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.