¡Grin-Go! There were certain logistical problems associated with my life in Ecuador – what else would one expect – and my 10 months in-Country instead became 5. Not to worry as it was an experience that I wouldn’t have missed. I’ll write more when I’ve had the chance to decompress.

Class is dismissed. As my semester at SECAP was winding down I was rather delighted to see that my core group of students, the survivors, had learned some English under my tutelage. Early on that wasn’t so evident. For our final day of class we spoke about parties and about future plans.

No Botar Busura. I was going to do an entire ‘sanitation’ posting, but really, in this case, one picture is worth a thousand words. The sign says, "No Littering." You can't make this stuff up, and in Ecuador you don't have to.

¡Un Gallo Malo! Below is a photo of one of the neighborhood roosters. This guy doesn’t know day from night, and accordingly, he belongs in the stew pot.

¡Agua, Agua, Agua…veinticinco centavos! ¡Coco, Coco, Coco…veinticinco centavos! ¡Helado, Helado…veinticinco centavos…Helado! The vendors on the buses have a regular rhythm and cadence here, and I don’t know what would happen if one of them was to break with tradition.

Espuma de agua jugosa. Juicy water foam. There’s all this talk about how, in Ecuador, they drink their fruit, but that’s really not ‘zactly true. Instead I find that they drink a watered down, sugared up concoction that contains just a hint of fruitiness. I'm just saying...

Gracias, Mama. For Mother’s Day, at 0700 sharp!, we are going to loudly serenade you  - and the entire neighborhood – for 30 minutes.

The Transportation Posting. This has been a long time in the works and I hope it’s worth the wait. Bus fares are dirt cheap in Guayaquil, and you get what you pay for: a rag-tag, unregulated fleet of vehicles and drivers and a daily free-for-all that puts life & limb in jeopardy before, during and after the ride. The buses don’t really pull to the right lane, nor do they really stop, to let riders on or off; they just kinda slow down. I haven’t witnessed an accident yet, but there are zillions of ‘em. The photo below was taken by someone else; note the strict lane usage. If this was a two-way street things would look about the same.

One day I got on a south-bound #92 bus, named the “Apache VIP,” that was familiar to me from a previous ride. Now I wouldn’t pretend that this machine was decked out in ‘full-zoot’ Mexican livery, but it was a contender: fuzzy dice, fake wood dashboard and overhead, crocheted curtains and more. A guy with a dead chicken got on at one point. No suspension. Use your imagination to conjure up the worst and you wouldn’t be far wrong.

Vehicle inspection is still the law here, and I reckon that’s a good thing. But the crazy thing is that the inspection station is adjacent to the busiest place in town, the Terminal Terrestre bus depot. The entire area surrounding the Terminal is under construction, and so the traffic pattern for the inspection station has been changed: the morning of the last weekday of the month, I saw cars and small trucks and motorcycles lined up as far as the eye could see, blocking one lane of a busy boulevard, waiting their turns. As I’ve come to expect here in Ecuador, the whole affair turned into a circus, with food stalls, auto equipment hawkers and repair stations popping up willy-nilly.

“Walk, Don’t Run.” The Ventures might have been correct in their advice, back in the halcyon days, if you were living in Southern California, but here in GUY, if you're crossing the street, it’s “Run, Don’t Stop!” Otherwise you're a dead man.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIuIIqbyEIU

[photos to follow]

Good Friday? Not so good. Easter Sunday wasn’t great, either. The very traditional Good Friday meal in South America is a soup called fanesca, made with about a dozen beans and grains and some cod fish. To be honest, everybody eats it but hardly anybody really likes it. I thought that it tasted like a bean soup without any flavor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanesca

During my Friday morning run I happened upon a ‘Stations of the Cross’ procession that was so childish and cartoonish that it made me quite sad...

Pretty much - since Thursday -  things in town have been shut down, and families have traveled to visit family, or to the beach. Today is Easter Sunday, and – since all the bakeries are closed, and planning ahead isn’t an Ecuadorian attribute - there hasn’t been any bread in the house for 2 days, and, honestly, not a whole lot else beside rice & chicken & potatoes. At lunch today he whole extended family sat down to meager bowls of that every day concoction and, to a man [and woman], ate it with a spoon, as is the custom hereabouts. Knives & forks are seldom seen.

Seguridad. Security is a BIG concern here in Ecuador, and the private guard business is booming. I swear that I saw a bank guard downtown carrying a beat up, WW II vintage, M3 "Grease Gun."

Then, too, there are the ubiquitous ‘guard shacks’ on just about every street. To my mind the hombres who man most of these structures would be ‘the usual suspects’ in any crime investigation.

Things are barred and locked up twice! Electric fences, cameras, and broken glass on the top of walls are everywhere to be seen:

Casa Barros, where I reside with my host family.

Llaves. Keys. In ECU one keeps and always carries keys to locks that haven’t existed for generations or which are hanging rusted shut on some gate, somewhere. This ensures that several times every day the opening of any current locks will take a trial & error process lasting for many minutes. Everybody looks like a custodian.

