Ambato First Impressions

The Journey South

On Saturday I made the trip with the other volunteers at my placement site from our orientation in Quito to our permanent home for the rest of the year in Ambato.  Ambato is the fourth largest city in Ecuador and it is located two hours south of Quito, still high in the Andes mountains.  No one in the group had been to Ambato before, so none of us had any idea what to expect from our new host city.

People we asked seemed to respond positively towards Ambato saying it is a pleasant place to live, but quite a few people also warned us that it is an ugly city.  This is because in 1949 an earthquake destroyed Ambato, along with nearly all of its colonial architecture.  The city was rebuilt (and I've read that it is now considerably more earthquake proof) and the Ambateños celebrate their history of persistence every year with the "Festival of Fruits and Flowers."

Major cities of Ecuador

Since we all had our luggage for the entire year with us, we opted to travel to Ambato in a chartered bus.  A funny thing about Ecuador is that addresses either don't exist or don't work.  It is never possible to get in a cab and tell the driver your street name and number.  It is always more like you tell them the general neighborhood and once you get there you keep telling them "left" or "right" until you are home.

This problem was magnified to comic proportions when neither we nor the bus driver knew anything about the layout of Ambato.  We all had our addresses, but like I explained earlier, that didn't make things any easier.  What we ended up doing was calling our host families one at a time and having them give us turn-by-turn directions to their houses.

My first mission in Ambato: buy a map of Ambato.


New Host Family 

The new host family I will be living with in Ambato is the Nuñez family.  They are a large family and they live in a nice house very close to the school where I will be teaching.  I have a big room with a comfy bed, access to the Internet, and most importantly a shower with hot water.  I predict that I am going to like it here.


Like my host family in Quito, three generations are represented in the house: the parents, three of their four sons, and the four children of the two represented sons that are married.  The biggest challenge of living with my new host family so far has not been cultural.  Instead, it has been trying to figure out how to interact with the kids.


There are two babies in the house that are pretty easy to get along with because they don't really do anything, but there are also two young boys Pablo Alberto (6) and Luis Adrian (~4) that I am still figuring out.  I am unsure of Luis' age because every time I ask him how old he is he says six but puts up two fingers, so I've just split the difference.


The kids are actually pretty funny because they talk non-stop and don't make any sense.  It is really strange to see little kids from another country speak their language because they make mistakes and can't pronounce words just like little kids who speak English.  I know that shouldn't really be surprising, but I guess I've just never tried to talk with little kids in Spanish before.  Although I can't always understand Pablo and Luis when they speak Spanish, I am fluent in Transformers.  The only utterances I have comprehended from the kids so far have had to do with Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, and they seem impressed that I know what they are talking about.  Too bad these kids aren't into Pokémon, otherwise I would really impress them.¹   

Centro

Since I don't start teaching classes until next Monday, I took a few buses an explored the city today.  I went to the centro where tons of people go to buy everything they need or get something to eat.  This was in stark contrast to yesterday when my host brother took me to the Ecuadorian equivalent of K-Mart.  Walking around the Supermaxi, as they are called, I immediately felt like I was back in the United States.  Today, however, I could not have felt any farther away from home.

The centro reminds me of Chinatown in Manhattan.  There are a ton of stores that jut out onto the sidewalk and an astonishing mass of humanity walking around in the streets.  It is definitely more work than shopping at Supermaxi, but everything is a lot cheaper if you buy it in the market.

Ambato is nice because a cab ride from anywhere in the city to anywhere else (with a few exceptions) is only $1.  On the way back home I was still feeling adventurous, however, so I took my best guess at which bus would bring me home and I jumped on.  I payed my 20 cents and was barely able to get behind the driver the bus was so packed.  I thought for sure the driver would not let any more passengers on the bus, but Ecuador was ready to surprise me again.

In New York, passengers on public transportation are aggressive.  People try to shove themselves into already over-full trains and will hold the door open until someone scoots over to let them in.  The rest of the passengers comply because everyone knows that the train won't start moving again until the jackass holding the doors open gets in and the doors close.

Ecuador is very similar with one small difference: the transportation doesn't wait for the door to close.  This means that people will jump onto already moving buses and hang on with their bodies outside of the bus.  The people on the bus have no incentive to scoot over because the bus is moving whether the door closes or not, so the guy holding on for dear life outside is going to do whatever he can to push his way inside.  This leads to dangerously overcrowded buses.

Today there was a woman with a baby strapped to her back standing in front of me.  As people kept jumping on the bus, I got pinned to the wall with the baby firmly pressed against my chest.  The bus approached my stop (I somehow got on the right bus) and I could not move because I didn't want to shove the baby.  I had to wait until someone else tried to get off the bus and push their way through.  The disturbance she caused incited some movement of the other passengers, and I delicately rode a wave of people (without elbowing the baby) to the front of the bus where I got off a few minutes past my stop.  

Needless to say, the taxis in Ambato have started to look a lot more appealing after today.


iCrap

During orientation they took all of the volunteers to get cell phones (I found out early on that my Droid still does in Ecuador, but that it also costs a lot of money).  I was surprised when our director found a place that was selling phones for $35 so I ran into the store and bought one immediately.  Unfortunately, when you buy a $35 phone, you only get $35 worth of features.

I hate you.

The only thing my Comcel phone does well is make calls.  The service is fine and I can even store numbers in a contact book.  What my phone doesn't do is tell me who is calling or texting me when it is one of my contacts.  Instead of the name of the person showing up, it only gives me the number.  Every text turns into four when I have to ask the sender who they are, wait for their response, then text my own appropriate response given the recently identified sender.  This is stupid.

Furthermore, my phone can only send texts to one person at a time.  This means that mass texts are a non-option and if I ever make more than one friend in this country a complex calling chain will have to be developed if we ever want to meet in the same place.

Finally, my phone has no vibrate.  I might understand this lacking feature given that the phone was so cheap if it weren't for the fact that Comcel decided that there were other things more important to include on a stripped-down, bargain-bin phone besides vibrate— namely a flashlight and an FM radio.  Sure the flashlight is cool and it is helpful for trying to find my keys at night, but if I ever designed a $35 cell phone, I would like to believe that vibrate would be higher than flashlight and FM radio on the list of "must include" features.

Getting Settled

The next week I will be preparing for my class by giving placement tests at the school and putting a curriculum together.  I have two Intermediate II classes that start next Monday.  In addition to my teaching job, I will spend my free time this week trying to get a schedule together for the other aspects of my life and join a gym so I don't gain too much weight while I am here.  I'm placing the over/under at 7.5 lbs.

Works Cited

1. Surasi, Krishna. "Evolution in Pop Culture: Pokémon Breeding." University of Notre Dame, 2010.