Guayaquil, Ecuador!

On Sunday, January 21, I left the Galapagos Islands to fly back to mainland Ecuador. I had originally planned to stay an extra couple of nights in the islands, but I decided 7 days in the hot equatorial sun was more than enough for my delicate Irish skin. When the boat dropped us off at the airport on the last day and I discovered there was no fee to change my return flight, I decided to hop on the next plane to Guayaquil. (There I am in the photo above, about to get on the plane.)

I spent three nights in Guayaquil, Ecuador's most populous city and its main seaport (it's located on the Guayas river which flows into the Pacific Ocean). To be honest with you, the city is hot, humid, dirty, noisy and not particularly attractive overall. But things are definitely getting better. An impressive riverfront promenade project, the Malecon 2000, was completed -- appropriately enough -- in 2000, and there's an amazing restoration/development project going on in the city's oldest neighborhood (Las Penas), which is going to be the next "Coconut Grove," as my new friend Ricardo informed me during a walking tour of the construction site.

Guayaquil also signalled the end of the "Reign of the Pocket Gays."

Given some of the emails I have received, I think this would be an appropriate time for a quick primer on pocket gays, to which I have referred in earlier posts. It seems not everyone is familiar with the term, and a little explanation might be in order.

A "pocket gay" is a rather small, portable gay man. The term is only ever used affectionately (at least by me and my peeps), and unlike in the heterosexual world, short men have a huge fan base among gay men. There's even a weekly party called "Runt" in NYC for short gay guys and their admirers -- it's held in a bar in the East Village with a very low ceiling. Seriously. And they give each patron a "Hello. My name is..." sticker with their height printed on it in lieu of their name. Fabulous!

I'm not sure whether the term originated on "Will & Grace" or not, but that's certainly when it exploded into the mainstream (meaning, that's when I started to use it).

JACK: Well, you see what you have there, don't you?
WILL: I see what I don't have, the other half of my date.
JACK: What you have... is a pocket gay.
WILL: A pocket gay?
KAREN AND GRACE [BOTH]: A pocket gay?
JACK: A pocket gay. The perfect travel-size homosexual. Just pop him in a man-purse, a briefcase, and you're good to go. In ten years they'll be making 'em all that way



Anywhoosie, getting back to my trip, partly because Colombianos tend to be rather short, and partly because Venezuelans and Ecuadorians tend not to be particularly tall, either, I had been encountering one pocket gay after another for weeks. So it was nice to mix things up a bit in Guayaquil and hang out with Cristobal, who I actually thought was taller than I am until I saw the photos. But regardless, he's definitely no pocket. And he's a native Guayaco, and really proud of his city, so it was great to have him give me a driving tour one night and a walking tour another. He is also a veterinarian, which I thought was totally hot. While he was pointing out the city's sights, I was imagining him at work in a white smock, heroically wrestling a ferocious pug down on the table to administer some life-saving injection or something. I found out later that he actually worked in-house for a big chicken company (like Perdue, but in Ecuador), trying to keep the chickens healthy until they are "put down." This sort of wrecked my fantasy, as being a "chicken vet" didn't carry quite the same sex appeal for me as "ferocious pug wrestler," but he was still adorable and very sweet and I had a lot of fun seeing the city with him. (Here's a photo of the two of us in front of the gardens on the Malecon 2000.)

Here is a photo of La Rotonda, also on the Malecon 2000, which commemorates the meeting of two Latin American liberators, Simon Bolívar and San Martin. (Bolivar, of course, was the famous Venezuelan who brought freedom from Spain to Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezeula, while San Martin was the Argentinean equivalent who freed Peru and Chile from the Spanish rule.) Frankly, it really looks to me like the two of them are exchanging wedding vows, which ironically, they could now do in Spain. It's sort of like coming full circle, but not really.

The other that happened while I was in Guayaquil was that I received notice from my top-choice MBA program that my application had been selected for interviews, which is the last hurdle in the admission process. Woohoo! I was very excited to hear this, but unfortunately it meant that I needed to hightail it over to Sao Paulo, Brazil for the aforementioned interviews, and skip my next destination (i.e., Uruguay) completely. The good news is that I was able to change my flight destination from Montevideo to Sao Paulo on Copa Airlines without any fee, and since the fare worked out to be less, I used the difference towards a flight on Gol Airlines for within Brazil. I found out about the interviews on Tuesday, spent the requisite two hours at the Copa office changing my flights the same day, and then flew to Sao Paulo, Brazil on Wednesday (Jan. 24).

Next up, Sao Paulo, Brazil!