The Paris Olympics

Another Summer Olympiad has come and gone. I have some thoughts.

Did we win or tie? The United States won the most medals overall, with 126. China came in second, with 91. Great Britain, host nation France, and Australia rounded out the top five.

However, the United States is one of the few countries that prefers to tally national Olympics performance by overall medals; the rest of the world seems to prefer a "gold first" tallying system. Under that method, the United States and China are tied as the most successful National Olympic Committees in the XXXIII Olympiad, with 40 medals apiece. 

But even that method has a tie-breaker: the number of silver medals awarded. In that case, the United States still comes out ahead because its athletes won 44 silvers, to China's 27.

Italy had the most "aluminum metals," i.e. fourth-place finishes, with 26. I'd make fun, except that the United States came in second in that category, with 22. I've always felt bad for athletes who just miss the podium. It must almost feel better to come in 5th or 6th, rather than 4th.

Welcome to the medals club! Albania, Cape Verde, Dominica and St. Lucia all won their first-ever medals at these Olympics, the latter two winning golds. The Refugee Olympic Team, which has been competing since 2016, won its first medal as well. 

Botswana and Guatemala have previously medaled but won their first-ever golds in Paris.

Medals per capita. The aforementioned Dominica and St. Lucia leave Paris as the world leaders in the production of gold medals per capita, with one gold medal per 67,400 and 184,100 residents, respectively. For comparison's sake, the United States won one gold for every 8,397,000 residents, while China won one gold for every 35,242,000 residents. 

The most productive nation in overall medals is Grenada, with one medal per 56,300 residents. On the other end of the spectrum is India, which didn't win any gold medals and whose athletes only produced one medal per 235,152,000 residents. There are many reasons as to why the world's most populous nation underperforms in the Olympics.  

They weren't missed. Russia might be a traditional Olympics heavyweight, but that country (and neighboring Belorussia) were completely absent from the 2024 Olympics, both having been banned due to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. 

Given that Russia's "ban" from the 2020 summer games (as well as the 2022 winter games) following a massive doping scandal was a complete joke, I can't say I was upset at the country's complete absence from this year's games. The IOC should continue to ban Russia from all Olympic contests until at least Vladimir Putin dies.

A handful of Russian and Belorussian athletes were able to compete in Paris as part of an "Individual Neutral Athletes" team.

Want to see how your favorite college performed in the Olympics? There's a table for that. It ranks the number of medals produced per NCAA-participating institution, regardless of whether the student-athletes of a given university competed for the United States or some other nation. Stanford is the clear winner with 39 medals, with Cal and Texas a distant second and third, respectively. 

The University of Houston accounted for two medals, both in the men's 4x100 relay. South Africa's Shaun Maswanganyi, who won silver, and Great Britain's Louie Hinchliffe, who won bronze, both compete on the Cougar track and field team under coach (and Olympic legend) Carl Lewis.

They just keep getting faster. Speaking of Carl Lewis, 40 years ago he won gold in the Men's 100 meter sprint with a time of 9.99 seconds. That wouldn't have even been fast enough to qualify for the final round of the 2024 race. American Noah Lyles broke a 20-year American drought in the event by winning gold with a time of 9.784 - just five one-thousandths of a second ahead of Jamaica's Kishane Thompson - in a finish that even had the announcer fooled.

Unlikely up-and-comer? The South American nation winning the most medals was Brazil, with 20 (and who thought that country would become a gymnastics powerhouse?). The South American country with the second-highest number of medals was... Ecuador. 

Four years ago I joked about Ecuador becoming an Olympic powerhouse after they won three medals in Tokyo. Obviously they've got a ways to go before they reach that level, but the five medals the Ecuadorians won in Paris matches the total number of medals the county has won in all previous Olympics combined. 

An Urban Olympad. I really enjoyed the city-focused format of these games. From the Opening Ceremony featuring a parade of nations along the Seine, to the Olympic flame being located adjacent to the Louvre (rather than in a stadium), to the beach volleyball court located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, to the bicycle races being held in the city streets, the games' organizers did a great job making all of Paris the backdrop, rather than the fancy, specially-built venues designed to be the centerpieces of previous Olympics. Most of the event venues used for these Olympics were either previously existing or were temporary.

A word on NBC's coverage. If you've read this blog for any length of time you know that I love to trash NBC's Olympics coverage. However, I really don't have a lot to complain about this time around.

For those able to watch it, NBC's daytime coverage was - dare I say it? - actually pretty good. They switched between events as they occurred and provided live look-ins on events being shown on other channels or streaming platforms (and told you where to find them if you wanted to continue watching). Since it was all live there was little in the way of maudlin "human interest" stories and other pointless tidbits that detract from the overall coverage of the games. Sometimes they even covered sports that did not feature American athletes! 

NBC's primetime coverage, on the other hand, was their typical formulaic, over-edited digest that we all love to hate. But even then they finally seems to be getting away from the fiction that their prime-time coverage - which is happening in the wee hours of the morning in Paris - is somehow "live." In an age of streaming services, push notifications and social media, NBC appears to have accepted that the days when a single network can gate keep the entire Olympics are now long gone.

I still think that replacing Bob Costas with Mike Tirico was one of biggest improvements NBC has ever made in regards to their Olympics coverage.  Tirico just needs to brush up on his vexillology before his next Olympics broadcast.

Time lists the twelve most memorable things of the 2024 Olympics, while Yahoo Sports breaks down the biggest events of the games by each day of competition.

The mystery of SAETA flight 232

A civilian airliner crashed in Ecuador in 1976. It took 26 years to find the wreckage:

Aviation’s history books are full of mysteries, some of which are solved and others yet to be figured out. Sometimes, we hear of those cases where aircraft have disappeared and were only found many years later. Such is the case with SAETA Flight 232, which involved a 26-year search and frustrated stakeholders. 

SAETA was a privately-owned Ecuadorian airline which competed on a handful of domestic and international routes with government-owned carriers Ecuatoriana and TAME. I flew SAETA from Miami to Quito and back during my summer 1990 stay in Ecuador. The airline's selling point was that all passengers "flew first class." It wasn't completely true - nobody got nice first-class seats, for example - but the service was attentive and the multi-course meals, which were served with real (i.e. not plastic) silverware and dishware, were definitely an upgrade from normal economy-class fare. SAETA actually underwent a significant expansion in the 1990s, at one point becoming Ecuador's dominant airline. It met its end as a result of Ecuador's financial crisis at the end of the decade.

On August 15, 1976, a Viscount operating as SAETA Flight 232 departed Quito at 08:06 hours bound for Cuenca. There were 55 passengers and four crew onboard the turboprop with a planned flight route over mountainous terrain. All seemed normal until air traffic control lost radio contact with the flight at 08:27 when the crew reported flying over the city of Ambato at 18,000 feet.

Ambato is located in the central Andean valley of Ecuador and sits beneath several tall mountains. It is the capital of the province of Tungurahua, at an elevation of 8,455 feet (2,577 meters) above sea level.

Realizing that the aircraft failed to arrive at Cuenca, emergency search operations began. One more plausible suspicion was that the plane had crashed somewhere in a nearby mountain range. So, a massive search was conducted by air and land throughout the Amazon and all along the flight-planned route. Despite an intensive search, the wreckage was not found for several years. Twenty-six long years to be precise.

It turned out that the wreckage had become embedded within a glacier over 17 thousand feet above sea level on the side of Chimborazo, which is Ecuador's highest mountain* and which is 20 miles southwest of Ambato.

In October 2002, Pablo Chíquiza and Flavio Armas, two members of the Nuevos Horizontes mountaineering club, helped mark the exact crash site after fellow mountaineer Miguel Cazar had previously come across it. The rest of the story involves accusations of government officials dragging their feet and overlooking the location during previous searches. Several parties pointed fingers at each other, while the families of those lost in the crash experienced a bittersweet moment of reliving the pain of a tragic loss while also receiving some closure after the discovery of their loved ones’ remains.

If anything, stories like SAETA 232's might give the loved ones of victims of other unsolved plane disappearances (Malaysian Airlines 370 easily comes to mind) some hope that, eventually, the mystery will be solved and they will at least experience closure. 

This accident would be eerily similar to another SAETA crash involving a Vickers Viscount only a few years later.

Another SAETA Viscount crashed while flying between Quito and Cuenca. On April 23, 1979, an aircraft registered as HC-AVP crashed in the Pastaza Province, killing all 57 people onboard. The wreckage of this aircraft also took several years to locate. The flight was considered missing until 1984, when the debris was discovered.

