Hecho Juntos: Made Together: Life inbetween Art Clubs: more visitors!

So another big bit of exciting news is that at the beginning of the month my great friend Lucy Pickles arrived into Ecuador! Yay! :-) Lucy flew into Quito and spent her first week there, so on her second weekend I headed to Cuenca to meet her, along with my flatmates Laura and Becky. First thing into Cuenca and we were greeted by this smiley-faced wall and this smiley-eyed dog in the hostel, Vincent - so a happy start to the weekend despite the drizzly cold! :-)

We wandered around the town on our first day, photographing murals, chatting endlessly and stopping off in the museum where I spotted these ancient stamps midway through searching for brownies.

The big mission for the weekend was to go to Cajas National Park, and so we set off from the hostel with good intentions to get the 10am bus, but our initial dealyed start seemed to have a knock on effect, when our posh (pelucón - word of the weekend!) breakfast took longer than expected and it turned out that we'd been misadvised on the buses. Waiting at the second stop ucy pointed out the Gaudi connection in this mini park. Lucy is in fact a far more efficient and funny blogger than me, so for the rest of our days escapades trying to get to the park I'd recommend reading her blog post about it…www.panpipepickles.blogspot.com.

Suffice it to say that the day involved lots of seeming delays, the buying of much-needed gloves at a very religious drop off point we'd mistakenly got off the bus at, drinking alcoholic canelazo and wishing ourselves a happy Christmas, a walk around an impressive lake in the national park that the guidbooks describe as "rugged" and comparable to the Scottish highlands, getting as frozen to the bones as you can in Scotland, drinking delicious hot chocolate and then being lucky enough to get a lift back down to Cuenca when all the buses were passing us by laughing.

Another 2 brilliant things about Lucy coming to visit is that: 1. she brought a stash of chocolate, Tahini and my new bike shoes to me and 2. she was up for coming back to Guayaquil to help out with the set up of the our JUCONI kids' Club de Arte exhibition that I have been working hectically to prepare over these last few weeks. Also, by complete chance, my "little cuz" Kory from Sustainable Bolivia turned up on Tuesday afternoon and so between the three of us we got all the kids' work up and ready for the big opening of the exhibition this last Wednesday, the 20th of August. I'll save the photos and stories of the exhibition for the next post, but here definitely want to say a huge HUGE thank you to Lucy and Kory, you were both amazing helpers! :-)

A bike made of bamboo, from another exhibit in Mueso Nahim Isaías where the Club de Arte exhibition is currently hung.

The chocolate stash that Lucy brought led to a chocolate experiment where our (British-biased) hypothesis was that British chocolate would come out the 'tastiest' over Ecuadorian and U.S. chocolate in a blind taste-test where the Tyrone and Kory needed to grade the chocolate between 1 (disgusting) to 5 (delicious). This is all proved to be very funny for Lucy and I, but I'm not so sure about the lads, seeing as neither of them are sweet-toothed fiends like us… we had a sneaking suspicion that they might have been humouring us!)

Another really special thing that has happened for me recently is that my good friend Åsa asked me to be godmother to her son Edvin Odvin Stewart, who was born on the 16th June. Åsa and Lee took wee Edvin to Finland for his first visit and for his christening on Sunday 10th. I wished so much that I could be there with them, but so that I could be with them in spirit even while I'm all the way over here in Ecuador, I asked the priest at the local church if he could read the mass in Edvin's name that Sunday and went to the service with Ty. Thank you Åsa for such a lovely gift of asking me to be Edvin's godmother! Lots of love :-) <3