“Hola Piña! Como vas?!” I turned around for the fifth time in half an hour to see a group of girls eagerly clambering down the stone bleachers towards us. In front of me, the tall figure of ‘Piña’ – otherwise known as Jose, and still further known as my friend Sherri’s host brother – stretched out his arms jubilantly and grinned at his approaching friends. He had good reason to smile; spending eight months away from Cuenca had clearly taken…
“Excuse me.” A middle aged woman passing our table stopped for a moment. She looked down her heavily made-up nose at us haughtily; a group of English girls in an Ecuadorian coffee shop on a weekday evening, eagerly discussing our travelling plans for the next few months. Clearly the concept was not at all appealing to her, because she decided to chastise us for it. “We are all citizens of the world,” she started, looking pointedly at each of us.…
“It’s basically Ecuador’s equivalent of Zante!” The words echoed through my head at 7am, as we bundled bags and bodies into the bus for a seven hour ride to Montañita. The tiny coastal town, encompassing just a handful of streets and a long stretch of beach, is a mecca for travellers, hippies and surfers, both local and foreign alike. We’d known that a visit was on the cards ever since arriving in Ecuador, and a quick chat with some of…
“Floracita, you are ok?” I grinned, gulped, and nodded my head. The moustachioed man with the round clip-on sunglasses looked at me quizzically, a slight smile playing on his lips. “Aha, Floracita! Now you are no longer ‘la lora’!” Unable to contain himself, he and his wife fell about laughing on the steep bank of grass. Lora means parrot in Spanish. Within two weeks of arriving in Ecuador, I had been dubbed the ‘lora’ of the group, on account of…
“So you know when you said today was supposed to be sunny?…” We looked out at the torrent of water that cascaded furiously down in front of us. Only moments before, the sky had been bright blue; now the fat droplets were hitting the flagstones with such force that they almost bounced right back up again. I cast a dejected eye around our suddenly melancholy group. Among the nine of us, only two had suddenly pulled waterproofs from the hidden…
One of my major reasons for moving to Ecuador was to learn Spanish properly. I’ve tried learning languages before, and it’s never gone too well, despite my best efforts to the contrary. Years of primary school French resulted solely in a haphazardly memorised version of Frere Jaques; Italian GCSE threw me at the last hurdle with a sudden realisation I’d forgotten everything that I’d learned, ever, about grammar; and sharing a flat with fellow Brits in Florence for two months…
It was a typical Monday afternoon in Cuenca. Sunny, breezy and calm. Old Ecuadorians sat on the benches of Parque Calderon, young children played amongst the pigeons, and a general sense of lazy comfort reigned supreme. For the locals, at least. Sadly, this chilled out mindset hadn’t yet travelled to a group of the city’s newest inhabitants who, less than a month out of their English comfort zones, were feeling slightly stressed. About my birthday, no less. “We spent ages…
“Over there, across the trees, are the balconies, bordering the river. Los balcones. If you mention them, people will know where you are.” We stood at Claudia’s bedroom window, looking out over the view that would belong to me, temporarily, for the next four months. Eva Lucia pointed into the midst of buildings, anxious for me to understand. “Below the blue domes, the Catedral Nueva, are the thinner stairs. Don’t go up those at night. People cannot see you there…
Living up in the mountains overlooking Quito – the self-proclaimed ‘middle of nowhere‘ – has been a rather unique education to the smaller pockets of Ecuadorian society. Up here, the houses have names, not addresses; there are more farm animals wandering around than people, and a little yellow school bus driven by Pepe doubles up as the sole taxi to take us all the way down to the main road. We walk around the neighbourhood and skitter down the paths…
On my second day in Ecuador, I awoke to the sounds of three different people on Skype. Despite being dotted around the creaking wooden house in various good wifi spots, the walls and the ceiling of my room were thin enough that I could hear every word. “Yeah, the family we’re staying with are really lovely… No, we haven’t eaten guinea pig yet!” I turned over and closed my eyes. “…I started my period on the plane and I had…