Due at least in part to to its mountainous terrain, SAETA 232 is just one of several commercial aviation tragedies Ecuador has unfortunately experienced. 

*In addition to being Ecuador's highest peak, Chimborazo's peak is also the furthest from the center of the earth. the Mount Everest is the world's tallest mountain as measured from mean sea level, but because the earth is not perfectly round (i.e. it is slightly fatter at its equator), there is more distance from the earth's center to Chimborazo than to Everest.

A new Olympic powerhouse?

Ecuador has won three medals (two golds and a silver) at the Tokyo Olympics. 

This exceeds the number of medals the country has won in all previous Olympics combined.

Former banker is Ecuador's next president

This was a bit of a surprise:

A conservative businessman has unexpectedly won Ecuador’s presidential election as voters rejected the leftist movement started by the former president Rafael Correa more than a decade ago.

Preliminary results showed that Guillermo Lasso took 52% of the vote in the runoff following a campaign that pitted free-market economics against the social welfare plans of Andrés Arauz, an economist.

“We will work together from now on for true change,” Lasso wrote on Twitter. “Today we woke up in peace and with the certainty that better days are coming for everyone.”

This outcome is surprising because Lasso barely even made it into the second round of voting. He carried only two of Ecuador's 24 provinces in the first round of voting and edged out third-place finisher Yaku Peréz of the left-indigenous Pachakitik party by only 0.36%. Lasso surged in the second round of voting, held two Sundays ago, to win 18 provinces and the presidency.

Ecuador's incumbent President, Lenin Moreno, did not seek re-election.

Lasso's election represents a significant shift from the leftist administrations that have governed the small yet beautiful Andean nation over the past fourteen years, and may have been a function of voters' dissatisfaction over the excesses of those administrations as well as the way the country has handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Foreign Policy's Will Freeman explains: 

More than just a competition between two candidates, the polarizing election became a referendum on Ecuador’s recent past. Arauz ran as the handpicked successor of the populist former leader (Rafael) Correa and promised to return Ecuador to the era of Correa’s “Citizens’ Revolution”: a period from 2007 to 2017 marked by high growth and the emergence of a new middle class, but also by repression and censorship of Correa’s civil society critics.

The vote shows that nearly four years after Correa left office, distrust of his brand of authoritarian populism still runs deep among a broad cross-section of the population. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic twice pushed Ecuador’s health system to the brink of collapse and plunged 3.2 million additional Ecuadorians into poverty, a plurality of voters preferred an untested alternative over a return to the past.

However, Lasso faces a formidable task in negotiating Ecuador's political divisions and governing effectively: 

Disillusion with democratic institutions is running high, and Lasso will take office as an isolated president with a weak mandate, given the balance of parties in the recently elected legislature. The top three left-wing parties and coalitions hold almost 70 percent of the seats. That means he will face a much bigger challenge in governing than in winning a plurality of votes: He will need to convince his opponents that even when they lose, it’s still worth playing by democratic rules of the game.

This is important to note, because the "democratic rules of the game" have not been historically well-followed in Ecuador.  Since the 1940s, the country has enjoyed only three relatively short periods of democratic stability, where presidents were allowed to serve out their terms (unless they died in mysterious plane crashes) and the transfer of power between elected governments was peaceful: 1948 to 1961, 1979 to 1997, and 2007 to the present (the country's most recent presidential ouster occurring in 2005). 

(Lasso) will find scarce legislative support in Ecuador’s newly elected National Assembly, where his Creating Opportunities party and its ally, the Social Christian Party, control just a fifth of the seats. Even among parties on the left, there is much division. The largest legislative bloc is formed by Arauz’s Union for Hope coalition, which remains loyal to Correa’s vision of active state intervention in the economy and staunchly opposed to Lasso’s slate of market reforms. The next two biggest left-wing parties in the legislature—the Pachakutik party, which is committed to environmentalism and Indigenous people’s rights, and the Democratic Left—are in talks to form a united front. The coalition plans to oppose privatization of state enterprises, reform of the Central Bank, and new extractive projects that could cause environmental harm. Pachakutik and the Democratic Left remain bitter toward Correa, who put hundreds of Indigenous leaders and environmentalists on trial during his time in office.

Freeman suggests that Lasso's best course of action may be to work with this center-left front in forming policy, thereby keeping his opposition fractured and Correa's loyalists in the National Assembly at bay.  

However, if Lasso attempts to go it alone or proves unwilling to make substantial policy concessions, he could quickly make friends out of enemies, and all three left-wing parties could find common ground in opposing him in the National Assembly or, more ominously, in the streets. In this worst-case scenario, Ecuador could come full circle to the presidential ousters and economic chaos that plagued the 1990s—an outcome all sides have a stake in avoiding.

The presidential inauguration will be held in Quito on May 24th.

Will Ecuatoriana arise from the dead?

If some Ecuadorean investors have their way, Latin America's most colorful airline will fly again:

The name sounds familiar, but it has nothing to do with one of South America’s best-known carriers, Ecuatoriana de Aviácion, Ecuador’s largest aviation company until it stopped flying in 2006.

An initiative of the country’s entrepreneurs, Ecuatoriana Airlines was registered with the National Civil Aviation Council (CNAC) of the South American country in late August and intends to launch services from the Mariscal Sucre International Airport, in Quito.

According to the application sent to CNAC, the new airline plans to serve the cities of Coca, Cuenca, Esmeraldas, Guayaquil, Loja, Macas, Manta, Quito, Santa Rosa and Tulcán. The fleet of the new Ecuatoriana is not defined, but the company is evaluating the ATR 42-500 and Dash 8-Q200 turboprops and the Airbus A319 and A220 jets and its competitor, the Boeing 737 in the 300, 400 or 500 variants.

Ecuatoriana’s share capital, however, is only $ 16,000, 99% of which belongs to a foreign investor, the Ecuadorian press revealed – the company’s partners are Eduardo Delgado and Ann Martillo.

A few thoughts here: 

• Given my (admittedly three-decades-old) experience with Ecuatoriana, my first thought was "Cool! Now a whole new generation of travelers to Ecuador will get to experience fearing for their lives in heavy turbulence and having their flights summarily canceled."

• The airline's proposed destination list indicates that the new Ecuatoriana will be entirely domestic and, interestingly, will not fly any routes to the Galápagos Islands, even though they are popular with tourists and are financially lucrative. 

• $16,000 in share capital isn't going to buy a lot of airplanes, but that may be a typo. This article (in Spanish) claims that the airline has lined up $15.84 billion in foreign capital and $160 million in domestic capital. 

This filing comes amidst an unsettled civil aviation situation in Ecuador:

The Ecuador market is up for grabs. In May, the Ecuador government put TAME Ecuador, the former State carrier, in liquidation. Two of the other airlines that operate in the country, LATAM and Avianca, started reorganization processes under Chapter 11 in the US. Therefore, there could be a void left by these carriers, and a new airline could develop it in the post-COVID world.

State-run TAME had been struggling for awhile; the Coronavirus pandemic was the 58-year old airline's death knell. This left Ecuador without a true a flag carrier, as Avianca Ecuador and LATAM Ecuador are both subsidiaries of parent airlines based in Colombia and Chile, respectively, and face uncertainty of their own. So it certainly makes sense to set up a new airline - if only on paper for now - to fill the gap left by TAME and to take potentially take advantage of problems at Avianca and LATAM.

Obviously, the new Ecuatoriana won't begin flying anytime soon; even if it were possible to do so, it would be foolish to start operating a new airline in the middle of the pandemic. And, it goes without saying that in order for the new Ecuatoriana to be successful, it will need to be run much better than its infamously unreliable state-owned predecessor.

But if Ecuatoriana 2.0 does ever (literally) get off the ground, they could do worse than to bring back the old color scheme.

Starchitects, high-rises and Quito

I recently wrote about the potentially transformative effect of a new subway in Quito, Ecuador. One of the subway's intended effects is to create density by encouraging more high-rise construction around stations. Architectural Digest explains how some of the world's top architects are participating in that transformation: "Initiated by an enterprising local developer and fueled by a revised zoning code and new transit-oriented development incentives, Quito is shaping up to be a starchitect’s next frontier."

