Puerto Lopez

i dont know where this week has gone but it has. I was only planning to stay here for 2/3 days but things never go to plan do they. Ive met so many local people here and now when i walk down the street im always stopping to chat to them. When i first got here there were only a handful of gringos (and they were mostly german) so i had no option but to chat to the locals. Now my hostel has filled up and ive been bringing business to Winston and his boys. The other day i was like ´Winston, im gonna come on your tour but im not paying´ and he was like ´listo´. My birthday was pretty cool. I went on the only major fishing boat in this town with all the pescadores, fishermen. We were searching for about three hours before we caught anything. Diego - el capitan - has this radar in his boat which tells you if theres fish or not and when you find them it takes over an hour to reel them in. We only caught two loads in over 12 hours! Xmas eve i was invited for dinner with a family that owns a little stall here. They sell the usual handcrafts, bracelets, hats and other touristy stuff. We ate some really good chicken and had this egg/cheese/caramel-like dish for dessert. The woman of the house (ive forgotten her name, phool!!) is a really lovely lady and her husband, Pepe, is known to everyone here as tio (uncle). Everyone calls him ´mi tio´, my uncle. Christmas day was random. I was just walking about as you do and went over to mi tio´s stall to thank them for dinner. Ended up going for a few beers with him and Louis (dude from Columbia who has a table set up next to mi tio selling similar things). After we got bored of his local, we went down the ´main strip´ and bumped into Winston, Robben and others. We all went to a bar and had a good old session. Yesterday, i spent the day helping out Winston on his boat and doing some minor translations for the gringos on his tour. Went over to mi tio´s and his wife gave me a little telling off (in a friendly way) cause mi tio was useless the whole day! I bumped into two girls that i met over 5 weeks ago and we are going to Montañita later today. I could easily stay here for another week because im pretty settled in but i have to cover some ground. This is only my first stop and theres many more to come!!