I Dressed as a Bus for Halloween

I dressed as a bus for Halloween.

More specifically, I dressed as a blue bus for Halloween. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

October 19th was a Sunday, and Sundays have come to mean one thing: the Ciclopaseo. Every Sunday morning, with orange cones, yellow tape, and a healthy amount of trust in public good will, Quito closes a 15-mile stretch of a major artery of the city to all traffic, and bicycles are given free, safe access to hours of road miles. You’ll see the occasional runner or roller skater, but mostly, bikes rule the Ciclopaseo. Every now and again, a car or motorcycle will cross the yellow tape and interfere with the closed route, but typically the mass of bikes is strong enough to force their shameful gigantic wheels off onto the closest side street. Linde and Roy, a kind Dutch couple in the Americano community, were the first to take me on the Ciclopaseo back in early September. (Linde is the reason they’re here—she’s been teaching Diploma Program (DP) science for the past 3 years at school, and Roy, the trailing spouse and full-time scientist, is no slouch himself. They travel often and move through conversations in English, Spanish, and Dutch with confidence and ease. They’re the epitome of the type of cool, worldly people you meet in the international teaching game.) I’ve since made it a habit of going to the Ciclopaseo every Sunday when I’m in town.

Linde, me, Roy on my first Ciclopaseo at the start of September. The little round hill in the background is the “Panecillo,” a hill topped with a famous statue of the Virgin Mary in the historic old part of Quito.

October 19th was also the first Sunday that my neighbor and fellow new foreign hire, Rob, had his bicycle here and assembled. He was eager to explore the city on two wheels, and I was eager to share my knowledge of my Sunday route. We set off from our apartments, zipped down the hill past Atahualpa Stadium, crossed Parque Carolina, and hopped on the Ciclopaseo on Avenida Río Amazonas. We went south, in the direction of Centro Histórico.

We were waiting at a stoplight, almost to Parque El Ejido, when I asked Rob, “Do you have a costume for the Halloween party?”

“Not yet,” he responded. “I don’t really want to, but I think I’ll have to go to one of the pop-up stores and see what’s there.”

The light changed. “Same,” I said as we started rolling. “I just haven’t come up with any decent ideas.”

We did a lap of El Ejido, slowing down to look at the art vendors set up along the north side of the park. As we waited to cross Avenida Patria, Rob commented on how safe the roads felt along the Ciclopaseo. Rob has a car here in Ecuador, and he has made many comparisons between driving in Quito and driving on Toad’s Turnpike in MarioCart; traffic can be very chaotic here, so it really is remarkable how calm the closed roads of the Ciclopaseo feel.

While we were still waiting at the long light, a blue bus whipped past us, mere inches from our front tires. “Imagine competing with them while on your bike,” Rob said. “No chance.”

Another blue bus approached the intersection, this one cutting off a line of taxis to make an absurdly wide turn, then coming to a rolling stop—not nearly a complete stop—to drop some riders from the back doors and scoop up some new riders, the group rushing in step to pull themselves on board by grabbing the metal pole by the front door like a train hijack scene in an old western.

Rob and I watched in wonder, then chuckled. “Maybe that’s what I’ll be for Halloween, one of those buses,” I joked.

“Just run through the party bumping into people and making a mess!” Rob said as the light changed and we started moving back towards safe, bike-only streets.

I’m sure a lightbulb appeared above my bike helmet. “You know, I was joking, but maybe I will.”

“Do it,” he said, and we bobbed through some kids on roller skates, speeding up as we hit the downhill stretch just before the southern part of Parque Carolina.

There is lots to see and do along the Ciclopaseo: above, I am about 8 miles from home, looking back towards the wooded park near my apartment. Below, L-R, we have an old neighborhood in the south of the city, me enjoying a $1.50 fresh coconut pitstop, and the mini bike park inside Parque Carolina.

So I had my idea. The only thing I had to do was figure out exactly how one dresses as a blue bus.

I began by studying the buses. Every morning and afternoon on my bus (school; yellow) commute to work, I took notes about common design features, and I read old news articles and travel websites in Spanish. From my extensive research, I learned a lot, but I was also left with many more questions about how the blue buses work. Here is what I do and do not know about the blue buses:

Things I know:

• The buses are blue.
• They are [almost all] owned by a company called IMETAM, but they are operated by the city of Quito as public transportation.
• Most buses have a list of stops in their front window that indicate where the bus is headed. The majority of routes travel north/south, because Quito is a very long, narrow north/south city.
• Each bus comes equipped with a driver and a “cobrador,” a man who occasionally hangs his entire body outside the open front door to yell at pedestrians about where his bus is headed, or to shoo away cars with his arms when the bus wants to merge.

