those bare necesities..

We had a Thursday off of school 2 weeks ago, and even though everyone else in Quito had school off, stupid USFQ decided to go against the president and have Friday classes/work, so we skipped it. My friends from the Otavalo trip (pretty much my best friends here) and I decided to go to the jungle aka el oriente. We left on Wednesday night at 1130, got to a town called Lago Agrio at about 630am (which was supposed to be more like 8am), and had to wait a very long 4 hours for the few people that were arriving by plane. Then we took a 3.5 hour bus ride to Putumayo, and a 2 hour canoe ride to get to Cuyabeno which is deep into the jungle and stayed at a camp thingy. The place we stayed at had no electricity so we used candles at night to see in our rooms and outside and eat dinner and play cards at night! It was actually pretty cool. There was a monkey named Poncho that lived at the camp and was like 5 months old and the cutest thing ever. When Melanie and I got to our room on Thursday at about 6 something right when it was getting dark, we were unpacking a few things, and I saw this huge clump of something on our bed and it started crawling! We realized it was the monkey that our friends had told us about, who had gone to the same place the weekend before so we werent so freaked out. It climbed right onto my shoulder and hung out there! Poncho hung out with us all weekend and very often just decided to climb up us and sleep on our shoulders or in our laps and steal some food off our plates! haha
All of the trips we took while we were there were in canoe. We went on a few bird watches, a few walks through the jungle, and swimming a bit. We got to see a ton of toucans and lots of cool and ugly birds, the biggest tree ever with the biggest roots ever (probably 3 times me!), a sloth, the back of a manatee, some pink dolphins, monkeys, spiders, frogs, and snakes! I actually held a snake at one point and he bit me a few times, drawing a little bit of blood, but it's all good.. he's not poisonous! haha We also went fishing for piranhas! You're supposed to swish the pole in the water a lot and wait. Our guide Neiser and Melanie both caught one and the teeth in those things are so large and pointy! It was pretty sweet.
All the food we had there was soo good and typical Ecuadorian style.. soup first, a plate with a meat, some rice, and some veggies, along with a glass of fresh fruit juice (different every night), and then a dessert like fruit or somethin. You could never hear them making it and then all of a sudden they would ring the bell and come out with all this food! There was a group of about 50 high school students there so there were so many people there to feed. I also learned how to actually play spades there and Ryan and I won the first game that we played to 500 so we were pretty proud of that but then we got our butts kicked the next day when Melanie and Josh beat us so bad. It was such a great trip and the last thing we all definitely wanted to do while in Ecuador.