car for sale

Today, in some way, marks the beginning of the end of the great Quito experiment. We put the car (technically a 4x4 suv, though small) on the market. The morning was taken up with getting a much needed clean up of the car - 5 people working on cleaning the interior, exterior, undercarriage and even the engine for a half hour for $8 - and "registering" the car at the patio (which, in some weird twist of language, is the ecuadorian spanish word for car dealership).
The little vitara was good to us and always got us where we needed to get to. I hope it finds a good home (and quickly, since we need to close the sale before we leave).
We're leaving in 4 short weeks, with many mixed emotions.

On a tangential note, related but not relevant to the above, the woman running the car wash asked me to help move several of the cars around during the washing of my car. Kind of strange. There wasn't a lot of room in the little garage, and a lot of cars, so they play this weird game with the cars - kind of like that game with the squares that you have to re-arrange to make a picture. I'm not sure why I was pressed into service, but there I was, backing other people's vehicles into tight corners, and trying to squeeze a pick up around other parked cars and up onto a ramp (elevated space with the gap under the tire lanes where someone can walk under the car). All this with a stick shift, and with not a lot of space in the pick up cab for me to fit. What fun.
Oh, yeah, and all the cars had proximity alarms, and alarms that went off when doors were opened, and, basically, alarms that went off all the time. Fun.