Supplies

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Quito is a city of 2 million people. Admittedly, it is in a developing country. However, typically you don't realize it and there is plenty of whatever one might need. The fruit shelves are abundant with the most incredible exotic fruit you may ever have dreamt about. The supermarkets have literally everything you can buy back home. And there is beautiful artesania, medicinal plants, stolen cameras, heaps of cheap pirate copies of whatever CD or DVD you might dream about and loads of other things.

But then, every once in a while the whole city all of a sudden runs out of a certain product. It first started with hanging files. I use them to arrange my hiking information of the various locations in Ecuador. As i have accumulated loads of brochures, maps and other stuff, these folders are really useful. And usually there is plenty of them in different colors in the various SuperPaco and Juan Marcet stores (the main stationary chains). But then from one day to the other there wasn't a single folder left anywhere I went to in the city. And they couln't get any for weeks and weeks. Some day I found then by chance a few leftover folders of a different brand and style in a small store (which I was happy with).

The next thing was the Nestlé chocolate. Those who know me, know that I am a chocolate addict. However, I won't eat just any chocolate. It has to be good chocolate. The best I can get here is the Nestlé chocolate in the red wrap. Not that it's anything like Milka or Merci, but it's good enough. Sure, you can get Ritter Sport and other brands here, but I just refuse to pay between 3 and 7 USD for 100g of chocolate. So I had been living happily on the Nestlé chocolate (sorry, antiglobalists..) for the past nine months. Until when one day in the recent past I opened greedily my latest Nestlé acquisition... just to find it all grey...I tried one bit and didn't like the taste at all. So I brought the chocolate back to the shop. The customer support attendant tasted it as well and said she didn't find it too bad. So she tasted more and more and also let her colleague try it. Until not much of the chocolate was left. She then said I should go back to the shelf, and get myself a new one and come then back and open it together with her. Which I did. There were only a few more chocolates left. They all turned out to be grey and bad. So they finally gave me the money back. I went to another Supermaxi: no red Nestlé available. Another one: they tell me that they will not be able to obtain the chocolate for an unknown period of time (for unknown reasons). I just found some remainder of the little bars of the same type of chocolate in a shop which I rapidly purchased and devoured. Ok, why not, it will do me good not to eat chocolate for a while (but then, I have already lost 10kg during my time in ecuador, so I could actually eat chocolate).

The latest missing good now is the black ink cartridges for my Epson CX5600. The CX 5600 is the most widely sold consumer printer in Ecuador. On my uncomfortably short bike I cycled today throughout Quito's mad traffic from SuperPaco to SuperPaco and Juan Marcet to Juan Marcet and their various non-chain smaller brothers and sisters, being numerous times very nearly run down by yellow taxis, blue buses, red Ecovías or Quito's ever growing upper class super duper 4WDs - just to realize that the city has run out of yet another good. Now how many months will it take that I can use my printer again?

Now don't you guys ever question again where all my time goes and why it takes me so long to get my project finished! This is just a tiny little example of the crazy latino world.... ;-)) And, hey, Ecuadorians, don't you get me wrong: you should know from all my other blogs that I love the beautiful nature and lots of other things about your country!

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