[Note: apologies on the long delay in getting this post out.  I had a friend down here for eight days of traveling about, and there were few free moments for some sweet blogging.]

Not a day back in Quito from the rash-inducing initiation provided by Chone, and I’ve already got a solid offer for a place to live — to go from dormitory-style hostel living to being an actual Quiteñan, at least temporarily.  Three hundred big ones a month is a fairly steep price tag down here, as most hostels are far less than ten dollars a night.  But most hostels don’t have their own laundry room, internet, and steady supply of hot water fed from a showerhead that doesn’t look like it was sinisterly designed by Nazi war criminals.  As an added perk, I would have full control over anyone else that might end up sleeping in my bedroom, which is definitely not part of the typical hostel arrangement.

Still, wide eyed from only having just arrived in the city, with grand plans of getting comfortable with the hostel scene that would represent my life for the next year, I decided to put off moving into my own swanky Ecuadorian bachelor pad (on the top floor of the building, it could be called a penthouse suite, though that would be a stretch and should probably be covered in my next entry, as opposed to this, the hostel-themed one) for at least a week to get a full taste of the hosteler’s lifestyle and answer the lingering questions I had about it:

How does one share a kitchen, let alone a bathroom, with 32 people?  How easy is it to come and go at awkward hours of the night?  Do Australians do more than relentless baby-arm-sized lines of cocaine when traveling South America?  How hard is it to connect with people, both in the friendly “let’s go check out that goat market” way and the friendly “let’s go check out that innocent unicorn tattoo you said you had so high up on your right thigh that most of his horn is generally covered by underwear” way?  How comfortable is a three-inch thick foam mattress, slept on by people from at least six continents each month?  Do other people snore as oppressively as I do, and is it hypocritical to tell them to shut up?  What nationalities travel the most and what fun quirks can I expect from each?

Arriving less than a week ago, I hopped from my cab in the dark, apprehensive about arriving in any South American city after dark after all the warnings I had heard.  More tourist muggings happen in Quito than any other Ecuadorian city (Guayaquil is more violent, apparently, but gets less tourism), but most of those tourist violations happen in La Mariscal (the section of town I was in), and most of those happen on Avenue Reina Victoria (the street I was standing on).  At the time I didn’t know this, but I did know that I was lumbering slowly from a cab with two thousand dollars worth of gear as a large Nigerian man walked into the street and approached me unbidden, talking gruffly in Spanish.

His stance and body motions weren’t in any way threatening, but the unwanted venture immediately into my zone of comfort was far from comforting.  And even if he merely meant to discuss fantastic Am-way deals, I didn’t have the time for him or anyone in my decidedly defenseless position.  My eyes darted quickly about the dimly lit street.

El Centro del Mundo

Home of “Free rum and coke” night.  My eyes facing down, helped by a fairly heavy backpack pushing my entire body in that general direction, I darted casually yet gracelessly toward the entrance of the hostel.

Buzz to be let in.

The small sign’s in English.  Good good.

I buzz once, turning insouciantly back to the African with the same plastered smile on my face since I’d jumped from the car.  No problem here, ha ha.  He’s still standing in the middle of the street where I’d gotten out of the car, now speaking in English with a thick, resounding African accent.  Think “Coming to America” — though more Eddie Murphy or James Earl Jones than Arsenio Hall.  His arms are spread wide in feigned shock as he queries me, his eyes bulging and unnecessarily accusatory, as though I’d accidentally just driven over a cherished pet.

“WHUT?  You just Ignoor me?  You just walk away like I’m not even talking here?  I’m some kind of DOG to you?!?”

Dammit, he’s employing guilt in his repertoire.  I buzz two more times in rapid, machine gun progression, the picture of over-privileged American tourist timidity.

“A DOG?  Is that it?!”

The door clicks open as he further explores the dog metaphor for at least four or five sentences from his spot in the street, and I rush through the second entryway just as fast, pulling it in behind me.  Composure.  No problems here.  Normal hostel environment.  Casual walk up to the desk, past a room full of veteran travelers, mostly younger than me, all without the frayed, wild-eyed look I’m currently sporting.

“Hi, I’m here for.. I’ve got a room.“  A sentence trying to be a question.  Failing.

“Que?”

“Hablas Englais?”

“Oh.  No.”

He speaks little English, but is used to travelers that speak even less Spanish, and through a series of gestures and pointing manage to work out where I’d be sleeping and for how much (The key says “4″ though the door has no numbers on it.  The cost is $5.50 a night).  I smile as he goes over rules that I clearly could not possibly understand, though I give my best reassuring “It’s cool — I’m not one of the problem travelers…” grin the whole time.  I actually do manage to understand some of the rules.  Hostel staff man the doors 24 hours a day, so come and go as desired.  No guests.  Checkout at noon.  Breakfast is free, though it costs money for it to be good (read: more than burnt toast and tea).  All alcohol consumed in the hostel must be purchased from the hostel.  No problema.

