No Cigar

I came to Quito with a secret plan: to transform my hotel into a wireless hotspot. The Radisson would no longer be able to claim it was the only wireless hotel in Quito. La Casa Sol would become a haven for the 802.11-enabled from all over the world. But after two hours of fiddling, I better understand why companies hire IT professionals. It's fair to say the Radisson remains the only wireless hotel in Quito, and that La Casa Sol will stay a haven mostly for backpackers who read Lonely Planet and want to spend approximately $20 a night.

Thankfully, the hotel night staff was very gracious as I crawled behind the manager's desk yanking at cables and intermittently dropping things. (It helped that the manager wasn't due in till tomorrow morning.) They even surprised me with a juice of a fruit whose name I didn't recognize--it's magenta (would make a good nail polish) and very tasty. While I worked, one, Moses, also asked me for advice on what computer to buy for school. This was a step up from Cancun, where Sanjai and I tried to juryrig a network connection on the sly and then had to explain ourselves to a suspicious clerk.

I just asked Suzy, who squeezed the juice, to repeat more slowly what kind of fruit it was. She sheepishly admitted that it's not what she said originally--maracuya--but guayaba, which I think I´ve seen on sale at Whole Foods. I assured her that I'm not too picky when it comes to unfamiliar fruit, and since the maracuya looks a little more like a lime, I probably came out ahead in terms of taste.

Before logging out for the night, I should share a little bit of my afternoon since posting earlier. After touring the city´s historic plazas, where I mostly visited churches and hunted anxiously for toilet paper, I rode a trolley back to the neighborhood near my hotel, Mariscal Sucre. The trolley bounced around a lot more than Boston´s Green Line, which meant I slipped back and forth in a desperate fight to keep from hitting the ground. Everyone else stood around looking bored. One was eating a drumstick of fried chicken, which is big here: local chain restaurants with names like "mr. pollo" and ¨pollo rey¨ pepper the whole downtown area.

Outside the oldest cathedral in the city, one dating back to the 1500s, a man sold drawings of God for $10. He had scratched out an earlier price of $20.

It was a quiet afternooon back in Masicral Sucre, a bit of it devoted to investigating other local hotels (because it's fun to pose as a travel guide writer) and the rest to my paper on coverage of the presidential election in New Jersey. I planted myself at Papaya.net and wrote over a slice of manjar-and-vanilla cake and a cup of coffee (the combo conventionally priced at $1.99) while also tracking the Clippers score. Thankfully, they won, beating Philadelphia.

Manjar is also known in the States as dulce de leche; it's one of my favorite treats from Chile and the moment the waiter told me it was in the cake, I ordered a slice. If I understand it right, manjar is made by boiling condensed milk while stirring in sugar. At any rate, it's gooey, looks a little but tastes nothing like caramel, and goes great with almost all breakfasts and desserts.

Later on I had dinner with Eli and Orazio of Grupo Faro at a Lebanese restaurant, where we ate shwarma, passed on the water pipe, and caught up on some Kennedy School gossip before settling down to business. Their project sounds interesting and they're very flexible about how I can most help them--which I appreciate, given that I´m an energetic person but not always that focused. I'll write more about Grupo Faro and its mission tomorrow.

The thing that most surprised me today: I was mistaken for a college professor.

Off to sleep and dream for a few hours, hopefully with no guest stars from the twenty-fourth century. When I was little I once dreamed I was a smurf--an evil smurf created by Gargamel to mislead the good smurfs, but who ultimately found redemption with the help of Papa Smurf. That dream, I could have again. But please, no more of Captain Picard with a scalpel.

Make it so.