Devin and Kim: Ecuador Day 44: Guayaquil

Sorry for the late update from yesterday. It was a super long day with the trip to Guayaquil. We left the house at 5 am to get to our flights at 6:50 am. The flight there was uneventful. We met the attorney who was helping us, Martitza, at the airport. She is a really nice woman and she speaks fluent English! Nice break for my head. :)

Here's what I wrote on FB yesterday, just so I don't have to recap again:

I totally feel and appreciate your prayers. I feel like we have had mountains in our path many times during this adoption process and because of all your prayers, fasting, putting our names on the temple roll, etc., they have been moved. (See my blog post about our civil service registry day If you want examples!) Today we had another giant problem that was miraculously solved.

When we got to the consulate this morning for the visa appointment for Mishell, the system showed her old last names even though I had gone on and filled out the form to change her name online on Friday. I even had the confirmation page of the name change. Well, everyone was mystified as to why only the old names were showing. The lady we were working with said she's never seen this problem and said that she was almost certain it would take a day to fix it. She told us to go to lunch and come back and they'd see if it was fixable. We left and I felt completely defeated. I cried in the taxi all the way to lunch (that man thought I was nuts) certain that we'd be staying at least another day in Guayaquil. I had no internet during lunch, but I wanted so badly to at least talk to Devin for some reassurance. But I did the only thing I could and said prayer after prayer. I felt at that moment that I was not praying alone, but I knew many others were joining me.

When we returned to the consulate, I had resigned myself to than fact that we would be staying overnight (though we have tickets back to Quito tonight). When we walked in, a kind man who I took to be the director (clearly from the US while almost everyone else is Ecuadorian) said he'd been working on our case and the system had miraculously updated our case while we were gone with the new names. Mishell's visa was ready a half hour later, at 2:30, earlier than we anticipated even without problems.

I feel immensely grateful for all your support and prayers. We are over the last hurdle and WE GET TO COME HOME TOMORROW!

We are enjoying a few more hours in Guayaquil (beautiful city, but so incredibly humid!) before we head back.

After we finished at the consulate, we did a little sight seeing around the city. We had a taxi driver take us to the Iguana Park because I have heard so much about it. It's really quite gross- iguanas roaming freely throughout the park and these are no small iguanas! We then walked a few blocks to the pier. It was beautiful there. Guayaquil sits in a little inlet from the ocean, so it is flat and hot and humid. Totally different from Quito. It was a really pretty city (in parts), but I definitely prefer my Quito! After we walked along the pier and had ice cream, we took a taxi to the temple. I forgot it was Monday, so it was not open. But we were able to get some pictures outside of it. By this time it was around 5 pm and we were beat, so we took another taxi back to the airport to see if we could get on an earlier flight. Ours didn't leave until 8:30. Unfortunately, we just missed the one going before, so we had to wait until then to go. We were too tired to do much else, so we hung out in the airport for 3 hours. We had dinner there, which was the worst sandwich of my life, but no one's keeping track. We made it to Quito around 9:30 and then Ramiro drove us home. We got here about 10:30 and went straight to bed because we were beat! All in all, a long, but successful day!

Here are a million pictures:

Quito airport has playgrounds inside! How about that?

AND you can throw toilet paper inside the toilet!! HOW ABOUT THAT?! Pretty much nowhere else in Ecuador have I seen a sign saying DO throw it in...it almost always says DO NOT throw it in. Fun stuff.

We had beautiful views of Cotopaxi on our flight out. Gorgeous. Look at all the smoke it's spewing, though...

After the oh-so-fun morning at the consulate. Looking at our soon to be next American citizen!

I took this picture out the window of the taxi while we were driving. Fancy motorcycle guy got in the way. It's the stadium in Guayaquil where their soccer team plays (soccer is big around here, remember)