Things I don’t know:

• The cost of one fare, or how exactly you pay, because people seem to jump on and off indiscriminately and sometimes the cobrador is too distracted yelling at people to make change.
• How it is possible to know where a designated bus stop is or when a bus is likely to arrive at that stop.

Things I don’t know for sure, but I assume to be true:

• If they ever come to a complete stop, the blue buses will explode, so best not to risk it.
• If the blue buses ever have less than 40 people inside, they will explode, so again, why take the risk?

I mostly studied their aesthetic. Even though they are uniformly designed, structurally speaking, any blue bus you encounter has a huge “bus tipo” name on the top of the front window—things like “Reino de Quito” and “Guadalajara” and “Quiteño Libre”—in an absurd script font that is unique to that particular bus. (I’m not sure if these names indicate the line, the final destination, or a blue bus family association.) The entrance and exit signs—entrada y salida—are also in random fonts, sometimes all caps, sometimes lowercase curly script. Inside the doors and windows, drivers decorate the space with their personal bus energy: you’ll often see giant felt dice swaying from the ceiling, neon LED lights blinking like a teenager’s bedroom, and any amount of scarves pledging allegiance to local soccer teams. Almost all buses have the “Quito Metro” logo on the back of the left side of the frame, and they all have their registration card in at least two places, but beyond that, sometimes the outsides are blank, or sometimes they are covered with “PedidosYa” ads. There are usually boxy white arrows pointing at the three different doors, and there are anywhere from 3 to 53 red and white strips of reflective tape lining the bottom edges of all sides of the bus.

I made the early decision that I would not try to look like a bus with my costume; instead, I would try to spiritually embody the terrifying, almost militant chaos that the blue buses bring to the streets.

Bus inspiration photos taken from my school bus and brave moments on bike rides.

On Monday after work, I set out down the hill to try to find some cheap clothes that I could destroy for this costume. I started at the pop-up Halloween store a block from Parque Carolina, about a 15-minute walk from my apartment. I perused for a while and found nothing but a soldier hat that was just the right color blue. I made my way over to Quicentro, the nearby mall. I went in and out of every store that had clothing, checking every blue dress, shirt, and pant, and came up with nothing. After nearly two hours, I found myself in the last corner of the mall—at Old Navy, of all places. 

(It’s a bit strange, the things that give you comfort when you’re living abroad: this was an exhausting evening with very few successes, but as I trudged around the massive Quicentro—my first time ever stepping foot in the mall—I felt waves of recognition and relief seeing the overpriced Patagonia store, the unending H&M, and (well, obviously) the food-court sized Dunkin’ Donuts battling the upscale Starbucks. After all, even if it is gross consumerism, what is comfort but predictability?)

This Old Navy was no Burlington-Mall-circa-2010-Old-Navy, though. Just like every clothing store in the mall, even the simplest, solid color, cotton t-shirts were expensive. Almost all clothes in the city are imported, so the import fees make buying clothes here quite the investment. (There are, of course, cheap places to buy cheap clothes in a city of two million people, and some of those cheaper places are in the old part of the city, where my Sunday bike route takes me. But those are biking distance away, not walking distance, and not necessarily where I’d like to go by myself in the dark on a weeknight.) I was staring at a $25 plain white t-shirt near the entrance of Old Navy when a sales associate approached me and asked if I needed help.

All night, when store employees had asked me if I needed help, I had quickly said, “No, gracias,” and shuffled along. But at this point, I was exhausted from not finding what I needed, and I managed to eke out in sleepy Spanish, “Yes, I actually am looking for any piece of clothing that matches this bright blue color.” I showed her the hat I’d bought hours earlier. A hint of confusion flicked across her eyes, but she smiled. “It’s for…it’s for Halloween,” I added, and she nodded and told me she’d start looking on the right side of the store. I went to the left side and started digging through the clearance racks and men’s shirts.

After a few minutes of searching, we met in the middle of the store again. She presented a pair of blue leggings and I showed her the youth XL t-shirt I’d found. She said that they didn’t have any sizes of leggings that’d fit me, but they’d have more next week. I explained that the costume party was the coming weekend, so next week would be too late. I looked at my measly options after two hours of searching dozens of stores: an overpriced boy’s t-shirt and a pair of pants that don’t fit. I couldn’t rationalize spending a ton of money on something that just wouldn’t work. I thanked the Old Navy woman for her help and promised I’d return if all else failed. I stopped in SuperPaco on my way out of Quicentro and bought some iron-transfer paper, then slowly made my way back up the hill, feeling a bit defeated, but still confident I’d be able to make this costume work.

