Hello everyone - hope you're having a wonderful December and enjoying the holiday season. We had our staff holiday party last night which was lots of fun. Even though we miss spending time with family and friends it's kind of nice to be in Ecuador during the holidays because it's so much less commercial than in the states.

In the beginning of December we had 3 days off school to celebrate the fiesta de Quito - the founding of the city. So, Chris and I decided to use a prize we had won last year - two free nights at a beautiful, colonial hotel in the old part of the city.

It's not super far but we hardly ever go there and when we do we're not really sure where to take people.

There are lots of beautiful churches...

The old city has a few restaurants with inside courtyards - we were on the balcony of the second floor and are looking down in this photo.

The hotel we stayed in was really beautiful and very close to the main plaza where the president's house is.
Here's Chris when we arrived in our room - it was really nice and even had two floors!



Here are two pictures taken from the little interior balcony outside of our room - there was a little table there where we played dominoes.



We went to a few museums and saw some cool panoramic photos of the volcanoes here.
Here's a picture from when we were walking around and you can see the streets are cute and the panecillo (the statue of the virgin) is on the hill behind me.

Other than that we had coffee (we did find a good coffee shop that made excellent cappuccino instead of the nescafe you find around here), did a little shopping and hung out in cafes. Unfortunately a lot of the places we were looking for "no existe" or no longer existed so we didn't feel overwhelmed with choices of places to go and after two nights we were ready to head home and see our kitties.
It was a relaxing break and now we only have 3 1/2 days of school before our winter break. Meredith and Michael arrive on the 21st so we'll have more to post when we take a few trips with them.
We miss you all and are thinking of you during the holidays!