OMG PLANTAINS!!! And other awesomely Ecuadorian things

In addition to cebiche y su mercado artisanal, Guayaquil is known for its iguanas. An extremely resilient species, iguanas can thrive in a variety of climates, and those that inhabit Ecuador are particularly suited to the equatorial environment de aqui. As is the case for all cold-blooded animals, the body temperature of the iguana depends upon exterior climate conditions; thus the outside world determines how the iguana will behave. That is what it means to adapt—like the iguana, I have learned to take Guayaquil’s unfamiliar cultural climate as the standard to which I adjust my own behaviour.

Here are some of my favorite things about Ecuador that, when taken as the norm (as they have to be), have forced me to reevaluate my North American way of looking at the world:

You have to throw the toilet paper into the trash and not the toilet. This makes you much more conscious of your toilet paper usage, for example I use exactly three squares each time (MATCH THAT). In public bathrooms, there is one toilet paper dispenser on the wall and you have to get it before you go into the stall. Or if you are unlucky there is no toilet paper. And there is never any soap.

No one recycles :o( This is the one thing that makes me sad.

When you are eating, it is not rude to reach way across the table, and if you are eating with a lot of people, then it is more likely that you would even get up and go to the other part of the table where the food is instead of just asking someone to pass it. It is also apparently fine to poke around in a dish with your fork in order to decide which piece of whatever it is that you are going to stab and put on your plate. Lunch is the big meal of the day—the first day when we were eating lunch I was like oh man, if this is lunch, I can’t wait for dinner! But then dinner turned out just to be a sanduche. They think this is more saludable because you don’t go to sleep on a full stomach, except that OMG the food is so good sometimes I do anyway.

It is very impolite not to greet someone fully with a kiss on the cheek (yes, this is indeed a phenomenon that some of the young gentlemen try to take advantage of). If you are sitting and someone comes in, you need to get up and walk over to them to go greet them properly, and if you come into a room where there is a full table, you are expected to walk all the way around the table and kiss every person. Also letting other people go through doors before you is a huge deal. I have yet to convince a man that it is okay for him to walk out the door before me, much less to go through one that I am holding open for him.

When you want to take a taxi, you first poke your head in the open window of the passenger seat and ask them if they are going in that direction, and only if they say yes do you get in the back. (Except that foreigners should never take yellow taxis! See below).

Also everyone drives like complete psychos and there are few rules and those that do exist are more like guidelines, anyway. Literal guidelines (like to divide lanes) do not exist in the street and everyone drives ridiculously close to one another. One-way street means that you should feel free to drive in either direction, and I was told explicity that red lights should actually be considered stop signs. Plus, the traffic lights frequently do not work and people just do whatever they want anyway. Things would be so much more difficult if everyone had to drive stick…Oh wait.
The second that a light turns green, every car behind the first one honks impatiently, but every time that I have been in the first-in-line car, the driver takes advantage of the stop to delve more deeply into conversation and look me earnestly in the eye, completely unconcerned with the light. Hilarious.
The pedestrians are as insane as the drivers, if not more so, and will run out into the street in a way that I would not even do in the US where I have more confidence in the drivers. During red lights in high traffic zones (where the lights are more or less obeyed), everyone will cross the street, weaving in between the tightly packed cars. There are also vendors, beggars, and thieves who run into the street, taking advantage of the fact that none of the cars can move in order to try to sell their wares and take your money voluntarily or by force. You are most likely to be robbed in your car in these high-traffic situations, which means during the late afternoon rush hour, in broad daylight in front of all of the other people here (like last week when my boss had her Blackberry stolen while driving home from work!).

On a similar note, getting robbed is pretty much a constant possibility to which you accustom yourself. If you are robbed it will be at knife or gunpoint, a fact that has ceased to instill terror in me because basically you know that if you just give them your stuff then they will leave and not try to harm you in other ways, so in the end, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, really.

They have this thing called ‘Ecuadorian hour,’ meaning that if someone invites you to do something at a particular time, it will not happen until about an hour thereafter. It's about time I learned to chill out.


Unlike the iguanas, I find myself less adapted in the morning than I had been the night before. The little things you barely perceive—you do perceive them, but at first it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what they are and what it is that is different—to which you had accustombrado yourself before falling asleep are upon awaking again novel and unexpected and unfamiliar, likewise the language, with which you had become somewhat at ease the night before, is again uncomfortable and your tongue clumsy.

It is strange to realize that each day you have to start the process over, to find that each night, you have adapted a little more, but each morning, you are a little less adjusted than you had been the night before. And even though everything is still a little unfamiliar, one of these days I too, will be green and scaly and fluent in Spanish, basking contentedly in the Ecuadorian sun.