I spent the next few days designing the details I would iron on to the clothes I still didn’t have. From my studying perch on my school bus commute, I recreated the Quito Metro logo and transportation registration cards, I designed a “bus tipo” sign that merged as many bus clichés as I had seen, and I copied and pasted enough “entrada” and “salida” text boxes to adequately capture how many doors are on these buses. (A standard blue bus has three doors, but as it speeds past you, it always feels like so many more).

   

Some of the pages I needed to print on an inkjet printer.

Thursday rolled around, two days before the teacher Halloween party, and I had all of my designs set. Since I had a planning period first hour that day, right when the bus dropped us off at 7:25, I went down to the print center at school and asked the printer man if, among the many printers all around the entire campus, there was one inkjet printer I could use to print on my iron-transfer paper. “No inkjet printers anywhere on campus,” he said in Spanish, shaking his head. “And it might be hard to find one—laser is much more common here in print shops.” Darn. I knew it’d be too easy if I could just print at school, but since I needed to go out again in the evening to look for blue clothes, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to check in on a few print shops in my neighborhood.

Walking back to my room, I ran into Libby bringing a cup of coffee to her classroom in the 7th grade block. Libby teaches Individuals and Societies, which is fancy-IB-school-lingo for middle school social studies. Our shared students often accidentally call me and Libby by each other’s names, which everyone finds to be very fair. Libby is from Montana and is a couple years older than me, but she is about the same height and build, has blonde hair and glasses, and just like me, dresses like the prototypical young White American humanities teacher (think: cardigans). To a 12-year-old Ecuadorian child, at first glance, we are pretty interchangeable. Unlike me, though, Libby has been living and working in Quito for a few years, and she has an Ecuadorian fiancé.

“Are you going to the Halloween party on Saturday?” Libby asked, opening her door and waving me into her classroom. Core subject teachers have common planning periods based on when our students have specials like Gym and Art, so when I am free, the other English teacher Alina is also free, and so is Libby, and so is the rest of our block. I followed Libby into her empty room. “I am planning on going to the party, and in fact, I could use some advice,” I said. Within five minutes, we had Google Maps pulled up on her computer and both of our phones, and Libby was showing me the third print shop she knew of in the Carolina area. “By the way, right here, across from Quicentro,” she offhandedly pointed at a block of shops, “there’s a little store, very unassuming, you’ve probably walked past it dozens of times. It has random clothes and shoes imported from China. They’re not great quality, but super cheap. Anyway, go past there, take a right, there’s another place you can print...”

Lorelei the instructional coach poked her head in the room to say hi. Like me, Lorelei has an East Coast confidence and a let’s-get-this-done-efficiently attitude that she sometimes needs to check while working in a culture with a slower, gentler pace than her home of Maryland, and like Libby, she has been living and working here a few years and has an Ecuadorian fiancé. We told her we were talking print shops, and Lorelei confirmed a few places in the neighborhood that Libby had already pointed out. I thanked them both for their help and walked back to my classroom. Later that afternoon, Lorelei stopped me on my way to lunch and gave me the tip that if I was unsuccessful in my hunt downtown, she could call in a favor with a teacher over in the primary side of the school who she knows for certain has a personal inkjet printer.

By the time I made it home from work at 4:30 that afternoon, I felt ready to tackle the city again, this time armed with more knowledge and even an honest-to-goodness backup plan if I failed. I put on my rain jacket and boots and set off down the hill. Libby had told me to head to Avenida República de El Salvador, which is a J-shaped street that juts off of, and then runs parallel to, Parque Carolina. I decided to start in the hook of the J and then work my way north up the street. I went into the first print shop that Libby recommended and said the line I’d practiced all the way there: “Hola, necesito imprimir algo con este papel. Tiene un impresora de inkjet?” (Hi, I need to print something with this paper. Do you have an inkjet printer?) I had “tinta” (ink) in my back pocket as well, but the printer man at school had told me that “inkjet” would be understood. This printer man told me no, and pointed to another store a few doors down. I went there, said my line, and was told no again. I put my hand on the door and was about to say, “Okay, gracias,” and go on my way, but I stopped.

If one of your goals living in this country is to become fluent in Spanish, you have to start talking, I told myself.