The lockers are substantial enough to not only store my backpack but take things out and get a little comfortable as well.  The metal-framed bunk beds don’t look like much, but they’re nicely made and long enough for my non-Ecuadorian frame.  The room, clearly arranged for four, is about half the size of my old apartment bedroom.  I never really filled that space well anyway — my few attempts at purchasing wall art caused lingering, relentless relationship stress and didn’t even match the carpets anyway.  My few but valuable worldly possessions now secure, thoughts turned back to my first encounter with a local, both from his guilt and from my own remembrance of facing the situation as amateurishly as I did.

Our eyes meet immediately as I walk outside.  He’s talking to an Ecuadorian, but stares at me warily from across the street the moment Centro’s large, reinforced wooden gate cracks open.

“Hey!”  It was the best greeting I could come up with.  He does a parting hand clasp with the local, the two hands coming together in what at first looked to be a handshake, only to touch like a sideways high-five and slide off of one another, morphing afterwards into fists for what FoxNews classified as a “terrorist fist jab,” though I myself have used it many times in the past in non-terrorist ways.  I walk over calmly.  I’m cool, I’m cool.

“Sorry I ignored you earlier.  I just got to Ecuador and wanted to just get inside, you know.  You’re not, like, a dog to me or anything.”

“Yah mon, it’s Cool.”  He gives me a slightly different hand clasp/slap/shake than the one the Ecuadorian had just gotten, and I almost seem to respond to it competently.  His name’s Leonard, pronounced with two syllables plus a side of diphthong in the middle.  His eyes light up a bit as I tell him this is the start of my journey.

“Oh mon, you got to be careful here.  Good city, but dangerous.  Very dangerous.  Don’t trust anyone you meet, not even me.”  He laughs.  I laugh too.  At the very least I’d already proven my mastery of the latter.

He gives me a basic primer on South American street smarts (avoiding streets is smart), as well as shares a quick rundown of his rambling life.  Born in Nigeria, he’s lived in Singapore, Sydney, New York, Rio and Quito among other places and and speaks about four languages passably.  Africa wins in his book as the most dangerous continent for casual traveling, but South America is a surprisingly close second.  Despite that, it’s also his favorite, though he admits that his opinion on “favorite” changes regularly.  We chat for about ten minutes while sitting on a stump outside the hostel, before I finally take his advice to not hang out on the street after dark and make my speedy return inside.

“Yah, good to know you, mon.  Be safe.  You need any coke?”

“Oh.  Well, no.  But if I did I would definitely buy it from you.”

He laughs as our hands touch, this time in the manner I’d witnessed before with the Ecuadorian, giving me that warm “in” feeling.  I’m cool.

Back from Chone a week later with a fresh harvest of rashes blooming across my body, I can finally enjoy the backpacker-friendly atmosphere.  My bedroom at the hostel is small, but doesn’t tend to feel cramped.  Roommates constantly shift, in a steady flow of ages, weights, genders, nationalities and colors, and sometimes I wake to a completely different social landscape than I went to sleep to.  Backpackers are a friendly sort in general, filled with curiosity about the adventures of everyone else around them, either as a way of comparing notes or looking for new ways to spend the glut of free time they’ve allowed for their travels.

In the common room, the television is seldom switched off, with the sick, tired, hungover and lazy of the hostel’s occupants sprawled out on the makeshift sofas (well-placed old cushions all over the floor) around it.  With the US election looming, the days are often spent with one of the English language news channels on; the nights belong to HBO.  Standard Ecuadorian cable has about a third of the channels in English, with Spanish subtitles.  This actually can be kind of beneficial towards learning the language, assuming the viewer has a reasonable understanding of what’s going on in any given show.  For this reason, The Simpsons is on whenever possible, and more than a few travelers have claimed it as their favorite learning aid.  Veteran travelers as a whole tend to scoff at those that spend their days in front of the television, to the point where some hostels advertise that their common room is boob-tube free as though that were a bigger selling point than free Internet.

Centro del Mundo comes complete with an outdoor terrace including an all-weather pool table.  The thing’s old, wobbly, stained, torn and has probably supported a few late-night, passionate trysts when it was assumed no one else was watching (generally a bad assumption here).  The thing still works reasonably well for its primary task.  The kitchen, a standard necessity at hostels, is also outside, though a small plastic overhang keeps the budget chefs marginally dry.  The pans are bruised and battered, and look as though every usage in their long careers cooking up various rice or noodle dishes involving five-or-less ingredients added a new, charred, unwashable scar to its already far-from-smooth surface.  A lack of spices and fridge-space has me avoiding the makeshift kitchen for now, though I have no issues snacking on the goodwill of others.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, as mentioned many times before, are “Free rum and coke night” and lend themselves toward slightly rowdier evenings in general.  Comparatively, Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays are completely dead, either because guests are still hungover or because there’s an unspoken rule that sometimes a break is a good thing.  My first Wednesday back, sporting a fresh goatee to cover my facial rash (and because the protrusion is absolutely unshaveable), the large pail of cuba libra empties and we carry the party over to the dining area for drinking games and steadily loudening chatter.

