My Hotel Friends – Oct 11, 2006
My first marriage proposal of the trip occurred today. All the guys at the front desk thought it was hilarious. Silvia has proved to be a very funny and in-your-face old woman. “You’re very handsome. Are you single?” she asked me point-blank while the guys and I were talking about how I liked Riobamba. They betrayed the answer to her. “Why don’t you marry me and take me to America with you?” The seriousness on her face belied all the laughter surrounding me. They explained to me that she was having trouble getting a visa to get to America. “Hey, it was worth a shot.” She kept her candid manner—a perfect delivery. “She is a very funny old woman,” Sandro needlessly explains. Silvia replied, “If you can’t laugh in this life, you might as well die and get it over with.” She won my respect, but not my hand in marriage.
I anticipate more good times in the neighborhood of the hotel front desk. This place feels like family, and in fact is family-run, with four generations taking some part. I have no idea what the particulars are, but it seems like different parts of the family live here in shifts, with a whole new set of people for the weekends. At any rate, everyone is very delightful and pleased to help me practice my Spanish. I help a few of them with their English. Sandro tells me my Spanish is noticeably better today. Que bueno. And here’s another thing: my good amigo, “baby-face” Angel, turned out to be 26 and married. Can you believe that? I thought he was sixteen.
Apparently, smiling is good for the complexion. Newman looks 26, but he’s not. He’s 32. No wonder people act surprised when I tell them I am 23. Furthermore, one would think that people named Washington, Edison and Newman were white. Well, they were, but they aren’t in this case. There seems to be the strange fad here to give children first names that are the last names of famous Americans. And why not? They can give them as many other names as they want. Take Washington Giovanni Angelo Ricardo Lopez for example. He has five; five names, ha ha ha—as the Count from Sesame Street would say—and I have learned to take the Count’s word for it when it comes to numbers. But I think even he would have trouble counting the number of times Sandro blinks in a ten-second period, so I haven’t even made the attempt. Better, I think, to smile back at him as he throws all the hotel freebies he can find over the counter at me.
I decline the soap. There is a stack of soap about ten-high in my room, next to a stack of shampoo packets. Honestly, who goes through a bar of soap a day? Sometimes I think I have stumbled into the wrong room because my bed cover has changed colors. They change my sheets every day, which is about 29-30 times more often per month than I had them changed at home. That seems a little crazy, and sometimes I try to explain that to the person who is standing at my door holding a rag and a plunger, but I have never seen a more eager person holding cleaning products, and I inevitably cave in.
They work in swarms. Once one of them is allowed in, others buzz in from nowhere, and I think that little kid with the shampoo packets came in through the outside window. I turn around and everything is done. I have never witnessed the bed being made even though it has been done in my presence twice. As quickly as they came, they are gone, thanking me for allowing them into my room before I am able to thank them for cleaning it. Furthermore, I am fairly certain all the laundry here is dried on the roof, and I find it hard to imagine all the blankets in the 3-story hotel hanging up there. But these people obviously have their ancient secrets passed from generation to generation and I don’t intend to infringe on their sacred methodology.
A tip to the unwary American: if eating in a crowded Ecuadorian restaurant, be prepared to be seated at the same table with strangers. If handled properly, this can be a nice experience. In fact, this morning, I seated myself face-to-face with a handsome stranger in the hotel restaurant. He seemed pleased and we immediately began conversation. He had been to the United States several times for business and spoke a little English. So we explained our basic goings on, with me speaking in Spanish and him speaking in English. Speaking in someone else’s language seems to be common courtesy here, except in the case of tourists who bust through the door loudly asking questions and directing their luggage in English.
“Where next?” The obviously English man asks me, on his way to breakfast. Reflexively, I answer him in Spanish, but his goggling eyes needn’t protrude any further for me to repeat myself in English so he can understand. He is surprised to hear I am staying for a while, and no doubt amused at how chummy I am with the help around the hotel. I find myself avoiding conversation with this chap and his garish-looking wife. Instead, I sit across from the more agreeable Ecuadorian. If I really want to speak in English, I would rather speak simply with Sandro or my University colleague, Yesi.