Speaking out loud in another language is scary and vulnerable. It’s been five years since my days of speaking Portuguese in Peace Corps, and it’s been nearly ten years since I last consistently spoke Spanish in earnest, when I studied abroad in Madrid. I’m rusty; what Spanish I did retain after switching my brain to Portuguese during training in Mozambique is mostly dormant. I can talk with my Spanish tutor no problem, and when practicing with colleagues I always have the safety net of their bilingualism. But standing alone in that print shop staring at the printer man, a stranger, was very different. I could very well stumble over my words, not be understood, and leave feeling embarrassed. But enough of a little voice in my brain reminded me that that was not a guarantee, just one possible outcome. I took a breath.

If Peter Falk were a small, shy lady living in one of the largest cities in South America, you would have mixed us up as easily as my kids mix up me and Libby: “Just one more thing,” I said, turning back to the printer man.

We went on to have a fruitful conversation: I told him that I was looking to get words and images onto clothing for a Halloween costume, so I needed to find a place that could support the iron-transfer paper. He mentioned “el caracol” (Did he say snail?! I thought) but said that was too far away, and suggested I try a t-shirt design shop around the corner. Maybe they could put the designs for me directly onto the clothes I wanted, or at least they could help with printing. He walked me outside and pointed further north up the road. I thanked him profusely and headed that direction with a new Spanish bounce in my step.

The evening took on a winding turn from there: the t-shirt place used a different printing method, so I couldn’t print there, and though they drove a hard bargain, one complication in having them print directly on my clothes was that I still did not have said clothes. I talked with a few different guys in that shop, and one had me come around the counter to show me on Google Maps where I should go next. He pointed out El Caracol, which does mean snail, but evidently is also a shopping mall on the far side of Parque Carolina, about a 15-minute walk. It looked familiar on the map; I’d passed it many times on the Ciclopaseo. “You’re sure there’s an inkjet printer there?” I said. “Absolutely,” he responded. I put my hood up, because it had started raining, and started crossing the park as the sun set.

The section of Parque Carolina that I crossed that evening. Photo is from, you guessed it, a morning on the Ciclopaseo featuring neighbor Rob.

The t-shirt man told me it was “frente a” the McDonalds, which is an easy enough landmark, so when I got to the golden arches, I looked in front and found the entrance. I spent an interminable amount of time in this mall, going up, down, and all around, asking about printers and print shops, and being pointed in every direction. I was happy that I was being bold with my Spanish, but I was starting to lose hope with the main task of printing. I felt that sweaty, muggy discomfort that reminds me of walking across the Lower East Side to get to work in college: I had been stuffed in my raincoat and walking for hours at this point. I was hungry and my legs were tired. Finally, I found a little shop in the basement floor of the mall near the back stairs with five printers inside and one printer man sitting behind the counter. I walked in, my face and shoulders weary, and I said my line. “Oh, we don’t have inkjet printers here,” the man said. Before I could ask any follow-ups, he then said, “You should try going to El Caracol.”

My eyes narrowed, not to sneer at this innocent printer man, but to double check before I lost my mind.

“El Caracol?”

“El Caracol.”

“Is...is this place,” I gestured broadly with my arms, “is this place not El Caracol?”

“This place is not El Caracol.”

I did the thing that I’m very grateful I’ve learned how to do, which was to take a deep breath and check my East Coast attitude, because this was clearly my error, and curiosity would help me learn more, not anger. The kind printer man and I went back and forth for a few more minutes. I learned a lot this evening, but one of the most helpful lessons was that the phrase “en frente de” means “in front of,” and the phrase “frente a” means “across the street from.” I walked back up to ground level, emerged outside, discovered that it was now nighttime, looked back at the McDonalds, and crossed the street to find the real El Caracol, which was a dizzying, overwhelming, spiraling nightmare collection of electronics stores that had 0 inkjet printers inside.

El Caracol, photo taken a few weeks later when I was emotionally ready to step foot in this place again. This place is terrifying.

I was halfway home, standing across the street from Quicentro, contemplating whether I should return, tail between legs, to my friend at Old Navy, when I froze and thought of Libby’s comment so many hours (years?) earlier. Right across from...I spun around. There it was in all its glory, the little Chinese clothes store. I walked inside and immediately spotted a blue shirt. A young employee walked up to me and asked if I needed help. “Oh, I need so much help,” I said, the Spanish now spilling out of me with ease. I told her about the soldier hat, and the blues, and the printer fiasco. She seemed fascinated by me, yet delighted at the very specific task I was presenting. We got to work going through racks of clothes, and within 20 minutes, I had a full outfit assembled: a long sleeve shirt and shorts that matched the blue of the hat perfectly, and a white short sleeved cotton shirt to do the iron transfers. As I was leaving, the young woman asked me what exactly my costume was going to be. I pointed out the front door at the row of blue buses outside Quicentro. “I’m going to be one of those,” I said. She stared at me blankly, and then we both started laughing. I went back up the hill to my apartment, texted Lorelei that I’d need her to call in that favor, and fell asleep in minutes.

