On our way back from the terraces and harvesting beans, Micheal’s wife Katia drives across and up the other side of the mountain. The roads are steep and very bumpy. We are going to pay a visit to her sister. We come almost to the end of the lane, high up with a staggering view down behind us over the suburbs of Quito… we park and enter the property through a door in a high wall. I am staggered. There are two houses, well one is a house the other, as is the art studio. Both are beautifully constructed, painted white with dark wooden windows with small square panes of glass, stained glass in parts and flowering creepers blanketing the sides. As we enter the hall it opens out into a sitting area raised up and a series of steps down to an open airy kitchen and dining area all with floor to ceiling views down the mountain. Beautiful pictures and objects hang on the wall, every piece of furniture designed but comfortable and the floor tiles spiralling in accordance with the curve of the stairs. The art studio is of a similar appearance but a two story round design with views out from every side. Perfect for an artist.
And the strange thing, I feel instantly at home in this atmosphere. I have spent so much time in Ecuador surrounded by utilitarian design quite happily forgetting how great good design makes you feel. Perhaps it is this or the fantastically warm welcome that Katia’s sister gives me but I feel like I never want to leave this house, and part of me wishes it was mine. It’s strange, the experience of coming across such luxury in a country where I spend most of my time avoiding the issue of wealth. It makes me realise that for me the whole process of reconciling any wealth I have with the world I see around me I find incredibly hard. I seem to want to be in constant denial of having, wanting or needing anything. I seem to want to live on nothing whilst also knowing the reality is different. I’m rather lost in the middle somewhere between wanting to live on very little but knowing that to deny yourself of almost everything you want is perhaps unnecessary and liable to make you unhappy. There must be a happy medium somewhere, but in this country where I am a foreigner and the culture foreign, it’s hard to know my place. Could I as a foreigner, come here and buy land and build a house with all I could afford whilst seeing people around me with so much less. It’s just the same in the UK, there’s a wealth gap, but here this isn’t my culture and I feel the need to tread everso much more carefully. For me the solution isn’t simple. How can I be happy having things when so many have so very little?
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