YOU HAVE THREE WISHES! booms the genie in my head between the time I crawl into bed and the time I fall asleep. (Apparently Grandma Helen falls asleep at the exact moment that the pillow meets her head; but I got the Swanson genes of lying awake and thinking for a long time before the Sandman takes me.) WHAT’LL IT BE?
“Great!” I say to myself, “I’d like to be independent, and… exercise more.”
I must be the kind of fairy tale junkie that misses the moral of the story: “be careful what you wish for.”
On Friday night after most of our classmates had set off for weekend beach excursions, six of us girls set out to find a specific club which supposedly had several different locations within a radius of the hotel. We never ended up finding it, though we stopped for directions about 5 times, and after trying out a couple of other locations ended up eventually right back where we’d started, in the same bar we always go, with the bartender we know.
Wish numbers 1 and 2 got me lost three times this week. Trying to save Grampi the (short) trip to the Carcelen Supermaxi, I rode the Carcelen bus all the way to the end of the line, which happened to be behind the basketball courts of a more run-down barrio than I’d walked around in to date, and a run-down barrio that I could not locate on my mental map of Quito. After making a few phone calls, I jumped on a bus that I assumed was going back into town, to get off at Supermaxi after all… When I realized the bus wasn’t going where I wanted to go, I hopped off onto a graffiti’d cement street and felt the grey walls and street and sky pushing my panic buttons. My hit-or-miss sense of direction (also inherited from my dad) started me walking up the hill the way I wanted to go, and there it was: Terminal Carcelen, right at the bottom of the street where Grampi lives. “I’m extra-happy to see you,” Helen laughed as I walked in a few minutes later, and nudged me toward the cookies.
The next morning I went to church with Grampi and the pastor spoke like a poet, with all the pauses, breaths and emphasis of a great word-speaker. He spoke of finding time and making time for God, drawing from the New Testament poets Paul and Jesus the way Fake Andrew draws from Shihan, Shane Hawley, Sage Francis and each other. I felt comfortable again, I found a fellow speaker of the word.
Later on in the house I found more words, this time printed and leather-bound: a shelf full of classics with publication dates like 1921 and old owners’ autographs pencilled onto the title page in the precise curly script of the last century.
Back in the city on Monday, I set out with an address copied from a guidebook, my passport, and $10 to renew my soon-to-expire 90-day tourist visa. Feeling determined and capable, I took the bus to exactly the right place only to be told that I was at the wrong place, and the right place was mere blocks from my home base, on my own turf, in my own ‘hood! So I took the Trole bus back, crammed so full of people we didn’t even have to hold onto anything in order to stay standing, to the address they gave me. And there I was directed across the street and to the following morning, to an office only open from eight to noon three days a week. Feeling discouraged but at least better-informed, I trudged back home in another gathering storm. This time the heavy clouds promised refreshment, but the iron gates in front of the hotel were a welcome sight.
I have power-walked back and forth to that office at least 5 times this week. Twice I’ve been the first one there and spent two whole mornings tapping my feet waiting for my number to be called, waiting to be told what other documents I needed to fill out and what other payments I needed to make. Finally I think I did everything, but I have to go back again to pick up the final visa, my passport and other necessary documents. I am frustrated and finally understand why everyone hates bureaucracy. Fabian said, “Now you know what it’s like for us getting visas to your country.” That’s not even the beginning of it. By the time I shell out the exit tax at the airport, I will have paid a dollar a day just to exist within a space defined by invisible borders.
Sick of getting my exercise under extremely stressful conditions, I did a graffiti tour of the town with Taylor yesterday, and set out this afternoon with Brad and Katie to Parque Alameda to take a turn in the rowboats. Quito’s buildings are covered with spray painted political messages, not as artistic as some North American displays, but definitely more politically aware than a lot of the shows I’ve seen. Or rather, more aware of mainstream politics: “Pobre país en los manos de naños listos,” a reference to President Correa and his brother, who are making a lot of changes and a lot of enemies.
Parque Alameda has been on my destination list since my second week here. It boasts an old observatory with astronomical, meteorological, seismological instruments dating back over 100 years, and one of the oldest functioning telescopes in the world. We finally rented a rowboat ($1.50 for half an hour) and took two laps around the lazy river carved into the park. On its banks people nap or read; beyond them buses and cars belch black smoke into the air between the towering office buildings framing the valley on one side and the mountains on the other. And above that, sunshine, finally.
I have had a great run in this country and even without a genie I’ve had lots of wishes come true. But when this genie comes back to ask for my third wish, I’m going to say, “Genie, I want to go home.”
