tales from a house-hunting gringa

Today I saw 4 apartments. This was not the plan. The plan was to see the first one, like it, and move in immediatly. My local friend Tamy lives in the first one, so it seemed like a perfect fit. I wake up pretty early to go meet her and her live-in landlady at their place. The first thing I notice is that the landlady has the most annoying yappy little dog I have ever encountered, which would bother me even if I wasn't allergic to dogs. Some dogs, like our awesome huge gray friendly dog in the office, who eats everything in sight and can't seem to stop farting, are worth allergic symptoms or taking medicine regularly. Other dogs, like the little rodent in this apartment, who sits on the arm of the whatever seat the land-lady takes, are not. The land-lady shows me around the apartment, and it seems nice enough. The living-room is spacious and the kitchen is do-able. While she is showing me the place, she says to me things like "you can't have friends over, ever. oh, and I don't cook." She seems to think it's hilarious and strange that i didn't bring bedding, or a bed, with me to South America. "Just your clothing?" she repeats, like its the most ludicrous thing she has ever heard.

In the fairily drab and unremarkable room she shows me, there is in fact a bed, so I don't know why she is insistent that I bring my own bed. In the corner of the room there is also a bowl of greasy leftovers on the floor, and right next to it, laying right on the carpet, is a chicken drumstick. She sees me eyeing what I assume is the dogs food, and crouches down to pick up the bowl. She leaves the drumstick where it is. I decide right then that no matter what else she shows me in the apartment, good or bad, I am definetly not going to live here.

Next, I head to the center to check out a kind of ramshackle travelers compex in a totally non-touristy (and consequently kind of rundown) neighborhood. The owner, Pedro, is a really friendly guy with lenses in his glasses that change back and forth from from dark blue to translucent depending on how sunny a spot we are standing in. I wouldn't call it a house or even an apartment building, as all the individual rooms are entered from open air corridor type things. The rooms look pretty much like dorm rooms, with nothing in them but a bed, and if you are lucky, some kind of small desk. The walls are exposed brick. Pedro happily tells me that once I move in I can do whatever I want to my room, decorate it any way I like, and when he showed me a room that somebody else was actually staying in, a Spanish girl, I saw that she had created a collage/mural of Spain right on her wall. So I guess he isn't kidding. He takes me up a precarious flight of winding stairs to the roof, where the kitchen is, where you can get a really good view of all the pastel colored houses that line Quito's mountains, and also, where his little daughter is playing with two bunny rabbits. While I like Pedro, and even like the kind of laid back dingy atmosphere that the place engenders, I was hoping for more of a home feeling, less of a college/flophouse/hostel feeling. Still, at 90 dollars a month, its the best deal I've found so far.

Sitting on a stoop on the corner, I call (with my cellphone! yay!) another number for an apartment that I've picked up info on from an internet cafe. Dante picks up and tells me to meet him in an hour at the Casa de Cultura de Ecuador. I get there pretty early and with a bit of time to kill, I check out the art there, hoping to catch some of Eduardo Guayasamin's art, who is Ecuador's most famous painter, but the Guayasamin room is empty. Instead I check out a Bolivian artist whose name escapes me, but who paints very haunting portraits of Bolivian misery, and occasionally, still lifes of Bread loafs on tables. With half an hour more to kill, I cross the street and circle around the El Ejido park, where every saturday local artists prop their work on the fencing. I see enough Guayasamin imposter paintings here to make me want to see the real thing even more than before. In fact, most of the local art is more or less apalling, the kind of thing you might buy from a frame shop and hang in a dentist's waiting room. The only piece that caught my attention is a very long and narrow minimalist painting of a nude woman, except at the knees the painting ends and the rest of her legs are on a canvas an inch below, and the two are framed together. While walking around the park, I see an adorable tiny old man, in a tan suit, tan hat, and big wire glasses getting his shoes shined by one of the local street kids who walk around begging everyone to allow them to shine their shoes, especially white girls wearing sneakers. The pair catches my attention and I kick myself for not taking my camera with me, but I stand there for a moment and take a mental snapshot, just long enough for the two to notice me, and as always happens when a photographer tries to capture a scene unnoticed, those in the picture stop what they are doing and suddenly make you their focus.

