Quito - la ciudad criminal

Well guys, I might not be very representative to tell a travel story about this little country situated south and north of the equator. But it made it very very hard for me to actually like it and to refrain from jumping on the next plane and get the hell out of there. On my first day out my iPhone got stolen in the bus downtown (I should have listened to Javier, I know). Second day, Javier himself got attacked in our taxi on our way down from the Panecillo, but lucky him the two drunken guys were too pissed to wrestle his phone out of his hands through the open window before the taxi driver managed to speed off. And on the third day I learned, that the bloke from Hong Kong that we met on the Panecillo got snitched on his bus to Columbia, camera and laptop stolen, both of which he safely carried the previous six months all the way through South America. And it wasn't so bad that my phone was away and so on, what annoyed me the most was that any day from then it was just hard to trust the people around me, at times I felt like the whole damned city just wants to rob me. And that's just the way your trip gets spoilt big time. What can I say, shit happens and sometimes Murphy's Law just strikes quite heavily, that's life.

Sure, I met a whole bunch of very nice people too down there, students and teachers at my Spanish school and with some of them I experienced some quite cool excursions to Quilotoa or Mindo for instance, then there were local people at my yoga and salsa classes who were very kind towards me, and last but not least I met a lovely lady from Germany, who was quite fond of travelling like me but now lives & works in Quito. So it wasn't all too bad. But still I felt quite happy when my friend Patrizia showed up and together we would move on to the next big adventure, the Galapagos Islands.