27 August 2009
18 August 2009
la patria: playing limbo for family, country and home
“So, I just have to ask,” says Steve Macdonald through the phone from Vancouver, in the middle of his third confirmation call, “are you Canadian?” I laugh. “No, I’m from Minnesota. Not too far off.” I imagine him shaking his head. “Normally I pride myself on being able to pick out accents, especially Canadian accents… But yours had me stumped!”
This is a common problem: “Where are you from?” someone might ask, intending to spark some pleasant small talk. I inevitably hesitate, calculating which town or country would make most sense to this person and which one I would most easily be able to explain in ten words or less. During this pause, my companion’s smile falters as they wonder what kind of space cadet they are talking to.
Fortunately I have invented a simple formula for such situations. When someone thinks I’m Canadian, I’m actually from Minnesota. When I meet members of the North American university crowd I strike up a rousing chorus of Um Yah Yah, and I make people laugh through bitter Minnesota Januaries by speaking with an Upstate New York accent. If I can get a national discount for being Ecuadorian, I whip out my cédula, and as far as street cred goes, in my favorite restaurant 4 Ases, I’m a legit quiteña.
On August 15, my family dresses up in their Indian best to sing Jana Gana Mana with the subcontinent’s 1.15 billion. But as Ecuador’s Bicentennial passes (el 10 de agosto), I find myself more tightly wrapped in the yellow F.E.F. jerseys and close-toed shoes of my country of birth.
I spent most of el Día de la Independencia on a bus with my friends, on our way back from a weekend in Baños. We slept most the afternoon, but just before we got into Quito I looked out the window between the curtains and lost my breath. In the soft pre-dusk light everything looked sharper – the road and the trees unfolded in front of us like pages of a pop-up book, the mountains exploded navy purple against the cloudless sky, snowcaps glinting pink in the falling sun. The sun itself shot a crown of rays through the sunset clouds and the valleys and then we crested a hill and the snakelike city of Quito spread out beneath us. I felt very patriotic, at home between walls of sierra.
Baños reeled me in with its pungent park and glowing steeples, $1 earrings and Andean street bands and cuy (an equatorial cousin of the guinea pig) roasting in front of shops. The main drag sported restaurants, bars and heladerías, and little sweet stalls piled high with fresh-pulled taffy, rich berry syrup, dulce de leche and fruit paste. Tourists roar past on ATVs and dune buggies while Mama Tungurahua looks down over it all with a stern but loving eye, crowned at our arrival with the clearest rainbow I have ever seen.
Stationed at the headwaters of the Amazon, Baños is surrounded by waterfalls. I knew the gorge from a ten-year-old memory. From the one-bus suspension bridge I peek out the window and look straight down hundreds of feet to the river crammed between two sheer rock faces. On the other side some of the students find their inner Superman on the zipline across the canyon, while below them I inevitably miss the next rock in my trail and fall into the river. We visit three more waterfalls and take a metal basket tarabita across one of them, singing the Indiana Jones theme song with the wind whipping through our hair. The last of them is so massive it is called el Pailon del Diablo, or the Devil’s Cauldron. We get soaked within meters of the falls, whose deafening mass crashes down on top of another rainbow.
We eventually rustled up $15 for a cuy, and ended up taking more sensationalist photos with its head and claws than eating its dark meat. José came back from his biking excursion with cuts all across his face, and on Dana’s birthday one of the bartenders whipped up some flaming shots and colored bendy straws “solo para las chicas!” The blue-lit church steeple tempted me to Mass (I resisted in favor of dinner), and Hannah made me cry with a song she’d written about how we too often stop believing in things as we grow up, we have to be in control of our selves and our emotions, and the ways we try to get that hope back. It struck a nerve, and she has a beautiful voice. Unlike the parrot in the backyard, whose squawks beneath our window never failed to make me jump. A bright green hummingbird also took up residence in the tree just outside, sipping from white flowers.
I am in awe of these miracles. Last week we took a field trip to a flower factory where they grow roses at high altitude and in direct sunlight to export to florists around the world. A lot of the mountain towns sell only one thing: Cayambe, aside from the flowers, specializes in a crunchy bread snack called bizcocho, while Pelileo sells denim and Quisapincha all kinds of leather. On top of the TeleferiQo at 4100m with Grampi and Matt, I check out the distantly visible socioeconomic spectrum of Quito’s barrios through the telescope. We take turns at the oxygen bar, a lab-like set of tubes with different colors of liquid bubbling inside them. They slip a tube over our head and into our noses and we breathe scented oxygen while looking down at the city and the cable car gliding up and down the mountain. (Grampi testifies to the supervisor about how the oxygen bar glorifies God, and she nods along until the 15 minutes are up.)
