The News From Quito!

The San Cristobal airport. So glad I didn't ask which gate to go to. That would have been awkward.

 
Guys, I've had a great two days. The plane flight to Quito was loads of fun. For starters, we got fed THREE TIMES, beginning with a full meal on the way out of Galapagos. I can't believe we get Full Meals on two hour flights in Ecuador! Definitely not something that happens in the States... The last time I got a full meal on a plane was on a 9-hour flight to Japan (not counting the plane into Galapagos)! Then on the flight from Guayaquil to Quito, they gave us little mini-empanadas!

So cute! They were filled with tuna, though, so not your ideal empanada flavor, but whatever. And then when we got off the plane in Quito, we got even more food--granola bars with peanuts and raisins. Wow! THREE TIMES we got fed on that plane trip! Also, the trip itself was nice and smooth, not bumpy coming into Quito like last time. Even better were the views of the mountains as we came in--there were almost no clouds, just a few low ones, and we were able to see several very snowy peaks coming in. Apparently it's quite uncommon to see them all unshrouded like this, especially Cotopaxi, so we were quite lucky!

Cotopaxi:

Cayambe:

Among others.

We also got a great view of the Quito smog layer, which extends all the way to Cotopaxi. Ew.

I added lines at left and right to make it more visible, but I think it's probably fine without them. It was way thicker right over the city too.

I was also excited to see the new Mariscal Sucre Airport. It's way bigger and way more sleek and modern than the old airport was, smells nice, feels like a modern airport, views coming in were way better... I thought it was really a big improvement. Yes it's way out of town, which is probably a huge pain and expense for tourists, although there is an interesting new boom of hostels springing up around it, in amongst the ramshackle houses that make up the edge of town. And I'm sure Quito could have done better things with the money than fix a not-broken airport. But I still thought it was a lovely place to arrive into. Driving into town, I reflected on how everyone had told me before going to Galapagos that the new airport was going to cause all kinds of traffic problems because the road infrastructure to serve it hadn't been put into place yet. We were moving pretty fast and I had just decided that the infrastructure business wasn't a big deal when we stop at a stoplight and my host father (who picked me up) starts telling me how poorly thought out the road situation was in regards to the airport. As it turned out, we went about 0.1 km further before crossing a bridge with only one lane in either direction. Hmm... I guess we just got lucky with the number of cars on the road today, then. Fortunately, they are apparently building a better access way into Quito.

Also, this car trip marked the third time that I can recall having a conversation entirely in Spanish that lasted over an hour. The first one was with the GAIAS security guard (during which time I discovered that he's a 9/11 truther, of all things) and the second was with the owner of the DVD shop on the malecon. Today, I also had a decently long conversation with JuanCa, IES Quito's mildly eccentric guardian of students and sometimes-bodyguard for the rest of the staff there (or at least Eduardo), while he was showing me how to take the bus from Quito back to the valley. He informed me that of all the places in the world, he wants to travel to Germany because they have the best metal bands there.

I was told that the family didn't have a car, but they actually do. Actually, they have several, which is nice. My new host father used to work with the petroleum industry (he's a specialist in the economics of energy), but I guess something about the Correa administration caused a lot of layoffs (I missed the exact detail in Spanish) so now he's working as an economics professor at a technical university in Quito, and I get the impression that they don't have that much money left. But even though he left the oil business two years back, the family still has a really nice, modern house. His wife is an interior designer who is also serious about painting and she designed the interior and has painted most of the artwork that hangs in it. Half the house has two stories and half three, with the staircase in the middle so that when you walk up it, it feels like there are five floors, plus the basement. Most of the rooms have walls (and/or ceilings) with a variety of colors, and mine has a series of concentric angles raised out of the slanted ceiling.

 
My floor is imitation wood paneling, which, despite its artificiality, is a refreshing change from the tile/linoleum that I've found on the floor of every other room in every other Ecuadorian house. I mean, it's still sort of a form of linoleum, but at least it doesn't look like it. I have no idea why Ecuador likes tile so much, but it is essentially the only indoor flooring material here and used liberally in the walls (indoor and outdoor) and outdoor walkways as well, without regard for slipperiness when wet. There is a set of tiles out front of a store in between my house in San Cristobal and the hospital/Kicker Rock restaurant area that are literally so slick that I slide on them in my tennis shoes even when they are completely dry. I would say How can people possibly let this hazard exist? but then I think back to all the times since coming to this country that I've almost fallen into one of the large, unmarked utility pits that are frequently open in the sidewalk...

My new host family has three children, only one of which is still at home. He recently had to switch from USFQ to a cheaper (but far worse) university in Quito, where he is finishing his degrees in architecture and law. He also loves to paint and write music, although he's having trouble finding anyone in Ecuador interested in promoting it, since his lyrics tend to focus on his liberal ideologies rather than on more marketable romantic themes. He speaks English fluently, although like most Ecuadorians he spends a substantial amount of time commenting on how terrible he is at the language, and we talked extensively over our dinner of peanut meal balls with sweet and sour sauce (apparently a trademark food of Ecuador's coastal region) tonight. He's concerned about the apparent recent use in America of 3D printers to print plastic weapons. Of the other two kids, the daughter finished a degree in interior design and is living in Peru and the other son is studying economics at a British university in Prague, which amazingly enough is still cheaper than USFQ, Ecuador's most expensive university at $7000/semester. Overall, the family members I've met are all really awesome and way easier to communicate with, even in Spanish, than my host family in the Galapagos, and I'm really excited to be living with them.

