I (Elise) have spent the last three hours, sitting in the office of immigration (Ministerio de la Extranjeria), in order to report to Ecuador that I have arrived!  It gave me time to mourn the exit of Obama and grudingly accept that the incoming administration is, in fact, Mr. Trump & Co.  

It also gave me some time to reflect on the last 2,5 weeks that have absolutely FLOWN by! Filled with a lot of hours sitting and waiting in various government offices: 

  • Senescyt (to register our foreign degrees)
    You can meet friends queuing
  • SRI (to get a tax number)
  • Registro Civil (to TRY unsusccessfully to get our marriage registered and get a new national ID card for Andréś/Norbert)
  • Notary Public (to get documents that say that German Norbert Andrés Murgueitio is the same person as Ecuadorian Norbert Andrés Müller Murgueitio and French Elise Thérèse Serbaroli is the same as the US-American Elise Therese Serbaroli….)
  • Translators office (to translate any and every official document we’ve ever had)
  • CNT (to get cell phone #’s)
  • Customs Office at the airport (4 visits until we successfully picked up the 7 boxes we shipped from Switzerland)
    So close to our boxes and yet so far

Time sure flies when you’re sitting around government offices!

Between visits to gov’t offices, we’ve been blessed with Andres’ mother’s cooking.

Petra’s cooking lab and outcomes 🙂
 

She is Ecuadorian, and has had Chinese, German and Moroccan influences in her cooking experiences.  That talent mixed with delicious raw materials available here (for example, the backyard honey, avocados and cactus fruit) makes for constantly delicious meals, that can only be described as culinary genius!

Avocados, bees and Cactus fruit in the backyard

On the professional end, I was lucky to land a part-time teaching position at the University of San Francisco de Quito, which is up the street from where we are living.  

San Francisco University Campus

The schedule is perfect, because it leaves me time to fit in all of these government visits!  Andrés is busy getting an understanding of the food industry here, and has had a few promising conversations that will hopefully eventually bear fruit. 

All in all, we’re filled with gratitude, excitement and curiosity at having this opportunity.  We’re also optimistic that, after a few years of playing around with the idea and almost a full year of preparing ourselves financially and psychologically, we’ve taken the right decision of moving here.  (Reading news stories like this one doesn’t hurt either!).