In the cloud forests of Mindo we step into a netted jungle, a butterfly breeding ground populated by at least 12 species of different sizes, shapes and colors. The tube guide of Mindo is dark with golden honey eyes, muscles rippling like the river as he pulls and pushes seven tubes tied together over rocks and rapids with eight or nine people on top. Our canopy guides hook each of us onto the ziplines to soar over the jungle with our lives in their hands and a playful smile. In another moment of identity crisis I become a butterfly, flying upside-down, arms and legs stretched out, over the jungles, under the sky, between the peaks. Around the fire at our campsite that night, somebody stumbles upon a huge wolf spider with an equally huge egg sac at her abdomen. We take turns petting her before Xavier the bug expert sets her free in the dark with the fireflies.
My cousin Matt just graduated from high school in Chapel Hill, NC, and spent a month in the jungle and a week in Quito before heading off to become a Sun Devil at Arizona State. He looks the part, tall and very blond, his face pink from the sun and his shoulders tanned from being on the river all summer. That week we saw the crime-fighting cuy in Fuerza-G and toured the Voice of the Andes – the HCJB radio station and Hospital Vozandes, with a personal tour from jungle doctor Wally Swanson. On Matt’s last night in town some of our jungle cousins surprised us at the hotel. We all went out to 4 Ases, where a ten-member band and a German with dreadlocks burst in drumming, making handicrafts out of beads and wire and singing raucously over their cheap Ecuadorian beers. The lead singer, a wiry little man with long black hair, started giving shout-outs to all our patrias, to Ecuador, Germany, Colombia, Bolivia… Matt told them he was Swiss, and I said I am from Quito. They didn’t believe me at first, but then they laughed and asked my name. “Ah, you are Clarita, and she is Oscurita!” one man chortles, pointing at the cheery little Bolivian woman in the corner. She waves, I catch the eye of the clear-faced German, and everyone starts singing again.
I am all of this; I am what I say and what I make: the Tour d’Eiffel earring stand for Natalia’s growing collection of arretes, the gringuito fish and potato wedges for dinner, apple oatmeal for breakfast. I am a presentation about xenophobia and a poem about love. I am from many places and many people: my Swedish great-grandparents, the gathering of Latin American presidents in the Estadio on August 10, my two sets of missionary grandparents. I am ROLLING in social capital. I am independent, interdependent, a cynic and a believer, a crier, a laugher, a lover and a liver. I’m LILLY, I am the QUEEN, and I like EVERYTHING!
This is a common problem: “Where are you from?” someone might ask, intending to spark some pleasant small talk. I inevitably hesitate, calculating which town or country would make most sense to this person and which one I would most easily be able to explain in ten words or less. During this pause, my companion’s smile falters as they wonder what kind of space cadet they are talking to.
Fortunately I have invented a simple formula for such situations. When someone thinks I’m Canadian, I’m actually from Minnesota. When I meet members of the North American university crowd I strike up a rousing chorus of Um Yah Yah, and I make people laugh through bitter Minnesota Januaries by speaking with an Upstate New York accent. If I can get a national discount for being Ecuadorian, I whip out my cédula, and as far as street cred goes, in my favorite restaurant 4 Ases, I’m a legit quiteña.
On August 15, my family dresses up in their Indian best to sing Jana Gana Mana with the subcontinent’s 1.15 billion. But as Ecuador’s Bicentennial passes (el 10 de agosto), I find myself more tightly wrapped in the yellow F.E.F. jerseys and close-toed shoes of my country of birth.
I spent most of el Día de la Independencia on a bus with my friends, on our way back from a weekend in Baños. We slept most the afternoon, but just before we got into Quito I looked out the window between the curtains and lost my breath. In the soft pre-dusk light everything looked sharper – the road and the trees unfolded in front of us like pages of a pop-up book, the mountains exploded navy purple against the cloudless sky, snowcaps glinting pink in the falling sun. The sun itself shot a crown of rays through the sunset clouds and the valleys and then we crested a hill and the snakelike city of Quito spread out beneath us. I felt very patriotic, at home between walls of sierra.
Baños reeled me in with its pungent park and glowing steeples, $1 earrings and Andean street bands and cuy (an equatorial cousin of the guinea pig) roasting in front of shops. The main drag sported restaurants, bars and heladerías, and little sweet stalls piled high with fresh-pulled taffy, rich berry syrup, dulce de leche and fruit paste. Tourists roar past on ATVs and dune buggies while Mama Tungurahua looks down over it all with a stern but loving eye, crowned at our arrival with the clearest rainbow I have ever seen.
