Carnaval

The weekend before lent is Carnaval…a huge celebration and a couple extra days of vacation. Some friends and I headed to the Coast to join the majority of Ecuadorians who travel to the beaches for this holiday. We stayed in a small beach town called San Vicente and shared Hotel Vaccacion’s last room….four beds and six girls…but it was great and fun to see a new part of Ecuador. After spending about ten hours on the bus on Saturday we tried to buy tickets for the return trip on Tuesday, but the only option was a Monday night ticket. On Sunday we took a short ride to Canoa for a day at a beautiful and very crowded beach. I bought some ridiculous blue sunglasses and we tried the water from a coconut (which felt very tropical and holiday-appropriate). The water was almost bathtub warm and felt amazing with the intense sun. There were all sorts of vendors including snow-cone cups made from blocks of ice and a hand crank. On the bus back to San Vicente I made friends with a huge family from Guayaquil enjoying time together at the beach. I was standing next to the Abuelo and before I knew it they took my picture next to him and told me that it was for their vacation album. When I got off the bus the kids and I blew kisses back and forth even though I had known them for approximately 20 minutes. Nora, Grace, Becca, Nora Skelly and Allie had applied copious amounts of sunscreen, but still ended up with bright red burns….and I even got a little burned which may have been my first ever. That evening the other girls returned to Canoa for dinner, but Nora and I stayed to walk around San Vicente, eat at a local restaurant and read. Allie ended up getting really sick from something they ate, which put a damper on the trip and kept her from doing much on Monday.
The next morning we took the motorboat ferry across the bay to Bahia, which is another smallish town packed with people for Carnaval. Part of the celebration includes squirting people with water guns, so I definitely got wet a couple times. Right before we left for the 9 pm bus it started to pour, so we made our way through the muddy streets to the station. The bus was pretty rickety and our window did not shut, so the ride was cold and damp. Also, it was so full that people were standing in the aisle and one guy brought a plastic stool and plopped it right next to Nora and I, which made it kind of awkward to fall asleep. But we finally made it back to Quito around 5 am and I happily crawled into bed for a few hours of sleep.
I spent Tuesday with my host family and we went to a park to play soccer with some cousins and friends. The friends have a six-month-old baby named Nicholas and I was trusted to be his car seat while we sped over speed bumps and windy roads outside of Quito. Overall it was fantastic to get to meet my first Ecuadorian baby and we all had dinner together in celebration of the holiday.