Days of in Quito, Amazon Prep

I awoke this morning sometime before sunrise with every single bug bit on my body in full itch mode. Not a good way to start the day. Luckily, we had no class today and none tomorrow.

At 11 I went to meet Nora and Liz at a Guayasamin museum up the hill from my house. I will admit before going to the museum I knew nothing more about Guayasamin then what my Lonely Planet guide says. He is Ecuadors most famous painter and was also a collector. The great thing about art is that you can enjoy it no matter what language you speak or what country you hail from. We wandered around the museum for awhile looking at his pieces which go from the very realistic to the very abstract. He was an extremely diverse painter, to say the least.

When we entered the largest room a curator came up to me and started speaking really fast Spanish. My facial expression must have given me away because she quickly discovered I could not keep up with her so she led me over to a blond girl sitting on a bench in the middle of the room. The girl introduced herself as an art student from Germany volunteering at the Fundacion Guayasamin for a couple of weeks. She apologized for her poor Englighs which of course was fine and then offered to tell me about Guayasamin. Apparently he started painting when he was 7 and grew up in a poor family. His mother died when he was relatively young and as a young man he did a lot of traveling around much of South America and Europe. His paintings are in 3 series, the first is realism, the second is based on a time of anger and the third is very abstract. He passed away in 1999 but painted right up until his death. The German girl told me more about what she likes about his paintings, the colors, the large hands and eyes, and the focus on body interpretations. It was nice to have her supplementing my viewing.

After our museum visit was complete the three of us went to Megamaxi for lunch and Baskin Robbins for a treat. Then we stopped by an internet cafe for awhile before parting ways. I took a nice, slow stroll home. I worked on catching my journal up and was just about to switch to homework when Colleen called to say we were going out. About eight a cab pulled up to my house and we went to la Mariscal to have a beer and smoke some Hookah. We also sang karaoke. What was our song of choice, well Bohemian Rhapsody of course. Steve really towed the line and was the star of our five minutes of fame. Most of the bar was not really into it and were probably relieved when it switched back to tunes in Spanish. I did see a couple of Ecuadorians getting into it though, so Queen is a good choice on this continent as well.