Stationed at the headwaters of the Amazon, Baños is surrounded by waterfalls. I knew the gorge from a ten-year-old memory. From the one-bus suspension bridge I peek out the window and look straight down hundreds of feet to the river crammed between two sheer rock faces. On the other side some of the students find their inner Superman on the zipline across the canyon, while below them I inevitably miss the next rock in my trail and fall into the river. We visit three more waterfalls and take a metal basket tarabita across one of them, singing the Indiana Jones theme song with the wind whipping through our hair. The last of them is so massive it is called el Pailon del Diablo, or the Devil’s Cauldron. We get soaked within meters of the falls, whose deafening mass crashes down on top of another rainbow.
We eventually rustled up $15 for a cuy, and ended up taking more sensationalist photos with its head and claws than eating its dark meat. José came back from his biking excursion with cuts all across his face, and on Dana’s birthday one of the bartenders whipped up some flaming shots and colored bendy straws “solo para las chicas!” The blue-lit church steeple tempted me to Mass (I resisted in favor of dinner), and Hannah made me cry with a song she’d written about how we too often stop believing in things as we grow up, we have to be in control of our selves and our emotions, and the ways we try to get that hope back. It struck a nerve, and she has a beautiful voice. Unlike the parrot in the backyard, whose squawks beneath our window never failed to make me jump. A bright green hummingbird also took up residence in the tree just outside, sipping from white flowers.
I am in awe of these miracles. Last week we took a field trip to a flower factory where they grow roses at high altitude and in direct sunlight to export to florists around the world. A lot of the mountain towns sell only one thing: Cayambe, aside from the flowers, specializes in a crunchy bread snack called bizcocho, while Pelileo sells denim and Quisapincha all kinds of leather. On top of the TeleferiQo at 4100m with Grampi and Matt, I check out the distantly visible socioeconomic spectrum of Quito’s barrios through the telescope. We take turns at the oxygen bar, a lab-like set of tubes with different colors of liquid bubbling inside them. They slip a tube over our head and into our noses and we breathe scented oxygen while looking down at the city and the cable car gliding up and down the mountain. (Grampi testifies to the supervisor about how the oxygen bar glorifies God, and she nods along until the 15 minutes are up.)
In the cloud forests of Mindo we step into a netted jungle, a butterfly breeding ground populated by at least 12 species of different sizes, shapes and colors. The tube guide of Mindo is dark with golden honey eyes, muscles rippling like the river as he pulls and pushes seven tubes tied together over rocks and rapids with eight or nine people on top. Our canopy guides hook each of us onto the ziplines to soar over the jungle with our lives in their hands and a playful smile. In another moment of identity crisis I become a butterfly, flying upside-down, arms and legs stretched out, over the jungles, under the sky, between the peaks. Around the fire at our campsite that night, somebody stumbles upon a huge wolf spider with an equally huge egg sac at her abdomen. We take turns petting her before Xavier the bug expert sets her free in the dark with the fireflies.
My cousin Matt just graduated from high school in Chapel Hill, NC, and spent a month in the jungle and a week in Quito before heading off to become a Sun Devil at Arizona State. He looks the part, tall and very blond, his face pink from the sun and his shoulders tanned from being on the river all summer. That week we saw the crime-fighting cuy in Fuerza-G and toured the Voice of the Andes – the HCJB radio station and Hospital Vozandes, with a personal tour from jungle doctor Wally Swanson. On Matt’s last night in town some of our jungle cousins surprised us at the hotel. We all went out to 4 Ases, where a ten-member band and a German with dreadlocks burst in drumming, making handicrafts out of beads and wire and singing raucously over their cheap Ecuadorian beers. The lead singer, a wiry little man with long black hair, started giving shout-outs to all our patrias, to Ecuador, Germany, Colombia, Bolivia… Matt told them he was Swiss, and I said I am from Quito. They didn’t believe me at first, but then they laughed and asked my name. “Ah, you are Clarita, and she is Oscurita!” one man chortles, pointing at the cheery little Bolivian woman in the corner. She waves, I catch the eye of the clear-faced German, and everyone starts singing again.
I am all of this; I am what I say and what I make: the Tour d’Eiffel earring stand for Natalia’s growing collection of arretes, the gringuito fish and potato wedges for dinner, apple oatmeal for breakfast. I am a presentation about xenophobia and a poem about love. I am from many places and many people: my Swedish great-grandparents, the gathering of Latin American presidents in the Estadio on August 10, my two sets of missionary grandparents. I am ROLLING in social capital. I am independent, interdependent, a cynic and a believer, a crier, a laugher, a lover and a liver. I’m LILLY, I am the QUEEN, and I like EVERYTHING!
01 August 2009
sea level: the hemispheric limbo world record
"Hey Brad," Paul shouts over the waves buffeting the hull of our little boat, "what altitude do you think we're at right now?"
