Hasta la vista, Ecuador

I am back in Quito and today was our last day in Ecuador... very early tomorrow morning I leave for Argentina -- I'll be spending the month of July in Buenos Aires, where I have an apartment in the neighborhood of Palermo Viejo.  I have no idea what to expect of this new adventure in a new, different country, but I leave here with optimism and a little sadness.  I've really grown to like Ecuador... and I've definitely melted into its customs and culture and just how everything works and how it is to be here.  So, onto Argentina... but before I go, some random thoughts and memories about the last 7+ weeks... these things I think could only happen in Ecuador:

The ultimate bargain:  Here you are expected to bargain for pretty much everything you buy.  Because I have more money than most people here, I usually only bargained for a few cents or a dollar here and there.  But this totally cracked me up... I met an indigenous woman in Quilotoa, Sandra, who - after Steve commented on how beautiful her 3 month old baby daughter was - offered to sell her to us for $10,000 - but it was negotiable and quickly went down to $5,000.  What a deal!  And you guys thought I wasn't coming home with a baby.

Adkins, Ecuador-style: In the Galapagos, Mom and George and I went to a very nice dinner at a  place called Angermeyer just across the bay from Puerto Ayora, the main town on Santa Cruz. Just before our food came, a salamander fell from the ceiling onto my plate!  I pretty much freaked out, but the waitstaff thought it was just part of the ambience... perhaps they thought I needed more protein?  We quickly relocated to a different table.

Lost in Translation: The ultimate experience in false cognates, Mom and George and I went to a restaurant in Quito called La Ronda (one of the nicest restaurants serving typical Ecuadorian cuisine).  The menu came and we immediatly noticed the mistakes in translation. Here were some of our favorites:

Lobster Thermidor = Lobster Thermometer

Pasta Primavera = Spring Spaghetti

Melon con Prosciutto = Watermelon Balls Wrapped in Jam

If there were a Starbucks in Pompeii: While watching mudslides with Laurel and Micheala in Baños over breakfast one morning, we started talking about what would happen if there was actually a volcanic eruption.  I thought we might be ok if we just stayed in our hostal drinking coffee... they disagreed and then the mental image of archeologists chiseling us out 100 years from now came to mind -- we would be perfectly captured sipping capuccinos and buttering our bread.  What would they think of us?

Spanglish: Being around so many English speakers, as I have been, has created some notable Spanglish lines that I thought were hilarious.  My favorite of the bunch came from Patrick in Cuenca, who often made this comment about the weather, "hace f***ing frio!"

White Lies: I know I dished out my own white lies while being here, but Steve's scared me the most.  He volunteered at a hospital in Cuenca for the 6 weeks he was there.  While only going to be a senior in college (pre-med, at least), he told everyone he was already in medical school.  So, they let him give injections, sit in on surgeries and give his prognosis for certain patients who came in. This, if nothing else, convinced me to stay as far away as possible from the hospitals in Ecuador.

Juliana que mala eres: I've pretty much answered to any name starting with "J" here in Ecuador.  Jillian is way too hard to pronounce, as it comes out sounding like "i-y-i-a-n," so I quickly adopted Juliana as my go-to name for anyone Spanish speaking.  The problem is that there's a salsa song of the same name... it goes "Juliana que mala eres" (Juliana, how bad you are!) because she broke the guys's heart in some terrible way.  People from across this great country have sung that song to me, including Javier in some of his last emails...

The news: Being a newsy person, at least when I am at home, I was shocked to find that here in Ecuador... a) not a lot of people read the paper (while I was in Canoa, they didn't even sell the paper at all - I guess becuase the literacy rate is so low); b)when people are killed in some tragic way, they either show a close up of them dead at the scene of the crime or later in their coffins during the funeral (up close and personal), c) that there is almost zero international news at all.  Apart from the big, fancy hotels (in which I was not staying until Mom and George arrived) no one gets CNN either so it's like we are living in the little bubble of Ecuador and Peru and sometimes Colombia, d) I haven't seen a weather report in nearly 2 months.  They don't report on the weather!!

Corruption runs rampant: The biggest problem in Ecuador's government is corruption.  It has been this way for a while, but you see it in big and small ways - from that crazy mine protest in Cuenca that shut down the roads in and out of town for 4 days - to the fact that Chavez gives Ecuador tons and tons of dollars for various things all the time.  I experienced this in my own way too: I took money out of an ATM in Cuenca and received counterfeit 20 dollar bills.  They were really great fakes, apparently, but I figured this out only when I tried to buy something... and there's literally nothing you can do about it.  Can you imagine how far up the corruption ladder goes to actually allow for counterfeit bills to find themselves in the banks??  Incredible.

Still with the safety standards: I've mentioned it time and again (and maybe thought it about 800 thousand times), but things that happen here just could never happen in the states.  My last night going to Corpus Christi in Cuenca with Israel sealed the deal on how these people are generally so dangerous.  Aside from the falling fire, the fireworks and other craziness, that night, there was a man walking through the crowd with a giant metal cow perched high on his head.  I noticed that where he would walk, people who start running in the other different direction and quickly found out why.  About every 4 minutes or so, little roman candle like rockets would shoot out of the cow and into the crowd.  People would run like crazy with sparks flying everywhere.  Terrified, I asked Israel if anyone ever got hurt?  He said that since it was a religious festival, God was protecting everyone and nothing ever happened.  Insanity.  Can you imagine that moment when the Cuencanos were sitting around thinking about what they could do and the idea finally came to them?  "Yes!  Let's get a metal cow and put it on Diego's shoulders.  Then we will attach fireworks to it and shoot them into the crowd... brilliant!!!"

Maybe you had to be here, but these are things that I've been thinking about in my last hours in Ecuador.  I'm going to miss being here, but I'm also looking forward to what's ahead. Until Argentina!  xoxo