April 16th

Day 10: Get Me to the Church On Time

The first part of today was pretty unremarkable - wake up, breakfast, walk through the city under an overcast sky, have lessons with Pilar. By the time class was over, however, an amazing thing had happened. As you can tell from most of my photos, it´s been cloudy almost all the time here, and it usually pours at least once in the afternoon. But today as I went back to Casa de Isabel, the sky was blue and sunny.

Since I didn´t get to see much of the Centro Cultural Metropolitano plaza on Monday, I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go back there. I ran into a bit of a snag when the taxi driver not only didn´t know the place I was talking about (it´s a well-known part of the city, and both the previous drivers I´ve gone with knew it), but took my being out of breath from walking in the hot sun to mean I was lost and terrified. Once I showed him the map in the guidebook, though, he managed to get me there, and finished the whole encounter by overcharging me.

Things didn´t go much smoother once I arrived. The place I most wanted to visit was the Iglesia de la Compañia, a church that´s famous for having seven tons of gold decorating the interior. When I got there, though, they must have been setting something up, because there were workmen carrying things inside, and they told me and the other tourists waiting outside to come back at 4:30 (it wasn´t even 3 yet, and the tourist hours end at 4). Not having much choice, I milled around taking photos of the outside, and then went to check out some other places.

That huge white building I took pictures of on Monday is the Catedral Metropolitano, usually just called ´La Catedral´, and that´s where I headed first. The guidebook described it something like "the Sistine Chapel of the Americas", and the name is well-deserved, because La Catedral is amazing almost beyond words.

For one thing, it´s enormous: it fills something like a third of that giant building, and that arch is its main entrance (we tourists entered through a tiny side door). But much more than that, it´s beautifully decorated, with lots of gold, columns, painting, and a ceiling made up almost completely of ornate woodwork. There are lots of painted statues, done at about 2/3 life size, in the alcoves, and a series of biblical pictures done in portrait format, but as 3-D painted woodwork. Of course, there were also lots of huge Renaissance-style paintings: my favorite was one of the Last Supper that was extremely similar to Da Vinci´s, except that people were sitting on both sides of the table.

Even better than the decorations was the history. I got to see the tomb of Antonio Jose de Sucre, one of the top guys in the South American independence movement after Simon Bolivar, and both the sarcophagus of President Gabriel Garcia Moreno and the place where he died after being shot and stabbed as he was leaving the cathedral.

Maybe it´s just as well they don´t allow photographs, because my camera would have never stopped flashing.

After I left La Catedral it was still too early to go back to La Compañia, so I wandered the streets around the plaza, looking for stores that might sell sunhats. But no luck - the fashion for women in the mountains seems to be a fedora-like hat with a brim about an inch wide, no good at all for keeping the sun off. I don´t want a baseball cap, so I´ll keep looking, and maybe they´ll have something better down on the coast. I did manage to find some more kneesocks, though, and two very nice headscarves to add to my collection.

Wandering around during this time gave me a chance to reflect on being a foreigner. Over 80 percent of Ecuador´s population is mestizo or indio, so when I walk down the street, almost all the people I see have dark hair and skin in shades of copper and bronze, and my mind quickly comes to think of that as the norm. Then there comes a moment when I´ll pass by a window, or look down and see my hand, and I´ll realize that my lily-white, light-brown-haired self stands out like a caribou in a herd of gazelles.

Actually, that´s not the best comparison, because my height is the one thing that doesn´t make me stand out. I´m five-six, and growing up I was always one of the tallest kids in the class, but here in Quito I´m about average - when I pass people on the street, I´m usually the same height as the women and either the same or shorter than the men. The only real exception to this are the indio women who work as street vendors: these people are tiny. The lady I bought the scarves from didn´t even reach my shoulder. But I´m the gringa here, so I guess I have no place to talk.

