Gringo Love

Sunday, today, was to be the day I split from Quito. I'd pop up to Mindo - a lovely small town just north of Quito nestled in a cloud forest with a neat zipline - spend the day, then start moving south. Saturday would be spent sleeping, working on grad school apps, and maybe booking tours.

Two out of three aint bad. I achieved sleeping well enough, despite noisy German roommates, and set out on booking tours. First, breakfast... well, lunch. I hit the nearby 24 hour cafe, a known gringo haunt, and met my first Americans since arriving. Philidelphia and Detroit respectively, we naturally competed over who's heard the most gunfire from their apartments. I'll call it a draw. We ate hamburgers (for breakfast), drank Budweiser (for lunch) and reveled in our little bubble of Not-Ecuador. They wanted to trade numbers, hang out later, but I declined. I have no cell phone, I'm supposed to leave the next day, and I'm trying to avoid fellow gringos.

After shopping around online, I found the best deal was to be found right here in the Mariscal Square, a little tour booking agent called the Happy Gringo. A backpacker's special, 5 days in the Amazon, only 200 bucks, starts from the small distant outpost of Lago Agrio, starts Monday morning...

Qué what? This meant 3 immediate things. One, no Mindo. Two, I had an extra day in Quito. Three, my first intercity bus happens to be a night bus halfway across the country to the dangerous Columbian border, and I still can't speak Spanish.

Meanwhile, a day and a half to kill. I briefly flirted with the idea of doing work, but watched Return of the Jedi for the 8th time instead, figuring I'd have plenty of time tomorrow. Nor could I work after, since the big World Cup Qualifier match between Ecuador and Uruguay was on tonight.

Now, I've played [pee-wee] soccer, but I've never actually watched a full game. I just could never be bothered. Now, with hundreds of rabid fans filling the square, encircle by dozens of riot police, I couldn't help but get into the spirit. Still, the square itself was a terrible place to watch, I atleast wanted to be in a bar. All were jammed full well before the start of the game; the hundreds in the square were merely spillover.

The only spot I could find was on a broken stool placed ad-hoc in front of the bathroom doors near the bar in the very back of the Irish-American pub. Oh, you read that right. I watched a South American soccer game in an Irish pub, drinking Mexican beer, eating a Philly cheese steak, chatting up the Norwegeian girls (different ones) next to me. It was very multicultural, in that inauthentic Epcot kinda way. I could've atleast kept the theme by drinking a can of Guiness or Sam Adams, but at 15 bucks a can, I'd rather eat 3 meals and have a bed to sleep on for the night.

Late night snack, same café, new gringos. Two Australians, their first night in the Mariscal. They're even more naive and lost than me, so I take it upon myself to teach them some of the basic Spanish I'd picked up lately over beer and hamburgers. I'm shocked by how much Spanish I've picked up over just a few days. Lago Agrio seems less scary.

They want to trade numbers, I decline. I'm trying to avoid gringos.

The Sunday plan is simple. Wake up early, check out the touristy Mitad del Mundo (the Equator monument, more or less), work on my apps the rest of the day, catch the night bus while I'm good and sleepy. I wake up at 2. No apps this week.

The trip to Mitad is a bitch. The walk to the bus stop is long and rainy, the bus itself is crowded and slow, we get stuck in traffic right outside the city, and some bratty little niño won't stop poking me with the shitty candy bars he's trying to sell with his cute poverty-enhanced little kid charm. I wonder what child abuse laws are here.

Let me be the first to tell you, EquatorLand is not worth the price of admission. There's a small park, overpriced snack stands, a glorified "You Are Here" sign, and a statue/tower you can climb if you want to pay even more. The best part is that it's not actually on the equator. About 200 meters north is a smaller, cheaper tourist trap with Indian artifacts and cheap parlor tricks. You can balance an egg on a nail off the Equator, it's hard to walk in a straight line with your eyes closed anywhere, and the Coriolis effect does not affect kitchen sinks. A clever-shaped sink and a subtle change in how you pour the water in controls the direction of water flow in the tank and thus the subsequent whirlpool when you pull the drain. Sorry, I call bullshit. But atleast I had fun in this little hands-on tourist trap.

Perhaps that fun was due to the fact that for once I wasn't alone. Simultaneously, independantly, the little tourist trap was being visitedy by two naive Australians I never expected to see again. Together we explored the park, ate mysterious street vendor food (chicken ala plastic bag, I think), got lost, attempted to hitchhike, figured out the train schedule, got off at the wrong stop, hailed a taxi, got lost in a taxi, found our way in a taxi, bargined the taxi in faux-fluent Spanish, got off at different stops, and chanced into each other on the street half an hour later.

Temporary, sure. I'll probably never see them again. I don't have their phone numbers. I'm not here to spend time with fellow gringos.

But then again, maybe I will.