(Many weeks later, fellow new hire Jay was hosting a murder mystery Christmas party where we had to dress as characters from A Christmas Carol. I was assigned Scrooge, and I returned to the Chinese clothes store immediately after I was cast. When I walked in the door, the same young woman’s eyes lit up like she was seeing an old friend. “I’m looking for something kind of specific,” I said, and she smiled, said, “Of course!” and wanted to hear all about my new weird costume. I assume she has invented a very peculiar backstory for me, and I love it.)

The next day, Friday, Lorelei brought me to primary teacher Natalia’s classroom to print my designs, and within minutes, at long last, I had them in my hands. That evening, I video called Steph as I started ironing on all of the images in haphazard, chaotic directions on the white shirt. Steph, of course, had new ideas to add, and she convinced me to get up Saturday morning and walk around the block to the bike shop and ask for an old busted tire so I could “run over” the white shirt with blue tire tread to add to the chaos. Saturday morning, I was video calling with Steph again as I dipped the old tire in blue paint and pressed it into the shirt on my kitchen floor. It felt just right to involve Steph in this project because this is precisely the type of weird art we’d be doing together in her Arizona room had we both still been in Sierra Vista.

The Halloween party itself was a blast. Some people understood my costume. Here’s the thing that I’m sure will be a disappointment to anyone who’s made it this far into the story: I don’t really have a great photo of the final assembled blue bus costume. The best I can offer you is this awkward mirror selfie I sent to Steph to show her when it was done, and then this one photo from early in the party.

The one good thing that El Caracol gave me was a toy store where I bought a little stuffed man who stuck out of my pocket and served as my cobrador.

    

L-R: Neighbor Jabari, blue bus, Christmas host Jay.

***

My third week living in Quito, at the end of our two weeks of pre-service in August before the kids came to school, I was sitting alone in my classroom when my phone rang on my Ecuadorian line. I felt a little nervous, but I answered it. I had no idea what the person on the other end was saying. I did hear them say “Colegio Americano” at one point, so I knew it was not spam and was probably an important phone call. “Can you wait so I can find someone to translate?” I said breathlessly into the phone, then ran out of my room. I made my way down the 7th grade block: Alina was off at lunch, Libby was eating with Alina, and the Spanish teacher Tati was there, but I hadn’t yet heard her say a word of English, so I kept running. I made it all the way to David’s science classroom. David is an alumni of Americano and studied and taught in the States for a while, so he can bounce between conversations with local hires about community-specific politics and conversations with foreign hires about backpacking in Colorado gracefully—he is our 7th grade team lead and reminds me of a mix of my friends Noah and Harrison and if you know either of them you’ll know that is absurdly high praise. I burst in his door and said, “David, can you help me?” He sprung up in his chair and I thrust the phone in front of him. Without asking me any questions, he started talking to the person on the other end and scribbled some notes on a sticky note.

As he talked, I caught my breath, and it occurred to me I might cry. For the first time since arriving in Ecuador, I felt really, really overwhelmed. In that moment, I was simultaneously feeling grateful that this person I’d just met a week earlier was willing to drop everything and get on a random phone call for me with no context, while also feeling embarrassed that I couldn’t do such a simple communication task by myself, and also feeling scared that I might struggle like this forever. David ended the call and explained patiently that it had been the school’s transportation department, and they were just calling to let me know what bus number I’d be riding with the students on Monday and what time I should be outside my apartment for pickup. He handed me the sticky note where he had written the bus number and the time. I thanked him for his help and apologized for bursting in, and he assured me that it was no problem. I quickly left so I didn’t start to cry.

Then, a few weeks after Halloween, I was in the backseat of Rob’s car as we drove with Ry and Gianna, two other new hires, on our way to go hike Imbabura Peak. We were going to spend the night in La Esperanza, a little town with a hostel that mostly serves travelers who come to summit the volcano. “Listen, the guy from the hostel is about to call me,” Rob said, picking up his phone. “I need someone who speaks Spanish to handle this!” All eyes immediately turned to me, and, humbly, I picked up the phone and then took the phone call with ease.

A lot can change in a few months.

After successfully communicating with our hosts, the next day, we successfully hiked Imbabura, whose first peak sits at 15,000 ft.