Eventually 4:30 rolled around, and I was able to check out La Compañia. Not more than a glimpse, though - since it was technically past hours, there was a small service going on at the other end. Once again I wasn´t allowed to take photos, but I did stay long enough to see that they made the most of those seven tons of gold: the entire inside looks like it´s made from gold filigree.

After that, it was a taxi ride back to the mall, a walk back to Casa de Isabel, an evening with Los Simpsons, and early bed.

A few photos:


A small statue I saw when I was looking for the entrance to La Compañia.






Some shots of La Compañia´s outside.


Yes, that´s a rooster. They love roosters here.


The Banco Central, down the street from La Compañia. Why can´t we have banks like this in the US?


The mall I´ve been visiting. Like I said, it´s an Orwellian concrete block.

April 15th

Day 9: The Avocado Jungle of Death

Today began with a most interesting encounter. Isabel´s staff was a bit late getting in this morning, so when the doorbell rang, I was the one who went to answer it. Outside the front gate was a guy selling fish from a cooler, and when I say fish, I mean whole fish, including a massive eel that he lifted out to show me, and several prawns complete with eyes and antennae. Back inside, Isabel asked who it was, and I replied, a bit rattled, "Es los pescados¨("It´s the fish¨). She thought this was very funny, and told the salesman to come back later. I have a feeling I´ll see that eel again.

After that, it was off to La Lengua and another morning of lessons with Pilar. When class was over, instead of going straight home for lunch, I decided to check out a bookstore down the street from the school, to see if they carried Spanish versions of anything I knew. They did, but not many: I settled for Stephen King´s El Pistolero (The Gunslinger) and Jules Verne´s 20,000 Leguas de Viaje Submarino (I assume even those who don´t speak Spanish will recognize that one), as well as several mechanical pencils that tried to compensate for their tiny erasers with flashy metal exteriors.

Back at Casa de Isabel, Miguel and I were joined at lunch by a very attractive young man from New York who, like me, came to Ecuador to teach English (unlike me, though, he´s actually a professional teacher). When I first saw him, I thought he was wearing eyeliner, but then I realized he had a fading black eye - from what I overheard of his chat with Miguel, it´s from a mugging. Yet another reminder never to let my guard down here.

On a side note, I´m pretty open about trying new foods, and even if I´m served something I don´t like, I´ll still eat some of it to be polite. Since I don´t know the names of most Ecuadorian dishes, I tend to eat first and ask questions later - so far, I´ve enjoyed almost everything. Today, however, I found myself facing down my vegegable nemesis: avocado. I hate avocado with a passion, so when half of one appeared on my plate, I won the standoff, and politely sent it back.

The Vivarium in Parque Carolina was open today, and that´s where I spent the afternoon. It´s the cold-blooded equivalent to the botanical garden: reptiles and amphibians native to Ecuador, plus from a few other places. I didn´t take any photos, since it was dark inside and the flash would have bothered the animals, but highlights included:

- A family of tiny poison dart frogs, dark red with neon-green lines down their sides.
- A ´rana verde de Quito´, a very fat and wrinkly frog.
- A beautiful rainbow boa, with black-ringed copper spots on its back and a gray-green underside.
- Several garden boas, which have fat middles and huge heads on skinny necks and tails.
- A ´verrugosa´, a venomous snake that lives where I´m going.
- Three very ugly African clawed frogs: blobby white things whose eyes look like octopus suckers.
- A turtle with a fun name: ´cabeza de sapo´(toad-head)
- A little caiman, the size of a housecat.
- Two oriental boas curled up together, with a third one lonely by itself in the corner.
- River turtles having a turf war, biting and chasing each other.
- A basilisk lizard and a frog, both of them the same shade of brown, sitting together on a branch.
- A dart frog with the best name of all: ´rana diabolito´ (´little devil-frog´)
- A cage that had a baby mouse in one corner and a toad the size (and shape) of one of my hiking boots in the other. Draw your own conclusions.
- A tank full of ´renacuajos´(tadpoles).
- A tank holding a mother rattlesnake and her two-week-old babies.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I worked some more lesson plans for Salango, watched The Simpsons in Spanish, and eventually fell asleep. If things go smoothly tomorrow, I´ll try and go back to the Centro Metropolitano - there´s still lots to see there.

