Fried ripe plantains with cheese

When we in Switzerland talk about bananas, everyone knows what we mean. The yellow, long, curved fruits, preferably still a little greenish to keep them fresh longer in the fruit bowl. Lately, I have also seen the little bananas, called Banäneli. They are delicious and great to eat.

Here in Ecuador, there are countless varieties of bananas. One of them is the Maduros, which cannot be eaten raw. Well, technically you can, but you'll end up with a stomach ache. Maduros are cooking bananas. They are also yellow and similar in size, but when you open them, you can feel that they are denser and firmer. School director Alvaro showed us this afternoon how to fry them in oil, or to be more precise, how to fry them. He put the peeled and sliced bananas in hot oil until they turned golden brown, both on the outside and inside. Then, he took them out and placed them on clean paper towel to absorb the excess oil. He added a generous strip of mozzarella cheese inside the banana and put it in the microwave. We could have used the oven, but we opted for the simple version. It tasted good, but I believe it would have been even better with a stronger cheese.

In general, the food here is not particularly spicy. It is healthy and diverse, because Ecuador is simply the land of fruits and all kinds of greenery. If you want spiciness, you have to go several hundred kilometers north to Mexico.
And speaking of cheese: I miss it here. I can manage without french fries, my second staple food, no problem. But a fine, flavorful Appenzeller surchoix? You can't find it here. However, I have managed to find some decent cheese in the past few days. Gruyère, Tilsiter, Gouda. They are all produced in Ecuador and therefore different from what we have at home. On the other hand, there are other things here that you won't find in Swiss supermarkets, like sweet milk, for example.
No complaints. After all, I'm not here to eat fondue and raclette.

Today, I took a little stroll through the streets, right around quitting time. I felt like a part of this city. Nobody knows who I am, just as I don't know about the others. But it seems that I am a small dot of color among the two and a half million Quitenos. These are moments that seep under your skin and later shape the memories of this time. And what is also beautiful, I have to say once again: I have a wonderful wife, amazing children, two of them already independent and one on her way there, a house, great friends, and a world that I love. This is what makes me feel comfortable here as well.

The weather this morning was simply awful. Rain, rain, and even cold. Unlike Switzerland, it is always a damp cold here. In the morning, when you put on the shirt that was hanging in the closet to dry, it is uniformly damp. The houses are cold because there is no heating. Nowhere. When it's cold here, you can go into a house and immediately feel warm. Here, it's just as cold inside, but when the sun comes out, it gets warmer outside right away, while inside it takes some time for the temperature to rise from ten degrees. People here sometimes walk around in padded jackets inside their homes.
Like everything else, it's a matter of getting used to.

As I was strolling around the area with my plastic bag containing ham, cheese, and rolls, it started to rain again. Since I happened to pass by the hair salon on Avenuda Portugal, I decided to get my hair cut and trim my beard. Although the barber didn't trim it as much as I wanted, he still did a good job with the few hairs he worked on. It cost me $6 and took him half an hour.
The haircut was perfect and the rain had stopped. Two birds with one stone.