¿Quién es Eduardo?

La pregunta es: ¿Quién es Eduardo? or in English: Who is Eduardo? Now that the question has been posed we shall provide part of the answer. Eduardo is the friend I met in the summer of 2007 in Quito on the basketball courts in El Parque de la Carolina. He, along with his then roommate, Cesar, invited me to come stay with them during my next visit here in Ecuador. I took them up on the offer and now I’m staying with Eduardo (Cesar is in now working in Spain).

Eduardo is a man of many names and many talents. Eduardo is actually his second name, his first is Abel, but he prefers Eduardo or Edu for short. Edu works as a computer programmer by day and baller by night (and the weekends). I know of few other people here in Ecuador that are as into basketball as Edu. First and foremost, the man’s got skillz, and yes that’s skillz with a “Z.” I mean, you know someone’s a baller when they have a backboard from the park and a pile of championship and MVP trophy medallions as decorative pieces in their living room.

He’s also got a basketball shoe collection that would make most shoe-philes in the US jealous and most of the time he’s playing outdoors (which is killer on your body as well as your shoes). I’m literally burning holes through the soles of the shoes I brought to play with out here (last summer I had two pairs fall apart on me). Despite a busy work schedule, Edu plays ball 4x a week and parties about the same number of nights a week.

While I’ve been resting up for the big B-day party, Edu has been coming home at 3, 4, 5, or 6am in the morning. And he’ll sleep for a couple hours and be ready to go ball by 8am. I’m still rolling around in the bed at this time on the weekends, and Edu will come in my room like “¿Listo para jugar?” Ready to play? I got 3 or 4 times more sleep than you Edu and you’re ready to play already? I tried to say I don’t play well before the afternoon, but I’ve gotten more used to it especially with my compañero pushing me out of bed in the morning.

Oh, so onto the B-day party. Edu and me are basically the same age. He just hit the big 3-0 and I’m about to in a few weeks. I’ll tell you though, we both live young. I think it’s the jugo especial we had the night of the party (or all the ball we play).

The night of the party the house had waves of people coming through to pay their respects to the birthday boy and the liberations were flowing for 10 hours straight! That’s right. Mas o menos we had started partying around 7pm and I think I went to bed around 5am. Not really sure though, but that’s another story, and there were many other details that I’ll have leave for another time (the pics I think speak to the kind of time we had). Bottom line is that we kept it movin from sundown to sunup. And that’s how Edu "do" on the regular.