They also have the biggest golden retriever I've ever seen, a beast named Lazarlo who is roughly the size of a mountain lion. Last night, he decided he liked me and would therefore demand my attention at all times, both by nudging me incessantly for pets and by trying to hump my legs while I walked around the kitchen.

Size comparison. His head is bigger than mine.

I also found this new interesting thing in the kitchen last night... Every single egg is marked with the company name and the expiration date (which is the same for every egg in the carton).

I asked my host mother why they bothered marking every egg instead of just the carton and she suggested that it might be a marketing technique.

This morning, I managed to forget the time zone change and left late to meet Eduardo, who was taking me to my doctor's appointment. I also forgot the treatment history form that the doctor in San Cristobal gave me as I flew out the door, so we had to run back to the house for that too. All told, we left about twenty minutes after our intended departure time of 9:00. From Cumbaya in the valley, it's a half hour car ride to Quito, but there's always traffic, so we'd left well in advance of the 10:20 appointment and still had an hour to get there. Eduardo is one of the safer drivers in Quito, which is probably why he's allowed to drive students around, but that still meant that we went slower than I anticipated and since I'm still well adjusted to Quito's frantic vehicular mayhem, I found myself silently thinking "Why are we stopping at a yellow light? Yellow in Quito means 'Speed up, you can make it!'" and "Why didn't we just muscle into that brief gap in the cars? Our car was bigger than theirs and now we'll have to wait for like five minutes to get another!"

We ended up getting to the hospital zone around 10:20, at which point Eduardo called to say we'd be five to ten minutes late. Then we spent another 25 minutes looking for the clinic building and, that done, a parking space. I figured we'd have been allotted a half hour for the appointment and that they'd probably have just canceled it by then, but 'Ecuadorian time' came to the rescue again and the bored receptionist simply told us that the doctor had just arrived. We turned around to see him throwing on his white coat and were ushered right into his office.

Naturally, he spoke perfect English and my concerns about translation were entirely unjustified. He let me give a brief description of the problems and then looked in my ears. It took him about a second of looking in the right one to exclaim at the vast quantities of wax within and move me over to another table with equipment that could be used to remove it. I've never had my ears suctioned out before, and it was an interesting if slightly painful experience. That done, he assured me that he didn't see anything at all related to a cholesteatoma (which is what the doctor in the Galapagos said I had), and even whipped out a thesis he'd written on the subject in Switzerland a while back to prove that he actually knew what he was talking about. We did some more tests of my hearing, including a tuning fork test and a standard decibel threshold test in a room that wasn't anywhere near as soundproof as it should have been. Afterwards I pestered him about all the other symptoms the doctors in the Galapagos had said they'd seen and he insisted he didn't see any of them. He stuck a camera stick in my ear to attempt to prove it to me, but he'd been using hydrogen peroxide while cleaning the wax out and all my ear canal really looked like to me was a mushy foam. (It was also really hairy.)

At the end of the exam, he decided that all my problems were probably caused by having too much wax mashed into the little corners where the eardrum joins to the ear canal and that the Galapagueña doctor had misinterpreted some of it as a symptom of cholesteatoma. I was a little dubious that such a seemingly innocent thing could cause all the symptoms I've been having, so he gave me some antibiotic drops to use for now in case there's still some residual infection and told me to come back in five days so we can make sure nothing else is amiss. Despite my doubts and some lingering twinges of pain, though, I will admit that over the course of an hour or two after the appointment, my hearing returned to normal and the feeling of pressure I'd been experiencing subsided. So yay for that. I'm a little sad that I left the Galapagos early now, though, since I was looking forward to attempting a trip to Floreana and some artisanal fishing this weekend. But I guess peace of mind is worth something, especially for someone as hyperreactive and paranoid as me.

I also discovered that the hospital I went to is right near the teleférico, on the slopes of Pichincha, which is one of the big things that I didn't get to when I was in Quito the first time. My plan is to get Eduardo to drop me off there after my follow-up appointment on Tuesday so I can see the sights, and then wander down the verdant park boulevard that is Avenida Mariana de Jesus towards the IES center and catch a bus home again after exploring Quito a little more. Also, now that my surgical calamity has been averted, I figure I shouldn't waste time lounging around in Quito and I don't want to be too much of a burden to my host family, who weren't really planning on having another student around for at least another week and a half anyway, so I'm going to try to go so some other places in Ecuador that I didn't make the first time around. I'm hoping to leave for Mindo Saturday and return Monday evening, and I'm considering trying to make a trip to Quilotoa next week.

While we were walking to and from the clinic this morning, we were solicited by a number of indigenous women with baskets of fresh fruit for sale. Pears; clementine oranges; luscious, juicy strawberries... I wanted some really badly, having been fruit deprived in the Galapagos for the last three months, but Eduardo insisted that I was not to buy food off the street. Fortunately, later, when I got back to Cumbaya, I went to the new mall that opened right across from the university and found a waffle stand where I got a waffle with chocolate sauce and tons of strawberries for $2.50! Also, my host father wasn't kidding when he said that they'd build a skywalk between the university and the mall to promote after-school shopping! Ah well, capitalism at its finest!

All in all, I have to say, even though the Galapagos was a really great place, there's just something I love about Quito. I've been tremendously excited to be back here. The weather these past few days has been gorgeous and coming down the hill from the hospital, we could see all of the snowcapped peaks surrounding the city with no clouds whatsoever. There may be a smog layer, but the mountains are beautiful above it and something about the bustle of the city just charms me! I'm really happy being back here.