The urban shift in Quito started with a relocation. In February 2013, the municipal government moved the entirety of Quito’s 1960 Mariscal Sucre International Airport from the dense residential and commercial neighborhood that had grown around it to an agricultural area 12 miles away. The previous location of the airport (now being transformed into a large park) had capped surrounding building heights at four stories. A revised zoning code now allows towers in the city up to 40 stories, though air rights must be purchased from the government.

As fun as it was to watch the planes fly overhead on their final approach to the old airport - I used to sit at the window and watch the 747s of Lufthansa and KLM, the DC-10s of Iberia, the colorful 707s of Ecuatoriana and even the droning Lockheed Electra turboprops of TAME - the flight path was rather treacherous, given the city's geography. It was also rather loud. Quito's new airport is larger, with a longer runway and a flight path the does not require you to land in the middle of a city crammed up against a volcano.

Recognizing the new potential to build taller and better, Quito-based development company Uribe & Schwarzkopf has been recruiting world famous architects with a "why not here?" attitude. For the 46-year-old, two-generation company where father Tommy Schwarzkopf and son Joseph Schwarzkopf work side by side, it became increasingly obvious that sometimes you can't do it all. For about the last 40 years, the firm had taken a design-build approach, with Tommy (a trained architect) at the helm of designing modular residential and commercial towers across the capital. The buildings are efficient, but far from radical, on a growing skyline. When Joseph came into the family company, the two hypothesized that starchitects could bring more intrigue to their projects, and Tommy says he was satisfied to hand over the design reins and accept a new development challenge. 

Thus, their firm’s first foreigner-designed tower sprung up in González Suárez, an artsy, bohemian, and increasingly affluent neighborhood on a slope. The developers called on Miami-based Arquitectonica to design the 22-story residential Yoo Quito. French designer Philippe Starck crafted the interiors and amenities, which are dotted with his furniture and inspired by the clouds the tower seems to touch. Floating above the roof terrace is a cloudlike shape of undulating aluminum panels that hides the building’s necessary mechanical systems. On the ground level, too, the tower does something new for Quito: Retail at the base engages the public with the building in a city where most private residences have a barrier to entry.

I know exactly where Yoo Quito is - on Avenida Gonzalez Suarez, between Avenida Francisco de Orellana and Calle Muros - because it is directly across the street from the small apart-hotel on Calle Muros where my family and I lived in the late 1980s when we spent our summers in Ecuador. That part of town always had high-rises, both along Gonzalez Suarez as well as Avenida 12 de Octubre. Now, if local officials have their way, the rest of the city will start going vertical as well.

The government is, however, working to increase city center density through the city's first underground metro line, whose first phase will run from north of the former airport to the southern suburbs in 2020. Explains Jacobo Herdoiza, a former secretary of territory for Quito, the hope is that upper-class residents who currently drive from the suburbs to work downtown each morning will ditch their cars for mass transit and move back to the city center. For developers, an incentive has been set in place: If you construct a new residential project within an eight-minute walk from the new metro or a five-minute walk from a bus rapid transit station, the city will pick up the tab for your air rights.

The article claims that "Quito suffers from a pedestrian-unfriendly urban streetscape." I'm not sure I would completely agree - some parts of Quito, such as the colonial center or the Mariscal Sucre district, offer a good, active pedestrian environment - but the city is otherwise mostly automobile-oriented and I recall that many Quito sidewalks were narrow, uneven or poorly-maintained, with cars in driveways blocking them, a lack of curb cuts and other accessible infrastructure, and blank, uncomfortable security walls adjacent to them. Good pedestrian infrastructure is critical to the success of transit, and this is where transit-oriented development comes in to play.

These transit-oriented development incentives convinced Uribe & Schwarzkopf to hire one of the world's most buzzy architects, Bjarke Ingels of BIG, to design two residential towers (the firm's first projects in Latin America) along the forthcoming metro line. Across from La Carolina Park, the city's most popular green space, the 32-story IQON and the 24-story EPIQ towers by the architect are quickly rising. The former is set to be the city's tallest building and has a facade that, when trees are planted on each terrace, will reflect the adjacent park. The latter takes a more historic approach to its materials: It will be constructed of concrete dyed in various shades of pink to reflect Quito's terra-cotta heritage. Green roofs atop each setback become communal terraces for residents, while the ground level is activated with retail, offices, and a restaurant, a strategy that is hoped to encourage pedestrian traffic.

To be sure, these signature starchitect luxury high-rises are only part of the transformation process. Ecuador is still a low-income country and the percentage of the population that can afford to live in them is low. In order for the process to truly work and for Quito to reach its potential as a vibrant, walkable city, a lot of less-iconic but more-affordable housing options will need to be constructed as well. But by giving famous architects a "canvas" for their designs, perhaps an impetus can be created in Quito's development community for dense, mixed-use and pedestrian-friendly construction for all income levels. As the developer Tommy Schwarzkopf explains: “A new skyline for the city is being created and a new type of citizen is emerging.”

Did I mention that it's time for me to go back to Quito?

Quito, Ecuador: the city and its subway

Curbed's Jeff Andrews writes a fascinating history about the capital of Ecuador, its historic urban form, the changes to that urban form caused by continued growth, and the fact that these changes have required the city to build a subway.

Looking down on the city of Quito from the teleférico that rides up the eastern slope of the Pichincha Volcano, buildings as high as 30 stories dot an urban landscape that includes the former citadels and centuries-old churches of what was once a Spanish colony. 

But someone looking at Quito from that same view 50 years ago would have seen a considerably smaller city full not of high rises but of single-family homes. 

The discovery of oil in Ecuador in the late 1960s triggered growth in the country’s capital that pushed the city not only out but up. Quito’s population has grown from 350,000 then to almost 3 million today. 

Now, Quito’s transformation from sleepy town to vibrant metropolis is entering perhaps its most important phase: The population explosion has created the need to overhaul the city’s transportation infrastructure. Having already moved its airport out of the city center, Quito will open a brand new subway line in 2020, just seven years after the first phase of construction began. The metro could usher Quito into a new era as a regional economic power.

Quito is highly geographically constrained, with Mount Pichincha to its west and the Tumbaco Valley to its east. While the city has seen some residential development spill over into the Valley in recent decades, these geographic constraints otherwise means that the city's urban core can really can only grow in two directions - north and south. As a result, Quito's core is over twenty miles in length, but only about two and a half miles in width at its narrowest points.

This, necessarily, means that north-south commutes are the norm, which in turn causes significant congestion:

Quito’s topography, shaped by the city’s position in a valley of the Andes, provides residents with breathtaking views of the two mountain peaks on either side of the city. But as the city’s population has ballooned, Quito’s topography also contributes to traffic problems weighing on the city. 

Take El Panecillo, a hill in the center of Quito, just south of the city’s historic Old Town. On top of it lay a 135-foot-tall aluminum statue of a winged version of the virgin Mary, known locally as the Virgin of Quito. The statue is visible throughout Quito and is a source of local pride.

The hill is also an impediment at the center of traffic flow between the north and the south, as is the Old City itself, which has narrow roads originally built in the 16th century. Numerous ravines snake down the mountains in the east and cut through Quito’s center before flowing down to the valleys in the west. The bridges and infrastructure over these ravines weren’t built for the number of cars that now use them, and the available public land for new roads is limited, narrow, and expensive. 

The result is, for some commuting Quiteños, a traffic nightmare.

“The economic booms and the consumer patterns in Quito are very car-oriented,” [former Secretary of Territory for the Municipality of Quito Jacobo] Herdoiza said. “One of the first priorities for a new labor force is to have their own car. So you have an increase in the number of vehicles that doesn’t match with improvements in road networks or in public transportation.”

I remember very clearly how chaotic Quito's transportation network when I spent my summers there in the late 1980s; the city, while already large, was much smaller then than it is today.

Beginning in the 1990s, municipal officials tried to combat congestion by improving public transportation options. The Trolebus, an electrically-powered Bus Rapid Transit line running in the median of major Quito thoroughfares such as Avenida Diez de Agosto, opened in 1995. Diesel-powered BRT lines, such as the Ecovia and Metrobus, opened thereafter. Given the fact that Ecuador is an impoverished country, this type of transit infrastructure was probably all that was fiscally feasible at the time. But as at-grade bus systems, the Trolebus and Ecovia were limited in terms of the parts of the city they could serve and the number of riders they could carry. These riders were, for the most part, laborers commuting from the working-class neighborhoods on the south side of town to the businesses and industries in the north.

