The last two weeks have flow by; it’s hard to believe I’ve completed my last Spanish class and homestay in Quito. My Spanish has definitely improved and I’m having fun trying to speak it. I hope to continue to practice for the next month while I’m in South America.

I can’t say enough great things about my host family here in Quito. They welcomed me into their home and made me feel like part of their family. They have a lovely house just a block away from the school and very close to La Mariscal, a popular area for tourists with restaurants, bars, cafes, and shops (in fact, it’s sometimes referred to as “gringoland” since there are so many white foreigners).

In the house, I have my own room and bathroom upstairs with everything I need. When I arrived there was a huge bouquet of beautiful pink roses in my room as a belated birthday gift!

My host mother Dolores is so sweet (more…)

Baños is a small town in the highlands of Ecuador, about 4 hour south of Quito. Last weekend I took a school-organized trip with about 14 other students and a teacher. Overall it was a great trip and I had a good time, but it wasn’t necessarily perfect…

The good:

• Location – Baños is a beautiful city nestled in a valley with lush green mountains, a river, hot springs, and lots of waterfalls.
• Friends – The group was really fun and we all got along well despite the cramped conditions in the van (see below). I roomed with my new friends Stephanie from the US, and Christina from Germany.
• Activities – There are tons of fun activities to do in Baños. On Saturday we road bikes and explored a few of the waterfalls. Two of them we hiked right up next to. Sunday I indulged a little and got a great 1-hour massage, while others went ziplining and horse-back riding.

The bad: (more…)

Benjamin Franklin, inventor, pirate, and patriot, would have been 304 today.

Mr Franklin had an idea: what if I buy a book and then share it with as many people as I can, even strangers?!  In that spirit, he founded the first public lending library.  Today this basic concept has been ultra-optimized, thanks to the Internet, and is generally referred to as piracy.  An elaborate set of contradictory and confusing laws and precedents have been put in place so that libraries are legal and sharing mp3s on the Intertubes is illegal*.  But don’t kid yourself, when you check a book out from the library you are STEALING from the author as surely as if you put it in your pocket and walked out of Barnes and Noble without paying.

But Ben Franklin would approve – of checking out library books, anyway.  He might have approved of pirating mp3s too.  This is a guy who never patented any of his many inventions because he felt they should be used for the good of everyone.  He was also involved in a revolution, so you could argue he had problems with authority. If he were alive today, Franklin would probably be a member of the EFF.

*Downloading mp3s is not the same as checking a book out of the library because when you download an mp3 you make a copy whereas you have to return the book to the library.  Don’t worry, this loophole will be closed eventually.

I’ve had so much fun this week with my Spanish school. The school is great – both for learning Spanish and the fun activities. There are probably 30-40 students at the school, of all ages but mostly in the 20’s. It’s a really good mix of people mostly from the US and Europe (Germany, Norway, Sweden, England and Russia). I’ve heard there’s a guy from Boise, but I have yet to meet him since his classes are at a different time then mine. How random!

My teacher is Gerardo and he’s great. I have 1-on-1 lessons for 4 hours per day. (more…)

¡Hola desde Quito, Ecuador!

Although I don’t have many photos yet, I wanted to say hello and share a little about my time so far in Ecuador. In summary: so far so good!

I arrived Saturday night and met my fantastic host family here in Quito. Francisco, Dolores, and 1-year-old Ignacio live in a beautiful and cozy home in the city, very close to my Spanish school as well as many shops and cafés. More on them later, but let’s just say that they’ve made my first days alone in a faraway city very comfortable.

 
I started Spanish school on Monday and so far I’m extremely happy with this school and my instructor. I have 4 hours per day of private one-on-one instructions, and many additional activities offered by the school. For example, Monday night I attended a lecture about the local indigenous medicine men, called shaman. And Tuesday night me and my two left feet participated in Merengue dancing lessons. After that, I’m ready for Wednesday’s cocktail lessons 😉 (more…)

I’m so excited to share our upcoming travel plans for 2010! While the first half of our year of traveling was a whirlwind of many places within a relatively small amount of space and time (3 months in Europe), the second half of our trip will be fewer places but spread around the world for 5 months. And I mean that literally, Ben and I will be traveling completely around the circumference of the world using a RTW (Round-The-World) flight ticket. In RTW-terminology, we’re purchasing a 5-continent OneWorld Explorer ticket (“LONE5”) starting in February from Ecuador. The ticket is pricey, around $5k per person after all of the taxes and a couple additional flights. And it’s not easy to plan it either, I’ve probably spent a good 40-hour week figuring this out (good thing I’m not working!)

But back to the fun part, here’s our itinerary:

View RTW 2010 in a larger map
 

• Quito, Ecuador (3 weeks) – Alonna will be studying Spanish while Ben remains in Boise
• Galapagos Islands, Ecuador (10 days) – Ben arrives in Ecuador we head out for an 8 day cruise
• Patagonia, Argentina & Chile (3 weeks) – Hiking, biking, and enjoying the outdoors
• Buenos Aires, Argentina (4 days) – A little time in the city before leaving South America
• Istanbul, Turkey (6 days) – We missed Istanbul on our Europe tour, so we’re going back!
• Egypt (9 days) – Traveling further back in history from where we left off in Ancient Greece and Rome
• South Africa (9 days) – We’ll base in Johannesburg and go on an African Safari
• New Zealand (1 month) – Focusing on the South Island and all the adventures we can manage in a month
• Australia (3 weeks) – Three weeks somewhere in Australia
• Hawaii (1 week) – Bonus! Our RTW ticket lets us stop in Hawaii on our way home

All of this starts January 8th when Alonna leaves for Ecuador – only 1 week away! Our dates are flexible, but we plan to be back to Boise by the end of May.

Please share this trip with us! We are extremely interested and open to having YOU travel with us at any point of this trip. If you were thinking of going to New Zealand, Egypt, Hawaii or somewhere else listed above this spring, let us know because we’d love to meet up. Also please share if you know anyone in any of these areas that would be interested in meeting or hosting us. The more the merrier!

It’s been really nice to be back in the US for the holidays. We’ve been able to see both of our families, catch up with friends, relax, and plan the next phase of our trip. For Christmas we spent 12 days traveling to both Virginia and Minnesota to visit family, and the common theme for the entire trip was SNOW! Between the huge East Coast snow storm and then the Midwest snow storm, we got our share of snow this holiday season. And for the most part, we loved it!

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Many people asks what our favorite place was during our recently completed 3 month trip to Europe. Even though we’ve settled on a generic (but honest) answer of “all of Italy and Greece”, of course there’s a lot more of our trip to share. Here’s a few favorites…
 

Favorite Scenery: Chamonix, France

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A while back, Ben created a program to create photo collages and mosaics.  If you’ve seen one of our poster-size prints, then you know how cool it is to stand far away to see the main image and then get up close to see all of the little photos that make it up.  If not, then you can zoom in and out one of these for a similar effect.  Here’s a few that I created using only our photos from Europe. Click on the image to see the full size.
 

Photo of our shadow on a small medieval street in Southern France:

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One of our favorite experiences in all of Europe was visiting the ancient ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Ben already shared some of our interesting discoveries at these sites (see his Pompeii and Herculaneum post), and here’s a few more photos…
 

Pompeii

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