Football and Shopping

So Gav sneaked out of school early on Wedneday to go and watch a random football match. He said it was a "6-1 thriller" the ref had to be escorted off by riot police at the end of the game. I think he's got it out of his system now so we can get on with the rest of our trip without football getting in the way. (Editor's note: NO WAY)

We finished school on friday. We had a really strict teacher this week( Mercedes), she gave us about 40 words a day to learn then gave us a vocab test each morning, then on Friday she said we'd have a massive vocab test of all the words we'd supposedly learned. We were a bit disapointed as we'd thought it would be like the old days when you brought games in on the last day of term. So there we were having our jumbo vocab test and enduring even more new spanish grammar when Mercedes whips out the scrabble. Gav's eyes lit up.

Gav met his match, Mercedes didn't concede an inch, she was scanning (our) dictionary for words. For thoss of you who haven't had the pleasure of playing scrabble with gav, he is a master, he's memorised the scrable handbook and knows an infinate number of high scoring 2 letter words that he likes to jam between other words so that he scores for 10 words at a time. "pi" and "id" are 2 of his favorites and sadly they both work in spanish too. Mercedes was not happy, especially when he came up with "Lavese" (a reflexive verb that joined onto another to make a plural) . Mercedes was the eventual winner, Gav still claims that this was only because he didn't have any vowels, nothing to do with the fact that he only knows a couple of hundred words.

We left the family on Saturday morning and moved into a hotel. It's a bit like Fawlty Towers. We reserved a room on wednesday. We checked in and went up to the room we'd booked. It had someone elses stuff in it, so we went back to reception and they gave us a new room so we went up and started to un pack, when a chamber maid came up and said someone else had booked that room so we'd have to move (oblivious to the fact that we'd booked a room too). Ecuadorian efficiency.

We went on a trip to Otavalo on Saturday. It's famous for having one of the best indidgenous markets in South America. It's been going since before the Incas, the indigenous people from the Jungle come up to the Mountains to trade with the indigenous groups from the highlands. Of course nowadays there are a lot of tourists too. Gav wasn't that keen to go. But he wanted to get his mum something for her birthday so he agreed to come. It was amazing, we ended up getting Christmas presents for all our family. We had to go home early just to stop ourselves buying more stuff. Fingers crossed that the Ecuadorian postal system is up to the jub of sending it to the UK.

The pictures don't really do it justice, it was massive, imagine Northwich with market stalls down the centre of every single street. About half the stalls were aimed at tourists the rest were for the Ecuadorians. The majority of the Ecuadorians there were wearing traditional dress. It was an impressive sight.