Parque Historico. On 13 April 2011 I took a long, hot walk across the Rio Daule to Parque Historico. Lonely Planet describes the park like this:

"Historic Williamsburg meets the zoo at this large park across the Guayaquil-Durán Bridge. It's divided into three zones: the Endangered Wildlife Zone, which has 45 species of birds, animals and reptiles; the Urban Architecture Zone, which has a restaurant and showcases the development of early 20th-century architecture in Guayaquil; and the Traditions Zone, which focuses on local traditions with an emphasis on customs, crafts and agriculture.”

Cerro Santa Ana, Las Peñas, El Fortín del Cerro and The Lighthouse. Up, up, up on the hill. These neighborhoods, on the northern end of the Malécon are a bit old and artsy. They are now merely home to the rich, but the buildings have been restored and the whole place is a tourist stop; regular people live there, so it’s not unlike Charleston. The Fort on the Hill and the lighthouse are up a famous set of 444 steps. The Museum of Anthropology & Contemporary Art had a few interesting exhibits.

A poster of the Ecuadorian Pavillion at the Chicago Exposition

Good morning, Mr. & Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are. Today I had homemade pumpkin [calabasha] preserves on my roll at breakfast. The taste is not at all what you might imagine.

¡La luz is verde! ¡La luz is roja! ¡Mi coche tienes un CLAXON ! The light is green. The light is red. My car has a horn. For all of those reasons or for none at all, there is a constant cacophony of beeping on the streets. There is also the seeming continuous sounding of car alarms.

Montañita & Salinas. The beaches were pretty good during the last few days of March. But, Montañita isn’t on my list for a 2d look. The town touts itself as a place to surf and drink, but it wasn’t much of either happening when I was there; it was just a backwater. The Charo’s Hotel held promise, but they were doing a big reconstruction job, and the hammering went on from dusk ‘til dawn. In addition, while it wasn’t the ‘Feast of the Saint of Montañita,’ it was ‘pledge week.’ All afternoon and into the night they were blasting the names of donors over loudspeakers set up throughout the town.

Salinas is a different story: the mini-malecon is well kept and the city is large enough to offer a variety of restaurants, if not much else. It was off-season there, and quiet, but nice. The pacific was calm as a lake, and refreshing. I finally had some ceviche…at Cevichería Chelita, located in ‘Cevichilandia,’ a grouping of similar restaurants. It wasn’t very interesting, just fish in lime juice with a bit of red onion and a red pepper flake or two. I was expecting some avocado and some tomato, or something, in there somewhere. Silly me.

Street in Montanita.

Salinas

¡Feliz Compleaños, Sandra! Happy Birthday, Sandra! The Princess turned 30 today, 26 March, 2011, and there’s a big family party in the evening. It’s a crab-crack, and I’ve seen folk carrying pallets of crabs on the bus, and so it should be a pretty good feed. They’re supposed to be cooked on the grill, and they promise cerveza, so we shall see. I’m not big on picking crab meat, but I need the protein, so please don’t get between me and my mallet. I can even say that a need a few more calories; I’d be interested to know what I weigh after 5+ weeks in-country, but for sure it’s less than when I left the USofA.

This morning, early, I helped Anicia bake the cake. Think “Aunt Jemima,” and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the way things were. Everything was mixed by hand…literally...for about 30 minutes: margarine, sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla, lime zest and baking powder.

Sandra, the birthday girl:

Parque Bolivar, Malecón 2000 and El Centro. The Malecón is a well done boardwalk, more than a mile long, which was constructed 10 years ago to reclaim the downtown waterfront. Anicia, America, Andres, Carmen and I walked it for 2 hours, in the early evening hours of 23 March.

Parque Bolivar is famous for its iguanas, and it is odd to find them – a lot of them – right downtown! We also wandered just a bit thru the town center, which is reminiscent of cities everywhere, yet different enough. The closet-sized stores are cheek by jowl, and how they can be worth the effort I don’t know. Fact is, the people here work themselves into the ground just trying to keep up: as much as the education here is a disaster, a diploma or certificate leads to a small but noticeable difference in lifestyle…

Below part of the Guayaquil family, clockwise from upper left:

Anicia, America, Carmen & Andes

Kulture Shock. ‘I’m not in Kansas anymore.’ I admit it, they warned us! Guayaquil is noticeably poorer than Quito, and it has neither the Colonial history nor the panache of being a capital city to help it along.

Nor is there a sense of ‘poor, but proud’ hereabouts. Nothing seems to be complete. For want of a few buckets of paint concrete-block walls look like crap-ola. Nice houses abut lots where people are living w/o water or electricity [or sewers], under plastic sheeting. There hasn’t been a drop of rain in the week that I’ve been here, and the smell isn’t all that pleasant. People throughout Ecuador drop trash without a 2d thought.

I understand more than ever why the immigration problem in the States will never be solved: a ‘hot cot’ in Jackson Heights beats living poor in ECU by a country mile.

Still, there are some nice things, too: 

Otavalo. Been there, done that, didn’t get the t-shirt. I took the 2-hour bus ride with some of the group, and I saw the big market. It was legit, but to my eye it was about the same as every market everywhere. It was a nice weather day, and that was a good thing.