Morning Edition

Breakfast is sacred time for me. The food is important--and those who have seen me prepare my breakfast tell me it approaches ritual--but, honestly, what I enjoy most is lingering over the meal. It is quiet time, time to read, time to write, time to reflect.

I so jealously guard this time that no matter when I wake up, breakfast completely fills in the gap between then and when I have to leave the house. It makes no difference if I allow myself 30 minutes or three hours for breakfast, I will always be in a rush at the end and invariably late to wherever it is I need to be.

In my corporate career I attended my fair share of 7:30am breakfast meetings--I even called a few of them--but I never really enjoyed them. I'm not the type who likes the feeling of rushing out of the house to begin the day.

Here in Quito, my breakfast routine is similar in structure to what it was in New York, but the trappings are certainly different. I wake up at six, just before the sun rises over the eastern Cordillera and into my face. I like to be awake to watch as the clouds that invariably cling to the mountains turn pink and yellow with the sun. Sometimes, the illuminated adobe and granite facade of the church down the hill appears to take on the same creamy pinkish cast of the clouds at exactly the same moment (see image at the bottom of this post).

Breakfast begins with tea and Spanish vocabulary at my desk. (I save the excellent Ecuadorian coffee for my afternoon pick-me-up.) The rest of my breakfast I eat a bit later on the patio, in the full face of the sun (see left--can you believe that hat?). Generally, I eat bread and cheese and fruit.

The traditional Ecuadoran cheese is a non-aged cheese (queso fresco). It is bright white and soft, with the cool creaminess of mozzarella and the shape and texture of feta, but without the dryness. At first I was skeptical of it. Now I eat it every day.

Then there is the fruit. There is so much to say about the fruit here in Ecuador that I'll have to devote a future post to the topic. For now, I'll just mention the two in the picture below. Uvillas (little grapes) are a firm, yellow fruit with a slight tartness. They are about the size of grapes and have the skin texture of a tomato. I love the sharp, cool feeling as they pop and release their juice inside my mouth. I eat them by the handful. I've been going through about two pounds a week.

The other fruit in the picture is granadilla (little grenade), a type of passion fruit. To get at the sweet, gloppy fruit inside, you have to crack and peel the hard rind just like you would crack a hard-boiled egg. The grey, gelatinous insides of the fruit, which you eat with a spoon, are hideous. Ask people what it is reminiscent of and you'll get anything from snot to uncooked sheep brains. It is best not to think about these when eating grandilla.

Recently, I've also been eating candied black figs, which are not technically fruit, as far as I'm concerned. These come drenched in honey and are best enjoyed with slices of queso fresco (white cheese) to cut the sweetness of the figs. It's an excellent combination. The perfect finish to a long breakfast.

The NPR program, Morning Edition, has been part of my breakfast routine ever since I moved to New York in 1992. I miss it. Sure, I could listen to Morning Edition on line, but that wouldn't be the same. So, I listen to local radio. Lately, I've been listening to Radio Publica Ecuador (RPE). It's pretty good but if the name implies an NPR equivalent, that's not quite accurate. The station is free of commercials and has a peppy line-up of news, talk, and music--and lessons in Quichua, the language of the country's largest indigenous minority, hosted by my latest heartthrob, the effervescent Marta--but rather than being a station that attempts to reflect the broad range of views in the country, RPE is really the mouthpiece of the government. And in Ecuador, that means it is the mouthpiece of Rafeal Correa, the young, charismatic, and wildly popular president. The New Yorker recently wondered if he might not be "Another Obama." Here he is striding in the surf, Obama-like.

Correa is rapidly changing many aspects of society and government in Ecuador. He recently pushed through a new constitution which abolished the congress. Granted, it was a notoriously corrupt body, but I'm still trying to figure out how laws are now being made in Ecuador. Another constitutional change: abolishment of hourly employment. This was an effort to curb the use of third party contract agencies that paid workers less than minimum wage. What this will do to job creation is beyond me. Correa is an economist and should have been able to come up with a better way to curb wage abuses than by enshrining full-time employment in the constitution.

Like Ecuadorian fruit, Rafael Correa is endlessly fascinating and deserves a future posting here all to himself. But for now I'm interested in his relationship with the media. Almost since his election, Correa has been feuding with the press. Like Obama, he wants to reach out to his legions of supporters without the filter of the news media. But, as Obama is finding out, this is hard to do when the question is not a campaign but the business of daily government.

Correa's latest feud with the media came about a couple of weeks ago when the local press picked up a story that ran in Colombia alleging the FARC--the guerrilla movement in that country--had helped fund Correa's campaign.

It was around this time I started listening to Radio Publica Ecuador. At the height of the controversy, every hour on the hour, there would come a "special message from the government" in which a stentorian voice (not Correa's), harangued the news media, claiming it had been spreading misleading stories about the government. The two-minute long message warned the people to be wary of one-sided reporting and closed by saying the government supported the idea of some third-party watch dog organization to oversee the media and ensure fair reporting.

These messages stopped the day the government sheepishly released evidence showing the FARC's leader had indeed tried to give money to Correa's campaign, although without Correa's direct knowledge.

But this didn't stop the government from pushing its idea of an independent media watch dog. What happened when the government didn't get any takers on this idea? It went ahead and established its own. Independent?

These are exciting times to be a journalist in Ecuador--or simply a media watcher. Meanwhile, the Ecuadoran version of Morning Edition will ensure my breakfast time listening remains entertaining.

Morning twilight in Guapulo