As the day began early, as leaders of the day, we marched down the halls and woke up everyone. Then we ate breakfast across the street at a restaurant named Nativa. The chef Cesar cooked a delicious meal of eggs, toast, hot chocolate, and/or tea. After breakfast, we came back to the hotel and played games such as football, basketball, and mafia which was a game that included a “killer,” doctor, detective, and villagers. After free time, we reviewed rules and safety. Next came lunch where we had fried steak, popcorn and chocolate mousse. After lunch, we returned to the hotel to quickly refill water bottles (water is very important here) and gather stuff for our history of Riobamba scavenger hunt.

We all started at Plaza de Toros, a bullfighting ring near our hotel. From there we all left for different landmarks around the city where we had to collect information about Riobamba and Ecuador from locals that would earn us points at the end of the scavenger hunt. Along the way, we met some very humble and interesting people. The owner of a Chola bakery gave us cholas which are pastries with ‘dulce,‘ or candy, inside them. Later on the hunt at Parque Maldonado, we met some really outgoing and cute children who we enjoyed playing with and they were really curious about Asmahun’s camera. Our departure from them was quite sad. At the end of our hunt, we met up at Parque Sucre where we ate more cholas and reviewed what we learned on the scavenger hunt and talked about our questions of the day: How does history influence people’s identities? How do you feel about the people and the city? Also, there was a dog who we were not allowed to pet, but everyone really liked and named Oscar. Oscar followed us almost all the way back to our hotel.

We then ate BBQ chicken wangs for dinner with arroz con leche. As the day came to an end we met in the cafeteria of the hotel to have our nightly meeting. We played a get to know you game where we asked each other questions. In the nightly meeting, we talked about highlights of the day, lowlights of the day (in the meeting they are called roses and thorns).  We also do pluses and wishes about how we behaved.  We passed on the torches to the new leaders, Luz and Sydney after they showed us their unique talents, and we ended with them leading the big love which is where people get to bring up a moment from the day when someone else from the group did something nice for you. And now the day is pretty much over and we will soon sleep.

Sincerely, Bryan and Leif

To all my people at home-

Bruhh…

-Leif