I look around at the unbroken ocean and grin over my shoulder at him, "Probably sea level." A few minutes later I am deathly ill over the side of the boat, and he and Brad both grab my waist to keep me from plunging overboard into the spray. The tiny boat has been riding ocean swells like a rollercoaster for almost two hours, and I've had enough. For me, who has hardly survived any boat ride without getting sick, two and a half hours across the open ocean in a pinprick launch is hell.
But a gorgeous one at that. The water glitters clear cerulean, a color I have not seen in probably at least five years and a color that I love. I survive the trip to our glass-front hotel, separated from the beach by a narrow dirt road, and spend the afternoon bodysurfing, watching for sharks in the crests of waves. No sharks, but the silhouette of a sea lion darts through the thin green wall of water fifteen feet away from us.
I am surely more mermaid than sailor.
***
We take rolls of film full of iguanas, splayed out on the rocks to absorb heat or swimming across an island lagoon, a dragon-like head barely visible above the surface of the water. Watch flamingos and herons and fragates and boobies of all colors and sizes, lean precariously over the shark resting area, where at least four white-tipped tiburones hide from the midday sun, over the side of the boat to catch a glimpse of a sea turtle soaring alongside. Three times we snorkel with sea turtles and twice with a baby sea lion, darting around our group and even accompanying us to the shore when we head in to take off our mask and flippers.
Dana and I, sunning ourselves on the front of the boat, ask the boatdrivers if there are pirates in these islands. No? Mermaids? (The Spanish word is sirena, which makes me smile asking, thinking of Odysseus.) "Yes -- two," he replies, grinning at us. They invite us and our ten friends out dancing to Bar de Beto that night. A son of theirs, who bears the magnificent name "El Capitan Junior," becomes a great friend and important landmark on helado-hunting excursions into the tiny town for snacks and ice cream.
The afternoons pass us on the beach, reading, napping, chatting, or bodysurfing. After a shouted exchange with some guys with a soccer ball, they invite us to play and we gather a team. While we duck waves to cool off, my teammate Gabriel and his compañero Luis introduce themselves and invite us to a discotek for islanders. "Bar de Beto is full of Americans," they say, scoffing -- tourists themselves, from Quito and Guayaquil respectively. In these islands, people actually believe that I am ecuatoriana.
We try to do both. The girls all put on dresses and makeup and nurse expensive drinks while the guys hit on the bartender, a gorgeous 18-year-old from Texas. I still don't know how she got there... We girls leave early and leave them to their flirting, and on the way home decide to take a naked dip in the dark ocean.
On our last day on Isabela we hike up a volcano. We start at the bottom in needlepoint drizzle, at first tiptoeing around the mud on the path until we realize it is probably safer to run, and by the time we reach the top our legs are covered in splattered volcanic soil. The sun gradually burns off the mist so we can see into the crater. The clouds moving through it create the odd impression that we are being sucked into the crater, full of four-year-old volcanic rock, and a rainbow crowning the great canyon gives us the impression that unicorns and leprechauns could emerge at any moment.
The next day we have to madrugar to catch the Launch from Hell at 5:30am. I survive this trip by holding a high stakes conversation with Brad and Dana, covering nearly every possible topic and every possible side of the issue. This time, the rolling waves feel more like a thrill ride and we make it to harbour without incident.
...And promptly onto another boat, a yacht cruise called Poseidon, for the day. We are all so sunburnt from Volcán Chico and so tired from waking up so early that we pass out on the upper deck. At one point I awake under the table surrounded by Brad, Jason, and Paul, all of us sprawled on the floor wherever we could find space. Today we take a few hour-long jaunts around tiny unnamed islands, where I see more carcasses than I ever have before -- of sea lions, iguanas, birds, crabs, and anything else you might imagine. We are also privileged enough to witness the mating dance of the endemic blue-footed booby, whose mating call sounds like the whistle that comes out when you blow on those serrated plastic straws from sippy cups. The boys all vow to try that tactic when they get back to campus in the fall, and I wish them luck. Sort of.
On Santa Cruz we visit a ranch for breeding Galápagos land tortoises. The path is full of guavas and the guide explains to us that someone brought them here and they now threaten the delicate balance of the ecosystem, because their seeds spread and their trees grow faster than they can be eradicated. Between guava trees a few Galápagos coffee trees show clusters of red and green berries, the seeds of which become the coffee beans sold at Starbucks worldwide. The next ranch is more of a country club, where we dance and play cards and sports until lunch. In the afternoon we pull a fast one at the Charles Darwin Research Station, breaking up into groups of three to avoid paying a guide for the afternoon. The Estación basically consists of a cluster of buildings used for researching conservation efforts, and is also the home of Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species. He is pushing 150 years and refused to use his mating years, so he remains the lone member of his type, and holds the burden of extinction on his rapidly weakening shell.
