Quito time

If anyone is concerned about global droughts and needs to reassure themselves that it still rains in this world, I would advise a trip to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, where I currently find myself. Truly a remarkable amount of rain. Every day for the almost two weeks I’ve been here. Fortunately the purpose of my time here is to learn Spanish at a language school inside so the rain isn’t a problem at all. And I have a rain jacket and the general attitude that a bit of water never hurt no one. (Except people who drown). 
Back to where I left off last time. My last day in Chile I spent with my hiking friend Anna. We had a deeply jolly day. It’s remarkable how close you can get to someone when you meet them in the right circumstances and are suited to one another. That night I slept in the airport, curled up in my sleeping bag in the corner waiting for my morning flight. When I checked in they told me I couldn’t board because I had no proof of onward travel from Ecuador. I tried to explain that I was a free spirited, spontaneous hippie who hitchhikes and had no intention of settling permanently in Ecuador but they weren’t buying it. During my 8 hour layover in Bogota I had to buy a pointless plane ticket to Fort Lauderdale which I cancelled immediately. What a silly system. 

When I arrived in Quito I went right to my host family’s apartment. Very nice and comfortable. I have a large picture of Jesus and another of Mary and Jesus guarding me all night. I had Sunday to explore the city before my lessons started last Monday so I went into the old town and sat on a park bench in the main plaza for a while. Two random old men started talking to me. One of them offered to show me the centro commercial, which I understood to be a local market where we could get lunch so off we trotted to a bus that took us 30 minutes through the city. Finally we disembarked and walked into the hugest, cleanest, most American mall you can imagine. Zara and Armani and Apple and KFC. I was almost sick. I explained to him in my limited Spanish that I hated shopping, I don’t buy things, I have no interest in seeing shops that are abundant at home and wanted to return immediately to the historical town. Things soured between us rather, and anyway he was quite a bore. We went our separate ways. 

My lessons started the next day. I have four hours one on one from 9am-1pm for $7 an hour. And unlimited bread rolls at the school! I mean, they cost approximately 10 cents so it’s not as if I couldn’t buy them myself but there’s something nice about having an bowl of them handy for mid lesson nibbling. And my teacher Isabel is very cute and brings me fruit every day. She is a very good egg – open-minded, kind, good teacher, friendly etc but boy can she talk. She asks me about my day yesterday and I say a couple of sentences and they might remind her of something and then I learn about the fight she had with her nephew and her tumultuous relationship with her brother and the other brother who moved to Spain and the mass exodus from Ecuador when the economy crashed and they moved the currency from the sucre to the dollar 15 years ago or so and the corruption of the politicians and the impossibility of saving money here and the terrible hospitals which only give ibuprofen and only let you in if you have a fever and how she gets up at 4.30 every day to milk the cows before work. You could almost say my lessons are more lessons in the minutiae of Isabel’s life than Spanish lessons. But they are in Spanish and I do understand so I must be learning. We turn to grammar eventually and I approach it with such fervor the 16 year old Emma of school French and German would fall off her chair in shock at the difference. Back then 40 minutes of class felt like an interminable waste of time and now I find I’m easily able to focus for four hours and then go home and revise everything I’ve learnt, shove some more vocab into my skull and do my written homework, all with great happiness and diligence. I suppose that is what happens when you choose to do something and pay for it yourself. And it pays off – I’m probably better at Spanish now than I was at French after learning it at school for 7 years. 

(Easter parade).

There is another person staying with the same Ecuadorian family as I am – an older American gentleman called Brian. I have taken umbrage with him. He speaks not a word of Spanish and seems to have the impression that I am remotely interested in his political opinions and recommendations of hop on hop off bus tours around the city. After a couple of meals together I had a quiet word with the host mother and now Brian and I eat separately. It’s always bit awkward when my meal overruns and we cross paths at the table but life’s too short to listen to lameoids ad nauseam and anyway, I’m paying for the homestay for full immersion. 
On Saturday I went to a famous market town a couple of hours out of the city for the day. (Brian tried to get me to pay $45 for a tour there but I took the normal bus for $2.50). You had to write your name on a list when you got on the bus for whatever reason and when I sat down another tourist sat next to me and started talking to me in German. He’s seen my name and assumed I was German. Gerhard was perfectly nice, quite stereotypically socks and sandals German, but I wasn’t quite feeling his company. At this point I enjoy being on my own so much uninvited people sometimes feel like a real intrusion. We walked round the market a bit together which had the one bonus of making me feel like I really could speak German. It was quite a relief to be about to express myself fluently in a foreign language. Previously I’d been insecure about my German and was loathe to speak it in case I conjugated some verb wrong but now I know what it’s like to actually be bad at a language my German has shot up. Everything is relative innit.

 I managed to shake Gerhard off and walk up a hill to a sanctuary for birds of prey. What amazing creatures. Reminded me of that great book H is for Hawk. There were tiny Pygmy owls the size of my fist which were particularly wonderful. All the birds are threatened by humans destroying their habitat which added some pain to my appreciation of their beauty. 