A few token photos:


The outside of the Viviarium.


A close-up of the python figure on top of the sign.

April 14th

Day 8: She´s Not Leaving the Planet in a Taxi

One of the things that´s been worrying me this past week is where/when to get laundry done. Fortunately, today turned out to be laundry day, and I dropped off my little basket by the machines on the back porch.

I tried the new route going to La Lengua this time. It turns out it actually is a little shorter, and it´s a lot more colorful - a lot of vendors and their dogs seem to hang out along there. Since it´s a much more residential neighborhood, there are some houses with high walls and very nice gardens.

Class with Pilar was pretty unevenful, except that she finally convinced me to try the tea that´s always being brewed in the school kitchen. I have no idea what plant it´s from - it´s something with big wrinkly leaves and stems like twigs - but the rest of the students drink it and they seem all right, so hopefully it will do no harm.

As I said in my last post, this week is supposed to be my week for touristy things, so after lunch I consulted the guidebook I brought. My first choice was the Vivarium, a little zoo of reptiles and amphibians located near the botanical garden. Luck was not with me, though: I walked over only to discover it isn´t open on Mondays.

My next choice was the Quito Observatory in Parque Alameda - it´s the oldest observatory in South America, opened in 1864. Since Old Town is beyond walking distance, I took my first taxi ride to the park. There luck cheated me again: the Observatory is closed for rennovations. The park itself was pretty, though, so I roamed around for a while, taking photos and keeping my back to the wall/statue/tree/etc.

By now it was mid-afternoon, so I decided to make one last try at tourism, and took another taxi to the Centro Cultural Metropolitano, where there are supposed to be several beautiful churches. The only one I had a chance to go into was Iglesia de El Sagrario, but it was gorgeous - I´ll have to go back and check out the others.

It started raining soon after, so I ducked into a store and bought a few packages of dulce de leche candy while I waited for the rain to stop. Tired and wet, I took a taxi back to Casa de Isabel, where I retired to my room to eat candy and do my Spanish homework, and occasionally run door-answering duty for Isabel.

(By the way, I think I either misremembered dulce de leche or bought a bad batch, because the first candy I tried was awful - grainy and slightly rancid-tasting. The chocolate ones were good, though.)

Photos:


One of several monuments in Parque Alameda.


Yes, that is a rooster.


The observatory I wanted to visit, with one of Quito´s many roaming dogs in front.


A closer view of the observatory.


Mourning doves are almost more common than regular pigeons, and they don´t like being photographed.


The monument to Simon Bolivar.




Two more shots of the Bolivar monument.


The outside of Iglesia de El Sagrario, under repairs. I didn´t take any photos of the inside because I was the only tourist out of maybe 9-10 people, and I didn´t want to be rude.


¨They say Aslan is on the move . . .¨


An outside shot of the Centro Cultural.


A close-up of the statues on top.


La Virgen de Quito, on top of El Panecillo hill. You can´t really tell it from my photos, but that statue´s over 90 feet tall. It´s possible to go up to the base, but the neighborhoods are said to be bad so I didn´t try it.

April 12th and 13th

Day 6: Rage Against the Machine

Since I didn´t sign up to have classes on Saturdays, I was able to sleep in for the first time in two weeks. However, my internal clock has reset to the point that ´sleeping in´means waking up before 9 AM.

Two days ago, I discovered a Porta phone service center in the basement of the Supermaxi mall, so after breakfast, that was where I headed. I explained the problem - that my phone could make international calls, but had trouble receiving them - as best I could in my still-limited Spanish, only to have the service person conclude that my phone was simply inferior, and only Porta´s better quality phones could easily receive calls from outside Quito. None of the phones she named cost under $100, and for reference, the phone I bought cost just under $45. I suspect this is at least partly a ploy to take more of my money, so nothing doing - I don´t want to waste cash if the more expensive phone also doesn´t work.

