Jonah's Gap Year Journal

After a simultaneously chaotic and slow burn stay at my hotel in Quito, it was time to fly to California. I woke up at 8 in the morning on the 15th and took a taxi to the airport at 10. In an effort to limit redundancy I'll copy a section from my notebook here that explains how the day unfolded: "The flight info that Alison sent me had all the flight times in 12-hour time. When I wrote my itinerary, I converted all of them to 24-hour time, for clarity's sake. Ironically, I seem to have missed one important conversion. This was the time of departure for my flight from Quito to Houston. If I had looked ahead at the departure from Houston to SF, I would have noticed that it was for 5:50 rather than "17:50". I therfore could potentially have considered the possibility that my flight to Houston actually departed at 00:40, rather than 12:40, which is what I wrote. I arrived at the Quito airport, Mariscal Sucre, at 10:40 this morning. I went to check in when to my disma...

I just spent the last 4 days on the Galapagos Islands in a town called Puerto Ayora with my childhood best friend Mateo and his family. It was an unreal experience to see Mateo again after multiple years, but of course we realized the instant we saw each other that nothing had changed all too much. His family let me stay in their house and showed me around the island, and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to finally fly out to see them. The days leading up to my arrival, however, were a little more chaotic. I spent two full days traveling from Costa Rica to the islands, which are a time zone west of the coast of Ecuador. Waking up in Tamarindo on the first full travel day was not an easy task, such that I missed my 5:30 am bus to San Jose. As it turns out, this may have been for the better because the hostel had not yet finished cleaning my laundry. After a few stressful hours of packing, waiting for my clothes, and figuring out how the heck I was going to get to the air...

Currently I am sitting in my new favorite place: a coffee shop called Derecho Sagrado. Not only does this place have amazingly high quality coffee and local Kombucha, but it is a gathering place for some of my favorite people. Halfway through my trip, I met a pair of locals who have all moved from the United States to Tamarindo. Adrian is an amazing glassblower and a local guide, and Timber just through hiked the AT in a few months, has a rich academic background both as a teacher and a student, and has been a mentor in my yoga journey. Aside from them, I have met countless people here at the coffee shop who have so many stories and skills to share. After my initial Botella de Leche family moved on in their travels, I've been left to spend practically all of my time here at the coffee shop with my new squad. I wake up, do about 30 minutes of yoga, take a shower, and then take the shortcut to Derecho Sagrado where I'm guaranteed to see someone willing to have a conversation. Th...