These commuters have to deal with every topographical impediment the city center has. Only about a third of Quiteños own a car. The rest rely on existing public transportation—the bus system and the bus rapid transit (BRT) system, or trolley buses that run north-south along major avenues. Low-income people in the south who work in the north often have to take multiple modes of transportation, spending as much as 20 percent of their income on that transportation. The commute can be as long as two hours each way, with delays caused by bus drivers who, Correa says, often bypass stops with fewer passengers in favor of more crowded stops that bring in more fares. Laborers who spend four hours on a bus every day not only waste time they could be working or being with their families, but they’re also exhausted during work hours from the long commute.

Thus, the Quito Metro, which is completely underground and which will run for about 14 miles along a north-south route featuring 15 stations. The project began construction in 2013 and is expected to open in 2020. Building a full subway - especially one beneath and earthquake-prone city - is an ambitious project for a relatively low-income country. But it could be transformative to both Quito's mobility and its urban form.

The metro alone will not solve these problems, of course. Because it only runs north-south through the city center, it won’t do much to alleviate congestion along Quito’s second busiest commuting route—people in the valleys who drive to Quito’s business district in the middle of the city center. 

And the metro stops also are not close to each other—1.5 kilometers apart, on average—so the metro will need to integrate into the existing system to truly meet commuters’ needs. At worst, the bus system and BRT could end up competing with the metro instead of working in concert with it, jeopardizing the financial sustainability of the subway.

If local officials can't get a subway, a BRT network and local bus systems to work together to provide complementary and interconnected services - e.g. longer north-south trips on subway, shorter north-south trips on BRT, and east-west and feeder trips on local bus - rather than competing services, then they're doing it wrong (and they need to hire someone like me to help them figure it out).

But if it works, the metro could unlock Quito’s potential to be a regional economic power. New developments around the metro stops are already well underway, which could create pockets of urban density that allow for more walkability and less reliance on cars and buses, something that younger Quiteños desire.

Quito already sees itself as something of a hidden treasure in Latin America, with a budding nightlife and restaurant scenes, and tourist attractions to rival any city on the continent. With two new ways of getting around the city, and phase one of an ambitious new metro system that took only seven years to complete, Quito may not be “hidden” for much longer.

Just another reason why I need to go back.

Quito’s Basílica Del Voto Nacional

As much time as I've spent in Quito, it's hard to believe that I've never visited this church:

The sight of Quito’s Basílica Del Voto Nacional is as threatening as it is beautiful.

 The neo-Gothic church can be seen from nearly any point in Ecuador’s capital, which sits high in the Andean mountains. From afar its three pointed towers reach up towards the peaks of the surrounding volcanoes, piercing clouds in the sky. At ground level, the structure looms over the city, appearing in clear sight in the gaping space at the end of el centro’s Venezuela Street.

Its harsh angles, towering height, and moody air make it an intimidating sight so much so that at any given time, hurried folks will pause to stare at the strapping structure for just a moment or two. Looking at this basilica from even a kilometer away, a tourist may feel a shiver creep up towards their scalp but if a gaze from a distance causes a shred of terror, know that there’s more to be anticipated once inside its walls. 

Basílica Del Voto Nacional is Spanish for Basilica of the National Vow. This is a monument iconic not only in the capital of Ecuador but for the country as a whole. Its original intentions were to honor the sacred heart of Jesus (the notion that the heart of the resurrected son of God is the symbol of his love). In a nation of devout Catholics, that holds ground but local legend has given the basilica another purpose. Even during a short visit to Quito a traveler from abroad may hear whisperings that this basilica has the power to end the world.

Source: Wikipedia - by Maros M r a z (Maros) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8319779

 Unlike the ornate, centuries-old Spanish colonial churches in central Quito (e.g. the Metropolitan Cathedral of 1565, the Iglesia y Monasterio de San Francisco of 1604, or the Compañía de Jesus of 1765, all of which I've visited). The Basílica is fairly new. The neo-gothic church was begun in the 1890s and finally consecrated in 1988. That was my first summer in Quito, and although I caught occasional glimpses of it, I never went for a visit. Looks like I was missing out:

Most visitors to Quito will become aware of this religious Ecuadorian icon either through seeing it on a walk through the UNESCO world heritage site that is the old historic center or through exploring its interior for a two-dollar entry fee. For the full experience, those with courage could (and should) embark on the cold-sweat inducing climb to the back tower. That excursion is a must-do while in Quito.

The basilica stands at a height of 377 feet which makes for a lot of stairs to climb en route to the back tower. During that climb, winding steps bring curious wanderers past small, circular windows punched out of the walls offering a peek at stone carved sea turtles and birds from the Galapagos and then to the floor looking down on the long, narrow body of the building with rows upon rows of pews faced towards an altar outfitted with the burning candles, the sacred heart of Jesus, and the Ecuadorian flag.

Even though be Basílica opened in 1988, it was not "completed" in that year. In fact, it never will be:

For three decades, the basilica has been open to devout worshippers and tourists alike. It has been well over a century since Julio María Matovelle’s workers first broke ground. Still, no matter when a curious passerby wanders inside its walls, they will see a group of Ecuadorians hard at work in some corner of the basilica. It may seem that perhaps a traveler arrived during a time when, say, one of the front towers was in need of fixing. This is not the case.

If the recent work on one of the front towers created a bit of an eyesore, unluckily for your Instagram feed, it’s because construction will in fact never be finished. Local legend has it that once this basilica is completely done, the end of the world will come. The story goes that life as we know it could be doomed thanks to this eerie-looking building that stands close to the equator in the middle of the world. As such, no detail is overlooked. There’s always work to be done, updates to be made, a spot to be fixed. This has been the case for 130 years and the people of Quito will continue to find excuses for the work to continue. Simply put: the Gothic structure is never to be finished.

It's now been eighteen years since my list trip to Ecuador. To finally go see the never-to-be-completed Basílica is just another reason for me to go back.

Thirty years ago today

Sometime in the late afternoon of Wednesday, June 8, 1988, I stepped foot in Ecuador for the very first time.

This wasn't my first trip outside of the United States, by any means. Even at the age of 14, I had already been to Canada and Mexico several times, and I had even taken a trip to Britain and Ireland with my parents just a few years earlier.

But this wasn't a family vacation; we weren't going to Ontario to visit some friends or to Cancún to sit on a beach. We were going to live in an obscure Latin American country for the summer because my father had been awarded a Fulbright fellowship to teach at a couple of universities in Quito. It turned out for me to be a true adventure; an eye-opening, life changing experience.

Getting there was an adventure in itself. Back then, the only way to get to Ecuador was through Miami. In the early hours of Tuesday June 7th my brother, my mother and I took a cab to Hobby Airport, where we boarded a Delta flight to Atlanta and then caught another plane to Miami (why fly directly to Miami when you can save a few bucks by going through Hartsfield...). Imagine our surprise when we got to the Ecuatoriana Airlines counter at MIA and were informed that the airline would not be making a flight to Quito that day; this was our first indication that Ecuadorian civil aviation regarded posted itineraries are mere suggestions. A night in a Miami hotel and one extremely turbulent ride aboard an aging Boeing 707 a day later, I finally found myself in the Andes Mountains.

We lived in apartment on the top floor of what was then the Hotel Los Andes on the eastern ridge of Quito, overlooking the city. Mount Pichincha sat directly in front of us. After every sunset, the city would glow with amber sodium light until the fog crept in from the surrounding peaks and valleys and obscured everything. It was amazing to watch.

We marveled at the ridiculously-low cost of living there (the constant devaluation of the Sucre made everything from groceries to restaurant meals to taxi rides to Spanish lessons dirt cheap for those with dollar-based accounts). We ate out at a different restaurant every night.

Our hotel, as it turned out, was located right behind the British Embassy. Right next to the British Embassy was a bar and restaurant called - go figure! - El Pub. Because it was so close to our hotel, this restaurant became a regular lunch and dinner spot for us.

El Pub's waiter's name was Pepe. We got to know him very well. And even though we had memorized the dessert menu simply because we had been there so often, we would always ask him to repeat it, because we liked the way he struggled to pronounce the word "cheesecake." (Pepe would always say "chiz-KEK.") My brother and I thought it was funny. My mom thought we were being assholes for making him say it.

My brother and I enrolled to the One-to-One Spanish School close to downtown Quito which, as its name implies, featured a student-to-teacher ratio of 1:1. I probably will never speak Spanish any better than I did that summer, as I spent several hours every day practicing, conversing and learning new vocabulary with my personal instructor.