My next stop was a nearby cabina (similar to an Internet cafe, but for telephones) to explain the situation to my family. I´ll keep the cellphone, since I can still use it to call people in Quito, and hopefully the one waiting for me in Puerto Lopez will work better. In the meantime, I´ll keep in contact through the cabinas, and give Isabel´s number if I need to be reached in an emergency.

To cheer myself up, I went back to the mall and bought shampoo, makeup, and stockings. I then returned to Isabel´s and spent the rest of the afternoon practicing my reading Spanish and trying to think of lesson plans. There are several songs I know that might be very good for teaching vocab, so I had fun translating those in case I need to explain their meanings. Current numbers include the Beatles´¨All Together Now¨, a cleaned-up version of ¨I Got Life¨from Hair, and Tom Chapin´s ¨Sailing to the Sea¨and ¨Long Way Home¨¨. I´m definitely open to suggestions, so long as they´re appropriate for elementary school and ones I´m familiar with.

The evening was fairly uneventful. I had another try at Ecuadorian TV, and discovered a showing of Beethoven´s 2nd (perritos San Bernardos!). It´s not a great movie, but it´s one I know well, so it was fun to watch it in Spanish and see how they translated things.

Normally on weekends I stay up very late, but my internal clock has kick in so strong that I was asleep before midnight. Oh well.

Day 7: The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Volkswagens

Today was an interesting one. Isabel´s staff don´t come in on Sundays, so it was just me and her, and since she´s not very mobile, I did things like fetching the telephone and answering the door. She invited me to go out with her and her friends later in the day, and I accepted, not yet realizing what that would entail.

I´d told my mother the day before that I would experiment with calling her cellphone today, so I headed out on the town after breakfast, only to find that all the cabinas I knew were closed. I´ll have to remember this in the future.

Isabel´s friends arrived in the early afternoon, and we all piled into the car and drove to Mitad del Mundo, a tourist spot built on the Equator. On the way, we stopped to shop for a few things, and since there were lots of dogs roaming around (my favorite was the black Sharpei in the hot pink sweater, being carried like a child by one of the other shoppers) we all chatted about our dogs. Isabel has two who´ll be coming home next weekend, and I´m looking forward to meeting them.

The drive to Mitad del Mundo was amazing. It´s located outside Quito, further down in the valley, so there were spectactular views of the mountains, as well as more views of Quito itself (from below, a lot of the buildings look like Lego constructions!) Mitad del Mundo itself, though, wasn´t that great - a tourist trap on a grand scale, complete with small carnival rides. Actually, we didn´t go into the site itself, because we were trying to find a restaurant with close enough parking for Isabel to walk it.

On the drive, we passed by a restaurant advertising ´Pollo y Cuyes´(chicken and guinea pig). Tryng to make conversation, I remarked on how it was interesting for me to see this kind of thing, since in the US, guinea pigs are pets. The Isabel gang thought this was very funny, and talked about ways to serve cuy, asking if I would eat one (I said I would, if it wasn´t one I knew personally). The discussion continued into lunch; we went to a buffet-style restaurant, where the name of the game was ¨What Can We Make The Gringa Eat?¨I was big entertainment.

Not that the food wasn´t good, though. There was a lot of chicken, fish, potatoes, unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, and a dish whose name I never caught: it´s a sweet, squashy thing made with eggs and fruit, wrapped in a big leaf. The only trouble came from the fact that the Isabel gang doesn´t understand concepts like ¨my stomach is full¨ and ¨I have a low alcohol tolerance¨ (we all shared a bottle of wine). When they realized they couldn´t stuff any more into me, we drove back to Quito, where I was very quiet due to the views and the wine.

