The Ecua-Wife Life: Ecuador

So, it occurs to me that a lot of people don't actually know that much about Ecuador. Here's a little post just to enlighten you a bit!

So, this is Ecuador.

It's bordered by Colombia to the North and Peru to the South and East. I'm currently living and working where the little red thing is, covering up "Quito", the capital city- we're about 40-50 mins away from Quito by bus.
Ecuador is made up of three regions: Costa (Coast), Sierra (Mountains) and the Oriente (East of the Sierra, the Jungle!). It is 109,468 square miles in area and it's highest point is an impressive 6,268m at Chimborazo mountain.
The main language is Spanish but Quichua is still spoken in the more indigenous areas, and Ecuador is home to some of the coolest and rarest indigenous languages, most- if not all of them- in the amazonian jungle region. The people of the Sierra tend to speak quite clearly and it's a great area to learn Spanish for that reason, where as the people of the Costa tend to speak faster and less clearly. In Spanish, accents are more often determined by the pronunciation of the consonants like t, d and s rather than the vowels which tends to be how accents vary in English most of the time.
Because it's pretty much bang on the equator (the equator runs through Ecuador), the weather is pretty similar all year round, with slight variations in how much it rains- when it does rain, it rains with conviction! In the Sierra it's pretty similar weather and temperature wise to Summer in the UK, or Scotland at least! The Costa and Oriente are much hotter and humid.

I haven't seen that much of Ecuador yet- anytime someone starts chatting to me on the bus etc they often ask me which parts I've seen- it's pretty large and I haven't had that much time to travel! The main form of public transport here is buses, be it local or a 12 hour journey to the other end of the country. Compared to public transport in the UK it's dirt cheap: a 40 min bus ride to Quito only costs me 40 cents (the currency here is the US dollar) which is like 25p. The lowest fare for a short journey is 25 cents, and even long journeys are comparatively cheap: a couple of months ago I travelled to Santo Domingo which took about 3-4 hours and it only cost me about $3.
You don't know what a full bus is until you've been on a local bus here- people in the UK can get a bit funny at times if they even have to sit next to someone on a bus, here, I've been on buses and trolleys so full that you actually can't move because the standing area is packed with people! Another vehicle related fact for you that I've observed is that, for some reason, Chevrolet seems to be the car make of choice here. About 50-60% of cars I see are Chevys.

Another part of the life in Ecuador is dogs. Dogs are everywhere. They just roam freely. My host family have two dogs, Panky and Blacky. Now, I have never wanted to smack an animal before in my life- that was until I met Blacky. The dogs aren't trained, and they just live outside in the garden and driveway (the house and garden are surrounded by a wall and there's a gate to get out), and whenever I'm going out or coming back I have to try my best to escape being attacked, jumped on, or bitten by Blacky. They also attempt to eat everything, two of my birthday cards that arrived by post being proof of that!

Something about Ecuador that I really like is that there are little "parques" (parks) everywhere, with trees, benches and sometimes a fountain. Also, there are lots of open access football fields and basketball courts which I really like. Something else really great is that you get pretty much every type of fruit here in Ecuador- fruits that we would normally have in the UK like strawberries, apples and pears and also tropical fruits. There are also a whole load of strange fruits here that we'd never have heard of in the UK!

Just to finish off, here's some of the pictures I've taken over the last four months!