I love old people!

I have changed continents, and so far, the above is what I have learnt.

Murry and I woke up at 5am in London on 1st September, and ended up in our rented apartment in Quito, Ecuador exactly 24 hours later.

Flying into Quito was exciting. It was 10pm so the night outside was dotted with those glittering white and yellow city lights that always look so inviting from the sky - a bit like a man-made attempt to recreate the stars up above. What made it really exciting though, was the contours. Quito is all hills. On the outskirts of the city, where the lights stopped, we could just about make out the dark looming triangles of volcanoes.

This morning we woke up to a view of Pichincha volcano outside our window. The hills above us, and below the volcano, were scattered with whitewashed houses. What is it about hills and mountains? I can't get enough of them.

  View from our bedroom window, Quito, Ecuador

 Then there's the steep ups and downs of the cobbled streets in The Old Town, where we are staying. When we arrived we had to crouch with our arms out ready to catch our bags, by the car boot, as the steep hill would have seen them tumble out the boot and straight down the hill. 

After a big wander around Quito's Old Town today, I can confirm that my other instant love in this city is the old people.

The old people here are amazing. I have gathered this much just by watching them, like some kind of creepy reverse paedophile. I think I have a fetish. I am already scheming some kind of 'grab a granny/ adopt a grandpa' plot. The old faces here are so weather-beaten and wonderfully wrinkled. Maps of lives and stories to be told. The grandmas look so kind and wise; really open faces and lots of toothless grins. Many of them have shrunk to tiny proportions, and oh my! Their feet! Old people in Ecuador have the smallest feet I have ever seen!! Their shoes are tiny.

My favourite grandma so far is an old lady I spied in The Plaza Grande who can't have been more than 3 feet tall. She was wearing a white dress and a big colourful woolly cardigan with slippers on her feet (tiny slippers of course). She was wandering around eating an ice-cream cone. That was it really. I didn't speak to her, I just fell a bit in love from a distance.

Murry sometimes gets annoyed when I say old people are cute. They are, after all, much older, wiser and more experienced than we are, so it's pretty patronising. But I mean cute in a lived, totalled, whole, shrunken again, and 'they-don't-give-a-shit' kind of way. They tend not to rush about like us younger folk, preoccupied with forwards and back, ups and downs, ego worries and life strains. They are sort of done with it and let go. Sometimes it seems people revert to a sort of childlike form in old age. Maybe we shed all of those other layers, keep the lessons we have learned and perhaps just learn to be a bit still with it all? 

Anyhow, still a bit jetlagged. I had a huge siesta earlier (could get used to this lifestyle).

Tomorrow we are going to look for a Spanish school to try and get our tongues rolling out the lingo. Then perhaps, once the language is on my side, I can start making my moves on some of the old folk...

All very wrong, I apologise. I really just mean have some innocent chatter with them.