It seems kind of silly to write about today, because I spent most of the time sitting on airplanes or waiting to sit on airplanes. After waking up at 5 AM (after less than 4 hours of sleep), Mom and Xander and I managed to get out the door just before 7, and made excellent time to BWI. In what would be an extremely symbolic scene if this were a novel, Mom gave me her watch - I´m wearing it now.
Most of the time when I fly from BWI, I go out the B terminal, which has an awesome food court. C terminal, on the other hand, has nothing except a Wendy´s and a couple of taverns, so breakfast was candy from a gift store. The flight to Atlanta was pretty uneventful, except for the poor guy sitting next to me who only had half an hour to make his connecting flight; I had to crouch up on top of my seat so he could scramble out.
The Atlanta airport, for those who´ve never been there, is so enormous that there´s a little subway connecting the outer terminals. When I reached mine, I was delighted to find a food court that put the one at BWI to shame. This helped calm my nerves after I discovered that not only had my departure gate changed, but I´d arrived so early that my flight wasn´t even listed at the new gate. The plane before mine was headed for Mexico City, so I had time to practice recognizing different Latin American accents among the passengers (so far, I can only recognize Mexican and Peruvian, but that´s a start!)
Eventually that plane left, and the rest of the passengers for my flight started to drift in. Most of those who weren´t returning Ecuadorians were tourists headed for the Galapagos: either college-age backpackers or families with small children. That is, except for the camo-clad military people who drifted in to fill 3/4 of the waiting area. I don´t know where they were headed, though - I didn´t see any of them on the plane.
The flight to Quito wasn´t as good as it could have been: I had arranged for a window seat, only to discover that the windows on the plane were divided into little groups with wall spaces one row wide in between, and my row was directly in one of those spaces. To make matters worse, the guy in front of me kept his shade down, so I couldn´t see out of his window either.
Aside from that, though, it was pretty okay. I sat next to a very talkative Ecuadorian guy who was returning from Vegas, and we chatted about vacations and places we´d visited. When I tried to explain why I was going to Ecuador, he assumed it was mission work (him and the people at the travel health clinic!). I didn´t really try to correct him - it´s not important to me and it made things go smoother.
After a dinner of overcooked vegetables, pureed sweet potato, and chicken in steak sauce, I was able to move the shade in front of me up halfway while the guy was sleeping, and I got a view of Quito at night. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful: it´s a long skinny city in the mountains, and from the air, it looks like a line of jewels scattered across crumpled black velvet. The Quito airport, though, is tiny: the baggage claim was directly across from the arrival gate, and I could see the plane taxiing away as I waited for my bag (a nervewracking experience, since the cart with my bag didn´t arrive until the plane had left, making me think they´d lost it).
Once I passed through customs, Roc, the MondoChallenge representative, was waiting for me. He´s a pretty cool guy, and we chatted as we drove through the city (another nervewracking experience, since it was pouring rain and the Quito roads are full of potholes). While I´m in the city, I´ll be staying at a boarding house, and it turns out I´ll be staying a little longer than I´d planned. Salango, the coastal village where I´ll be working, has had some bad storms and flooding, and the school is being used as a shelter, so classes are going to start a week later than before. Fortunately, I´d planned to stay in the country long enough that I can still work for the required eight weeks, and I´ll just use the extra days to take more Spanish lessons in Quito.
We reached the boarding house at around 10 PM, so all I was really capable of was unpacking and crashing. Tomorrow the adventure really begins.
Day 2: Stranger in a Strange Land
I´d set my alarm for 7 AM, but after it went off, I went back to sleep and didn´t wake up until past 8. Oops.
The boarding house where I´m staying is owned by Isabel, an older lady who´s currently recovering from hip surgery, meaning I don´t see much of her. She has several kitchen and cleaning staff, and they made me breakfast: fruit and more fruit. I could identify the banana, and could guess that another was a papaya, but there was one that I had no idea of. It was served in slices about 2-3 inches in diameter, and it´s translucent white with lots of little black seeds, and tastes a little like sweeter, less acidic kiwi. If anyone knows what I´m talking about, please let me know! For drinks, there was mote, a frothy fruit juice (this one was blackberry, I think), as well as cafe con leche.
After breakfast, Roc arrived, and we walked into the city to register me at the school where I´ll be taking Spanish lessons for the next two weeks. By day, Quito is a sprawling city, colorful little buildings side-by-side with skyscrapers, and lots of parks. The main street for me is Avenida de Rio Amazonas, so called I´m guessing because most of the smaller streets connect to it. After I was registered, Roc and I walked around the city - he showed me where Internet cafes and clothing etc. stores are, including the one where he met his wife.
I returned to Isabel´s for lunch. The other boarder besides me is Miguel, a businessman who works for a company that makes dairy machines (or so he told me), and he helped me practice my Spanish while we ate. The food was good, but interesting: vegetable soup, a salad of chopped beets and ´tree tomatoes´, and a dish whose name I don´t know: it´s a sort of quiche made from fish and potato flour. For desert, there was an etremely gooey apricot-like fruit that was too messy to eat by hand, but too big to fit into a spoon - Miguel and I ended up gnawing ours into smaller pieces when no one was looking.
After lunch, I went to the botanical garden in Parque la Carolina, and then hiked back down Rio Amazonas trying to be sure I could find the Spanish school again. I spent a very worrying hour hiking up and down Avenida de Cristobal Colon in the rain, before I realized that I was going in the wrong direction. After finding the school again at last, I went to Supermaxi, a gigantic shopping mall on Rio Amazonas. Since it was almost dark, I didn´t have time to do anything except eat a Cinnabon, but I´ll definitely have to go back.
I went back to Isabel´s and tried to watch TV, but the only programs I reconized were Spongebob and Family Guy, neither of which I like, so that was out. The staff had gone home by dinner time, so Isabel and I heated up more of the vegetable soup and fish loaf, and chatted in the kitchen. Her English is about as good as my unpracticed Spanish, so I´m not sure how much we understood each other, but it was good. She´s a very grandmotherly type, down to offering me cookies and calling me ´niña´ (not always, but sometimes).
The day ended on a bit of a sour note, though. I´d bought a cellphone during my afternoon hike, and while I was in the middle of a call to my mother, it died. I´ll have to see if I can get technical help tomorrow.
And now, photos!
My room at Isabel´s house.
A view of the mountains. Really, none of the photos I took do them justice.
A storm coming in. I got soaked by this about an hour later.
A lily larger than my hand, at the botanical garden.
My favorite plant, the flor de mayo tree. Photos don´t begin to capture how vividly purple the flowers are.
Close-up of a flor de mayo blossom.
Purple petals scattered on the ground.
Some more flowers.
The land of cacti.
I just thought these looked funny.
The botanical garden had several greenhouses devoted to orchids. Here are some of them.
More orchids.
I don´t know what this is, but it´s pretty.
These were my favorites - I kept expecting them to sing like the Andrews Sisters.
Three weird plants.
Some little orchids in the nursery greenhouse.
An azulina blossom.
These were cool. They look like the ghosts of plants, or something from an alien planet.
White and purple.
Another flor de mayo tree.
Another shot of the mountains.
Downtown Quito.
Yeah, they´re not big on political correctness here.
My attempt to get a shot of the storm rolling away.
More pictures are on my photobucket account, http://s291.photobucket.com/albums/ll320/ladystormcrow2/
