Carlos Alberto Montaner

This past week, we have enjoyed the visit of Carlos Alberto Montaner, a well-known Cuban writer, here in Guayaquil.

His prosaic words have taken us between the heights of the Bankers Club, the Oro Verde and the Hilton Colon, and lead me to enjoy some of the best meals to be found in these parts.

His book, Liberty and it’s Enemies, will accompany me on my trip north.

Productivity Live

Double Sided Photocopies:  Nope.  What requires three button presses in the US required 3 stores and a day and a half wait down here.

Plane Ticket:  I went to the travel agency and purchased a ticket.  Well, not exactly, I needed to pick it up the following day.  I learned this after sitting in the travel agents office for an hour while she called 5 people for various reasons and then we had to walk down to the main street to use a better photocopy machine than the one in the office.  Then, she had to call and make sure I live where I told her I was living and confirm that the eTicket (I don’t know if this is the best way to have a ticket down here as maybe you too have realized the travelocity-like fluency to this transaction) can be sent to her, but she couldn’t do that until the people at that office got back from lunch.  It was 3:00.

I returned the following day to pick up the ticket.  This lasted about a half-hour while she finished a phone call, gave me a print out of all the information I needed, and then insisted that I wait until another, very similar, paper be printed out.  She did not have this paper.  She tried again calling those people that were probably still out to lunch although, even though they said they would send it right over, nothing arrived for twenty minutes and then I was assured that what I have was good enough to get on the plane.

Yellow Fever Vaccination:  On reaching the vaccination center at 9:00 in the morning the whole staff had left to vaccinate some boat.  A nice man in the street was kind enough to ask me if I actually needed the vaccination or just the certificate.  I guess, depending on your situation, this could be a more productive or less productive an option.

I returned the following week for a more successful experience, you simply pay somewhere up on the third floor, they fill out two papers saying that you have paid, then you walk back down to the ground floor, go outside, and walk halfway around the building.  The room at the end of this trek is where you get vaccinated.  They fill out two more papers to say you have been vaccinated.

Insulation and Dreams

The 3am speedsters, the motorcycles, the bottle guy (botellas, not albondigas), the neighbors doorbell, the incessant honks at the neighboring intersection…; they’re all right in my living room.  I can’t even be sure they are outside until I get up and check to see the front door isnt wide open.

I have received several semi-tours of the city.  Guayaquil is a port city with several salt-water estuaries that meander their way through the city and it’s outskirts.  The main waterfront is known as the Malecon 2000 and stretches from the Hot Wok restaurant franchises of my co-worker until Las Penas, a wonderfully attractive hill with four hundred and some steps (yeah, intelligently, theyre numbered but of course I forgot to pay attention in the final moments of the ascent) which culminate in leading you to a petite church and a pirate ship.

On the outskirts of the city there are a series of private housing projects, very American in nature if you ask me (large tracks of land and similar houses, great for bringing down costs with economies of scale I suppose), and all walled in with their own social sundries.  The houses here, unsurprisingly (due to the heat), yet surprising to me (due to my shallow ethnocentric architectural expectations), have no insulation.  They are built with brickՑbut not red brick, those grey double-holed bricksand this brick is covered with something that looks more aesthetic, such as inners and outers of walls.

Of course, the house where I live also has this fascinatingly empty structure.  You cannot knock on the wall and determine anything about studs; the entire wall is simply hard.  The most cultural sounds that make their way to my living room must be the intersection honking.  That is, here in Guayaquil, as you near an intersection, you honk.  If you are going faster, you honk more times.  Itѕs probably proportional but I havent done any calculations.  It is a form of communication.  The honk supposedly says, “Watch out!  Coming through.”  Though, falling under the similar phenomenon of the grandfather clock in the living room, after enough honks, they somehow gain the special power of invisibility and near uselessness, save for their perpetual barrage of the unsuspecting traveler.