Further reflections

I'm really coming to love the city. It's very interesting. We traveled to el parte antiguo de Ecuador, the part that was originally built hundreds of years ago, and walked all around with a very smart and sassy Ecuadorian tour guide. We saw three different churches, one of which we climbed to the roof of. This part of the city reminded me of the pictures of European cities that I have seen, but a little rougher and possibly more colorful. There is a huge statue of the Virgin Mary overlooking all of Quito, which reminds me of the statue of Christ that looks over Rio(?) in Brazil. Quito itself is built in a valley surrounded by mountains, which made the view from atop the basilica very beautiful!

However, that location comes with a drawback. The high altitude makes you very tired. Couple that with speaking a foreign language day in and day out and it is very VERY easy to get tired.

There is a real plurality of people here. The majority of the people are made up of "mestizos" or people who draw their origins from a Spanish-native mix. There are many indigenous people walking the streets, and they are easy to spot, some African-Ecuadorians, and a very very few whites. When our group of Americans walk by, we definitely draw eyes!

The streets are filled with people walking around, with vendors, with beggars, with children trying to sell you stuff. Poverty is evident. The lives of the Ecuadorians are not nearly as comfortable as those of Americans. The attitude of drivers to pedestrians and vice versa is very different. Yesterday my host dad and I went down to a store called Mega Maxi, which is akin to Wal-Mart, to purchase a cell phone, and if a car drove where we were walking when we had the right of way, he would hit the car with his hand! Can you imagine if someone hit a car in the U.S.? I have only begin to scratch the surface of the culture here, but for everything Ecuador doesn't have that the U.S. does, there is plenty they have retained that we have lost.

There is a connection to spirituality and religion, especially a Catholicism influenced by the polytheism and animism of the indigenous peoples, that does not exist in America. There is a connection to nature. Every in Ecuador people keep their windows open and many shops in the streets are open to the outdoors. By contrast in the United States there is a strict distinction between indoors and outdoors.

As a final note, there are so many more fruits here than in the United States. At the store yesterday my host dad took me around the produce section and we named fruits in english and spanish. A quick funny story: my host family speaks no english. Early on they asked me if there were any foods that I didn't like and I said that there was one, but I didn't know the name is spanish. In hopes that they might know it, I said that in english it was called squash. They didn't recognize the word (and I later found that squash in spanish is calabaza) but since then they have had great fun with the word squash. It sounds very funny to them. And whenever they tell me what's in a meal they tell me there isn't any squash, and have a good laugh at the word.