot what 6am is like in Tumbaco. With the street dogs barking and roosters cockadoodling, there's not much sleep to be had in the morning.
Here are a couple pics I took with my phone in service today.

After service, we treated ourselves to our two favorite places to eat and drink. First we took the chicken bus to Cebiche de Ruminaui and had the best ceviche in the world, then walked up to El Espanol, a cafe where we can get a really decent iced latte (after explaining for 15 minutes that yes, we want the milk put in cold, not hot and then over ice.) We like to sit up on the terrace overlooking the mountains.

We found out today that we will be missing our District Convention since it is assigned the same weekend as the special English Assembly in Guayaquil. That makes us sad, but we will at least have our Circuit Assembly with our congregation, so all is not lost.

For those of you who haven't seen pictures of our apartment yet, below are a few I took after unpacking and cleaning up a little last night.

So next on our calendar of events to look forward to:

Mad service until end of service year

English Convention with visiting friends, then some touristy stuff with them

Visiting Cuenca, another beautiful mountain town, to see our friends before they leave for the States

...in the meantime, we are enjoying having the time to do all the things that are really important, like...

...watching marathon "Bones".

...doing personal study and catching up on our new publications.

...dancing on the terrace (scene of the afore-mentioned crime)

...contemplating life

...taking care of our health and well-being.

...long neglected pilates regimine.

So that's it for now. We decided to work harder on getting photos for ya'all so let's hope we make good on that and we've also decided to work harder at mastering Andean cooking, so maybe we can incorporate the two things and do a little cooking section to the blog. We plan to try preparing a new dish each week, one that we haven't been able to master or get quite right yet and we will let you know how that goes with photos. The cuisine here really does offer some delicious and interesting plates but they are definitely complicated and need the special Ecuadorian touch that foreigners apparently don't have because ours never turn out like theirs. Anyway, keep ya posted. Love ya all and talk soon!

-E