Friendly Folks

I know I've posted before about how friendly the local Ecuadorians are but I haven't mentioned how great the English speakers are.  Actually, I hadn't really thought about it all that much until yesterday.  I saw one of the little "trucklettes" and took a couple of pictures of it for my photo roundup this week.

Isn't it cute?

Just as I finished taking the last photo, a couple came out of the restaurant across the street and the man asked (in English) if they were going to be famous.  I assured them they would and asked if I could get a photo of them with their vehicle (he thought "trucklette" was pretty cute).  I explained that I have this blog about my life in Cotacachi and I try to share things that I think are unique to Cotacachi or, at least, Ecuador.

So here they are, Diane and Mountain with their cute vehicle, Shaolin.

Then I went in to my class and when that was finished had a quick bite at the restaurant there and there was a couple sitting at the table right next to mine and before you knew it, we were having a lovely conversation.  For those of you who know me, you'll be surprised to learn that I wasn't even the one to initiate it!

That made me think about the number of people who are so friendly here and will have a conversation simply because we both speak English.

As I was preparing to write this post I was thinking about the things we talk about and I realized that there are two questions that almost always come up in that first conversation:

• How long have you been here?  This is sometimes preceded by whether one is visiting or lives here.
• Where do you live? 

Today I made a quick trip to the grocery store and ran into the woman who organized the tour of the Kichwa village.  She even remembered my name and that was at least a month ago.  She also met close to 30 people that day.  She was taking her kitty to the vet and we chatted for about 5 minutes.  I told her I would love to come back and get more yarn one of these days and was even able to show her what I'm knitting right now that is from the alpaca/wool blend yarn I got there.

It's lovely to live somewhere that I can let my natural outgoing personality run free.