VW Expat in Ecuador

ECOVIA In my last post, I went through transport issues at my first house, and my first cycle of teaching.  In December I moved to a new house, where my hosts were a married couple Byron and Elsa.  I love Byron and Elsa and we spent many dinners sitting around the table and laughing and laughing. This in spite of  language gaps.  One of the frequent sources for our laughter were my transport stories. The commute from my new house to work was quite easy and safe.  I was able to take EcoVia both ways.  My house was on top of a very high hill, about a mile from the EcoVia stop.  On the way to work, it was downhill all the way and with breathtaking views of Quito and the Andes.  Coming home at night it was a mile up a Quito hill (a Quito hill is much steeper than a San Francisco hill).  However, the neigborhood ran a small bus service where for 25 cents you could take a bus up the hill. Ecovia is one of the public transport buses in Quito.  I have a real love/hate relationship w

MY TRANSPORT (MIS) ADVENTURES PART I. A good deal of my time and energy has spent trying to get myself from one place to another physically and emotionally intact. While this has been relatively easy  since January, September - December was another issue.  But in any case  I was always accruing good stories.  As I think my transport (mis)advntures are a pretty good reflection of my whole Quito/Ecuadorian experience, and they reflect the different places where I lived and also another theme of my life here - telephones-I will tell my transport stories. TRANSPLANETA I have had several comments on how my posts often are about hard times - or not exactly good times. And I don't think anything demonstrates "the good, the bad, and the ugly" as much as my Transplaneta experience.  The Transplaneta is the specific  bus I took from my first home to work.  It is part of a private bus company in Quito.  At this point in my Quito experience I did not know Quito, I did

Peruvian ceviche - raw fish, corn, sweet potato, served with Pisco Sour. LIMA I have been back from Lima for a bit now - actually Monday is the 2nd test for my class (2/4) so I have been back for about weeks.  Lima was great - it was a week of ceviche and Spanish.  I stayed in a very upscale neighborhood - Miraflores -and the apartment I rented  a room in was two blocks from my Spanish school.  The Spanish school was really, really good - and I believe I did make some progress.  At this school we studied in classes- with no more than five people to a class.  I had only one classmate - a young (22-23) German woman who knew German, English, French and was learning Spanish.  Her English was so good when I first heard her talk I thought she was from the USA.  Whether it was because she was young, had already learned many languages, or she was just smarter than me - she was pretty amazing.  We would learn a new tense, the teacher would put the conjugation on the board, an