Our trip to Baños began around 1500 on Friday and we arrived at our Hostel around 2000. It took us quite awhile to get there, but the way there was fairly scenic. I noticed a lot of buildings that seems half-way constructed either along the side of the road with not much else, or within small towns. I’m not sure why there were so many what looked like abandoned constructions projects, but there were. We also passed a small town, which had about 20 small shops all selling Jeans, all in a row. It was seemingly odd. We weren’t sure how any of them survived with so much competition. As we got closer to Baños, we encountered a lot more mountainous two-lane roads, with plenty of curves. As we were driving in the dark, this line of cars behind us continued to try and pass our bus on the side of a mountain. So one of them would stick out into the opposite lane to see if a car was coming. There were two very close calls, where the cars were almost going to collide head on if they didn’t merge soon enough. So that was the ride there. When we finally arrived in Baños, we found our hostel, which was very nice. Only 9$ a night with free breakfast and our own bathrooms with hot water, towels and toilet paper. It was great.
We went out to find a late night dinner and ended up eating at a slightly pricey touristy restaurant. Compared to spending about $1.50 for an entire plate of food in Quito, it was pricey. After that we decided to check out the nightlife. We stopped at this one bar/discoteq which advertised free flaming shots and 2$ Pilsener. Pilsener is the beer of choice around Ecuador. The bottles are about the size of 2 beers and when not in a touristy place they cost about 1$. You can easily get totally smashed on 10$-so its pretty cheap here and no I didn’t have any flaming shots. I was actually not in the mood to do much having been accosted by menstrual cramps around dinnertime. I was without any analgesics, so I self-medicated with a Pilsener and it totally did the trick—muscle relaxant and analgesic effects all in one. So after fixing that problem, we danced to what the club advertised on their flyer as F***in’ Good Music…a.k.a. American music. It was pretty funny. Also, the policia came in and we were all worried they were going to be like…you’re drinking illegally (to the people in our group who aren’t 21) because as Americans we have that mindset. The funniest part is they came in there and said, “we’re looking for Cubans.” We just cracked up about it. So after an hour or so at this place, we decided to move on to a different club, where our other peeps were.
It had more Ecuatorian music, like Reggaeton and music in Spanish. So I was dancing and was asked by an Ecuatorian if I wanted to dance. So this time I said okay. It was actually a lot of fun, because he knew how to dance Reggaeton and do spins and dips. So that was great, until the music flowed one song to another which made it quite hard to leave. The music switched to more Spanish hip hop and I was finally able to plead that I wanted to go to the bathroom and then dance with my friends, after saying that, “No I don’t want anything to drink.” He was quite respectful though, so it wasn’t that bad. In the end, I had to start ignoring him and dance with my friends. He just didn’t want to give up. In fact, I saw his face when we went to the bar across the street and asked my friends to hide me. Haha. Anyway, no worries I was surrounded by friends and he didn’t try anything. But the point is these Ecuatorianos don´t like to give up.
So like I said, we went to the bar across the street after the second one. At this place, they had Karaoke. This one woman like sang 5 songs in a row. She was loving it—all in Spanish of course. Then some of my friends picked songs to sing, mostly all American ones. I had originally wanted to return to sleep about an hour earlier, but I had to wait for other people to come back with me, so we got in around 130—not too bad.
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