Pichincha

This was a pretty eventful week although I didn't actually leave Quito for the first time since early September. Thursday was the first leg of the semifinal of the Copa Sudamericana. Liga was playing against an Argentinian team called Independiente. Tickets are hard to get so a couple friends and I decided to go super early to get them. By super early, I mean that we woke up at 5:30 so we could leave the bus station at 6. We got to the stadium around 6:30 and there was already a pretty long line. The tickets didn't start being sold until 9. Once they started selling tickets the line moved pretty fast. The game itself was tons of fun. It was raining the whole time, but was still really cool. Right before our team was about to come out, two guys came up to us and told us they were going to shoot off fireworks in front of us when the team would come running out. When we asked why where we were, they pointed to the ground at a giant X that was painted right at our feet. Unfortunately, some security guards stopped them, so we didn't get to shoot off fireworks. We were given flares though so that was exciting enough. We ended up winning 3-2.

On Saturday I got a group of my friends to climb Quito's volcano, Pichincha. We took a cable car partly up and then had to hike from there. Although everyone claims that there are roving bands of barbarians waiting to mug tourists at the top, we still decided to go. The hiking was both fun and difficult. The altitude made it pretty hard. It was a cloudy day so we were hiking through clouds. The summit of Pichincha is 4680 meters. It got cold pretty fast, and soon we were hiking through hail. There was also snow around which was cool. Unfortunately, it started thundering while we were hiking, so we figured it probably wasn't too safe hiking through the clouds during a thunderstorm. We did press on to the summit, but we only stayed briefly, and then hurried down. The total hike took about 5 or 6 hours.