things I like and things I don't like

In an attempt to steer my blog away from the "and then I did this..." trap, here's a half-assed list of my observations and/or experiences so far that will hopefully paint a better picture of the country than one I've given so far. 

I was asked the other day if I was "loving it" here in Ecuador, and I couldn't give an honest yes.  With more time I will be able to see this place in a more consistently positive light, but even with an open mind, after only three weeks I'm finding it difficult to "love" Quito.  However, bittersweet sentiments aside, gotta admit this place is a wonder.

Things I like:

• Ecuadorians are enormously expressive.  Besos everywhere!  What a warm culture, where walking into a room full of strangers warrants an individualized greeting to each person by means of a cheek kiss.  Most family members exchange them when leaving the house and coming home, friends greet each other with them daily at school, and students even give a kiss to their teacher when leaving the class.  At orientation, our director told us that upon his first trip to the US (for college, in Oregon) he reached out to kiss his teacher and she cringed so far back that it looked like she was doing the limbo.  Prepare yourselves for my return, fellas.
• Directness.  If there's a thought, it's voiced.  It's rare to "offend" someone with a curious question.  "Rude" just..isn't.  The honesty of physical descriptions, even, are beyond refreshing.  In the US it's perfectly fine to poke fun at someone for being skinny, but it's socially unacceptable to refer to someone as chubby.  Here, if you're gordito, you're a gordito!  No feelings hurt, just the truth.  Even the empleada sometimes refers to me as "chine." 
• Fresh fruit juice at every meal.  In Ecuador, the licuadora, or blender, is the most important kitchen appliance.  It's used for nearly every meal, to make juices and prepare the daily soups.  I've grown partial to a fruit called "tomate de arbol" (tree tomato!) in addition to a bunch more whose names I am fully aware I will never learn.
• Buses to any point in the city cost $.25.  This means that when I get on the wrong bus (as I did today) it's never too much of a loss.
• Food.  This summer I spent tons of time reading up on how I would adjust to the meat-heavy culture of the Sierra in Ecuador.  Prepared for a plate of carne after living 11 years as a strict vegetarian, it turned out that this preparation (as with the majority of "preparation" for travel) was completely unnecessary.  I'm enjoying avocados from the family's farm, daily soup, potatoes, plantains (disguised as anything from fried balls stuffed with cheese to boiled and sliced plain), veggies, rice, eggs on rice, eggs on other things, peanut sauces, etc. 
• Nature (i.e. opportunities to interact with nature).  I've only taken one real trip from the city so far, but the landscape is so beautiful and varied, not to mention the crazy-looking critters.  I will be heading to a indigenous market this weekend which sits conveniently near a crater lake, to a biodiversity station in the jungle at the end of the month, and I have plans yet to be cemented speckled throughout the semester to hike snow-capped volcanoes, visit some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and see Incan ruins.  All cheap, albeit long, bus rides away!
• Huge families. Everybody has countless tios and hermanos and primos.  My host mom had a family reunion last year that consisted of 300 people, each group wearing a different colored T-shirt signifying which kid of the grandfather they originated from.  She herself is one of nine daughters.  My friend's host family has 4 (four!!) generations living under the same roof, including a 90-something abuelita that hobbles to the dining table on her own each day.  Coming from a family of teeny-weeny, lacking a presence of extended family, it is refreshing to see the inherent community into which each person is born.  These people stick with each other forever, and someone always knows someone else with a connection that can help out.
• The vistas.  Quito's all mountains.  That means that there are so many viewpoints that can make any problema seem pequeño.  There's nothin' like feeling small to feel a part of something huge.
• Random, wonderfully nice people.  Not to say nice people are few and far between here, but given my horrendous Spanglish I'm not exactly the most inviting person with whom to strike up conversation.  After cutting through a street below mine for a few days, the security guard stopped me.  At first thought the sirens went off and I attempted to implement my first route of action when encountering any man-IGNORE, IGNORE!  But he had a huge enough smile that I brushed that off.  We spoke for 20 minutes--a welcome break from his 14-hr shift guarding the street, 7 nights/wk.  I left 'cuz I was hungry and it was 9pm and I was just getting back from my day.  Come back, he said, after you eat!  I told him I'd see him next time.  I'd like to think it was more than boredom that led him to be so open with a stranger, but I'll leave that conclusion for later.  Either way, I acknowledge the fact that I look different from the everyday citizen and it's nice hearing people voicing their curiosity as to WTF I'm doing here.  Beats apathy, in any case.
• The feeling of living.  Even though a good chunk of my time is spent frustrated over the list below, it's all just fuel for the brain and food for the senses.  I am absorbing new-ness from every angle possible.  New sights, new smells, new tastes, new feelings, new music and the weird transition from hearing noises of this new language to distinguishing meaning as they slowly (and very sparingly) form sentences and thoughts and ideas.
• Oh, also, there are no mosquitoes here.  Too high up.  Win.