Back at Casa de Isabel, the rest of the group went off to play cards or something, while I crashed hard and didn´t emerge for the rest of the day. Those egg-fruit-leaf things will knock you out.

One more thing I must mention. You know how in the US, the old Volkswagen Beetles are considered unsafe? Well, they must have retired them to here, because I´ve been in Quito only a week, in a radius of only a few miles, and I´ve counted well over two dozen, not to mention a few old minibuses as well. It´s kind of fun - Herbie´s Family Reunion in Ecuador.

Now that I´ve been here a week, I think I have a pretty good idea of where things are and how long it takes to get there, so tomorrow I´ll begin playing tourist. Let the photos commence!

April 10th and 11th

Day 4: These are the Laws of the Jungle

Tried getting up at 6:45 instead of 7 today, and that seems to work pretty well for getting me to La Lengua by 8:30. In fact, my body´s switched into that schedule remarkably fast - I found myself waking up five minutes or so before the alarm went off.

I think lessons with Pilar are going to go well. She´s a very cheerful and laid-back person, and I learned that before she became a teacher, she too was a psychology student. We´re still reviewing basic grammar, especially the uses of ´ser´vs. ´estar´ and different conversational phrases, but that´s really what I need right now. I can understand written Spanish just fine most of the time, but my ear for any language has never been great, and I don´t speak nearly as well as I understand.

After lunch at Isabel´s, I went back into the city looking for another phone service store, only to realize that I´d left my phone back in my room. Not wanting to walk all the way back, I decided to take a chance to explore the Supermaxi mall (I´ll have to get some photos of it - it´s a giant gray block of a building with no windows, like something out of 1984.)

Before I left for Ecuador, one of the ways I´d planned to practice Spanish was by getting some of my favorite books in the language, especially the works of Terry Pratchet and Stephen King. There turned out to be a fairly good bookstore in the mall, but unfortunately, they didn´t carry either of those authors, so I settled for El Libro de la Selva (i.e. The Jungle Book), and also picked up a Spanish dictionary small enough to fit in my purse.

I only have four pairs of shoes with me, and since hiking boots aren´t really city footwear, my current walking shoes are a pair of comfy black sandals, worn with thick kneesocks (not very trendy, I know, but I´m not trying for that). However, I only brought a few pairs of such socks, so after visiting the bookstore, I spent the rest of the afternoon roaming the mall, searching for a store that carried plain, neutral-colored kneesocks. I guess there isn´t much of a market for those in Quito, because out of several dozen stores that sold business clothing and/or footwear, I only found one that carried the socks I wanted.

With two books and three pairs of socks in tow, I returned to Isabel´s to read. Over dinner, Isabel informed me that the route I´ve been taking to La Lengua (the one down Rio Amazonas, which Roc showed me) is not only the long way around, but it´s a favorite haunt for ´ladrones´ (thieves). It´s a big main street and I´ve never seen anything suspicious during my walks, but I´ll still try the alternate route she recommended.

Day 5: She´s Got a Bitchin´ Cellphone

Since I didn´t want to risk being late if I got lost, I took the usual route to La Lengua this morning. While we were talking, Pilar agreed that the section of Rio Amazonas Isabel described isn´t safe, so I guess that settles it. Today turned out to be a good day for practicing conversation: there was some kind of special occasion at the school, and mid-morning all the teachers and students gathered in the common room for strawberry cake (which included Jell-o as an ingredient, something I´ve never seen before). I chatted with an Australian guy who´s also come to be an English teacher, and learned some phrases to describe my volunteer project in more detail.

Back in class we were supposed to be reviewing uses of ´ser´and ´estar´, but a few of the test sentences I´d written were about pets, and that got us into a big animated discussion about our own pets, past and present. It was fun trying to describe the names ´Sunshine´ (luz del sol), ´Nightwind´ (viento de la noche), and especially ´Fortitoad´ (a rough description of fortitude´s meaning, con la palabra inglés para ´sapa´) in Spanish. We tried to get back on track, only to come to a sentence about birds hatching, which led to a series of very funny stories about the habits of Pilar´s parrot and parrots in general, continuing until class time ran out. Oh well, it´s all language practice.

