San Miguel, TeleferiQo V 2,00, Unica Amor Fútbol!

¡Hola Todos!

First of all I will start off with a story about a foundation my work gives a share of their profit to.

With the company I am working last Friday we visited foundation san Miguel. This foundation will get about 10% of the profits Fuireciclado makes, they are involved in all kinds of care for children. The story I heard which struck me the most was of now 14 year old Gabriella, who lost all of her limbs when she was ran over by a train when she was 5, her grandfather brought her to the hospital heavily bleeding and the only thing they could do was to keep her alive, even though one arm and one leg were still attached to her body they could not help if from having them to be amputated. As she lived in Bolivia before, there was a British tourist who heard her story, and he decided to take her to Ecuador and in the care of foundation san Miguel, which gave her prostheses so she could walk normally again, and also draw with her “new” hands. Even though it is a far cry from how this would be managed in Europe, this foundation still has the ability to give children their life back and prepare them for the “real” world, so they don’t become beggars or just die in the streets, instead the organization is trying to teach them the skills to find a regular job and being able to take care of them selfs. This can be especially important in a country such as Ecuador which does not have a real social system like we have in Europe.

As might sound very cliché this was an Eye Opening Experience to me, as I never saw human suffering so up close, especially as the children which they help are from moderate handy-caps like having problems with their motor skills, like I myself had therapy at young age, but the reach of help extends to missing limbs to having down syndrome were treated there. The pity was that the foundation still doesn’t have the money to help these children fully from their own money but that they still require more donations and that the child’s parents still have to pay 50% of the total costs. And for Ecuadorian standards it is a lot of money, for example an amputation with prosthesis costs $4000,- half of which the parents have to pay, half of which is a gift from the foundation. But you also have to keep in mind that the average Ecuadorian makes somewhere around $300 or if lucky $400 a month so as you can see it is a lot of money for a Ecuadorian family. So after this sad story I will tell a bit more about this weekend.

TeleferiQo again.
So with a slightly different group we went up to the TeleferiQo again, which lies at 4100 meters, where there is only 62% of the oxygen in the air as there is at sea level, but there is a hiking trail which lasts for about 3 hours which will take you up to 4680 meters, where the concentration of oxygen is only 57% of what it was at sea level. This means that every step you take requires almost twice the amount of breath as it does at sea level. This makes it very hard to keep climbing especially as the higher you get, the less oxygen there will be. Although the landscape was very beautiful, we definitely felt the lack of oxygen in the air even though we are already acclimatized to a height of 2800 meters, this is the altitude Quito lies at. After walking on and on through this thin air we came across some eagles flying overhead and a truly silent and mystical landscape when we thought the path didn’t go any further and this was the so called “end of the road” but whilst climbing on a few rocks we saw that the path went even further, so a few members of the group didn’t want to go further, but together with Vivian and Tessa, I ventured on higher and higher into the Andes.

At these altitudes the landscape changed dramatically and it looked as if we were staring in “The Lord of The Rings” and from a lush forest we suddenly walked into the land of Mordor… ( for those of you who don’t understand this, the terrain got a lot more rocky and volcanic, so much that it almost felt evil.)
As we explored this mystical landscape the mist also came setting in quite severely so much at one point that I couldn’t see some of the others which were about 20 meters away from me, and wearing quite brightly colored clothes. To follow the path or, semi path which was what was left of it, we even had to climb a rock face for a bit, decent through old volcanic streams and climb sandy hills to try and reach the top. As it was already getting late and after a great climb we were getting really tired we decided we also had to go back to the others, so as a pity as it was we didn’t really reach the top. Although we didn’t reach the summit we still were very near and it was still a very beautiful trip. As we walked down the mountain in a scarce moment of too much energy we decided the jog down the not so steep pieces of the trail which were also quite safe. After a while when we were trying to get down the mountain it started to hail, at first it was very soft, but after a while the grain got bigger and the hail started to hurt on our hands. The bad thing about the hail was that it made the paths we had to follow into some sort of mudslide, and I don’t know how many times I fell and had to get up again, but it was a lot, but we learnt to walk on the vegetation stopped us from slipping all the time so that is what we did for about ninety percent of the time. And after passing all familiar landmarks we knew we were on the right way all together and would be reunited with our friends, who were actually waiting for us at the horse rental place where the locals had left them a small fire to warm ourselves and a cup of warm chocolate milk. After a quick warm up it was time to take the cable cart system back to lower altitude again and go to our nice home in the Mariscal to change our wet socks and shoes before meeting up with the rest again for dinner at Suzettes.

