San Antonio, el Mitad Del Mundo, la Salsa, las Adventuras del Quinche y mis Cumpleanos

Sorry for the hurried blog last time. I was at a net café and time was extremely limited. Hopefully they will be a little more polished from here on out.

We have now left San Antonio, the town where we went through our orientation and have returned to our base hotel in Quito, el hotel Alston, in la districta Mariscal (the district known for tourists, and coincidently one of the highest petty crime rates in Quito).

San Antonio is a town north of Quito, from which many people travel into the city on a daily basis for work. However, from a tourist perspective it is known for mostly one thing, el mitad del mundo (0 degrees latitude). Wednesday afternoon three other students from the group and I went over to el mitad de mundo to see what it was all about. As we walked up the main street in the town, the monument marking el mitad seemed to tower over us. When we got to the end of the road and the top of the hill, however, we turned right and started walking away from el mitad. Some tourists might have seen us and been confused. However, we wanted to go to the real mitad. The monument at the top of the hill was built before the development of GPS and for some reason unknown to me they ended up building the monument a couple of seconds off of the real mitad. Some think that this was an honest mistake. However, I think otherwise. The monument is built on the uphill side of the main street. Regardless of where you are on the street the monument towers over you. I personally have trouble believing that the ‘mistake’ was not politically motivated. I mean, who wouldn’t want large, impressive monument at the top of their main street?

But anyways, we walked a hundred meters or so down a side road and then up a hill on a dirt path in order to reach the real mitad, actually measured by “GPS” (the GPS part was really in quotes instilling even more confidence in all of us). At the mitad we took a tour in Spanish (which became a little tricky when we started the tour of the old houses where we were learning words for which I don’t even know their equivalent in English except for ‘large spoon’, etc.) and learned about the strange effects of el mitad. 8 feet north of el mitad the water drained in a counter-clockwise fashion, on el mitad the water drained straight down and 8 feet south of el mitad the water drained in a clockwise fashion. If you close your eyes, put your arms out sideways and parallel to the ground it is almost impossible to walk a straight line. An egg can be easily balanced on a head of a nail (I mean to try this out when I get home). And, your strength is greatly diminished when you stand on el mitad. We had to form a circle with our thumb and pointer finger and resist as they were pulled apart. I tried this one of the people with me to test it myself and there was noticeably diminished strength on el mitad.

Wednesday night we had a group Salsa lesson after dinner. We learned three basic steps and a twirl (una vuelta) in just under an hour and a half. Although I don’t consider myself a big dancer (as some of you know…) I loved salsa (it took a little while for mi companera y mi to figure out la vuelta, but we got it in the end) and a bunch of us are definitely planning on going to salsa clubs in the future.

Thursday morning we had to say good-bye to el Rancho Alegre, the hostel (but nice hostel) where we had been staying in San Antonio. El Rancho Alegre is a family run hostel and the atmosphere definitely helped everyone adjust to their new environment. It seemed like we were being feed constantly (we would have breakfast, a snack, lunch, a snack, dinner and sometimes another snack after dinner). And, our football games with Jose, Roberto and Diego at 10,000 feet will definitely be remembered (if only for nauseas feeling I got after playing for only 10 minutes. The altitude definitely does make a difference).

Three other students and I left el Rancho at 9 AM, setting out on our mission to go to El Quinche, buy a never seen before object, have lunch and get to el hotel Alston by 3 PM. Sounds easy, but we didn’t even know what El Quinche was! We confidently got on the bus headed to Quito. All was good. However, while we were talking to some of the Ecuadorians on the bus and telling them where were going, they immediately started to tell us to get off the bus. We were going the wrong way!! We immediately got off the bus, but that was our first mistake. Before we knew it, we were walking along the side of a major highway through Quito (there was a sidewalk though, just no stores or any other people). One of the other groups flagged down a cab and sped away, leaving us and one other group determined to find our way only using the busses. That is when we met Emerson. I have no idea where he came from. The sidewalk ended up ahead and I didn’t see him until he was on top of us, but we told him where we were going and signaled us to follow him. So, we turned around and started walking the other direction with our new friend in the lead. As we walked I talked to him and found out that he lives in Los Chillos (the town in which we are doing our first homestay), but works for a missionary group in Quito and travels to el oriente (the Amazon) on a regular basis (eager to see if I could use him as a resource for my ISP – which I want to do en el oriente – I asked for details, but found out he travels to the region that borders Colombia en el oriente – the one region en el oriente that the State Department has a travel restriction on and SIT students are not allowed to travel to…). Emerson, though, was our savior. He took us to a nearby bus stop where we all got on a bus, proceeded to switch onto the trolley car with us and walked us to la estaction de transferencia (bus transfer station) where we could hop a bus to El Quinche. The last leg of the trip took 75 minutes (but only cost $0.95) and we finally arrived in el Quinche just after 12 PM… The entire journey had taken a little over 3 hours!!! As a result our late arrival in town we ate a quick seafood lunch, purchased sugar cane for our never seen before object (when we first saw it we thought it was cheese), talked to a man in the market and then got back on the bus to get home. Although we spent less than an hour in the town, the day was still an adventure to be remembered. Who said turning 20 in Ecuador wouldn’t be memorable?

Later that night we found our way to a club and let me tell you… 21 gringros walking down the street at night stands out... A LOT. But, the excuse, “soy gringo” (I am a gringo) gets us off the hook for basically anything we do. And, our orientation paid off – meaning none of the girls sent a wrong message to one of the Latina guys (this ranges from how much they drink in public to the amount of eye contact they make and how they dance). I’m just glad to be a guy!

Just to prove the point even more, one of my roommates just returned from the market. As he walked in the door the first thing he said was, “I’m such a gringo!!” He had just bought a random assortment of alpaca shirts and an alpaca bag at the market. But, we can do that since we’re gringos.

I’ve now written more than 1,400 words… So I should probably bring this to a close. This afternoon we take a bus to Los Chillos and I meet my host family. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of good stories soon!!!