I love Baños in the the sunshine.

It wasn´t raining when we first arrived in Baños, but that happy state of affairs didn´t last long. We´ve been here all week, and so far the vast majority of that time has been grey and cloudy if not actually wet. Today, though, the sun came out for a few hours in the afternoon, and it made such an incredible difference.
We already really liked Baños. It´s a beautiful town, flat and green and edged by near-vertical mountain walls. The parks and churches in the center of town are classically, colonially picture-perfect, and there are enough cafes serving international food and showing movies in English to keep a gringo satisfied for quite some time.
We weren´t originally planning to be here for such a long stretch - we were planning to spend a week in Quito studying Spanish instead, but, plans being what they are (and by that I mean totally irrelevant) we decided to skip out on Quito and take the classes in Baños instead. Definitely a good choice - our teacher here is named Marco, and he is super cool. We plan to take him out for drinks on Friday night when our classes are over.
We also like Baños so much that we´ve decided to come back here with my family when they come down over Christmas...we´ve spent some quality time checking out out-of-our-budget lodgings and planning their trip for them.
And finally, today, we saw the volcano. Baños is famous for its proximity to the volcano, but until a few hours ago, it had been so cloudy that we didn´t even know where it was. We know now, though - we took advantage of the nice weather to hike straight up the side of the mountain behind town and spend a few pleasant hours watching the plumes of smoke from a nearby meadow.
And then we did our homework. Like the spectacular and highly responsible students we are - although Will did offer me money to "forget" about one assignment...