Stories from the Mosaic City

Hey Everyone

So I´m at Day 40. Six more days, and it will be the longest I´ve ever been away from home.

This Saturday, I´m also done my time in Quito. 6 weeks has gone by fairly quickly. I feel like I´ve been here for longer though. Not sure yet where I´m going to go yet, but I will be writing my next update from a different city.

Wednesday, I went out looking for the post office, as I have a number of gifts, and things that I won´t need on this trip, to send back. I couldn´t find it anywhere! I then got caught in the afternoon downpour, went down to Luis´ office (yes, it is a regular hangout for many of us) and discovered another branch of the post office is only 2 blocks up the street. Dumb!

Baked more bread on Thursday (I´ve gotten rather good at it, especially in absence of any kind of measuring utensils). Incidentally, my teacher that week, Blanca, was extremely pregnant, and was supposed to have a cesarian yesterday, but the baby decided to come out on Monday. I haven´t seen her, but apparently both mom and child are fine. I played scrabble with her on Thursday.

Friday was a holiday, so everything last weekend ground to a total halt. Many of my friends went down a big, popular beach on the coast. Emma and Carly (the Brits) left for a week long trip to the Amazon, haven´t heard anything from them since. Saturday, I went with Leo and Susan up on my second trip to Otavalo. Leo and Susan, after spending few of weeks with them, are just really cool. The two of them have been to all kinds of places around the world, they were in Afghanistan when the Soviets were invading in the ´70s. Anyway, that day, I bought myself a travel hat, yes, it is a panama. That day too, we were walking through the main plaza when a wedding was pouring out of one of the churches, very pretty it was.

On Monday, first day of my last week of classes (new teacher, Lucia, big on pronunciation). I went for a walk in the Parque Metropolitiano, which is the huge forested area in the middle of the city, and it´s a block behind my house. It´s beautiful, and surprisingly quiet, and all the trees are eucalyptus, the seeds of which, we´re smuggled in from Australia by one of Ecuador´s early presidents, about 120 years ago. I´d planned to go visit the Guayasamin Museum, a contemporary art musuem that Susan had recommended. I wandered through a field with cows and was chased by 3 large, and very loud, dogs. I found a small decrepit building at the top of a hill, which was love notes scratched onto almost all of the space on it´s walls. Coming down the hill, I came to a beautiful house, in bright yellow, in the middle of the woods, with no steel gates or bars on it´s windows like homes in the rest of the city, with a neat little garden growing down the hill from it. I came out of the Parque, in Bellavista, the city´s high-class neighbourhood. The homes there are expensive, even by Canadian standards. There was a little girl on the sidewalk further down leading a tiny white terrier with a piece of chicken tied to the end of a string. I found the Museum, but found out it closes at 5. It was 5:30.

Yesterday, I took a walk to El Guapulo, Quito´s "bohemian" barrio. I got lost, inevitably, raced a huge rain storm down through the streets, lost the race, and hunkered down, soaked to the bone, on the doorstep of a closed cafe, El Guapulo Arte. The man who ran the cafe, called Amaru, let me in when he found me out there, and gave me this hot fruit cider drink that was mixed with some kind of liqueur. So here I sat on the balcony patio, with a hot drink, watching the storm rage. The thunder was actually so loud my ears were ringing a little. After the storm, and thanking Amaru for allowing me to dry and warm, I got home in time to make dinner for everyone in my apartment.

Still surviving...