Fifteen hours into my two weeks in Quito I’m not sure where I am. Or maybe who I am in this place that’s so familiar but somehow not home anymore. I guess you can call it culture shock, but that just sounds like something enormous and sudden. My culture problems come in these strange little jolts more like the jerky feeling of riding in a car with someone who is just learning to drive a stick.
There are things I leave behind in my home culture like driving everywhere by myself and things I bring with me like my soda addiction. There are things that I pick up here like speaking Spanish and navigating the crazy public transportation. There are things that I should probably leave behind like my need to be “plugged in” all the time, and things that I should pick up here like eating pan de yuca but even though I know that, I don’t plan to change either of those habits.
When I’m hosting a team and we take them to the mall to eat, I always encourage them to try the Ecuadorian places instead of just going to McDonald’s. And once they have all dispersed, I go to KFC. My own youth totally busted me doing that this past summer when we were all here and eating dinner at Quicentro Sur. Oh well, I like my greasy comfort food. But sometimes I don’t have that option, especially late at night when everything closes. There’s not a lot of late-night options like Cook-Out or anything in Ecuador, but when Roberto picked me up from the airport last night and asked if I was hungry, the Menestras place was still open.
When I walked in I was thinking “It’s not Cook-Out, but it’ll do.” When I walked out I was thinking “That was so delicious, why don’t I live here?!” But I did hit the American fast food for lunch today. I’m a cultural pendulum when I first get off a plane.
There’s not really a point to this particular post. I don’t have some way of summing this all up and saying “here’s a lesson I learned” or “here’s a rhetorical question for you.” You know, all the ways a good blogger ends a post. But I’m out of practice at this whole thing and I just want to acknowledge I’m really excited about this whole time I’m going to be here. All the people I’m going to see. All of the experiences that I (and “we” as a team) are going to have, but also that I’m just going through that first day weirdness.