That night we dressed up and went out for sushi, at an expensive beachfront hotel restaurant where I blew $30 on sushi and the best, creamiest piña colada of my life. A middle-aged American tourist approaches us with the typical traveling-students small talk, and explains that he made a "huge mistake" on his order and accidentally got 64 rolls of sushi, and did we want to help him eat some of it. He didn't even have to ask. We went home full and happy and in awe of the world's little miracles.
***
On one of our excursions we encountered the tree of the poison apple, which burns your skin at a mere touch. The squashed and fallen apples and their pits scatter the path and I can't help thinking as we walk along, "Is this Paradise? Is this the legendary Garden of Eden, the back of the Great Turtle?" The basis of fairy tales and the beginnings of religions, of species, of Evolution. All here in one place, the famed archipelago full of animals found nowhere else on earth, formed from the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, found on the latitudinal Center of the Earth, the impossible made visible and the world's miracles at our outstretched fingertips. It is, and is not, unbelievable.
I look around at the unbroken ocean and grin over my shoulder at him, "Probably sea level." A few minutes later I am deathly ill over the side of the boat, and he and Brad both grab my waist to keep me from plunging overboard into the spray. The tiny boat has been riding ocean swells like a rollercoaster for almost two hours, and I've had enough. For me, who has hardly survived any boat ride without getting sick, two and a half hours across the open ocean in a pinprick launch is hell.
But a gorgeous one at that. The water glitters clear cerulean, a color I have not seen in probably at least five years and a color that I love. I survive the trip to our glass-front hotel, separated from the beach by a narrow dirt road, and spend the afternoon bodysurfing, watching for sharks in the crests of waves. No sharks, but the silhouette of a sea lion darts through the thin green wall of water fifteen feet away from us.
I am surely more mermaid than sailor.
***
We take rolls of film full of iguanas, splayed out on the rocks to absorb heat or swimming across an island lagoon, a dragon-like head barely visible above the surface of the water. Watch flamingos and herons and fragates and boobies of all colors and sizes, lean precariously over the shark resting area, where at least four white-tipped tiburones hide from the midday sun, over the side of the boat to catch a glimpse of a sea turtle soaring alongside. Three times we snorkel with sea turtles and twice with a baby sea lion, darting around our group and even accompanying us to the shore when we head in to take off our mask and flippers.
Dana and I, sunning ourselves on the front of the boat, ask the boatdrivers if there are pirates in these islands. No? Mermaids? (The Spanish word is sirena, which makes me smile asking, thinking of Odysseus.) "Yes -- two," he replies, grinning at us. They invite us and our ten friends out dancing to Bar de Beto that night. A son of theirs, who bears the magnificent name "El Capitan Junior," becomes a great friend and important landmark on helado-hunting excursions into the tiny town for snacks and ice cream.
The afternoons pass us on the beach, reading, napping, chatting, or bodysurfing. After a shouted exchange with some guys with a soccer ball, they invite us to play and we gather a team. While we duck waves to cool off, my teammate Gabriel and his compañero Luis introduce themselves and invite us to a discotek for islanders. "Bar de Beto is full of Americans," they say, scoffing -- tourists themselves, from Quito and Guayaquil respectively. In these islands, people actually believe that I am ecuatoriana.
We try to do both. The girls all put on dresses and makeup and nurse expensive drinks while the guys hit on the bartender, a gorgeous 18-year-old from Texas. I still don't know how she got there... We girls leave early and leave them to their flirting, and on the way home decide to take a naked dip in the dark ocean.
On our last day on Isabela we hike up a volcano. We start at the bottom in needlepoint drizzle, at first tiptoeing around the mud on the path until we realize it is probably safer to run, and by the time we reach the top our legs are covered in splattered volcanic soil. The sun gradually burns off the mist so we can see into the crater. The clouds moving through it create the odd impression that we are being sucked into the crater, full of four-year-old volcanic rock, and a rainbow crowning the great canyon gives us the impression that unicorns and leprechauns could emerge at any moment.
The next day we have to madrugar to catch the Launch from Hell at 5:30am. I survive this trip by holding a high stakes conversation with Brad and Dana, covering nearly every possible topic and every possible side of the issue. This time, the rolling waves feel more like a thrill ride and we make it to harbour without incident.
...And promptly onto another boat, a yacht cruise called Poseidon, for the day. We are all so sunburnt from Volcán Chico and so tired from waking up so early that we pass out on the upper deck. At one point I awake under the table surrounded by Brad, Jason, and Paul, all of us sprawled on the floor wherever we could find space. Today we take a few hour-long jaunts around tiny unnamed islands, where I see more carcasses than I ever have before -- of sea lions, iguanas, birds, crabs, and anything else you might imagine. We are also privileged enough to witness the mating dance of the endemic blue-footed booby, whose mating call sounds like the whistle that comes out when you blow on those serrated plastic straws from sippy cups. The boys all vow to try that tactic when they get back to campus in the fall, and I wish them luck. Sort of.