We didn't drink the tap water in Quito; it was lethal unless it was boiled. We used Güitig mineral water for everything, including brushing our teeth. Even so, I ended up with more stomach ailments in one summer than most people should endure in a lifetime; amoxicillin and imodium became my gastrointestinal friends.

Sure, there was culture shock and homesickness. Many an afternoon, after One-to-One clases were over, I would walk over to the "mercado negro" section of the Santa Clara Market to purchase "illicit" American goods (for example, an exhorbitantly-priced can of Dr.  Pepper out of a 12-pack somebody brought down from Miami, or a bag of M&Ms) before taking a taxi home. (We took taxis everywhere; Quito did not have a mass transit system other than buses, which were smoky and crowded and they never completely stopped at intersections so you had to get a "running start" to get on or jump off.) Sometimes after I got back to the hotel I'd open a window and sip my illicit imported soft drink and stare out over the city of Quito, waiting for dad to return and longing to be back home in Houston, where the climate probably was hot, but where the water was drinkable and the people spoke English.

Quito did not have a real McDonald's in 1988. I really could have used an occasional Quarter Pounder and some fries as comfort food back then.

We took trips around the country. Lots of them.

We took a trip up to the slopes of Mount Cotopaxi, the iconic volcano south of Quito. We drove above the snow line, and my brother and I had a snowball fight.

We went to the Mitad del Mundo monument that marks the location of the Equator. Many years later I would discover that its location is probably inaccurate.

We met a driver from the Hotel Quito taxi pool,very close to our hotel, who advertised day and multiple-night tours. His name was Hugo. He took us along the winding, narrow Pan-American Highway to the market in Otavalo, north of Quito (and ancestral home to these folks, who today sell their products all over the world) and as well as the leather-making town of Cotacachi.

Sometime in late June, my aunt Dorothy from Temple, Texas came down to stay with us and to experience Ecuador for herself. Hugo crammed all of us into his taxi and took us to the jungle, by way of the Hacienda la Cienega - an amazing Spanish colonial plantation turned into a hotel - and the delightful town of Baños, with its waterfalls and volcanic baths.

Somewhere outside of Baños, along the highway that parallels the steep valley of the Rio Pastaza, the roadway's asphalt was replaced by gravel and Hugo said "adiós, civilización." We had reached "La Selva" - Ecuador's outback-esque Amazonian jungle.

We got to the Rio Napo, parked the taxi, and loaded ourselves into a motorized water canoe that took us to a hotel downstream that could only be accessed by boat. On the way there, Hugo warned us about "The Monkey" that lived at the hotel and apparently had a habit of biting people.

We got to the hotel and got out of the canoe. I walked around the hotel grounds, deep within the jungle. Everything was lush and green. There were butterflies everywhere. There were colorful birds flying around. There were termites crawling back and forth between trees in termite tubes. There was a black and brown spider monkey that appeared out of nowhere, ambled right up to me and, before I could do anything, crawled up my legs and torso, wrapped itself around my shoulders, and sat atop my head. Was this The Monkey that bit people? I was petrified. I didn't know what to do.

Fortunately, Hugo appeared. I thought he would help me get the curious animal off my head. But he just smiled. "Be careful, Tommy, that is The Monkey," he said as he walked past me.

The Monkey's name was Ramón, and he actually became my friend while we were in the jungle. He would wrap his prehensile tail around my wrist and lead me all around the hotel's grounds. He'd do the same to my brother. Ramón was fascinating and protective, always looming over us from the trees as my brother and I walked through the jungle.

He never bit either of us.

My brother and I found a creek with a large vine hanging above it. We discovered we could swing from the vine, Tarzan-style, and drop ourselves right into the middle of the creek. It was fun.

In the jungle, it was Hugo's turn to have intestinal discomfort; I guess even native Ecuadorians can fall victim to the myriad bacteria that grows down there. He begged us not to tell "El Brujo" - the native witchdoctor that we were going to visit on a jungle tour one day - that he was sick, because he was very skeptical of the witchdoctor's "cures."

We didn't tell the witchdoctor when we met him. He found out about Hugo's ailment anyway. He made Hugo drink a nasty, gawd-awful potion to remedy his gastrointestinal distress. Hugo quickly felt better.

After a few fascinating days at the hotel in the middle of the jungle, we made our way back to civilization: first by river canoe, then by Hugo's taxi, and eventually the gravel on the roads gave way to actual asphalt again.

When we got back to our hotel in Quito, the person at the front desk immediately told us that somebody from the coastal town of Manta had been frantically calling and leaving messages, trying to get in touch with Dorothy.

It turned out that when Dorothy had first arrived in Quito a few weeks earlier, she had sent a message to a former student of hers, Maria, just to politely say hello and let her know that she was visiting her country. Dorothy had no expectation of actually meeting Maria.

However, once Maria discovered that her beloved former teacher was in Ecuador, she insisted that all of us come down to Manta to visit. But how to get there?

Ecuatoriana was Ecuador's international airline. TAME (at the time owned by the Ecuadorian Air Force) was Ecuador's domestic airline. Ecuatoriana flew aging 707s; TAME flew aging Lockheed Electra turbo-props. Ecuatoriana might not adhere to a posted schedule; TAME might not adhere to a posted destination. We all went to Quito's airport hoping to get onto a flight that landed at either Manta or the nearby town of Portoviejo (pilot's choice?). We made it onto the 1950s-vintage plane and landed in Manta half an hour later.

While I stood at the airport in Manta, waiting for our luggage to appear and wondering what I was doing there to begin with, somebody tapped me on my shoulder. I turned around to find a young woman, only a few years older than me, who looked vaguely familiar.

"Excuse me, but do you go to HSPVA in Houston?"

I will leave it to statisticians to determine the odds that two people - one a freshman theater major, the other a senior vocal major - from the same small fine-arts magnet high school in Houston, Texas, would somehow end up at the same little airport, in the same coastal city of Ecuador, at the same time in July 1988. I consider it a cool, random encounter. It turned out that Camille was spending the summer volunteering for the Amigos de las Americas program in Ecuador before she went on to college.

We met Maria, and her sons Italo and Renzo, and they took us back to their house in Manta and we spent several days there, eating ceviche and exploring the coast and making friends that I still have to this day. Italo, in fact, would later come to Houston and stay with my family while taking english courses ahead of college; he eventually graduated from the University of Houston.

We flew back to Quito, Dorothy flew back to Temple, dad finished his last course, and in early August, Hugo took us on another journey: this time to Cuenca, Ecuador's third-largest city, located in the southern part of the country.

This time it was my brother's turn to deal with intestinal discomfort. David was not feeling well as we stopped at restaurant in the town of Cañar on our way towards Cuenca. He put his head down on the table and refused to order while the rest of us made our choices off the menu. Hugo ordered the "caldo de pata de gallina." They brought him a bowl of soup with a chicken's talon sticking up out of it. My brother looked up. Hugo picked the chicken foot up out of the bowl and began eating what little bit of meat was on it. My brother's face turned three different shades of green.

The route from Cañar to Cuenca was cool and misty and green and it reminded me of my trip to Ireland just a few years before. Cuenca, likewise, felt uncannily European: is its cool climate, its church spires sprinkled about the skyline, the Spanish Colonial architecture, the city encircled by what seemed to be a wall of mountains... It's a place I truly need to revisit before I die.

One of the highlights of our trip to Cuenca was El Cajas, the national park just outside of town. The park is alpine in nature; there were many llamas there, and as David and I learned, they were not always the world's friendliest animals. We came upon a mother llama and its young offspring, and we walked over to the pair to see if we could pet them. Not a good idea... The mother llama considered us a threat to her baby, and proceeded to jump up on her hind legs and topple David over to the ground. The llama tried to do the same to me, but did not succeed. Hugo warned, "uh-oh, Tommy, la llama se enoja" - the llama is angry - and chased the unfriendly animal away with a stick.

On the way back to Quito, Hugo took us down out of the mountains - I'll never forget reaching the edge of the Andes and looking out over the tops of the clouds bunched up against the mountains, as if we were descending by airplane and not by car - and to the coast of Ecuador, where the roads were straighter and flatter and the trip back to Quito would be quicker.

