Drive-Thru Travel

On Eating Wilbur: Breakfast in Ecuador

Gisela Aydin

There are two types of travelers in the world: The kind that will eat anything that is put in front of them, and the kind that won’t eat anything that vaguely reminds them of something they saw in a horror movie. I like to think of myself as the adventurous eater, the kind of person who will try anything once.  A woman who is unafraid of the consequences because the experience will be well worth it! 
          

I have realized on my travels to Ecuador, however, that this is definitely not the case, and that my “adventurous” side has all been a figment of my imagination. I will paint a picture. My three girlfriends and I wake up at 5:30am in Guayaquil. At 6am we leave the city and get into a car we have reserved (complete with driver) for the day.  We head towards our journey into the mountains--specifically, Los Banos. Banos is known for its thermal springs fed from the base of the active volcano Tungurahua. During our trip, we learned that this volcano had recently erupted and thousands had been evacuated a few weeks earlier. Courageous of heart but not of stomach, I set out on this journey with my friends.

At about 9:00 am everyone is hungry and we pull to the side of the road for breakfast. It is a small outdoor supermarket of randomness.  There is one table that sat along the road. I notice a little store extending back about 4 feet with anything from chips to blankets for sale. A huge wok-like vat of something or other is cooking on a fire. I didn’t really look at it right away because my only thought at the time was to find a bathroom. Three hours in a car is rough; three hours in a car needing to pee is agony. 

I ask for the “bano” and an old woman points very vaguely and uninterestedly to the back behind the supermarket “del random.”  I shrug and see if I can figure it out. I walk around the store and see a backyard full of pigs, ducks, chickens, a rooster and drying clothes on clotheslines. Way, way, way in the back there is a concrete shed-type thing with a bare light bulb hanging right outside. I assume correctly that this is indeed the bathroom, and very well may have been the most disgusting toilet in all of Ecuador.  Particularly, because I had to sort of sneak my way past two grossly large pigs and a bunch of piglets to get to it.

I survive and I return to my friends ready to sit down for breakfast.  I notice I have been served breakfast. There is this thing in front of me and the smell of it makes me gag. It’s called “Fritada”, fried pork over loose white corn that is about 4 times larger than the yellow corn grown in the US. There are some sweet plantains precariously balanced on top. Sweet plantains that have been frying with the pork in the enormous vat of oil in the huge wok-like thing that was sitting by the side of the dusty road traveled by diesel fueled cars (see photo).

Perhaps if it hadn’t been 9:00am, or maybe even if I hadn’t seen the siblings of the now dead pig sitting in front of me I could have stomached this odiferous breakfast treat. But it was 9:00am, and I had seen Wilbur up there in the back, and it was all a bit much for my curiously strong sense of smell and morning stomach.         
So, I did what any good American citizen would do.  I bought a bag of chips and washed them down with some “coca-cola light.” -gisela@digitalseamstress.com