Memorable day

This morning, I still hadn’t got a response from David. So I still was with no concrete directions, still not knowing what my boss was wanting me to do.
Never mind, I decided to go to an internet café and gather the maximum possible information on the banana market. At noon, Fabian called me and tolled me that I could go to Cuenca (3rd city of Ecuador) with a cousin, Daniel Bermeo. He is actually one of my bosses brother.
Daniel was going to Cuenca for a challenger tennis tournament.
I obviously accepted the offer and ten minutes later, Fabian and Toya picked me up in the internet café and drove me home (not even 2km) so that I could get packed for the journey.
We then went, the three of us, to a delicious Italian restaurant for lunch and drove straight to the airport where I’ve met up with Danny. As usual in an airport, we waited in the line, registered our luggage, passed the security checks and boarded the plane.
But something really unusual happened, as the plane got to the take off slope, we got a message from the steward saying that there is a plane blocked in the middle of the slope and that for the next half hour, we would not be able to take off.
What do you say to that? Ok captain, we will follow the orders! You actually don’t really have much of a choice.
But when the captain come back up to you to tell you that we are going back to the gate and that we shall unboard the plane.
You really start to wonder why the plane in front of you doesn’t get the hell out of our take off ramp.
As Danny and I get off the plane, we are bombarded by all kind of different information. I plane shall leave in an hour, two hours, not leave before the next morning, actually it shall leave in an hour in a half.
What to believe, nobody had an idea. But I took advantage of this opportunity to speak to the cute girl of our aircraft, no not a steward, a plane passenger. Cecilia is actually a girl living in Cuenca, who actually came to Quito for her younger sister to get a very serious operation.
We’ve chatted for over an hour and have exchanged details before we got a final piece of information from the company airline telling us that the flight would definitely not take us to our final destination before the next morning at the first hour, 7:15am take off.
As everybody started to leave the airport, Danny him went back to the departure hall, because he was desperate to go to Cuenca for his tournament, as I stayed to look over our baggage and talk to Cecilia.
Cecilia left and Danny came back with one single seat on another airline that would be boarding any minute from now. He was going to leave without me, but I was going to attend Riccardo Jr.’s big party celebration for his doctorate graduation.
I first went to the Bermeo’s house where Raul, Daniel older brother and by little younger than David, lend me one of his blazers ties socks and pans. It all was a little small, but it definitely looked smarter than my polo and jeans.
We then drove to Riccardo’s place but we were two hours late, at 9:00pm. As we got there, it was the family speech session. What an embarrassment to get there so late, but whatever, I was starving so shoved up a couple canapés that were going around.
As Riccardo father and son had finished their speech, the party could go on.
What a lot of fun, I have never seen such a celebration, everybody was drinking from 7 to 77 year old. There wasn’t a minute to get bored, everybody was really social, I got to meet a small part of the family I still hadn’t met and got to meet some of the family’s business partners and so on.
Never have I ever seen anything like that before, not even in bar mitzvahs is there a drinking culture like this one, I was loving it.
By midnight, the people left at the party were mainly the family members. Several of them were over joyful but I was starting to feel a daisy step and an unknown constant smile hanging on my face, but drinking didn’t stop it just intensified before we headed off.
We are David, Raul and his girlfriend Maria José and Riccardo (not the new doctorate) and his wife Veronica. We went to a bullfighting ring that was turned into a nightclub. It was an overloaded nightclub, but that was not going to unplease me, because if it wasn’t loaded, people would dance the salsa style and I don’t know about it. So this was perfect, I could dance my style. I danced for a good 20’ with Veronica as we were on our own in the middle of the dance floor, but as the others got back, I decided to dance the “podium”, and so I went and made a fool out of myself.
But as soon as I dropped off the podium, Pablo came up to me, I didn’t even notice he was in the night club. He took me through the night club towards his group of usual friends that were here with him. But I didn’t stay there for long, because another person I didn’t know this time took my hand and took me towards one of his group of friends, I started dancing and in no more than ten minutes, I had hooked up with Carolina, my first novia here in Ecuador.
I stayed with her until the nightclub closed which was actually no more than half an hour, but I got her details. Then I met back with the initial group I had come with, but when it got to leaving, we still had to pay our drinks we had taken while dancing. What a mess, everybody was pushing to get through and pay there share before the others. Luckily I am tall and I’ve been able to reach the counter quickly, but seriously that system was a disaster.
Riccardo and his wife drove me back to the Bermeo’s home where I was suppose to spend the night, but I actually only had one hour left before the wake up call to drive to the airport for Cuenca.

What a great day, full of unexpected experience, but definitely unforgettable.