Quito: Arrival

I woke up at 3 a.m. in New York City and went to bed at 2 a.m. (3 a.m. EST) in Quito. I had breakfast over the vast gray ocean somewhere between Manhattan Island and Panama City, lunch somewhere between Panama and Medellín, afternoon coffee somewhere over the coast of Ecuador, and dinner in Quito at the dining room table with my friend María Paz, her mother, her sisters and her sister's cousins (Thank goodness airlines in Latin America still serve meals). I had after dinner drinks in the city with Paz and one of her good friends who had just had her car stolen - the second car in two weeks.

Before drinks, we made a stop by the police station to report the stolen car. As we stood in the chilly air of the street corner I listened to my educated friends discuss poverty and violence and the difference between the two. They hypothesized over "transition periods" and the strange increase in violent acts and petty crimes in the city over the past several months.

"Poverty is my purse that was stolen last week," concluded Paz. "Violence is the stolen car."

I asked my friends what usually happens with stolen cars - they are usually not found by authorities but transported over the border into Peru or Colombia. Reporting them is little more than a process.

It is cold in Quito, colder than I expected. I could see my breath as Paz picked me up from the airport. It was 6p.m. and night was already descending over the mountains, darkening the overcast skies and low-hanging wisps of clouds. I saw the same rain in Quito as I saw in Medellín, in Panama, in the hills of New York's Southern Tier...