When I returned to the bus station who should I run into but bloody Gerhard. We sat together on the bus again and I pleaded exhaustion and put my headphones on and stared out the window. It turned out we both had the same plan for the next day: to take the cable car up the mountain over the city and climb the volcano that’s up there. Most tiresome. I managed to arrange it that we wouldn’t go together and would just “hope” to see each other at the top. Once up there I climbed up for a couple of hours and just before reaching the summit I turned back. It was a real breakthrough for me to do that. Imagine getting close to the summit and not bothering to climb to the top of it! Madness. But actually not madness. I wanted to avoid Gerhard who I knew was ahead of me, the summit was covered in cloud so there’d be no view, I didn’t need more exercise, and basically I just felt like turning back and realized I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone about reaching the top. It was quite freeing to just turn around and skip down towards lunch and not push on for the sake of it. 
Yesterday I went to the the old house and museum of a famous Ecuadorian artist called Oswaldo Guayasamin. It was incredible. He was profoundly struck by the violence man causes against man and had painting after painting of contorted skeletal bodies, and anguished faces crying tears of blood representing exploited miners, oppressed people, victims of dictatorships etc etc. He was a friend and contemporary of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who writes about such things, as well as Victor Jara, a Chilean musician who sings about them. The whole thing really made it clear how affected South America’s culture is by its past of being brutally conquered by Europeans and their very recent past of being subjected to military dictatorships. Unsurprising I suppose, and not easy to swallow. 

Self portrait. 

(I was crying because I had no shoes until I saw a child who had no feet)
His house was full of beautiful art from all over the world and made me want to fill mine, once I’ve built it from scratch, in a similar way. 

Final Chile segment

I’m writing this from probably the oddest situation I’ve found myself in yet this trip, right on the two month anniversary of my departure. I’m alone in a very dirty house of a stranger I met on couchsurfing. It’s in a suburb of a coastal city called Valparaiso, and the house is one of those indentikit houses, with its twins all around, and the street is gated off from the main street. The house is foul on the inside, as if 5 student boys were living here. I don’t really understand the host – he sounded nice and fun and friendly from his profile and in our whatsapping, and at first he was all those things and then just before we ate he basically stopped speaking, only giving monosyllabic answers and smiling. Then he went out and said he would probably be back later or the next morning. I think he might just be extremely high because he is a chronic stoner, growing huge marijuana plants in his backyard. All of the spare rooms in his house are filled with beds and according to all the (overwhelmingly positive) reviews online he has hosted a lot of couchsurfers. I was trying this out to meet locals and socialize but this is the least social evening I’ve had since arriving. (Not including the camping nights because there my tent is my friend). But anyway, nice to have some downtime and to see that there are people in this world who welcome in strangers no questions asked and trust them in their home all night. I dread to imagine my parents’ reaction if I opened our house’s doors in such a way. 
That is setting the scene. Now back to where I was with Tilly last week or so. The pleasant times continued. I had an attempt at bareback horse riding, which is easy enough once you’re on but it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get up gracefully. You supposedly just fling yourself over onto the horse’s back, clutching its mane for support. But that is a lot easier said than done. The poor horse stood there patiently while I threw my entire body weight against its back again and again. Eventually I just had to slide over it perpendicularly, looking like a beached whale until I managed to get into a sitting position. But once up you feel very hardcore roaming around with none of the paraphernalia. Lucky the horses there were extremely docile or I would have been eating ground in no time. 

Tilly’s new existence is very enviable except that I don’t think I’d be able to slow my pace of life down enough to be satisfied. There is a huge cultural difference in the work ethic of Europeans and Patagonians meaning that basically nothing gets done here. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re not starving, and I am far from thinking that the purpose of life is to run around madly “achieving” things but I need a bit more activity I think. Another issue was that everything is cripplingly expensive in Argentina because of incessant inflation to the point where families take day trips through hours of customs queues across the border to Chile to buy basic electronics and alcohol etc. A tiresome side effect of a poor economy. But all that aside, it was amazing to be there in the beautiful countryside hanging out with Tilly.

 

After a week we made the 24 hour journey to Santiago for Lollapalooza music festival. The night we got there we went for drinks with a gay couple that Tilly met on couchsurfing who bought us loads of drinks and who talked to us in Spanish, not seeming to mind that we were about as witty as a park bench. Again, who are these freakishly generous people who take foreign strangers in and spend time and money on them with nothing in return? Amazing. (And this isn’t just me being naive. They genuinely wanted nothing in return). 
The next day we went to the festival, along with a German friend of mine from the eco camp, Alex, who is obsessed with Metallica, the band headlining along with the xx. We saw some good bands, chatted away merrily, didn’t drink at all because for some unknown reason it was a dry festival and then split up so Tilly and I could be overwhelmed by the incredibleness of the xx and Alex could have his ear battered to smithereens by the foul barrage of noise coming from Metallica. He called us stupid for not trying to experience their concert because apparently it’s out of this world good, but we just couldn’t bear it. 

The next day at the festival we met up with Anna (my friend from hiking in el Chalten) and a couple of her friends from their study abroad program and spent the day with them, raving away and lying in the grass intermittently. A random saxophone playing dj called Griz who I’d never heard of was a highlight. We moshed with a crowd of 17 year old boys. 
For the last couple of days I’ve been in Valparaiso with Mauro, who took a bus 3000 kilometres to come visit. Valparaiso is such a cool city – covered in murals and street art, set on extremely steep hills with painted staircases everywhere, mosaics, music coming from open windows all over the place, beautiful views of the sea.. all in all a place conducive to a romantic retreat.

 He told me about when he just graduated college and wanted to experience life in a factory so worked as a cushion gluer-together for two months. Apparently factory work is horrific as it sounds. I’m not sure I could handle it. We parted ways for good this afternoon and I came out here to this bizarre empty place with its marijuana plant taller than my head.