On the way, we passed coffee and banana plantations. Outside of Santo Domingo we visited some Colorado Indians, which were characterized by their shortly-cut hair dyed with red berries. We painted our faces with some of the berries. Afterwards, we took the long, winding road along the Rio Toachi back up the mountains to Quito, stopping at "El Poder Brutal," a huge face of a devil carved into the side of the mountain, and listening to the new President Borja give his long inaugural speech on the radio. (He and his successor both managed to complete their terms of office; a decade later a series of coups would end this rare period of Ecuadorean political stability.) It was late evening when we finally returned to our hotel.

And it was just a few days later that we returned to home Houston - once again, a day later than planned, thanks to Ecuatoriana. The summertime adventure was over.

I recounted all these stories, and more, to my friend Gwen so many times that she can probably tell them better than I can. At the time, I could only vaguely perceive how transformative that summer had been to me; my "what did you do last summer" story was pretty much "I spent all summer in a little South American country that doesn't even have a McDonald's" and that was that. As time went on, however, I began to realize just how profound an experience that was for me: being immersed in a nation that was both environmentally and culturally diverse; seeing things few Americans got to see  (at the time most American tourists came to Ecuador to see the Galapagos and maybe colonial Quito); visiting bustling markets and opulent 17th-century cathedrals; being invited into large, comfortable homes along the coast as well as destitute rammed-earth huts in the mountains; all while being in transition from childhood to adolescence, where experiences have an outsized effect on one's cognitive growth.

Something about that little nation that kept drawing me back. I returned to Ecuador (by myself) to visit the family in Manta the following summer. Dad was awarded a second Fulbright in 1990, so we spent a second full summer there; revisiting a lot of the same sights and seeing many new ones, including the Galapagos Islands. That summer it was my grandfather's turn to fly down and stay with us for a few weeks. Another solo trip occurred in 1993, when I was in college. My then-girlfriend and I traveled there in 2001. All of these trips have stories of their own.

I haven't been back since. I regret that.

Things have changed a little bit since 1988. Ecuador adopted the US dollar as their currency over a decade ago, so things aren't quite as cheap as they were back when there was the ever-inflating Sucre. Quito has become a trendy travel spot and is even being compared to New York City. As of 2001, it had a real McDonalds. Lori and I went there and I had a Quarter Pounder, just because. Quito is even building a subway now! No more dangerous winding roads in the county, either; Ecuador now has actual freeways.

Ecuatoriana no longer exists, which is probably a good thing. TAME is no longer run by the Ecuadorian military; it flies modern aircraft and serves a variety of domestic and international destinations. Today, if I want to get to Ecuador, I don't have to fly through Miami; I can just go up to Bush Intercontinental and take United's daily non-stop to Quito. It wouldn't surprise me if Southwest started flying to UIO from Hobby in the near future, too.

The family in Manta are friends on Facebook. We talk about getting together sometime. I don't know if Hugo is still around. Every possible permutation of "Hugo Herrera Hotel Quito taxi" I put in the Google search bar or in Facebook turns up nothing. Camille is a successful opera singer in New York City.

Things change, but the summer of 1988 in Ecuador, is something that changed me. And I'll have that experience forever.

Yet Another Olympic Wrapup

Another Olympiad is in the books, so it's time for (yet another) wrapup.

The 2018 Winter Olympics may have been held in PyeongChang, South Korea, but they absolutely belonged to Norway. The Scandinavian country of 5 million people utterly dominated the games with 39 total medals (including 14 golds). Germany came in second with 31 medals (14 golds), while Canada came in third with 29 medals (11 golds). The United States ended up with 4th place with 23 medals, including 9 golds.

This is the lowest medal haul for Team USA since 1998, and is reflective of what for at least the first half of the games was a poor performance by the Americans. Team USA did manage a late rally to at least make a respectable showing; that rally included, notably, USA's first-ever medal in womens cross county skiing, the womens hockey team besting Canada for the gold medal for the first time since 1998, and the US Curling Team's improbable comeback to win the county's first gold medal in the sport. And before we spend too much time criticizing Team USA for underachieving, it's worth remembering that, before the advent of the so-called "extreme sports," the United States pretty much sucked at the Winter Olympics. At the Winter Olympics in Calgary 30 years ago, for example, the United States won a grand total of 6 (!) medals.

The Netherlands came in sixth with 20 total medals, because speedskating. Rounding out the top ten were Sweden, South Korea, Switzerland, France and Austria.

Honorable mentions go to a handful of countries that don't usually figure in winter sports: Both Spain and New Zealand won two medals in PyeongChang, the first time either country has medaled since 1992. Hungary won their first medal since 1980 and their first gold medal ever in the Winter Olympics. Belgium won its first medal in twenty years, and little Liechtenstein won its first medal in 30 years.

Tina Weirather's bronze medal in the Womens Super-G, in fact, was enough to give Liechtenstein the highest number of medals per capita, according to this handy website, with one medal per (the beautiful - and expensive - Alpine principality's total population of) 37,531 inhabitants. Norway came in second, winning one medal per every 133,228 inhabitants, while Switzerland came in third, with one medal per every 552,465 inhabitants. The United States came in 24rd, winning one medal per every 13,974,731 inhabitants. Those rankings don't change significantly if you re-rank the medals by weight. Lichtenstein also tops the rankings of medals per GDP, simply because the microstate is ridiculously rich; Norway comes in second on that list as well, while Belarus comes in third and the United States comes in 25th.

Ecuador entered the Winter Olympics for the first time, with a single athlete: cross-country skier Klaus Jungbluth came in 112th (out of 116th) in the Mens 15-Kilometer Freestyle, beating out the famous Shirtless Tongan by two spots. Despite finishing poorly, Ecuador can now claim as many medals in the Winter Olympics as Chile or Argentina (both of who have at least some winter sports infrastructure): zero.

Finally, a follow up from my previous post, wherein I actually gave some praise to NBC's Olympics coverage. Apparently, I'm not the only person who thinks they did better job this time around. It's enough to make Vox's Todd VanDerWerff at least somewhat optimistic about 2020:

None of this suggests that NBC is off the hook forever. The 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo will have many of the same benefits of the 2018 Games, especially when it comes to an advantageous time differential with the US. But the Summer Olympics, where the US is generally more likely to sit atop or near the top of the medal count, often lead NBC to chase its own worst impulses of relentlessly pushing predetermined narratives. (It also won’t help that the Summer Games often schedule major events — especially in track and field — for the cooler evening hours, which will be the early morning in most of the US.) 

But I’m choosing to let the 2018 Olympics give me hope that NBC is finally addressing some of its most persistent criticisms. The network still has a long way to go, and it has to stop assuming that the best way to tell human stories at the games is via packaged profiles straight out of Dateline, rather than letting those human stories unfold in the midst of the competition itself. But maybe the network is moving in the right direction at long last. We’ll find out in two and a half years.

On to Tokyo...

Quito: the New York City of the Andes?

Katharine Shilcutt made a trip to Quito, Ecuador and wrote about it in December's edition of Houstonia Magazine, where she compares it favorably to New York City:

You shouldn’t try to rent a car in Ecuador; you are not nimble or practiced enough for the driving conditions, the congestion, the loose interpretation of traffic signals and lane dividers. And anyway, in a metropolis like Quito where 2.7 million people make their home, it makes as much sense as renting a car in New York City—which, as it turns out, is very close to what Quito looks like by daylight. 

The next morning, we gasp as we round a corner from our apartment down a hill toward Avenida América. Beyond the seven-lane thoroughfare sprawls a dense, colorful city packed with tall buildings that would seem even taller were they not dwarfed by the Andes Mountains beyond. In the far distance, the snow-capped Pichincha—an active volcano whose last major eruption, in 1999, covered the city with a layer of ash—looms like the home of an ancient god. The largest neo-Gothic basilica in the Americas, Basílica del Voto Nacional, is the only structure that comes close to competing with the natural landscape, its twin spires jutting into the sky like two jagged Andean peaks. 

As we walk the avenue, we see women selling fresh red crabs from deep blue buckets, next to a Colombian bakery where old men are laughing loudly at a curbside table, while diesel buses puff along, about one for every ten taxi cabs. Stick your hand out, and you’ve got a cab in, well, a New York minute. I can’t help thinking that long, skinny, built-up and crammed-in Quito feels like what would happen if you dropped Manhattan from the sky into the middle of the mountains.

It's nice to know that the drivers are just as crazy today as they were when I spent my teenage summers there, but otherwise I get the feeling that Quito has changed quite a bit since the last time I was there. It's always been a bustling metropolis, and it's always been densely-built - a geographic necessity, given that the city is hemmed in by Mount Pichincha to the west and the Valle de Los Chillos to the east - but I certainly wouldn't have compared it to Manhattan back then. While it was a somewhat cosmopolitan city, Quito was also the capital of a desperately poor and largely agricultural nation, and it simply did not possess New York City levels of wealth, sophistication or infrastructure. Three decades later, however, things may have changed: now Quito's even building its own subway.

