🎼 Say Goodbye to Ecuador 🎶 (apologies to Billy Joel) 🎵
On my very last night in Quito, all my new friends at the hostel where I’d been staying for more than two weeks threw me a going away dinner.
L-to-R: Angie (Mexico), Alex (Australia), Juan (Ecuador), Adam (Canada), Simone (Netherlands, seated), Maria Sol (Ecuador), friend of Adam’s from work, Carlos (Ecuador), Won Hee (South Korea), friend of Adam’s from work.
The next day I took a bus to Guayaquil, then hopped a flight to Barcelona.
At the airport in Guayaquil, while I waited for my flight, I bought breakfast, mostly so I could “rent” an electrical outlet. Having a table and chair was a bonus.
Fruit with yogurt and muesli. Orange juice. Cappuccino.
I later found the only area outside of the security zone, and not in a restaurant, where electrical plugs were publicly available. It was on the arrivals level, tucked behind the elevators. There were only five sets of outlets and only three of them actually worked.
At one point, there were seven of us back there charging our phones.
One of my most-used investments, after the theft of my power strip inside my backpack in Buenos Aires, has been a $2.99 extension cord. It is 2 meters (~6ft) long and has three outlets on the end. I plugged that in so that several of us could share a single power outlet.
I never asked the names of the two guys who shared power with me but they were grateful for my resourcefulness and I was happy to bring a little kindness to the world. Finally, here are my parting thoughts.
