Ecuador, je t'adore... up to a point!

First things first!

South America is not entirely in the Southern hemisphere! 7 countries out of 14 are actually fully or partially in the Northern one. The Earth, as a top, is heavy on its top, ;-) Paradise has a tropic, like a magnet, the North given to trees, and grass and animals - and man, and the South to the fish...

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Time warp...

I am back where I was yesterday, at Quito airport, hoping that I will get out of that time wrap and excape back into my normal life. With one less day with Naomi and Melissa… Time is not money, time is love!

Beautiful day today in the middle of the world. Clear skies with pretty, white lamaish clouds. The Pachincha peak peeked at us for the first time this morning, abandonned by its scarf of fog. Dry, no snow, still too early to have it covered with that glorious white cap that is the symbol of Quito pictures.

This extra day in Ecuador gave me several opportunities for unvaluable experiences.

First I discovered how unhelpful and grouchy airline people can be when they really don’t care about their passengers. Avianca was the worst as they took revenge on the fact that I had separate tickets on Air France and their airline. They more or less told me to take care of my ass by mysell! From such a cute and pretty girl! I did, bugged the ILAFA people, who by now think I have a maledicition following me, and ended up at Air France’s offices on the 11th floor of a plush highrise, glassed business buidling. They issued me a new ticket but did not bother to give me a seat number!!

Then I went cruising around in the city on foot, with no money. Took grafiti pcitures, quite stylish with hands and feet doing some kind of dance. And arrived at the Archeological museum, that is carred for by the Central bank, why not? Hey, but how do visit a museum without money? Since so many people are panhnadling in the city - actaully not quite, theu sell things, food or small useful stuffs like pelehon cords, I just went to the desk and told then I did not have any money. Not necesseily credible, with my foreigner’s look (quote, unquote!), but anyway he understood my broken Spanish and asnwerred in perfect English that it wa sright, I could look at the museum.

What a treat! The most impressive was the section on the very many cultures that grew in Ecuador since the paleolithic (15000 BC?) and until the invaders came in and messed up everything, the Inca first in the 15th century and the Spanish (actually in the singular, as Pisar defeated the Inca army with just 12 soldiers!!!) only one century later. If you are familiar with Le Temple du Soleil, well you are aware of most of the artifacts produced by these coastal and mountain cultures. I can’t quote them all without my book, but one of them was called Las Vegas.

Mostly earthware, all kinds of pots with the design of animals or people. Sometimes men holding proudly they slightly oversized penis up to the sky, and rubbing!

The third experience was the gala dinner, one of these things that steel executives like to organize to recover from the light agenda of the meeting that they suffered through for a day and a half. Pretty good food, local wine (from a bit further south though, Chili or Argentina). And a show of dances and songs and music which was the pretext for not engaging in too much conversation with the strange people, nice enough though, who were sharing my table, one of 50!

Music was initially Andean, there are indeed Andean bands everywhere - and all the time, actually, in restaurants, hotels, etc, you’d think you are in the Paris Metro! But the most interesting were the dances, where they actually put up shows where death was more or less always present, and work (in the fields) and the rivalry between men to catch the women and the women dancing around in very formalized steps to raise sexual tension. Quite touching and very good taste, nothing raunchy or whatever, there. We were all rounded up in a tytransparent steel building from 1899 that was a kind of replica of the old Paris Food Market (les Halles). The building was on a hill overlooking the city, why showed for what it is, a huge saddle on which roads and houses extend on both sides of the mountians, vulcanos and far into the flat middle. Quite magic in the night!

Bits and scraps from a week's stay in Quito, invited for giving a keynote lecture at the ILAFA annual conference, which changes venue every year, from mexico to Argentina. I got a bit distracted by the clever robbery, which separated me from my camera, my medecines, and about 2000 € worth of stuff that you I carried around within even thinking of it. Took a while to rebuild my wealth, a bag, a coat, another camera, - a smaller one, and medecine. All time consuming although it truned out to be another way of seeing a far away country.

The cherry on the cake (the frosting on the cake?) was the helicopter crash that closed the airport on me and made me miss my flight back to France. 24 extra hours that I was given to "enjoy" more of Ecuador, a drop in the cosmic Ocean of time but a big piece of sand that got my schedule stuck and messed up, this stupid tight schedule that I maintain, God knows why...