So…. A bit later, we went to Suzette’s where for a few dollar you can get a good crepe and a glass of red wine, it was Saturday after all. Suzette is a small restaurant on the plaza Foch though for what I have tasted until now it has the best kitchen! I had and still have the suspicion that the owner is a French woman, but she wouldn’t say as she came up with this beautiful story that she was abducted in a space ship and the aliens erased her memory of where she came from. As we were getting chatting away about the day and were preparing for the starter, a skewer of chicken and pineapple we had no idea how hungry we were and we devoured the skewer within seconds. This much to the delight of the owner as she already had said to the chef that this appetizer would be gone very, very fast . After this it was time for the main course, I took the “lomo maracuya” this is a sort of steak with a redwine-maracuya sauce which was as I can tell now really good. And as this restaurant isn’t as outrageously expensive as some restaurants in the Mariscal/Plaza Foch area it is really doable to eat there some times. The girls still wanted to go dancing, but I decided to call it a day and go to bed as the next day there was a new activity already, football, or Fútbol, we were going to visit the match between LIGA de Quito and Deportivo Quito.


Match Day!.!.!. . . . .
After a good night’s rest I was all set for the match. So after breakfast it was “Vamos al Estadion” this as all Sunday matches are played before 4 ‘o clock in the afternoon as they may not sell alcohol after this time, by law. So as we took the bus to the stadium we already realized the stadium was going to be packed with people as the busses were almost like the Korean subway at rush hour, the main difference was there still was room to breathe and move a little so this made our journey of 7 stops not really uncomfortable. When we arrived at the stadium there were a lot of police officers on horses, with dogs, with shields and everything, some of them looked like the classic starwars stormtrooper, only difference, a stormtrooper is white and they were all in black. So after we found the girls we went to buy our tickets for the game, funny thing is that outside of the stadium there are a lot of people selling tickets already, but also cold drinks, t-shirts fake and real from both teams, people wanting to paint the club logo on your face for half a dollar or a dollar, selling crisps and many more things you could need to support your team or want to consume.

After we got our tickets we wanted to go to the entrance, but this is a bit of a hassle in Ecuador as they just close the doors of a gate in front of you nose and you just have to figure out which gate to take. As you can imagine there are a lot of angry stressed people running towards the other end of the stadium just to get in, preferably in time before the match starts, even inside the stadium you have to look out that they do not close the doors of the stadium and you will have to find another entrance. Once we were finally in, in our very cheap LIGA t-shirts we were all set to watch the game except for a beer during the match. So the girls provided our first beer and the match began, Deportivo got a penalty in the first minute and LIGA was 0-1 behind very fast already, but still the atmosphere was indescribable, fans cheering, even when it started to rain and hail again, people walking through the stadium wanting to sell you ice-cream, hot-dogs, crisps, beer, fizzy drinks, hats and when it started to rain even poncho’s!

So as we were in the stadium it wasn’t for long before we started chatting with the people who sat in front of us, they thought us some songs and asked us our number for next week so we could go again, but then to the other stadium in town, which is as they claim more beautiful as it is Liga’s stadium. Soaked again after the match as it started to rain during the match (it the match turned out at 1-1 by the way) we went to the mall. This mall is one of the most modern things yet I have seen in Ecuador and totally did not fit in my view of how Ecuador is. It looked like as if you’d step into a European or American mall, it was clean and everything was well kept, so totally not Ecuadorian where everything is most of the time half finished. So after it was decided that we did not want to eat there, partially because of the prices we went back to the Mariscal and the Sunday was almost over already and with that the weekend, this one went way to fast, but I guess time flies when you are having fun!

Hasta luego amigos, besos para todos!