Pichincha - or Not

Having run out of minutes for my cell phone, I decided yesterday morning to take a walk to El Jardín to get it recharged. Of course, there’s no need for me to go that far just to buy minutes; there’s a store that literally backs up to the house that cells Movistar cards. But I still haven’t figured out how to get the card code into the phone myself, and if I go to the kiosk in the mall, they’ll do it for me. Besides, I didn’t have anything else to do and figured a walk would be a good activity to take up some time.

I had forgotten exactly how long the walk was until I made it – over forty minutes, and I keep up a pretty good pace. I got to the mall and got my minutes, and while I was there, Marie called and invited me to meet her and Liz at 1 o’clock to go up Pichincha on the teleférico. So I repeated the forty-minute walk in the other direction, told Meri I wouldn’t be home for lunch, and met Marie and Liz at Quicentro. Marie’s guidebook said that we could catch a bus straight to the teleférico from Quicentro, but when we asked a guard if that was true, he told us to go to Avenido Colón.

Colón is mostly in the Mariscal, and Marie’s mom had told her that we could also catch the bus from the Rio Coca station of the Ecovía. So we took the Ecovía to the station and asked someone there how to get where we were going. He told us to take the trolebus, which proceeded not to show up for over half an hour. Eventually we got on a different bus, which took us to Estación Norte. There we switched to the actual trolebus, and rode that as far as Colón. Having successfully made a large circle around north Quito, we caught a bus for Avenido Occidental. That dropped us off just a little too far to walk to the teleférico, so we grabbed a taxi to take us the rest of the way.

By that time it was nearly 3 o’clock…and when we finally got there, we were told that the teleférico doesn’t run after 1:30 – only on Tuesdays! Tired, frustrated, and sunburned, we had the taxi take us back to Colón, where we all caught our respective buses for home. Rather like our adventure to La Mitad del Mundo, we put a whole lot more effort than was entirely necessary into getting where we wanted to go, but at least we now know more about the bus system.

And actually, I didn’t go straight home; I took a walk down 6 de Diciembre and into the Mariscal first, looking for hotels on Craig’s behalf. I had only intended to walk as far as Eloy Alfaro from Naciones Unidas (probably half a mile), but once there I figured why not walk the rest of the way to the Mariscal. By the time I realized it was a whole lot farther than I wanted to walk, I was most of the way there already. I checked out Akros Hotel, Hotel Embassy, Hotel Reina Isabel, and Hotel Bonaventura, then went home before remembering that I had also wanted to check the ones on 12 de Octubre.

The other three went out to El Nobar again last night, and I considered going, but after my rather long walk around most of Quito, I was tired. Deciding that kicking this stupid cold was a better idea than getting drunk again, I stayed home and went to bed early. Not generally my style, but my reward is that I’m coughing less violently this morning than I have been for the last ten days. I think I’ve been sick for thirteen days now, but I’m finally starting to feel like I might actually get over it soon.

On a less cheerful note, I think my computer has a virus. It’s only been connected to broadband once in the whole month I’ve been here, but it’s just my luck that that one time would be enough to get it a disease. After all, I’ve been disgustingly sick, why not my laptop too? Of course, to be able to fix it, I have to connect it to the web again to be able to download virus and spyware definitions. I just hope that whatever’s screwing with it isn’t a trojan, or connecting it to broadband might just download a whole lot more unsavory crap. I REALLY don’t want to have to reinstall Windows while I’m here. Sure, I could do it, but I don’t have original discs or any of my software, and I’ve never made the Microsoft activation call that I’m sure they’d stick me with from outside the country.

Later update: asked Craig about the virus (so handy to have a boyfriend who's even geekier than I am!) and he said I probably picked it up off one of the local computers via my flash drive. When I remembered that McAfee said it had deleted something off the flash drive, I figured he was probably right. But that doesn't help the fact that my computer is still acting funky.