Things I don't like:

• Ecuadorians are enormously expressive.  While it's true that the US is an extremely non-PDA culture, and that any sign of affection more than hand-holding in the streets can disgust a passerby, Ecuador defines PDA in a new light.  It's nice how couples are always holding each other in their neutral state, but being pushed up in a crowded bus against a couple sucking face so hard I could smell their spit takes it a little too far.  The average age of marriage is a few years younger than that in the States (23 vs 26.5, or something) and this emphasis on amor is very blatant proven by the very many pregnant bellies and millions of niños.  But really I'm only bitter about the face-sucking.
• The poverty.  To be more exact, the huge socioeconomic disparities.  All of the exchange students live with middle-upper class families, so we are not directly exposed to this extreme, but it is obvious in the form of children just above toddler age who act like little adults selling snacks or knick-knacks on the street.  Given the number of beggars on the sides of the street, with inflamed skin and missing appendages, it's difficult to fathom how fancy the malls are twenty feet away, filled with fancy boutiques and shiny glass.  It's an odd feeling to act apathetic on buses, looking away from people asking "por favor," or to vendors chanting their goods--from bags of mandarins to plaintain biscuits to dvds, but the desire I sometimes have to take on the responsibility of giving to everyone in need is absurd.  After all, those are temporary solutions to a greater problem.  Especially, as foreigners, we exchange students are targets for thieves and pickpocketers of all ages.  The desire to give is often trumped by the desire for you fuckers to stay away from my shit, but this sentiment is also absurd.  I still don't know quite what to think, and quite how to react.
• Whereas I consider Guatemala to be my big eye-opening trip, where so many live on so little, Quito is a huge city, which inherently means that everybody's got their own shit to deal with, and their main goal is to take care of themselves.  The pace is fast.  If I want to know which direction of the listed street the bus will go, the response of the money-man is "SUBE SUBE" (CMON, GET ON) instead of something along the lines of "hmm, well you might want to consider taking this other bus, label XYZ, which will take you, blah blah."  You don't give others the time of day, unless it comes in the form of...
• Hisses, whistles, stares.  "Mi corazon," "mi vida."  Los hombres.
•  Sometimes it feels as though I'm putting my mouth on an exhaust pipe and sucking in with the expectation of oxygen.  You can trail the black diesel spewing from the buses, and from higher viewpoints you can see the thick layer of smog that sits atop the valley.  Even though the EPA doesn't get as much done as we'd hope to in the US, at least it's something.  This seems to be a common theme in everyday life.  The frustrations on the homefront regarding the Obama administration's inability to get anything done seem silly when, relatively, things in the US are working so smoothly.  We have poverty, but not this bad.  We have pollution, but not to this extent.
• Bottled water is a must.  The tap water contains "bichos" (little bugs) as my host mother, who doesn't know what she's talking about, says.  I saw a sign today that read "Reduce, Reusa, Recicla," but without recycling bins there's not a whole lot one can do.  Props for putting the messages out there?  I guess?
• The commute.  This is both an embarrassingly whiny, personal complaint as well as a piece of cultural dissatisfaction.  Sure, it takes over an hour for me to get to/fro school, and this includes two buses where there is often no room to sit, and walks in between each.  But the real kicker is that this is the MOST exposure I get to Ecuadorians in my daily life, and while I would love to be able to say I've struck up some really deep and interesting conversations with the hundreds of people that are heading in these curiously different directions, my main objective of any bus ride is to not make any eye contact, ignore that stare from point blank, and look bored.  It is not by choice I am unfriendly, I am simplying doing as the Ecuadorians do.  It is extremely easy to attract unwanted attention, and so long as I don't look eager, I'll blend in rather nicely to the background.
• Now this one is solely a whiny, personal complaint, so feel free to ignore.  I came here hoping for a host family to take me in as part of their own.  I'm treated wonderfully here, but while most other students live with families with sons/daughters our age to hang out with or little kids to play with, for me it's usually just once- or twice-a-day conversation with Meche.  While most other students have big meals, often with guests, where the families spend time together and talk about their day, I almost always eat by myself at a plastic table in the kitchen.  It's kind of a vicious cycle-- to be able to improve my language I need to practice, but there's little incentive for other Ecuadorians to talk to me when I'm at such a basic level of Spanish.  My host father says little more than hello to his grammatically challenged gringita, yet the host dad of a friend spent a few hours teaching us the rules to and playing a board game.  Luck of the draw, really.

