Our Faves of 2020: YouTube Edition 2020.1

Welcome to our FIRST list of 2020 YouTube video faves! This list will be short as it is a respectful nod towards our trip to Ecuador that helped change our lives for the better. Though we watched a lot of videos about it before we went, we only found three videos that hit our faves. These actually got us excited about the country and made us eager to get there.

I'm going to go into a little of our background as to why we ended up wanting and actually going to Ecuador. In June of 2020, we got attacked in Aurora by a mob of over +100 people. They had started pulling out sticks and knives (from my husband's account as I had already disassociated). This was all caught on dozens of police body cameras as we were standing...get this: right in front of the Aurora Police Department HQ. If it wasn't for Omar Montgomery from NAACP, we would've died right there. We DEEPLY appreciate what he did for us.

You may ask why were we there and what did we do to be attacked? Whoo, it's a long deep story that I still have PTSD from and will have to hold off on for a bit. But our Autism blinded us from socially recognizing some cues as to the possible danger. We, for some reason, thought the people would be reasonable and be willing to talk. All we did was state what happened in an incident. Literally the facts of what happened based on DA reports, body cam footage, and coronary reports. We only had one line of opinion and it should have aligned with everyone there (if their intentions were really what they were saying). But we messed up and put ourselves into a situation that was deadly.

We got death threats, we got chased, and we no longer felt safe in the city. It was good to know from later calls that the police and even the DA were supportive of us. But that wasn't enough to keep us around. With political tension rising and major cities around America were being hit, we weren't sure where we could escape to. So as we stayed at a family's place for two weeks, we planned to just leave the country for a few months until things died down. While there at the family's home, it wasn't pleasant either so we mentally escaped by watching tons of videos on Ecuador. With our funds really low, we weren't sure if it would be possible on what we had or if we had to take out loans.

What most caught our attention about Ecuador was 1) cheap 2) beautiful natural surroundings (Floral) and inhabitants (Fauna) 3) they use USD and 4) we understood some Spanish so it wouldn't be too difficult on trying to communicate with the locals. Thus this is where these videos came in. I hope you enjoy these videos and it gets you interested in exploring this amazing country!

ECUADOR

Which of these three did you like the best? Have you seen our Tagua Nut post? It'll go into more depth about what the first video covered!

Guess what? Bonus!

Happened to have a few videos that didn't fit in any of the other lists. So feel free to look into these to see if any might interest you! Not many made certain lists possible (such as not many TED talks this year interested me or caught my attention) so these are carefully selected and added to our general list. Please give them each at least a few minutes of your time to see if you are willing to watch the whole thing!

Were you able to watch any of these? Which one caught your attention first? Hope to see you in the next post!