Since I wasn´t in any hurry, I tried the recommended alternate route back to Isabel´s house. It really isn´t much shorter, and since it´s a lot of smaller winding streets, I really didn´t feel any safer. But, if it will set Isabel´s and Pilar´s minds at ease, I´ll keep using it.

Since it was raining, I stayed inside for the first part of the afternoon, which turned out to be a good thing because Roc came to visit, along with his aggresively cute son, Tommy. We chatted a bit, and he managed to figure out what was wrong with my phone, while I tried to keep Tommy entertained with some of the English children´s books I´d brought and stop him from putting his lollipop in his hair.

It turns out I don´t know very much about cellphones (I´ve never claimed I did), and it was only mad at me because I´d used up all its initial minutes and then given it the wrong kind of chip. Very embarrassed, I went back to the mall and bought more minutes, as well as several more pairs of socks. Back at home I experimented with calling my mom again, but it didn´t go very well - the phone still couldn´t receive her calls, and the card expired after ten minutes, so we´re back to square one. This time, I really do need to get technical service.

April 9th

Day 3: Don´t Drink the Water and Don´t Breathe the Air

I actually managed to get up at 7 AM today. Unfortunately, that still wasn´t enough time for me to get out the door at 8 like I´d planned, partly because Isabel´s staff make a delicious breakfast. I speed-walked down to La Lengua, the Spanish school, where I got a bit of a surprise when I met my tutor.

Not counting a very forgettable semester in college, I studied Spanish for three years, in high school. Each year, my teacher was Señora Cooley, a middle-aged and very matronly Peruvian woman. Pilar, my tutor at La Lengua, is almost the opposite: she´s only four years older than me, and she could easily pass for four years younger than me. However, she´s been a teacher for four years, and from what I´ve experienced so far, she´s a very good one.

We spent the morning reviewing la alfabeta, and some basic grammar, vocab, and especially pronunciation. I´m a shy person by nature, and I´m pretty sure Pilar picked up on that, since ´verguenza´ (shy/nervous) was one of the first pronunciation examples she used. Vocab isn´t that hard, so Pilar plans to focus the first set of lessons on conversational skills and grammar, which should be useful.

When the lesson was over, I returned to Isabel´s just long enough to pick up my camera equipment and tell the staff they didn´t need to make lunch for me, since I had so much to do that I was leaving right away. My cellphone hasn´t improved - in fact, it hates me so much it´s gone into security lock - so I hiked around Quito looking for a phone store with technical service, and when I couldn´t find one, I retreated to an Internet cafe and spent the rest of the afternoon uploading photos.

Needless to say, I wasn´t in a good mood, and as I walked home, my view of Quito started to darken a little. When there isn´t rain, smog from the cars builds up thick enough to make your eyes sting. The buses are the worst: they spew black diesel smoke from their tailpipes, and they seem to love blasting me with it when I´m waiting to cross the street. Some other colorful sights included a dozen police in riot gear waiting to cross the street with me, lots of anti-Colombia and anti-fascist graffiti, and a guy relieving himself on the wall next to the sidewalk.

Back at Isabel´s, I made another try at Ecuadorian TV. To my delight, there´s a channel that plays The Simpsons, but I didn´t get a chance to enjoy it because Isabel had some friends over, and they wanted me to have dinner with them, dinner being the reheated lunch I´d said I didn´t need earlier. Still, it was fun, and I got a chance to practice my Spanish.

La Lengua really is a school - it assigns homework. Not much, but enough to keep me up later than I wanted to be finishing it. I´ll have to try getting up earlier tomorrow if I want to get anything done.

April 7th and 8th

Day 1: The Gringa Has Landed

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/