Those minor cultural differences…

I´m spending the summer in Ecuador (Quito, The Galapagos, the Amazon, and the Andes) leading a service learning trip for high school aged students.  Yesterday, I flew from Denver, Colorado into Quito to prepare for the trip.

I´ve been to Ecuador before - in 2009, leading the same trip - so it wasn´t completely foreign, but there are definitely aspects of the culture that you forget about.  On the plane to Quito, I got seated amoungst a large group of Ecuadorians returning home, and was reminded that they (or perhaps all South Americans?) have very different personal-space paradigms.  It started when a large man uncerimoniously smushed his hairy, protruding belly against my cheek as he hoisted his bag into the overhead compartment. No apology, no adknowledgement, just a mouthful of bellybutton lint for me to chew on.  He kept it there for a good five minutes, helping all the rest of his family members hoist their belongings, as well.

Upon landing in Quito, you exit the plane into a long, modern looking hallway.  It seems to go on for nearly a mile, and there are no doors to other gates or restrooms. When you get to that point when your bladder is just about to fill past capacity, you finally descend the stairs into the not-quite-as-modern immigration room.  There´s a single bathroom on the other side of the room, but if you´re anything like me, instaed you decide to hop into the immigration line while it´s still short, because you assume (erroniously, it turns out) that there will be a bathroom you can use in customs while you´re waiting for your bag to arrive.

Baggage claim and customs serves as a further reminder of how Ecuadorians view personal space differentally than we Americans do.  In America, we tend to wait politely for our luggage to come off the carosel (ideally, in my opinion, several feet back from the edge so people whose bags are actually there have easy access, but that doesn´t happen nearly as often as one would hope.) In Ecuador, it feels like you´re a character in a video game trying to find the Golden Egg.  First you search among the piles of random bags, stacked in precariously balanced pyramids.  Then you have to jump over and squeeze between the large luggage carts (because apparently no one traveling into Ecuador arrives with less than 6 large, hard-cased suitcases, most likely tightly seran wrapped for security purposes) to get to the carosel. At first, it appears that there´s only one, long carosel, but it turns out there are actually two! So after ten minutes of waiting at one, you finally realize you´re not in the right place at all and you have to hop back over the luggage carts to the other side of the room.  And careful of all of the other passangers trying to get their stuff! For the most part, niceties are ignored.  You don´t ask for permission to squeeze between people, you just plow on through, and you certainly don´t apologize after bumping someone. It´s easy to pick out the Europeans and Americans because we turn sideways, whisper “permisso” or “perdon” and try to slide slyly between people.  

Once you finally find the right carosel, then you have to pay attention that someone else doesn´t pull your bag off before it gets to you - I´m not talking anything malicious, it just seems that some bags are worth of riding all the way around the carosel and others are picked to be tossed onto the floor into a newly-forming pyramid. Of course, I didn´t know this until I witnessed my bright blue and orange backpack come in off the truck, then lifted up and off by someone else.  I, of course, freaked out, leveled up to super-speed, and navigated back to the other side of the carosel. And there was my bag, safe and sound.  From there, all I had to do was wait in a 45 minute line to have my custom form collected and bag scanned, then find my Chilean co-leader, Javier, who I´d only ever seen in his Facebook profile picture, from amoungst the hundreds of people waiting to meet their friends and family, and proceed to take a taxi (which Javier had arranged in the 2 hours he´d been waiting for me, not realizing it wasn´t a legal cab) to our hostal in the middle of the part of the city I didn´t spend any time in in 2009.  Easy Peasy.

Well, I´m now here safe and sound, and have learned how to identify legal taxis for when the kids arrive (tomorrow!)

If you´re interested in the day-to-day happenings of the trip, my students will be keeping a blog at:http://www.lifeworks-international.com/blogs/allblogs.php I will also try to keep this updated somewhat regularly, hopefully with pieces that are a bit longer and more in depth on one particular issue.  But really, it will probably soon descend into your run-of-the-mill “you´ll never guess what I got to do today!” travel blogs.