Thoughts on a weeklong trip to Ecuador

After spending a week in Ecuador, here is a short summary of what my thoughts are on the trip itself:

• I really appreciate living in a first world country. It's nice to be able to do things like easily find good medical care and drink water from the tap
• Llamas make the weirdest sound
• Altitude sickness can really screw people up
• I can actually remember a lot of Spanish from high school – totally enough to get around
• Haggling is fun
• The GF is way tougher than she appears, and I don’t get sick of her company even after 8 days of 24 hour exposure
• Germans can be really snotty
• It’s often uncomfortable to be a minority in a mono-racial culture
• When walking through the Ecuadorian countryside you can be attacked at any moment by dogs, so carry sticks and rocks to keep them at bay

I put up a bunch of pictures from the trip that follow this. It’s not everything that I took, but it’s enough to get the idea of what we saw.