Some Shots

The first picture is the view from my home in Quito. I live in the northern part of the city, at the base of one of the Andean mountains. My room is one the second floor of the house. Marcia, my host mother, insisted that I take the one I´m in because it has the highest ceiling. Marcia is consistently impressed with my height; I´m consistently impressed with her cooking. As I´ve mentioned before, Miguel, my host father, is an architect, and the house itself is extremely interesting. He is also a painter, which is somewhat unlikely, because in Santa Elena my host mother´s husband was also an artist. I´ve gained the impression that all artists must have beautiful homes. I´ll include other pictures of the home once I´ve taken them this weekend.

The second picture is one of the many policia stationed throughout the city. If you´re eighteen years or old, a male and in need of a job in Quito, chances are you´re either a part of the national police or a security guard. These guys are absolutely everywhere you go--you can´t walk a block without running into a man dressed in black or green. Many of them wear pistols on their chests or have semi-automatic rifles in their hands, but it´s against federal law for any of these firearms to be loaded at any time unless there´s an absolute emergency. I wonder how much this law is really enforced.... Even so, I guess the Colombian version of these guards is much more imposing. They wear a pair of bandeliers over their chests with bullets that have the same diameter of your eyeballs. I particularly liked this guy because of his cool shades. I hope he didn´t notice me taking the picture, but, as my friends know, I´m not a very discrete person.

The last picture is me on my way to Guayaquil last weekend. As you can all see, I´m very thoughtful, trying to determine how to avoid my passport from being jacked. I actually didn´t carry it with me that weekend, which could have ended poorly because I was stopped at a checkpoint by the policia on the way home to Quito. One of the officers scrutinized the hell out of the copy of my passport, but eventually let me back onto the bus. That was at about 3:30 in the morning.