Excitement at the end of a long week

Wow so, last night my family’s car was stolen from right in front of the house while we were eating supper. I feel so bad for them. They’ll never get it back. It’s probably in pieces by now. Not to mention how ineffective and useless the police are here. I’m not even sure if they came last night. Myriam, of course, blames it on Columbians. According to her, anything bad that happens around here is because of the Columbians. Although, she did have a semi-valid point when she said that they are more experienced and therefore better at crimes like this. I guess the rise in violent crime here coincided with the mass immigration of Columbians. One of the neighbors saw it happen but did nothing saying that she thought it was someone from my family. But that might have been a good thing since the thieves were probably armed. So now the family is without a car meaning that everyone has to take the bus always. They might borrow one from a brother but obviously feel uneasy about it, especially since it looks a bit like the one that was stolen. Myriam also blames the theft on the fact that the vehicle (it was an old SUV) would be useful for thieves i.e. it can hold a lot and is durable. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes them to buy another car. I know cars (new or used) are expensive here especially when they have two daughters in college and one moving to the United States in a month. Plus, they couldn’t have insurance because it was older.

On the lighter side, this morning I went to register my visa. I got there about 8:20 and the office opens at 8:30. There was a huge line out the door already! A bunch of my friends were there so at least I had people to talk to. So when I finally got to the front of the line, I handed over my papers and passport and got a slip of paper to take to a bank to pay for registering. Then we walked about 25 minutes to the bank, paid our $7 and walked to a nearby store to make a copy of the receipt. For the sake of time, we forked over another quarter to take the bus back. One guy actually had to use two quarters because the first one was counterfeit. Don’t ask me why someone would make fake quarters. Evidently, there’s a bunch of them and 50 cent pieces (Ecuadorian not American coins, we use a mix of both down here) floating around. When we got back to the office, we had to wait in line again to hand over our receipt and the copy. I need to go back next Friday to pick up my passport and then I go to a different place and get my censo, which is my Ecuadorian ID card.

When we finally finished with that process (it was a bit less than 3 hours overall), we walked down to the Mariscal to rent a harness and carabineer for this weekend’s Andinismo trip. Then I hopped on the Ecovia to meet Myriam at Super Maxi (a grocery store) to buy some food for this weekend. I bought some mora (a berry similar to blackberries) tea. I opened up the box to make some tea in my Nalgene and now my room smells like mora tea. Yum!

It was gorgeous and sunny today in Quito. Not a cloud in the sky for most of the morning. But it was windy. Sometimes I think that that is the worst kind of weather here. It’s so gross and dirty here. My poor contacts, even with sunglasses on, I constantly had something in my eye. Ouch! Even so, I got some sun. Bit by bit, I’ll get my nice dark tan back.