A week prior, I had little to say in a room where travel stories dominate the conversations; Chone has seen to it that this predicament is no longer the case.  Drinking games are similar the world over, though different regions bring different rules to the table.  Irish “Circle of Death” contains rules for every card in a standard deck, and somehow there are 14 of us playing, representing the United States, England, Holland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Israel and, of course, Ireland.  Here, Israelis and Germans co-mingle without even a hint of old scars, at least until an Irishman forced to come up with a new rule for the game tried to make a pulled joker cause the entire table to make a “sieg heil” gesture.  The rule was quickly nixed by at least three countries of our makeshift, mock United Nations, proof that the “anything goes” attitude here does have its limits.

A cute, young English girl sits next to me and we banter with the room and, as time progresses, solely with each other.  Eventually she lets slip that she’s got her own private room here as opposed to one of the shared dormitories, and I admit that I am actually curious about how the place’s laid out — strictly from an interior design, feng shui perspective of course.  It’s my first foray in many years into intimate adventures with someone that I have no hint of affection for, and is unsatisfying enough on many levels that when I awkwardly request an email address the next morning I honestly don’t know if it’s to “make a new Facebook buddy” or send my condolences.

My walk of shame is a twenty foot hallway past loud, though friendly Israelis that are oblivious to me as they plan breakfast.  In general, kitchen access would seem to be a blessing to the frugal traveler’s pocketbook, but all meals I’ve seen thus far have been over-sized, with the clear intention of having extra enough to share with everyone, a culinary socialism that only works if we all play along.  I fall firmly into the “not playing, but gladly eating” category, though like so many other things here, no one seems to care.

Meals are sparse, but creative, with the obvious inexpensive starches — rice and pasta — providing a foundation for almost every meal.  My temporary friend from the night before sits next to me at breakfast, and there are no soft touches or discrete looks, the visible weight of our interconnectivity likely no heavier or lighter than anyone else’s to the discerning eyes of the others present.  Numerous open journals and constant note taking in the common room usually involve only three things here: Spanish lessons, travel plans/ideas and email swapping.  Everyone with more than a month to kill arrived here with very set plans, and nearly all of them have changed drastically following these tableside chats, as expressions like “you HAVE to go to…” and “Oh, it was without a doubt the greatest place I’ve been to in my life” are spread around the table.

Despite the US State Department’s warnings about relative safety in Colombia, it has relentlessly taken top prize in that category from almost everyone, and I’m both glad and a bit down that I won’t be there until the end of my trip.

I help clean the dishes, a lone display of hostel solidarity.  Travelers are now talking about crimes and muggings, and I find that I’m the only one in the room that hasn’t been robbed — seemingly good news if it didn’t make me feel as though I suddenly had a tremendous target painted on my head.  Some muggers attack using only the intimidation of outnumbering their victims, while others surreptitiously display a weapon and murderous gaze, which works about as well.  A young German barely had time to register the rush of footfalls approaching behind him when he was tackled to the ground and had his backpack unceremoniously ripped off his back with his camera and passport “safely” inside.

Each night as I carried my laptop to the Internet hot-spot, I carried a target large enough to break out the big guns had any possible assailants known, and this sobering conversation wakes me from my naive slumber.  My laptop now stays at home, always, as does my passport; I have a copy anyway, and US passports are worth hundreds of dollars.  On the left of my waist is a small spring-loaded knife that will more likely be used against me than in my defense.  And walking alone in uncertain areas, I rock a frown in tandem with a murderous gaze that hopefully translates to “Pick the next gringo — this one’s probably just faking it, but it’s not like we don’t have a never-ending supply here to choose from.”

The passing of time lacks the inescapable weight here that it brings with it on nearly every other “vacation.”  With eight days to play around on a typical break, every moment has to count.  When days number in the hundreds, the options tend to expand, allowing for more casual exploration of a place.  Chance meetings during breakfast lead to elaborate day trips to small towns and popular attractions that are hours away.  Despite safety issues, even the mugged are unswayed by their unpleasant incidents and bounce back into streets almost immediately, if a bit more wary, for more tastes of Quiteñan life.

I check out of Centro del Mundo the next week after going on about three to four improvized day trips and missing countless others.  My “first week” checklist is far from complete, but at least I’m safely enrolled in school and have a room to call my own.  Apartment living goes against the unspoke Traveler’s Creedo, apparently, but it’s a good warm-up for the rest of my journey, and I’m simply too spoiled to resist steady Internet at home.  My temporary home down here has a slew of its own catches and gotchas, but I’ll get to those later…