On Santa Cruz we visit a ranch for breeding Galápagos land tortoises. The path is full of guavas and the guide explains to us that someone brought them here and they now threaten the delicate balance of the ecosystem, because their seeds spread and their trees grow faster than they can be eradicated. Between guava trees a few Galápagos coffee trees show clusters of red and green berries, the seeds of which become the coffee beans sold at Starbucks worldwide. The next ranch is more of a country club, where we dance and play cards and sports until lunch. In the afternoon we pull a fast one at the Charles Darwin Research Station, breaking up into groups of three to avoid paying a guide for the afternoon. The Estación basically consists of a cluster of buildings used for researching conservation efforts, and is also the home of Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species. He is pushing 150 years and refused to use his mating years, so he remains the lone member of his type, and holds the burden of extinction on his rapidly weakening shell.
That night we dressed up and went out for sushi, at an expensive beachfront hotel restaurant where I blew $30 on sushi and the best, creamiest piña colada of my life. A middle-aged American tourist approaches us with the typical traveling-students small talk, and explains that he made a "huge mistake" on his order and accidentally got 64 rolls of sushi, and did we want to help him eat some of it. He didn't even have to ask. We went home full and happy and in awe of the world's little miracles.
***
On one of our excursions we encountered the tree of the poison apple, which burns your skin at a mere touch. The squashed and fallen apples and their pits scatter the path and I can't help thinking as we walk along, "Is this Paradise? Is this the legendary Garden of Eden, the back of the Great Turtle?" The basis of fairy tales and the beginnings of religions, of species, of Evolution. All here in one place, the famed archipelago full of animals found nowhere else on earth, formed from the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, found on the latitudinal Center of the Earth, the impossible made visible and the world's miracles at our outstretched fingertips. It is, and is not, unbelievable.
23 July 2009
visiting the hemispheric limbo stick
Queridos,
T-minus 1 day to Galápagos takeoff! And what a week it has been in preparation for it. I sleep less and less every night and have less and less time to do the things I need to do… Es la vida. And I am young, strong and ready for anything!
The Past Week’s Itinerary
Friday: Parque La Carolina for a rousing game of futbol. Most of us had forgotten either water or sunscreen and it was a very hot day – needless to say, we turned a nice spectrum of pinks, in a matter of hours. It was hard to believe that we were playing a game of soccer at 9000 feet, beneath a huge cross, the cupped fingers of the mountain range around us, and jets casting ominous shadows over the buildings towering above us as they took off minutes away from our field.
I walked home with a few of the students and we got juice and food, and set out to find Guápulo, famous for astounding vistas and artsy houses, and a church, which we did not encounter. We climbed up into a beautiful neighbourhood of modern homes and suddenly the ground fell out below us to unfold a series of little valleys full of houses, the city spread out before us like cinnamon sugar toast.
Saturday: Mitad del Mundo con mis abuelos. Grampi picked me up around 11, after calling at least four times to say he was on his way, he accidentally went home, he was 5 minutes away, he was lost, he was outside. We did eventually make it home, had a nice lunch and then I dug up the photo albums while he took a nap and Helen tried to Skype her friend in Poland.
I love the photo albums, hidden in the little tables on either end of the couch. The first few cover the babyhoods of me and my older cousins, but the deeper I venture into the stacks of books the older they get. A good chunk of them relate my dad’s college years, when he was perpetually flushed and wore huge brown-tinted glasses and short shorts. My favourite series documents a trip to the beach that my parents took with my dad’s two sisters. They wear buckets on their heads and stage sword fights with driftwood, my mom barricaded up in a massive sand castle making home improvements while some unclear division defends her and the royal family of crabs. A few of the albums, the dustiest ones, are full of black and white photographs of the missionary years: my uncle Tod decked out in Shuar gear, spears and headdresses and weapon belts; Jeff consistently looking put together, posing suavely for every shot; Lisa the wide-eyed baby, Lori with her wide gappy 8-year-old grin, and my dad always with a pout plastered onto his face.
