Week 1 Narrative and Notes

I am going to play around with some different formats, and I will try to make more narrative style posts every week, entonces....

I arrived at Quito last monday late during carnival. I was picked up at the airport by a man named Xavier that I haven´t seen since. It was hard to discern anything about the city except that it was empty. When I arrived at the house, it was near midnight, and Xavier pulled over on a quiet, modest if not a little poor, neighborhood. Manuel, the father, immediately jumped out of the apartment to greet me. I sat in the living room with my new family, Manuel and Nelly, who both used to live in Tena, a large town in the jungle, before moving to Quito where they now live with all their daughters and other family in the same neighborhood. I gave them a few gifts and we talked for ten minutes before they showed me my and retired to sleep.
I hardly slept the first night. The room was plain, with a few simple pieces of furniture, and a small bed as the centerpiece of a room without any color besides the sheets and the orange streetlight that pushes through the large window that spans the length of the wall.
Sometimes in the early morning I hear the neighbor´s rooster (gallo) singing very early, and soon after, the street dogs fighting until I wake up and wonder where the hell I am. The orange light in my window somehow reminds me that I´m in Ecuador. It illuminates the austerity of my simple room, and through the window, beyond a tangle of powerlines, I can see a small mountain village on the horizon. I always feel very sober then, and I am glad that I am not lying in bed drunk or naked or dubiously reflecting my future, instead I´m just a student and a traveler living politely with a family in a modest apartment, sleeping in a bedroom perfectly fit for me grandmother, and I am immediately refreshed and ready to sleep again.

For other less-narrative travel notes: I have since explored more of Quito. I have had a chance to wander the Historical District, which is filled with gold-interior churches, spacious plazas, and remarkable old Spanish buildings. Some of the churches have walls completely covered in gold. My friend and tutor in the States tells me that the gold comes from a small mountain town in the South, Zaruma, where children and adults both mine the mountains without any safety equipment and make the ore with their bare hands, handling mercury directly, for what amounts to a small amount of money for them.

Yesterday I took a gondola to the volcano overlooking Quito, and then I walked to the ridge, 4,700 meters (or about 15,000 feet) above sea level. I am not yet used to the altitude (Quito itself is 9,000 feet high) and on the part, a few hundred feet of sandy rock at a 45 degree angle, I had to stop to catch my breath every five to ten steps. It was good for me to climb slowly, because there is a surprising dropoff at the ridge, and people in the past have fatally fallen over because they did not pay attention. At the top, I howled for a moment and went back down. The views were spectacular but I realized what I like most about hiking is not the physical challenge but the coooperative participation with the forest. I suppose I´m a hippie, but I always feel better among trees and flowers, and in places like the Appalachians, I am always reinvigorated by the forest, its colors and energies. However, there is nothing hospitable about the top of a volcano. There is little flora and something about the weather and sharp drops sends a clear message to me as an animal, ¨don´t press your goddamn luck.¨ I didn´t. I went back down where it was sunny again. From Pichincha you can see just how big the city is. Because it´s in a mountain valley, it is very long but not wide. The last census in Ecuador (2001 I think) said 1.3 million people live in Quito, but I think it must be more than two million easily.

Before I finish posting, it´s probably worth commenting on the common gringo experience. I suppose every white American experiences this when traveling to a foreign country, even in a place like Quito, where lots of young white students come to chill, learn and travel. I think that being a gringo is kind of like being a white person in southern Dorchester or Harlem, except that people laugh at you. Taxi drivers always try to charge me too much and if you´r in a neighborhood without a lot of tourists, the locals have a special ridiculing smile intended just for you. I am trying to embrace it. I suppose it´s important for everyone to experience what it´s like to be the minority, especially for a white male who grew up in the suburbs. I think the only possible way to diminish the gringo factor, is to learn spanish proficiently, but even this I guess isn´t enough. I hear there are advantages to being a gringo, though. I just need to figure them out.

A quick hit list of interesting notes:
-The buses here are privately owned and compete for routes, which means the city has privately owned public transportation.
-Most everything is cheap (25 cents a bus ride, 2 or 3 dollars for lunch) unless it is imported. -There is a 70% tax on items imported from United States. I´m not sure why, I will research it.
-Right now flooding is causing a state of emergency along the coast. If you look to the news items to the right, there will likely be more information.
-The temperatures stays very consistently between the 50´s (in the morning) and low 70´s (afternoon). Despite the coolness, Quito is the worst place for sunburn because the sun is so strong. We are 9,000 feet up and right next to the equator.
-Ecuador, I believe, was the first colony in South America to revolt against the Spanish in 1809, although they didn´t win independence until 1822 (more history later).

Ok, this blog is long enough, paz, Sam.