My Life

I just spent a week in Ecuador. I know I complained about the traveling at first, but I have to admit…after the initial crap travel day this trip has been great. Ecuador is a very cool country. Just in case you cared, I thought I’d give you a run down of what I’ve done this week.

Saturday night I stayed at the Marriott in Quito, which is the nicest hotel in the capital. A friend and I went to a cool little dance club/bar. It was low key and they had a live band playing salsa and merengue music. Afterwards, we found a place on the side of the road and I bought a big bowl of fries with a slab of chicken on top for $1.50. Surprisingly, I didn’t get sick. The next day we woke up and went to a small cafe down the road from the hotel. We just sat there in the sun and drank coffee. We flew out of Quito and arrived in Manta that night.

Manta is a coastal city in Ecuador that’s known for its tuna fishing. In fact if you drive towards the beach you either smell sewage or tuna, sometimes one right after the other. The Air Force uses a small Ecuadorian base here to fly counter drug missions. Basically, they go up in an aircraft and do surveillance over the Pacific Ocean and Colombia looking for planes, boats, etc that are carrying drugs. The mission has been very successful. Just last year they captured 5.2 billion dollars of drugs. That’ a good thing. If you want to read more about it, you can do that here.  I was lucky enough to go up in one of the flights this week. It was long (12 hours) but worth it. I sat in the cockpit for take off and landing and learned a lot about the mission. I’ll try to post my tv story when it’s done.

Because it’s a coastal city, Manta has a cool beach with a little boardwalk that has a lot of seafood restaurants. Ceviche is a popular dish. It’s basically lemon juice and oil mixed with onions, tomatoes, etc and whatever type of fish you want. The best is Ceviche de Camaron (shrimp) or Ceviche de Pescado (fish). It’s actually a Peruvian dish, and I had some when I was in Japan, but it was better here. Just don’t get the Ceviche de Concha…nasty. Learn about ceviche. 

I taught a class full of ten years olds English while I was here. Not for long, but the main teacher showed up about twenty minutes late and I was the only one who came that spoke a little Spanish. So there I was in front of a class of ten years olds reviewing English words. That was really cool.

More cool stuff:

You can get a lot of hand made jewelery here. It’s all made out of a nut called tagua and is pretty cool. Here’s a small entry in Wikipedia about tagua.

Ecuador is also famous for their Panama Hats. Although they’re called Panama hats, the hats are made in Ecuador not Panama. They are hand woven hats that look something like Cowboy hats, but cooler. We took a trip to Montecristi, a popular city near Manta that’s famous for their quality Panama Hats.  I bought one for myself, so we’ll see if I ever wear it. Read about Panama Hats.

Overall it’s been a pretty sweet trip. The agreement with Ecuador to fly the counter drug mission ends in 2009 and the President of Ecuador says he doesn’t want Americans here anymore. However, if you talk to the locals they all love us because of what we do for their city. Not only do we bring in a lot of money to their economy, we visit local schools, orphanages, etc and donate a lot of money to them. We also keep drugs off the streets…as much as we can anyways. Hopefully the president will wakeup.

That’s all from Ecuador. I actually fly out tonight and am looking forward to getting home. If you ever have a chance, make sure you come down here!