Extra Gringos

Back in Quito. I am really enjoying staying at this particular hostel in Quito. It is owned by an ex-backpacker from Australia and it is only a few months old. Pretty nice with a great terrace with excellent views of the city. Very comfortable beds, a nice TV lounge, a well stocked kitchen and a big common room with a bar, book exchange, computers, darts and foosball. Not bad.

Been spending lots of time in Quito with people from Australia and England. I wrote earlier about Americans who developed British accents, and while that hasn´t happened to me, I have started using some of their sayings. I call gasoline ¨petrol¨and use words like bollox and queue. I also pretty much only use the metric system now, even though I still have to convert everything in my head (I have no idea what 1500 meters means).

One night in Quito me and Irishman and an Englishman went out for dinner in the Mariscal area. We had a big 3 course steak dinner with a drink for $6 each. Not bad. Afterwards, we went to a bar for a drink and they just happened to be showing the Sunday Night Football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Diego Chargers. The Irishman was an NFL fan and told me he enjoyed watching games (although he didn´t understand most of the rules). The Englishman, on the other hand, said that he detested American football and didn´t want to stay too long. We ended up watching the entire game, which luckily ended up being a very close game decided on a missed field goal in the final seconds, and I think the Englishman came around. I had to explain a lot of the plays and the strategies behind them and all of the penalties but both really got into the game. It was fun to watch both of them start to understand American football and in the case of the Englishman, actually enjoy himself while watching it. I promised the Englishman that the next day I would watch a British soccer match (I´m sorry, a proper football match) with him so that he could return the favor.

I also found out at the bar why there were so many more gringos than usual in Quito. An Iberia plane slid off the runway after it landed damaging its landing gear and one of the wings. Nobody was injured, but it did close the airports only runway for two days, which of course caused havoc and many flights were cancelled and diverted and it became very hard for people to get out of town. One guy I talked to had his vacation involuntarily extended by 5 days and wasn´t sure what he was going to do since he didn´t have any more vacation time at work. Interestingly, they don´t know what to do with the plane. It was a very large plane, an Airbus A340, and because the landing gear is damaged it cannot go to another airport and right now they don´t have the facilities to make the repairs in Quito.