if you were to have asked me two weeks ago what i was doing with my life, i would have told you this:
im going to argentina for a month or so, coming back to cuenca for another semester, going to the galapagos, then taking a flight to new york to determine what will come next.
if you were to ask me the same question one week ago, i would have told you this:
we will go to aregntina, come back to cuenca and work half a semester. then, we will go directly to portland maine and open a soup restaurant.
if you ask me today, i will tell you this:
we are going to argentina, getting a job and then either coming back to new york to decide what to do next or depending on how much money we can make/save in buenos aires, taking a short trip to spain to see the san fermin festival with some other friends who are going there.
things change.
you see. we have visa problems here in ecuador. you are only allowed to be in ecuador on a tourist visa for 180 days in a year. when we got back from colombia, we only had 60 days left. however, the customs official, either through the kindness of her heart, or the ineptness of her math, granted us a 90 day visa, which has allowed us to be here as long as we have. when we are going to argentina, we will be flying out of lima. the flight from lima is $250 cheaper than out of either guayaquil or quito, so it makes sense. it is 31 hours away by bus. we are moving out of our apartment. first of all, our apartment has become an uncomfortable place to live based on many space:amount of people who live there ratio factors. second of all, if we arent allowed back into the country, it would suck to have all of our stuff still in the country. therefore, we will be traveling with everything we own. the prospect of arriving to the border on a bus, with all our stuff, and not being allowed back into ecuador - getting kicked off the bus in the middle of the peruvian desert - is unappealing.
it isnt certain that this would happen, but why take the chance when we could just stay in buenos aires (we are arriving during the high hiring season) and avoid that stress. cuenca has been nice, but there are other things to see too other places to live, etc. especially other place that have cheap steak and wine all over the place. ok, the one thing to be really disappointed about - if you were me - is that i wont get to see the galapagos. but here are some things about the galapagos: from where i am standing right now, in ecuador, the galapagos is $500 away - and that is just flight and fee, that doesnt include hotels, tours, or cruises. also, it isnt as though we havent seen any animals. that is how im rationalizing that. plus, argentina has capybaras. so, essentially, im trading a turtle for a capybara. seen that way, its an even trade.
ecuador does not have a huge industry for the things that we big city folk would like to think of as the finer things in life. though the traditional food of ecuador can be quite tasty, it is usually not housed in great restaurants, and the food they choose to recognize as their national food is white rice. their national alcohol is unrefined sugar cane liquor. their national beer is called, 'pilsener', kind of like the fly - they never bothered to think of another name for it. the best wine you can get (for the price i am willing to pay) is called clos (pronounced, 'close'). it is tasty wine, but im assuming that i will get better in argentina. all these big-city lifestyle things are starting to creep back into my head as we are preparing to get to buenos aires. the rain in cuenca is back with tremendous force. things are winding down.
i still dont have any definitive parting words for ecuador, that will come soon enough. and i still dont have any definitive plans for what comes next. that may not come.
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