So this is what it looks like

After quite a bit of travel, a bit of adventure, a bit of good luck, and a bit of hassle, I’ve made it to Ecuador. One of my bags is still in Atlanta, and the flight was a little delayed, but I somehow got to fly first class on my flight to Quito. Karma?

My host-parents, Susie and Marco, picked me up from the airport, escorted me through the throng of vendors shaking candy in our faces at the door, and I rode home in their little zippy truck with a machete on the floor under my feet. Yes, I am definitely in a different country.

 The house is nice. It has many windows, just like most of the buildings here. There’s no worry about keeping heat in in the winter (what’s winter?) so windows are always a plus and never a negative. Except that ground-floor windows seem to always have bars on them. 

The streets here aren’t actually very narrow, but they seem that way because the sidewalk and street are lined by walls. Most of these walls, especially if they aren’t high, have some sort of deterrent to trespassers affixed to the top. Broken pieces of glass are the most common, others have metal spikes, and some even have nails. There seem to be locks on everything, but I suppose there’s reason for it. 

This morning I met the rest of the family: Andrés, Susie and Marco’s son, and his newly-wed wife Maria Fernando, otherwise known as Mafero (The wedding was July 16^th). They also have a dog whose name might actually be loco because that’s all I’ve heard him called so far. He lives on the roof.

I finally got a chance to unpack and settle in a little after breakfast and the full tour of the house and grounds. There’s a small yard behind the house with another small building for the washing machine. No dryer, they hang everything up outside to dry since it’s always so sunny. I keep asking my poor host mother what all sorts of different plants are called and I don’t think she’s actually much of a botanist. There are so many plants here that I recognize though. There are lilies in the garden that I know are only ever houseplants in the United States. Driving through the city today I saw at the base of a wall a long row of very healthy-looking mother-in-law’s tongues. There is a variety of jade that practically grows wild around here too, and I recognized century plants I’d seen in Texas, or something extremely similar. I also saw a rosemary TREE taller than me. I didn’t know that herb could grow to be so big! 

Susie put on a radio station while I was unpacking that played American pop music, and it was strangely comforting. She says she doesn’t understand any of it, but she likes the music. Once the unpacking was done they decided to take me on a trip to see some of the sights close to Quito. 

We drove over to where Andrés and Mafero work, then headed up the mountains to see the old volcano. Apparently there was a very large volcano here a long time ago that blew its top and the inside sunk way down and flattened out. Now it’s full of farmland to take advantage of the fertile volcanic soil. Since the viewpoint for this is even higher up the mountains than Quito, it was instantly apparent that the air is thinner once I started walking around. The altitude is above 2 miles in Quito alone, so it makes breathing a bit less effective, especially above the city. 

After the volcano, we went to “El medio del Mundo.” The middle of the world. I have now officially been over the line to the southern hemisphere. Not only that, I have a picture on the line to prove it! There was a small museum at the divide that gave tours with information about the indigenous people that lived (and still live, something we don’t really think about in the US) in the area. The tour also ran us through a whole bunch of different interesting “experiments” right on the equator. We got to see water drain by swirling opposite directions on either side of the equator and going straight down on top of it (yes it actually DOES happen). Something also seems to happen with gravity on the line, so you can balance an egg on the head of a nail (I did it), your balance is totally thrown off (you can’t walk in a straight line with your eyes closed), and your strength totally fails you. That was the weirdest one. If you try to pull someone’s arms down either north or south of the equator it’s difficult, once they stand on the line, it’s easily done. The tour was in Spanish so I didn’t fully understand why that happens, but it has something to do with crazy-awesome physics and gravity. Which are both basically the same thing.

After touring around, we went back to Mafero’s work and got lunch. Here, lunch is typically the biggest meal, so there was a lot to eat, starting with a soup of some sort containing chicken neck, heart, liver, and foot. The heart and liver were still connected by some sort of tissue and the scales were still on the foot. I was brave enough to eat most of it, but I just couldn’t get myself to try the foot. Luego, I will try it later. Susie is trying to control what I eat a little so that my stomach gets used to “la comida de Ecuador.” Once I told them I lived on a farm though, they decided I’d be able to handle more foods sooner, which is probably what led to the chicken-extras soup. Don’t get me wrong, the soup was actually very tasty, but I’m just not used to seeing a taloned foot as food.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be learning how to take the bus into school and starting intensive Spanish review classes. Vacation’s over, time to get to work!

Saludos a todos!