Hola amigos, it´s been a while!! Well, my time in Quito has been fairly quiet so far. There's only 9 students at the Spanish immersion school, and some of them are quite old, so we've not really been doing much together. Did manage to get a bit of a kick around going on Wednesday, Europe v Quito! Europe lost 10-9. Next time!!! I´m definitely acclimatising to the altitude now. Other than that, the only point of interest was the house of Eduardo Kingman (who died in 1997). He´s one of the two most famous Ecuadorian artists (along with Oswaldo Guayasamín (1999)). Kingman is famous to those who know for the prominance of hands in his artwork. I quite liked it. And the house was realy nice, converted and extended from an old bakery, in a semi-rural location in a village near Sangolquí. We had a guided tour, and I was really impressed because I understood virtually everything despite it being in Spanish, Talking is still another matter though! After that we went to Sangolquí itself, which has a nice old town square and church. Yesterday afternoon I also finally made it to the historic centre. I'd been put off by the relentlessly consistent weather that's pleasantly spring like and partly cloudy in the mornings (while I'm in class), and irritatingly spring like and pouring with rain in the afternoons. Well, yesterday the weather seemed a little nicer than usual after class so I braved it (even walking there instead of taking the ecovia). Well, what a foolish mistake that proved to be (going, not walking). Once I was there, the heavens darkened drastically, then opened in an apocalyptic downpour that in minutes left the streets of the old town looking like the canals of Venice, and me looking like I'd dived in for a couple widths. Well, not quite, but you get the idea. If you don't, maybe this will help. This morning my Spanish teacher came into school with a newspaper. On the front was a picture of a building in the south of the city (real close to her house), that had collapsed under the weight of a big thick layer of compacted hail. Nice. Well I'm off to the market to get some practice in Spanish and maybe pick something nice up.