As I gather my possessions, sprawled all over my room - I've been staying on the sixth floor of a modern condo building in Quito - I want to share some pretty pictures from my time here:
Maybe I showed a photo of this mountain already - Cotopaxi mountain just outside of town. It's so cool-looking, I thought you might want to see it again.
This is me abusing the local animal stock. Mercifully for Garnacha, I had eaten a rather light breakfast that day...
The angel guards over the southern part of Quito (background). To give the angel a little help, people plant broken glass on top of their fences (foreground).
And of course, you have your dog-and-llama yard protection and grass monitoring services...
This last pic is of my host Ceci in the back of a taxi. As is her wont, she's working at the absolute last minute - we're on our way to a grant-awarding agency and she's putting the finishing touches on her grant application. She runs a physical therapy non-profit and is always looking for income sources...
Altogether I've been two months here in Quito. I figure that means that I've listened to 2,489 car alarms, 14,235 honking horns, and maybe 200,000 barks from that poor German Shepard trapped in an 8=foot square pen next to my building.
This is what I know for sure about Ecuadorians: when they get behind the wheel they love to honk their horns: to signal turns, to signal going straight, to signal their love for the new Smurfs movie... Taxi drivers are the worst, honking for pleasure, honking the time of day, honking their availability, especially at foreigners, who they guess are more likely to want a cab...
I learned to keep my collar up and my hat down. Eyes on the sidewalk. Leaning toward the street, even looking up while on the sidewalk sets off the cacaphony. God forbid if I want to cross the street: looking to see if it's clear brings taxis from all directions screeching to my feet.
And then: the fuggin' car alarms. At first, I thought I had rented a room next to an alarm-testing facility. As far as I can figure, they're some kind of status symbol: Listen, everybody, I have a CAR!
Private auto ownership is rare here: there are 63 cars per thousand Ecuadorians, by contrast there are 265 cars per thousand Mexicans, 690 cars per thousand Italians, 863 per thousand Americans.
So they have to make up for the lack of volume with volume... And strangely enough I've seen people driving around, the presumptive owners of the vehicle they're occupying, their alarms blazing away. Either that or a lot of necktied businessmen steal cars at three o'clock in the afternoon.
They also have the house alarm here. In the nicer neighborhoods, you can signal to all your neighbors that you are leaving the house with a push of a button - I watched a prep-dressed schoolgirl coming home from school push a fob on her keyring and an entire condo alarm chirped off. That must be nice - any movement at all in a five-story building, and a hundred people are reaching for their keyrings...
The other motivation for alarming everything you own is - get this - the US dollar. Ecuador adopted the American dollar as its national currency in the year 2000, following a major banking crisis and recession in 1999. This served to stabilize the Ecuadorian economy. (I have no idea why that worked, but why don't we start using Deutschmarks just in case?...)
According to the people I talked to here in Quito, an unwanted byproduct of the change to dollars was the influx of Bolivians, Columbians, Peruvians, Chileans, Brazilians, especially those with malicious intent. The attraction of the US dollar, presumably more easily attained in Ecuador than say Miami or Phoenix, brought every shyster, pickpocket, con artist, and smooth talker in South America to Ecuador.
This resulted in, according to both local and internet sources, widespread petty crime, and "the spread of organized crime, drug trafficking, small arms trafficking and incursions by various terrorist organizations..." (http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1106.html) and, inevitably, more car alarms...
And house alarms. And bars on windows, electronic gates everywhere, businesses that are locked all day (you want to buy something, you ring the bell), armed guards everywhere (my favorite is the armed bakery guard with the bulletproof vest...), and if there's no money for security, you can just put up the "no gun" sign and hope for the best...
I'd post more pictures but it takes more than 10 minutes each to upload one photo with my underpowered little netbook.
Bye, bye, Quito!
Next post: Cuzco, Peru, one of the most spectacular cities in the world...
Even though there is supposedly this great influx of cons and shady operators from other countries, when my pocket was picked, it was by a bona fide Ecuadorian.
(T'was at a bus station: a cleaning lady bowled me over and her accomplice the station agent pocketed $20 US. All very local...)