Who can say why Yesi and I have become friends? We don’t have much in common, other than that we speak a little of each other’s language. She is kind of a boring person, really, but to such a degree that it is charming. Besides being small, weak, and a little nervous, her English sounds a little like it is coming from a deaf person, which makes it hard not to smile when I think about it. Likely, we both come together for the novelty of being around someone so strange. She is a computer technology professor, and this provides me, as her friend, the benefit of being more interesting than whatever else she might be doing. Whenever I want, I can give her a buzz and she will be at my door inside fifteen minutes. It’s almost like she is some unlikely superhero, and I might as well have a super spotlight to shine onto the night clouds her silhouette, with her frizzy hair and glasses, in order to summon her to my aid.
Sometimes, when it comes to superheroes, consistency is more desirable than superhuman abilities.
It is charming to watch an adorable romance unfolding between the middle-aged kitchen attendant and custodian. At times I will catch him coming in or out of the kitchen with a sheepish grin, saying, “Perdon. Buenas noches.” In the kitchen I can hear him charming her with his cheesy sense of humor. It is amazing what one can hear without understanding a word. Alicia brings out the food with a larger smile than normal, and maybe that is because I am receiving it with a larger smile than normal. For no reason at all, she apologizes as I thank her for the food, and hurries back into the kitchen. Ecuadorians are easily embarrassed, but they seem to enjoy it a good deal, especially in observing.
My room has just what I need, compactly and conveniently arranged. There is a single bed, a small closet with shelves, a mirror with drawer attached, a small bench, a television with American movie channels, a desk with locked drawers where I can do work on my laptop, and a nightstand with a drawer and lamp. Storage space is located under the bed when the closet overflows. It is a place for sleeping, for studying, for showering, and for resting, as it should be. It is not a place where I wish to be encased and pampered as in a cozy home in America. I eat in the restaurant with other guests and am served by friends. Nearby is the main street where social events occur.
Every day is a nice day to go for a walk. With an attentive eye to the curious intricacies of a strange city, there is always something precious waiting for me to enrich my experiential treasure chest. Evenings are good for practicing my Spanish with a friend at a quiet coffee house, for reading, and for going to bed early to wake up with the sun.
That is not to say that I am an early riser, however. It is the sun, and my hunger, that usually arouse me from my slumber. No matter how much sleep I get, my body seems to demand a little more, as if to say, “give me a little more time to really focus on tackling these heavy Ecuadorian meals.” As a result, I go through alternating cycles of feeling full or sleepy. Increasingly, however, the hunger is starting to catch up to the tiredness as my body becomes accustomed to this particular manner of digestion.
Still, I definitely have no complaints with the food. I eat like a king, especially when Rosa cooks dinner just for me at night (dinner is not normally offered to the guests). She comes out of the kitchen with a plate heaped with white rice, sliced tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, vegetables, some kind of scalloped potatoes or French fries, and roasted chicken or pork chops. Then there is the juice, and there cannot possibly be a better orange juice in the world. Fresh squeezed in the kitchen.
And there always seems to be enough time to put everything else off. For example, last night Rosa and I exchanged language lessons, and much of the material was food-oriented. It ended up including a lot of drawings on my part and laughing for both of us. This went on for about an hour and then the two college-aged daughters of another cook entered and ended up giving me a Spanish lesson along with Rosa, as well as offering some pleasant banter. By the end,we had whiled away another hour, laughing.
As I returned to my room for the night, still smiling at all that had passed, it struck me that these were people with lives and problems of their own, and although it seemed that they were just here for me, it wasn’t really so. They weren’t the ones stuck in a hotel with nothing better to do; they have families. How pleasant it is to me that these people would allow the flow of the moment to carry them where it may, to allow themselves the time to experience an unscripted conversation with a stranger as if there was nothing else to do in the world, to the rhythm of the cumbia—a popular Columbian dance—projecting over the dim restaurant with its doors locked and windows shuttered.
There seems to be an Ecuadorian instinct in these highlands to deal with everything by slowing down and looking around for things to smile at, to avoid looking too far into the past or the future, knowing it is not where they belong. They seem to exemplify the image of Jesus sleeping in a boat during that storm on the Sea of Galilee, and without thinking, it can seem that these people ignore problems. But in getting to know these people, I have already uncovered some problems and intuitively detect that there are more than have been mentioned, and I would be a fool to think these problems did not cause difficulty, but the people in this hotel have learned to laugh and smile through them, and to neither look back at them, nor to anticipate more of them.
After all, we cannot control the wind and the waves, but He who can is in the boat with us. My boat has landed me on a strange shore, and the adjustment is difficult, but I find the encouragement to sleep, laugh, and smile through it.
Today I have learned that paradise can only be found right here, and when we are finished smiling, we die.
Tags: Travel
Aaron Baldassare