The Great Garage Sale

As we have lamented throughout these last 3 years, things are hard to get in Ecuador. Import taxes are extremely high and the country doesn’t do much of it’s own manufacturing. As such, there is an entire revolving market for departing and incoming international teachers. Among the most coveted items are: clothing and shoes, electronics, kitchen items, and believe it or not - lamps. I bet you never took your table lamps for granted, and you wouldn’t, until you moved to a country that has no Home Depot, Target, or Amazon.com and even the dinkiest of the little lamps will set you back $60-$80. So at around this time each year, departing teachers start unloading their excess home goods, and local teachers and/or new incoming teachers start buying them up.

Since Justin and I made the decision not to send a shipment to our new school, we have a lot of things to unload. And since we will only be relocating with a few suitcases each, the time has come to weed out the non-necessities.

I took my first crack at this a few weeks ago. I made a cursory pass through my closet, pulled out some old blouses and sweaters that no longer fit or fancy me, and I posted these items for sale on our google community “garage sale” page. I was priced to sell - between $6-$8 for tops, $10 for coats. These were all items that I was no longer even wearing, mind you. Well. My inbox was overloaded with customers! Within one week, I had sold everything and made a quick, cool $300. This ignited a fire within me! What else could I sell? Had I missed my calling as a boutique owner? Have all these years toiling at teaching been wasted?

No, of course not. But this proves my point that there is a huge demand for quality items at reasonable prices here, and it encouraged me to go forth with the rest of our sale. Pretty soon I had photographed almost everything in our apartment, and created a garage sale slideshow.  Everything from furniture and kitchen appliances to linens, rugs, small homegoods, and the much coveted floor and table lamps. Once again I was virtually sold out within days. I could have sold the lamps five times over for the amount of inquiries I received. Next time you make a visit to Ecuador, consider bringing a suitcase full of lamps with you. You could probably fetch a resale value of 200%. Lamps. Who knew?

I have to admit, at first the thought of parting with all my “things” was a little scary. Thoughts such as, “Will I ever find a blanket that snuggly again?” and “I happen to really prefer this particular spatula” cross one’s mind. But the fact that we are relocating into a fully furnished apartment made the break-up easier. After all, it’s all just stuff, right? And once I was able to realize that, I had a light, care-free feeling that I wouldn’t have to be hauling a bunch of literal extra baggage halfway across the world.

There’s soon to be another closet purge, and I’ve already been asked by a few people when they can expect the next batch of clothes to be released. I can’t wait to see what I can actually get myself down to. Four suitcases? Three? Stay tuned.

Yoga Retreat

One of my favorite things I’ve been able to do in Ecuador is attend several yoga retreats. A couple of teachers from our school are yoga instructors and they have hosted a handful of weekend retreats. These are some of the most enjoyable weekends I’ve had here, enjoying nature, reading quietly, and of course practicing yoga. I still haven’t mastered a completely unassisted headstand yet, but I’m getting close.

This was my second to last retreat before leaving, and this time we went to El Monte Eco Lodge in the cloud forests of Mindo. I enjoyed the significantly warmer temperature and the myriad of bird calls awakening me each morning. Plus, while Justin favors the beach, the forest is my happy place.
El Monte was actually the location of the first yoga retreat I ever went on in Ecuador, so it’s fitting that’s it's also one of my last. Nestled back in the forest, you can actually only access the lodge by use of a wooden plank pulley that hauls you one at a time, over the river. To do this, you must just shout across the river until someone at the lodge hears you. Then they come to the bank and send over the pulley, and haul you back. One at a time we crossed, with backpacks on our shoulders and yoga mats across our laps. Cars stay parked on the other side, and so this really adds to the feeling of quiet and privacy once you cross over to the lodge.

The lodge also feeds you three square meals a day, which are healthy and delicious. Our dinners, seated at the open-air dining table, were candlelit and we dined to the sounds of the forest around us as the sun set and moths, bats, and leaf bugs started encroaching around us. At first they may sound like something you don’t want around you when you’re eating, but I actually found it pretty neat. A few times you get dive bombed in the side of the head by a blind both, but you just shake your head and he clumsily flies away to leave you to your banana cake.

