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.
