conquistadores on pbs took me back to quito, ecuador, where i lived for 3 years. it made me so nostalgic. i loved it there. quito is the ancient capital of the northern realm of the inca empire, and today the capital of ecuador. i used to live in the area called "el quito tenis," as it was on the hillside at the foot of the active pichincha volcano around el buena vista tennis club where i spent more time poolside than on the courts! rather exclusive for local standards, the club was only 300 feet or so down the street from my house. it had the same view over the whole city than the one we had from the modern concrete block of a house i moved in. from the street side our new home looked like a massive brown bunker. i wasn't impressed... fortunately on the other side it was a 3 story high wall of glass offering a plunging view of the city below & the cotopaxi in the background. i loved it!!! only a 90 minute drive away from the city, the cotopaxi is often referred to as the highest active volcano in the world. our neighbors to one side were the uruguayan ambassador & his family; to the other side the cisneros family, the wealthiest mobsters in town. oh wait no, the cisneros were the biggest mobster family in caracas... i can't remember the family name of my quiteño neighbors anymore. i just remember how annoying it was when their younger kids drove their noisy as hell miniature ferraris up & down the street, and the scary german shepherds pacing & barking by the gates of their house... as my folks called it, here's the "golden cage" we lived in for 3 happy years:
here's a pic of quito and the pichincha volcano in the background:
and here's the view from my house with the cotopaxi volcano:
check out these closer angles of the inca's "throne of the moon:"
my mom & stepdad had settled in quito by june 1990 while my brothers & i spent a few more weeks on our own in brussels, then a month in oregon with my father & stepmother who had rented a place there on the beach. i can't remember much. but i remember flying back from oregon to belgium in late july for about 10 days. 10 days i spent with friends i realized i was leaving behind. 10 days where walking through the streets of brussels on my own, taking the metro or bus or tram on my own, became so intense. i saw things for the first time i had never seen before, because i was looking at everything more closely than i ever had. i appreciated it more --sometimes even for the first time-- now that i wasn't going to have all of it in my everyday life anymore. i was taking it all in one last time as the place i called my home for the previous 10 years of my life. i found myself choked up more than once. it hit me the hardest once the plane took off. i'll never forget that feeling of rupture when i felt the wheels of the plane suddenly hanging in the air instead of rolling on the ground. i was looking out the window to the belgian land as i had many times before, but only then understanding it no longer was the place i would call home, or where i had one to come back to. i remember whispering goodbye, and thinking of my grand-papa & my granny, hoping they'd still be around when i'd come back to visit. so i kept my face glued to the window to make sure my brothers, and no one else could tell that i was crying.
the plane took my brothers & i to germany, where we got on a 747 lufthansa to caracas, then bogota, then finally quito. the whole trip took about 20 hours. i remember being so impressed with the airport of bogota. it was grand, modern, filled with marble, military security guards with scary machine guns & dangerous looking german shepherds. that's when --drum roll please!-- i heard for the very first time mc hammer's Can't Touch This. woaaaaaaah!!! mtv usa was playing on all the monitors in the airport, and i remember locking eyes on one of the monitors & zoning out on mc hammer, his moves, his crazy pants in the middle of a jetlag, surrounded by shiny marble, machine guns & guard dogs. SURREAL! it was nothing like the colombian airport i saw kathleen turner in Romancing The Stone with michael douglas. that would be more like the retro chaotic airport in smaller remote quito, capital of ecuador.
we finally landed in quito a few hours later. no one had told me that the airport is the middle of the freaking city, and no one told me that quito even had modern buildings. all i found on quito in encyclopedias & books (it was before the internet), were pictures of colonial buildings and native americans, the descendents of the incas. i was a little worried i was going to live in some sort of backwards village with quaint plazas, lamas on the streets & crazy chicken running around everywhere. not to mention i knew very little spanish & it was a little unselttling to go somwhere to live (not vacation at) with another language i'd have to pick up...
