Our Casa

I continue to be delightfully surprised at how cheap it is to live in Ecuador. In some upcoming posts I’ll share more details on how inexpensive it is to live in this breathtaking country, which despite its tiny size, never lacks for adventure or beauty. (more…)

Lesson number one when getting keys made anywhere in the world is, or rather should be:

Try out your keys before you lock yourself out of your damn apartment!

This is a lesson we ended up learning the hard way here in Quito a few days ago. We went down to the local key maker at his multi purpose shack. This is the person who besides making keys is also the local parking attendant, convenience store owner, guy who adds minutes on your prepaid cell phone, sells envelopes, peanuts, loose cigarettes, color or black and white copies, faxes, cellphone cases, candy and takes passport size pictures. He does it all from a shack that is only marginally larger than a portapotty. Long story short, we left our original keys in our house while we went out grocery shopping at the local market and when we came back were surprised to find our keys didn’t work! We hoped our doorman would let us in but alas even he didn’t have a key, the upside is our place is tighter than Fort Knox. We ended up calling our landlady, taking a cab across town and getting a working set of keys. Lesson learned.