ON A SATURDAY MORNING, Hala and I stroll through the city to brunch. In the huge Parque La Carolina, we pass a farmers market with live music, a Zona de Crossfit that proves the fitness trend is inescapable, and a grand botanical garden. We land at a German bakery where the table next to us chats away in Japanese as we munch on “Janky” (see: Yankee) waffles and bacon and gulp down dark, delicious blackberry juice and Ecuadorian coffee.  

“I didn’t expect this city to be so international,” Hala remarks, not for the first time. (The final time will be some nights later in a sushi restaurant, where I enjoy fresh eel while she carries on in Arabic with some diplomats from Qatar and a local Instagram celebrity originally from Tunisia.)

Sushi restaurants? Yeah, when I was 14 I resented the fact that Quito didn't even have a real McDonalds. In fact, looking at Google Maps I notice that almost all the restaurants I remember - the place down the street from our apart-hotel that had the excellent llapingachos and locro de queso, the quirky "El Pub" next to the British Embassy, the cheap "Chifa" restaurants serving fried rice and "wonton soup" with chicken organs in it - have all disappeared, replaced by vegan restaurants, Brazilian rodizios, coffee shops, tandoori restaurants and, yes, American fast food outlets.

Given its size and location in the center of the city, Parque La Carolina is fairly analogous to Central Park in Manhattan. But the only thing I really remember about that park is that once my mom and brother went down there to play tennis and were accosted by a bribe-seeking police officer for not having their passports with them; it certainly didn't have a botanical garden or live music back then.

For all the things that might have changed over the years, however, Shilcutt did discover one thing about Quito that is exactly the same as when I lived there:

Back in town and heading out for dinner, we notice the clouds are tumbling quickly over the mountains, into the streets of the city. “That cloud looks like it’s walking!” Hala exclaims. I always thought T.S. Eliot’s anthropomorphized description of fog in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was a little affected. But now that I’ve seen a cloud creep along a street like an animal, I’m regretting everything I wrote in that 12th grade English lit class.

Almost every night, the mountain fog would creep into the city. Watching it roll down from the mountains and up from the valleys was a sight to behold - it really would "crawl" along Avenida 12 de Octubre, Avenida Colon and the other streets around our apart-hotel - and once it enveloped the city it would completely transform it, creating a mysterious, shrouded cityscape punctuated by faded streetlights and passing headlights. It was a landscape that was a serene as it was eerie, and it was very cool to experience.

Quito is a city that upends expectations and offers fascinating contrasts: It’s a few miles south of the equator, yes, but it’s also 9,350 feet high, so it’s cool here year-round, with crisp, thin mountain air. Centuries-old cathedrals and cozy 1950s-era cafeterías coexist alongside hip, open-air food truck parks and post-modern high-rises out of The Jetsons. All of this, in a small country with an outsized global reach, thanks to its petroleum exports and fruitful trade agreements with countries like India and China.

The "crisp, thin mountain air" was one of my favorite things about Quito, especially since it meant escape from the oppressive summertime heat of Houston, and also because it came infused with a distinct aroma of diesel exhaust, firewood smoke and food being cooked: the "Quito Smell," I used to call it. And although I can't speak to Ecuador's trade agreements with China and India - the United States was, and still is, Ecuador's top trading partner - the fact that places like China and India play a larger role in Ecuador's economy than they once did almost certainly makes Quito more of an "international" city than it was a quarter-century ago.

Thanks to dollarization, Quito is a more expensive city than it was when I first spent my summers there, when the sucre was constantly being devalued and everything was crazy cheap. I first noticed this in 2001, during my most recent visit to Ecuador, and it drove my then-girlfriend crazy that I would complain about how much more expensive things had gotten in Ecuador because everything was still very cheap when compared to the United States. This appears to still be the case, if some of the prices Shilcutt reports for taxi rides ($2-$4), simple meals ($7-$12) and Airbnb nights ($40-$90) are correct.

Nobody's going to mistake Quito for New York City anytime soon; it's probably not even the "New York City of the Andes" as long as cities like Bogotá, Colombia or Santiago, Chile rank higher in the "Global Cities" index. But Quito is nevertheless an international city - obviously much more so than it was when I lived there as a teenager - and it is poised to continue to grow as an economic and tourist destination. It is a city full of history, culture, good food and amazing sights. And it's a nonstop flight away from Houston.*

Next summer will mark the thirtieth anniversary since my first trip there, in 1988. I haven't been back since 2001. Hence, another trip to Quito is in the planning stages. It's time to go back, and see the ways in which the city I once considered my "home away from home" has changed.

*Which is another thing that's changed since I was a teenager: back in the 80s, the only way to get to Ecuador from Houston was to fly through Miami. Now, United flies non-stop, and it really wouldn't surprise me if Southwest started flying to Quito from Hobby one day in the future, too. 

Topo Chico

The New York Times has finally discovered what Texans have known for years: Topo Chico is the best sparkling water in the world.

This super bubbly agua mineral, in retro green-tinted glass bottles, has developed a fervent following here in Texas. Devotees stock entire refrigerators with the stuff and tattoo themselves with the brand’s logo, an Aztec princess who legend has it was healed by drinking the water, which emanates from an inactive volcano in Monterrey.

Bottles of Topo Chico are tabletop everywhere in Texas this time of year, including tatty taquerias in the Rio Grande Valley and reservations-only restaurants in Houston.

The water is often the finishing fizz in cocktails at the hippest bars in Austin and the sidecar to espresso drinks at indie coffee shops in Dallas. Don’t even ask for San Pellegrino or Perrier; they’re likely not served.

At supermarkets and bodegas, it’s hard to find a shopping cart that doesn’t contain a 12-pack of Topo Chico. According to the market research firm IRI, Topo Chico has captured 62 percent of imported sparkling water sales at grocery stores in Texas, and 74 percent at convenience stores.

Sales in the United States were around $58 million for the year ending in June, up 83 percent from 2012, no doubt helped by health-conscious consumers who are avoiding sugary and artificially sweetened carbonated soft drinks.

Social media posts indicate that Topo Chico is difficult to find outside Texas. Its American distributor, Interex, in Fort Worth, said it is available, albeit to a lesser extent, in 29 other states.

Okay, so I could probably do with the overwrought "Topo Chico is a hipster drink!" vibe of this article. I've never seen anybody with a Topo Chico tattoo, and, no, shopping carts lacking a 12-pack of Topo Chico are not "rare," at least where I shop. And for the record, the only type of Topo Chico that comes in "retro green-tinted glass bottles" is the lime-flavored variety; the original stuff comes in clear bottles. This journalistic overreach aside, I'm not surprised that Topo Chico claims the majority of imported sparkling water sales in Texas (take that, Gerolsteiner!): its popularity is unquestionable. But what exactly is Topo Chico?

To be sure, travelers and even locals in Mexico are warned against drinking the water, but Topo Chico has been bottled and consumed there since 1895.

Before that, travelers from the United States flocked to Monterrey to drink and bathe in what newspapers of the era called “thermal springs” at the base of Cerro del Topo Chico (“little mole hill”). The water was said to have great medicinal value in the treatment of tuberculosis, liver disorders and rheumatism.

Nowadays the water continues to be bottled at the source after a purification process that the bottler, Compañía Embotelladora Topo Chico, said does not alter the water’s natural mineral composition, which includes sodium, magnesium, calcium, potassium and manganese.

Carbonation is added, but just enough to restore any fizziness lost during purification, in keeping with  F.D.A. rules for products sold as sparkling water.

The bottler makes no health claims other than that the water “quenches thirst” and “aids in digestive processes.” But some Texans insist it’s the best hangover cure.

I don't know if Topo Chico makes my hangovers any better, but its fizziness certainly feels great on a parched morning-after throat.

Beyond any curative powers, many fans of Topo Chico will tell you that it just tastes good. Justin Yu, the chef and owner of Oxheart in Houston, said it’s better than the sparkling water he grew accustomed to drinking while doing internships in Europe.

“There’s nothing better than a cold Topo Chico after a long, hard service,” said Mr. Yu, who was named 2016 Best Chef Southwest by the James Beard Foundation. “I think it has a cleaner taste, it’s definitely the fizziest and I really enjoy the slight salinity.”