when i saw all the tall modern buildings through the window, first i was surprised & more than that relieved. yay, there's an actual city down there. phew! then suddenly the buildings got closer & closer & my heart sunk, i thought we were slowly crashing into the city. and just when it seemed like the plane was only 50 feet above the tallest buildings (with red flashing lights on their roofs for planes to not hit them or guide them to landing strip who knows), the plane dropped. before i knew it, this massive 747 hit the landing strip nestled between mountains covered with houses. my parents later told me it was one of the most dangerous airports to land a plane. the planes can't make a progressive descent. they have to fly over the skyscrapers (if you can call 10 to 15 story high buildings skyscrapers) & get as low as possible then only have a few hundred feet clear of buildings before the landing strip, so they drop as much as they can when the buildings turn into houses, and regains some sort of control to not hit the land too hard. every now & then, jumbo jets still miss the mark & have to make a 2nd attempt at landing. some smaller ones have actually crashed into buildings!!! authorities used to put a cap on it & it barely made the news...
we got off the plane & walked on the tarmac towards the building, taking in the cold dry evening air of the andes for the 1st time. my stepdad greeted us & took us to my mother who was so excited to see us after 2 1/2 months apart she had tears of joy. no matter how long our separations would ever be, my mom always cried when we left her & always cried when we'd reunite; she still does! sometimes it gets so bad that my brothers & i will look at each other & try not to laugh. it's best we actually don't look at each other at such times or my mom will feel like we're being insensitive. she has a heart of gold, but it gets a bit dramatic sometimes...
it was late evening which at that point meant nothing to me. since we had diplomatic immunity, we sailed through customs, got in the car, and got to our new home in less than 20 minutes after landing. i was so confused as to how could we live so close to the airport but the city wasn't that big. as my brothers & i walked into the house for the 1st time, we decided with my mom's suggestions which bedrooms would become our new sanctuaries of sleep (and study urgh!), we explored the rest of the house, the gym & aerobics room (it had an entire wall about 30 feet long that was mirrored from floor to ceiling & one end to the other!). it became our playroom in which we had many parties for the following 3 years...
we weren't in our new house for more than 30 minutes, when i was standing by the floor to ceiling windows of the living room, looking at the amazing view of the city that was now my new home, when the windows started vibrating & making a low bass-y sound kinda like you hear when you inhale too much nitrus, which i never did by the way, but i can imagine... i thought i was hallucinating, like when you've had some mushroom tea, which i never had either for the record... next thing i knew everything was shaking. i think i could see the reflection of myself turning white in the tinted windows. first i dismissed the whole thing, telling myself there must be some metro line under the house or something, and how annoying that was. then realized i wasn't in brussels anymore & there's no way that could be possible anyway. i remember noticing people running out of their houses into the streets far away in the distance. then my brother jonathan who was only 9 went a little hysterical & was begging everyone to go back to the plane & leave cuz he didn't want to die. my mom tried to calm him down & then my stepdad & her told us that we now lived in a highly volcanic & seismic area & it was nothing else but an earthquake, and there was nothing to worry about because our house was built to withstand earthquakes. greaaaaaaat. this is what happens when the pichincha not only shakes things up but exhales a little:
my mom grew up in the mountains of central africa (in bukavu, by the shores of the lake kivu, boarded by zaire/congo, rwanda & burundi) where she had experienced earthquakes, and my stepdad had lived through a massive earthquake in santiago (chile) back in the 70s, where all the windows of his pad exploded. so to them, it was just a part of life. a fucking part of life??? ok, sure, why not! i guess i'll just have to get used to it. c'est la vie! jonathan had to sleep in my room for the 1st week, and each time there was an after shock he'd jump, and finally at one point that 1st night he fell asleep & was so exhausted he slept through several after shocks. my very 1st earthquake was around 5 on the richter scale if i remember well, and that's no small tremor. it brutally changed my take on life. nothing had ever made me feel so small & powerless before. never had i felt so strongly that i was part of something way greater & bigger than me: planet earth, the universe, nature, the freaking volcanoes... i had always been aware of all these things, and was educated about it all. those damn european international schools i attended stuffed my brain with so much data & info, but not a lot of experience. somehow the world evolved around me, and i had learned how to control my immediate environment, or at the very least spin things in a way that made me feel safe. from that day on, my 1st night in ecuador, i accepted --reluctantly sometimes-- that i evolve around things too, that i am part of something i can't always control, and that everything could just one day crumble under me... holy fuuuuuuuck!!! rude awakenings rule!