Things I neither like nor dislike, but are noteworthy regardless:

• Toilet paper doesn't go in the toilet.  Because of Ecuador's weak plumbing, where the pressure in the septic system can't handle the extra shit we flush (heh heh), TP goes in the barrel next to the toilet.  Always.
• Nonsensical explanations.  Word of mouth must be the word of God, or something.  I've been hearing some silly things (e.g. warm water is better for digestion than cold water) that only reinforce how little the population knows about science, even some of the educated, higher-class folk. 
• Having an empleada (maid/cook) live in the house.  These are mostly people from the countryside, and it's an odd feeling to be around someone of a lower class who openly accepts her role as a submissive figure. It seems that only when my mother has guests over does she speak to our empleada in a more authoritative manner.  Many of the empleadas aren't to be trusted (including ours, who once tried taking money from the fam), as they often take food or other unnoticeables from the house.  Apparently President Correa implemented new laws that gives them a more reliable salary, but I don't know how much that has changed the inner-house dynamics. Juli does cook delicious food, and sometimes while I'm brushing my teeth in the morning she'll even make my bed! 
• There’s definitely something to be said about the safety, err, lack of safety, rather, in Ecuador. There are so many badass professions that put into perspective how ridiculously strict regulations are in the US. Rafting guides in jeans using their feet to steer around boulders, babies with their first tufts of hair riding on the front of motorcycles, etc. The buses rarely come to a complete stop for men getting on/off the bus, so much so that it's almost a sport for them just to get to work. The traffic is, like any other Latin American country, wild. The streets in Quito weren't built with a metropolis in mind, so the act of squeezing two million into a network of streets built for 25,000 paves the way for some navigational creativity and a near-incessant earful of horn. Throw this against a backdrop of street peddlers at every red light or traffic jam-- a man juggling and jumping over flaming rods, a boy performing tricks on a tire while staring head-on to an SUV, a wheelchaired man in the middle of a 4-lane road during a green light, and niños running between lanes as a game, touching their bodies to stopped cars until the very last second they can get away with it without getting hit. It's just a different world.
  
  
  That's all for now, folks. My short-term objective is to actually start studying Spanish. My mind has yet to jump into school-mode, and my lacking improvements in language acquisition are unfortunate consequences. Ciao!