Howdy ladies and gentlemen,

A temporary, or perhaps permanent, solution to my photograph problem has been reached. Many thanks to Renata, my classamate, for letting me use some of her photos for my blog.

So, as I mentioned in the earlier post, the museum called Capilla del Hombre was quite dazzling. The centerpiece of the whole large building was a dome painting of suffering mine workers reaching for the light. The picture below is shot from the bottom floor looking up...to the light!

This is a picture of the sketch used for the much larger painting. So much suffering portrayed in his work....heavy. The painting is unfinished due to the death of Ecuador's most famous painter, Señor Guayasmín.

At the smaller museum Renata snapped this good shot of a sculpture of the artist, and one of his many multi-plate super-intense paintings. I think this is "The protestors hands", or at least the last one on the bottom.

Out of the deep and emotional art and into the light and flightyness of hummingbirds!

At Milpe, in the Cloud Forest, we were surrounded by so many birds! It was a thrill, as in Canaan Valley we have maybe 3-5 birds at a time...on a good day. Here, our host said that for every bird there are something like twenty more of the same species...or did he say forty? This pic might show the point.

While playing cards for a few hours we all noticed some lovely little buggers that also wanted to join in on the festivities. Awww, ho cuuute! (remember, you can click on the pics for a zoom in)

And what better way to end this post than with a nice view from the place that we enjoyed some lunch, in Los Bancos. West Virginia, I miss you...

Still have not made it to a football game here...but it is on the agenda. I like not having much time to do all the things on the list of desires. It is MUCH better than the opposite: numbing boredom. ¡Carpe diem! I have been enjoying the comments and I hope that you all are enjoying the blog. My first shot at it so please criticize.

Love to all,

Cory Lyle

STILL loving Ecuador...

...despite being sick, seemingly from the overabundance of pollution that fills in this city like dry ice in a bowl...and despite having my digital camera, loaded with pics, and my iPod, loaded with enough music to hear songs all day everyday for about 8 months straight.....stolen...on a bus...that was taking us back to the cloud forest.

Yes, I was suckered reeeeally bad, and my friends and I put all the pieces together and realized that we had not lost our electronics...oh no! They had been cleverly snatched by at least three people. One fellow acted like he worked on the bus...and he had put our bags under our seats. I though "Cool, better there then somewhere out of my reach." My friend Ashley sat beside me, and she had a big big bag that barely even fit under the seat...but this dude stuffed it in there. And we were all tired so Ash put her seat back...and before we had even left the bus station a man sitting behind her rudely put up her seat and said that he didn't have enough room.....enough room to crawl under the seats....and cut a hole in her bag.....and get her camera. Upon gettting off the bus, in a hurry and on the side of the road, I noticed that my belt and my red hemp hacky sack were on the floor beside my bag...hmmmmm, that is odd. They were both in two different pockets....but hurry, get off the bus or ride it into town without your pals!

We showed up at our destination, the Milpe Bird Sanctuary (my friend Mr. Rucker would have loved it!), just a few kilometers away from Mindo, which is wehre I was the weekend before. As I was tickled pink that their were literally tens of hundreds of birds, especially hummingbirds, I went to get my camera out of my bag....and it was nowhere to be found. Ashley had already relayed that she had "lost" her more expensive camera....and then I knew what had gone on....the guy who put our bags under the seat got off the bus before even getting out of Quito! And so did two other people that we now know helped him. Pro's, I must say! We had both been robbed.....and I didn't even notice the iPod was gone until I wanted to use it many hours later...no Primus before bed! Just random rain on a tin roof...

Shucks...so many neat pics on there from years past and from yesterday! I wanted to put up some of the pics I took at Oswaldo Guayasamín's quite interesting musuem and art gallery (since I can't, check out that link). We went here right before going to Milpe. This man is Ecuador's most famous painter and was a very passionate human rights activist. We later went to Capilla del Hombre (another great link, in both languages), which was basically a stunning and deep experience of architecture, paintings, murals, sculptures, poems, and a nice guided tour by a sweet lady who claimed not to speak English well but who was stellar at guiding us to see the message and depth of Guayasamín's work.

After that cool experience, we went to Milpe and helped to do some more reforestation work. Since it rained while we worked we could not plant trees...but we could but sprouting seeds into their cozy little plastic wrapped dirt apartments for future transport to the greater dirt home of earth...and when I use "dirt" I mean no disrespect or oversimplification. Utmost thanks to the soil and the ground from which I am fed and kept frrom floating into space...it is too cold up there anyways.

So....that whole rant above was certainly a type of therapy for me. While in Milpe, I awoke very early and hiked down to the river, stripped down and told myself that these material items are gone and that I wanted to shed the energy of anger and worry and keep on going with the amazing journey of breathing in the air (even if it is Quito's grungy air). And with that intention I dove into the river....ahhh! So refreshing and cool...not as cold as that waterfall experience, but just good enough to give me a great morning wake-up.

We returned to Quito on Saturday afternoon and went out for some salsa dancing with our program coordinator, Juan Miguel...of course, he broke it down for us and was quite the talented man, as I have said. What fun! I'll surely return for more....

OK, therapy is over and I have some homework to complete. Not to mention I need an alarm clock that actually works...two tries...third times a _____?

Still enjoying my journey,

Cory