There were only 10 of us on the retreat this time, and we had the whole place to ourselves. We went for a nice nature walk on Saturday morning, where we saw dozens of palms and bromeliads, leaf cutter ants, birds, tiny tree frogs, and one fluorescent green iguana.

The yoga was relaxed and restorative, not too many arm holds or headstands this time, but a lot of prolonged stretching and meditation, which was lovely. All of the yoga is done on the open-air deck, which allows a 360 degree view of the forest, and provides the ambient sounds of frogs croaking and birds and insects chirping. The lodge keeps a small fire burning all day, and the smoke from the sandalwood helps to keep the no-see-ums at bay, though not totally. Most of us left with at least a few of the telltale red dot bites around our ankles, but a small tax to pay, I think, for the beauty of the place.

On Saturday afternoon, after a core vinyasa class, some of the other girls and I pulled our mats
around the smoky firepit, and had a silent sustained reading session. The air was warm, there was the gentlest of breezes, and soon we had all nodded off to a pleasant afternoon nap, right there on the deck. We were suddenly awakened by one of the girls gasping, “Toucans!” We all ambled up off our mats to see the spectacle - a flight of about 15 toucans, crossing over the forest canopy to settle in for the evening. They flew one at a time, and were recognizable by their impressive beaks. I wouldn’t call the flight graceful, but more of a torpedo-like dive. I can’t imagine with a beak that heavy they are built for sustained flight, but rather more short bursts of energy from one tree to the next. They resembled flying bananas, actually. To see a toucan in the wild, and not on a cereal box is an incredible experience. But to see a whole flock of them soaring right over your yoga mat - now that’s breathtaking. The show lasted about 15 minutes, until all the toucans had relocated to the other side of the trees, and we could go on with our evening. That night, after another yoga session, we gathered around the smoky scented fireplace, and shared a bottle of wine. Our entertainment this evening was the march of about a thousand tiny ants, on some sort of secret mission, relocating what looked to be larva from under the wooden plank floorboards to another location across the deck.

We had one final breakfast and yoga class on Sunday morning, before heading back to Quito. I left Mindo feeling restored and regenerated, and geared up to power through the last six weeks of school.

Cuenca

We are sadly beginning the final stages of our last days in Ecuador. In response, we’ve made an Ecuador bucket list so to speak, including all of the things we want to make sure we do before we leave at the end of the year. When we first figured out we were going to leave Ecuador, Shannon made a color coded calendar of our available weekends, and we didn’t have many left. However, we had a nice three day weekend at the end of April that fit our Cuenca trip perfectly. On my list of things I’ve wanted to do since we got here was go to the city of Cuenca. Cuenca is the third biggest city in Ecuador after Guayaquil and Quito. It is famous for its cobblestone streets, Spanish style colonial architecture, countless cathedrals, and being the best place in the whole country to go for consistently excellent food. It also happens to be the home of the famous Homero Ortega Panama Hat Company. Needless to say, I was sold.

So for some background on the city, it is in the south of Ecuador. It is considered the most European city in the country. It stands in the Andes at 8,200 feet above sea level. There are about a million residents total, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its famous colonial architecture due to its conquest by the Spanish in 1550. It is famous for its textiles, crafts, furniture, silver, and Panama hats. It also happens to be the reigning top expat retiree destination in the world, for two years running. The relatively low crime rates, significantly low cost of living, beautiful scenery, and welcoming attitude towards foreigners make it a hub for U.S. retirees.