I get back to the Casa de Cultura just in time to meet Luis, a well-dressed and friendly faced man who seems to be in his early thirties. We take the bus together to the house he is going to show me. Along the way I learn that Luis is studying to be a Spanish teacher for foreigners, but that he also writes. We agree to exchange short stories in the near future. Luis's house is in the colonial part of town, which at first I didn't consider, as its relatively difficult to get around and doesn't have much in the way of supermarkets, internet, and other stuff that a poor foreigner might need in Quito. But as we get off the bus, (a stop early, so Luis can show me the neighborhood) i begin to change my mind. Here the streets are all cobblstone, the houses different shades of cupcake frosting. This might be my winner after all.

We arrive at the house, in which two English girls currently live, but are not around. The first two floors of the house are empty and gutted -- I've caught Luis in the middle of a project to turn the house into a Hostel. 3 flights up is the furnished apartment. Luis shows me yet another unremarkable room (this begins to be a running theme), with a bed whose mattress sags in the center and a small kitchen area adjacent, though the kitchen only has a rusty sink and a hotplate that doesnt seem to work. The rest of the apartment is quite spacious with 2 bathrooms, a large kitchen, and a living room whose focal point is a humungous rug made of mouse-brown alpaca fur affixed to the wall.

I ask Luis to show me where I can find the nearest pharmacy, bank, food, etc. and he takes me on a 10 minute walk down a steep hill and into a seedy plaza. Along the way, amidst midday hustle and bustle, my eye catches a scene in which a policeman is frisking a teenager with meager cornrows against a wall (what kind of cornrows can you expect with such sleek hair?), and right beside them, unfazed, a woman sells fried pig heads on a fold-up table. I stop and take another mental photo, framing it just right, but this time make damn sure those in question don't notice me.

As Luis walks me to the nearest bus stop to get back to my hostel, I understand why we got off the bus a stop early. The area quickly devolves from quaint streets with beautiful architecture to a dirty neighborhood with packs of teenage hoodlums on every corner, drunkards touching themselves, parapalegics dragging themselves along the sidewalks, their mangled feet dragging behind them.

Now I am exahausted, am not in the mood for my 4:00 pm appointment with Angel (roughly pronounced, for the non spanish speakers, ON-HELL) and my last apartment of the day. I meet Angel ( another 30ish man with deeep acne scars) at a cafe by my hostel. He picks me up in his car and we drive back to the neighborhoof where I saw my first apartment, a more or less rich neighborhood where all the shopping malls are, and where you can find a KFC, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, Fridays, and Curves Gym without even turning your head in both directions. Along the way, Angel tells me that he studied engineering and works on the production end of concerts and large parties -- he's in charge of lighting, lasers, special effects, waterfalls, and the like. His sister, 24, who also lives in the house, is an economics student. We arrive to a quiet street in a nice neighborhood. For the third time today, i think things may be looking up.

Angel unlocks the door and a huge, cold, expensive house opens before me. Every room in the house is furnsihed with the same shiny rich wooden furniture. The house has three floors. There is a dining room which he says is only used on Christmas, and a cabinet filled with chrystal china. There are at least 5 empty bedrooms, all roughly double the size of my New York living room. A large wooden cross hangs over every bed. The beds look like they were made years ago and have never been sat on. Angel points to two bedrooms and says I can have my pick. When I ask him why the other bedrooms aren't up for grabs, he says he likes to frequently switch between them, though to my untrained eye they all look exactly the same.

His sister is out in the yard hanging clothing. We kiss hello and then stand there awkwardly as the pair waits for me to say things like "my god, what an amazing home you have" which I know I should think, but its so big and so empty (the last tenants just left) and so clean and so sterile and so expensive looking that I just want to hang out on the veranda for a moment. Angel opens the door to the veranda and we stand outside, overlooking the yard. In the yard are two large cisterns holding water, and also in each, some sort of electrical machine. I ask Angel what those are, and he tells me the'yre part of his work. He practices making streams of water leap from one cistern to the other, and then reenacts that on a large scale at concerts. I excitedly ask him if he can demonstrate, but my question gets suspiciously lost in translation.

On our ride back to my hostel, I ask Angel where his parents are, why they don't live with him and his sister in the large empty house. He tells me they died two years ago, were both killed upon exiting a bank with large sums of money in their pockets. He tells me to be careful out there, kissing me on my cheek, and with that I am out of his car and waving to him as he drives away.

It's windy outside, I've got a dollar in my pocket, and with a deep sigh I resign myself to the fact that I'll probably be living at my hostel for a while longer.