The cookbook author and “Top Chef” judge Gail Simmons got hooked on Topo Chico while filming in Austin five years ago. “I would get in deep discussions with friends there about why it’s such an obsession — was it the size of the bubbles, the salinity, the slight citrusy note?” she said. “I consumed it as much as possible when I was in Texas, and then I came home to New York and was a little distraught because I couldn’t get it anymore.”

I think I began drinking Topo Chico 15 or so years ago, when I was looking for a mineral water that would approximate the taste and effervescence of Ecuador's Güitig (which I drank out of necessity when I lived there; Ecuadorian tap water wasn't allowed anywhere near my mouth). The breakfast taco place near my work was one of the few places in Denton that carried Topo Chico, and I became a fan. Obviously over time a lot of other people here in Texas have, as well; Topo Chico used to be carried almost exclusively by Mexican restaurants and grocery stores in Hispanic neighborhoods, but it is now sold by the pallet at Costco.

But what's the big deal about Topo Chico? you might ask. Aren't all fizzy waters the same? In a word, no. There are perceptible differences between brands - the taste created by the mineral content, the amount of carbonation in the water - and I believe Topo Chico simply tastes (and feels) the best. Los Angeles Magazine agrees; last May they sampled eleven brands of sparkling water and decided that Topo Chico came out on top:

This is officially the fizz water that all other fizz waters should aspire to. Topo Chico won big for what was aptly described by Audie as a “slicing bubble” (we really ran out of adjectives to describe bubbles) and scored a full 11 points over Gerolsteiner. The cute, retro glass bottle packaging also won our hearts. Well done, Topo Chico—you might be the new Mexican Coke.

Now that the New York Times has discovered what the "cool Texans" are drinking, will Topo Chico become so popular that demand overwhelms the amount of water that the plant in Monterrey is able to produce, and the drink becomes increasingly expensive and hard to find? That's certainly a possibility, and the Chronicle's Craig Hlavaty fears the Topo Chico shortages to come. Fortunately, Topo Chico's distribution range in the States is limited - at least for now - and it appears that the nation has already adopted La Croix as the popular, in-demand sparkling water. I'm not worried that there's going to be a run on bottles of Topo Chico anytime soon.

Besides... Even if Topo Chico does become the national rage, I'm not going to become the sparkling water version of the guy who liked a particular band until they became popular and stop drinking it. It's just too good of a drink to pass up.

Retroblogging

This blog didn't really begin in earnest until the late spring of 2006. However, I had been blogging for at least two years earlier, on my old, out-of-date website that I finally put out if its misery a couple of weeks ago.

There were some things I wrote on my first "blog" that I wanted to keep. For example, posts regarding Kirby's birth, posts about Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the exploits of the Cougars and the Astros, my trip to Japan, my very first trip to Dubai.

So I went through all of them, decided which ones I wanted to keep, and moved them to this blog. I backdated them to the date I originally published them on my old website. I generally cut and pasted them as they were originally written, only lightly editing them. I didn't even strip out the hyperlinks in many of them, even though a lot of them are now unfortunately dead.

I note at the bottom of each post the date they were "retroblogged" (today, August 23, 2015) and in many cases add a sentence or two to update what I wrote.

Thus, every entry now on this blog from 2004, all but one entry from 2005, and one entry from 2006 are imports from my old website. There are 40 of them in total. They all carry the "retroblog" tag.
Some what I think are the more noteworthy of these "retroblogs" are as follows:

July 18, 2004: Local homeowners complain about development in spite of Houston's lack of zoning

August 21, 2004: Kirby's birth

October 12, 2004: Astros get past the Atlanta Braves to win their first-ever postseason series

November 16, 2004: 2004 Presidential Election thoughts (aka, they both sucked)

November 22. 2004: The Coogs conclude a disappointing season

December 27, 2004: Houston experiences a White Christmas

March 15, 2005: Disco lives! at the University of North Texas library

April 25, 2005: Political instability continues in Ecuador as another president is forced out of office

September 8, 2005: Pondering the future of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

September 25, 2005: The disaster that was the Hurricane Rita evacuation

October 12, 2005: The "Kat-Rita Bowl:" Houston 35, Tulane 14 in Lafayette

October 20, 2005: The Astros are going to the World Series (and I'm going to Japan!)

December 7, 2005: College football teams that got Screwed and Shafted by bowl selection committees

December 10, 2005: Pictures and a review of my trip to Japan in October 2005

February 19, 2006: Pictures and a review of my trip to Dubai in January 2006

It was truly interesting to go back and read all of those old blog entries - many of which I hadn't looked at in years - to see how things were and what my life was like a decade ago.

There is still some material I saved from my old website that I might put on this blog in the future, but I probably won't be backdating them as I did with the above posts.

Ecuador ran a Super Bowl commercial

I never expected to use the words "Ecuador" and "Super Bowl" in the same sentence, but...



I guess the oil crash is causing them to really hurt for tourist and retiree dollars. But lots of respect to the Correa administration for "going big" and advertising during the Super Bowl.

With this buy, Ecuador became the first sovereign nation to advertise during the Super Bowl.

And yes, it's time for me to get my ass back down there.

Ecuador's president re-elected

There are things to both like and dislike about this election result:

President Rafael Correa, a dynamic leftist who has championed Ecuador's lower classes with generous social spending but faced wide rebuke as intolerant of dissent, coasted to a second re-election on Sunday.

Correa won 56.7 percent of the vote against 24 percent for his closest challenger, former Banco de Guayaquil chief Guillermo Lasso, with 36 percent of the vote counted.

Correa was originally elected in 2006 - at the time I wondered how long he would last, given the picturesque Andean nation's political turmoil - and was re-elected following changes to the nation's constitution in 2009. How has he done so far?

Correa, 48, has brought uncharacteristic political stability and modest economic growth to this oil-exporting nation of 14.6 million people that cycled through seven presidents in the decade before him.

He has raised living standards for the poor and widened the welfare state with region-leading social spending, though human rights groups say he bullies anyone who gets in his way and civil liberties have suffered.

Among Correa's accomplishments are improvements to the nation's health care, education and transportation systems. The number of impoverished people living in Ecuador has also decreased several percentage points under his presidency, if a United Nations report is to be believed.

But Correa has also arbitrarily wielded a near-monopoly on state power, critics say, using criminal libel law against opposition news media and seizing the country's airwaves several times a week to spread his political gospel and attack opponents.

These tactics shouldn't come as a surprise; Correa is merely borrowing a page from the playbook of his "personal friend," ailing Venezuelan quasi-dictator Hugo Chavez. While it's possible that Correa's heavy-handed tactics against his opposition have contributed to Ecuador's much-needed recent economic and political stability, it's nevertheless disappointing. There's also this:

In all, 1.9 million people receive $50 a month in aid from the state. Critics complain that the popular handouts to single mothers, needy families and the elderly poor, along with other subsidies, have bloated the government.

The number of people working for the government has burgeoned from 16,000 to 90,000 during Correa's current term, Ecuador's nongovernmental Observatory of Fiscal Policy said in a December report.

Correa also has been unable to stop a growing sensation of vulnerability in a country where robberies and burglaries grew 30 percent in 2012 compared with the previous year.

That last sentence reinforces what I've said recently about Ecuador's crime rate: that is truly one of the nation's most pressing problems right now. That he's doling out money to the needy (which Correa can do, thanks to high oil prices) and massively expanding the government payroll should come as no surprise, given his leftist philosophy. I can only wonder what those new 74,000 government jobs represent: its understandable if a large number of those jobs are a result of expanded education and healthcare services, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those jobs represent little more than bureaucratic bloat.

At any rate, the Ecuadorean people have decided that - for better or for worse - they want another four years of Correa's policies, and earlier today he outlined his plans to push through even more radical reforms, while still focusing on encouraging more foreign investment in his country. It would be nice for Correa to be able to accomplish his goals without further eroding press freedoms and civil liberties. But, now that he's been re-elected with over 55% of the vote, Ecuador can likely expect to see more of the same - again, for better or for worse - from the current inhabitant of the Carondelet Palace.

Correa will be re-inaugurated on May 24th. Provided he completes it, by the time his second term ends in 2017 he will have been president for ten consecutive years, a feat unprecedented in Ecuador's turbulent political history.

The Guardian's Mike Weisbrot explains Correa's popularity. The Economist is a bit more skeptical.