With Cuenca being a 45 minute flight away, and our flight scheduled for 6:45, we were in a perfect spot. We’d be able to leisurely ride to the airport and we’d be in town by dinner. We left right from school and went to the airport with visions of Cuenca dancing through our heads. Well…it wasn’t that easy. There were two flights scheduled for Cuenca that evening. There was one at 6:45 and one at 8:30. We were notified of a delay at 7:00. That got delayed all the way until 8:45. Now both flights were delayed. In addition, passengers began heckling the airline. They would chant, whoop, holler, and boo. They even started chanting, “Fuera Correa fuera!” which is an anti-government chant against Ecuador’s current President. It is unclear to me still what Correa had to do with our flight being delayed, but the crowd was on the brink of riot until they passed out conciliatory Doritos. When we inquired about what was happening, they made an announcement. They had one plane for two flights. This was poor planning on their part. However, instead of letting the group who was checked in and on the first scheduled flight leave, they made a poor choice. They announced that all women and children and the elderly would be going on the plane. The plane would then fly all the way there, drop them off, and return for the rest at 10:30. They treated this as if their plane was a lifeboat on the Titanic rather than something that we booked ahead of time, as the earlier flight. Well when 10:30 came, they told us the flight was still in Cuenca and would be coming back soon. In the meantime they would pay for us to go to the airport’s VIP lounge while we waited. When we arrived in the VIP lounge, they knew nothing of our circumstance and turned everyone away. Right as everyone was about to riot, they “found” a plane to put us on. In total, we were delayed five and a half hours, and including check-in time, we were there for over seven hours, for a forty five minute flight. It was a full-fledged flightmare.

After checking in to our AirBnb, we instantly fell asleep. The next morning, we woke up and walked to a nice breakfast spot that had been recommended to us. When we arrived, we were shocked that literally everyone in the restaurant was elderly, white, and spoke English. The menu was in English, with Spanish underneath it. It was clearly an expat hub. The food was delicious and cheap. We each ate eggs benedict and had a sheet of hash browns the size of a music stand, plus coffee, and juice, for under $17.

After breakfast, we took a walk to the Homero Ortega factory, hat museum, and hat shop. We walked around and learned about extensive process of making handmade Panama hats. It was fascinating. When we finally got to the hat shop, we began looking around for some hats but we were rushed out of the store due to their pending closing times. Obviously we should have known that one of the major tourist spots in a tourist town is open from 11:00am-1:00pm on a Saturday. After wandering the streets some more, we went back to the room to read, nap, relax, and play cards. We went back out in the evening for a fantastic (and cheap!) dinner at a restaurant called Tiesto’s that we had been recommended by a few friends. The food was outrageously good. We were served fresh bread with 9 dipping sauces, including an apple pepper salsa. We had steak, fish, side dishes, wine, and anything else we wanted. The restaurant was beautiful, quiet, and delicious.

We had ambitions of a nice hike at the famous Parque Cajas on Sunday morning, but that was rained out. We found out that the temperature at the park was about 32 Fahrenheit and sleeting all day. We decided it would be a better option to stay in town and explore. We hiked around the city instead of a cold, wet park, although I’m sure it’s very pretty there. We spent the day walking around the cobblestone streets, past cathedrals, back to the hat store for an grueling exciting shopping experience. We went to a local park right outside of the city’s main cathedral where we were impressed with beautiful landscaping. Oh, and there were two full sized Saint Bernard models who were taking photos with passersby for a fee. After that, we walked along the city’s river walk area, which consisted of a nice paved walking path next to a beautiful river. We watched a basketball game at a local pub, also surrounded by retirees, before going back to the room to share a bottle of wine, play cards, and watch a movie. It was incredibly relaxing.

On Monday, we woke up, walked to another incredible breakfast place. We spent the day walking around town. We went to a local artisanal market where we scoped out the stuff they were selling. We went to a few jewelry stores (although surprisingly, Shannon didn’t end up with any). We went back to the park to wander some more and visit the famous model dogs. Then, we went to the river walk again, followed by a trip to a café. After all of that, we went back to the room to read and relax until time to leave. The trip was thankfully much less eventful than the first trip.

All in all, we were impressed with the city, the food, the views, the cost, and the casual atmosphere that allowed us to relax. We’re going to be gearing up soon for the end of the school year and everything that comes with that, along with preparations for our next stop. It was nice to do a little traveling. I got to cross another bucket list item off of my list and we had a great time.