We eventually made it up to la Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, or the City at the Center of the Earth. The village huddles around the monument laid by the Spanish explorers to mark the position of the Equator, but as it turns out they were much farther off the mark than the Incas, whose equatorial monument is across the road a little way. A group of children in brightly coloured masks and headdresses performed a wild dance involving fighting and flirting in the central plaza, which we passed on our way to the museum of Ecuador’s tribes. Starting at the top, we wound our way down the stairs, and when we reached the jungle tribes Grampi got excited. “Wait a minute,” he said, stopping in front of the Shuar and Huaorani exhibits. “Let me just see if I know any of these people.” Sure enough, the big greyscale photograph of a Huaorani man turned out to be a good friend of his, and the old woman reclining on the wall across from him was in the original group to make contact with the missionaries, and not kill them. “I knew them!” he exclaimed, and started telling stories.
Monday: The alternative health market tour, Mercado Artesanal, and the mall with the girls. In the morning we had our first field trip, catered to our discussion theme of health and medicine. Rocío gave us a tour of the market with special focus on fruits with medicinal properties and an intensive study of the health shop ladies, whose stalls are full of plants and oils and incense. Brent, the sick one, was also the most sceptical. He wanted to go to a “real doctor.”
Megan, Katie and I spent the afternoon shopping, for gifts and clothes to wear in the Galápagos. Before we left Megan said, “I have a feeling this is going to be a hundred-dollar day.” She was right. Katie and I bought hats and dresses, for Katie’s sailor-themed week, and Megan bought art. We didn’t get home until 8:30.
Tuesday: La policía, and Natalia turned 12. Our second field trip took us to the Matriz to interview Major Marcelo Cortez about his personal and institutional views on the death penalty and policies on carrying firearms. In Ecuador both are illegal, but as it turns out most of the people I talked to were in favour of both.
In the afternoon Lori and Juan Miguel had the whole Ecuador family plus Taylor over for pizza. Juan Miguel’s sisters and mother all showed up while I was setting the table and immediately started gushing and telling me that I have the same little face as always, that I look exactly like my mom, and asking what my dad is doing now. I also met an old playmate, Rosita, a cousin of the same age as me. Apparently we used to play together when I was three, and we joined forces with the kids to make a movie about a mean-spirited millionaire whose assistant wants to make off with her dough. Rosita speaks very fast Spanish, but I understood most of what she said. She likes to read philosophy, and though she wouldn’t admit it she was definitely the directora.
Wednesday: La Chispa and los mercados populares. After class Taylor and I had lunch at a Peruvian restaurant called La Chispa, or the Spark, and took the Ecovia downtown to buy cheap Colombian shoes. Rocío had just finished telling our class how the people from the malls buy their goods from these popular markets at $3 or so a pop, and sell them for ten times the price in the fancy stores in the mall. The clothes in those shops are imported from Colombia, which means they are high quality and we got them at the people’s prices. A pair of wedge sandals for $16!
At this point we are so close to the Galápagos that it’s hard to focus on anything, hard to do anything, but this morning I have to give an oral presentation on immigration. I’m sharing the topic with the son of an Ohio lawyer, and my presentation consists of stories of people I know. We’ll see how our takes fit together. Tomorrow we all have to be at the airport at 6am, heading off for a week in a hotel 20 metres from the beach, a few yacht cruises, snorkelling near sharks, hiking up a volcano, and learning about tortoise mating patterns. I could not be more excited. And after class today, it’s all Galápagos all the time. I’m going with the girls to get our nails done, and we have decided we’re going to have a very cute week in the sun, by the clear Caribbean-blue water. It’s been too long since I’ve seen that colour.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Besitos,
Clarita
T-minus 1 day to Galápagos takeoff! And what a week it has been in preparation for it. I sleep less and less every night and have less and less time to do the things I need to do… Es la vida. And I am young, strong and ready for anything!
The Past Week’s Itinerary
Friday: Parque La Carolina for a rousing game of futbol. Most of us had forgotten either water or sunscreen and it was a very hot day – needless to say, we turned a nice spectrum of pinks, in a matter of hours. It was hard to believe that we were playing a game of soccer at 9000 feet, beneath a huge cross, the cupped fingers of the mountain range around us, and jets casting ominous shadows over the buildings towering above us as they took off minutes away from our field.
I walked home with a few of the students and we got juice and food, and set out to find Guápulo, famous for astounding vistas and artsy houses, and a church, which we did not encounter. We climbed up into a beautiful neighbourhood of modern homes and suddenly the ground fell out below us to unfold a series of little valleys full of houses, the city spread out before us like cinnamon sugar toast.
Saturday: Mitad del Mundo con mis abuelos. Grampi picked me up around 11, after calling at least four times to say he was on his way, he accidentally went home, he was 5 minutes away, he was lost, he was outside. We did eventually make it home, had a nice lunch and then I dug up the photo albums while he took a nap and Helen tried to Skype her friend in Poland.
I love the photo albums, hidden in the little tables on either end of the couch. The first few cover the babyhoods of me and my older cousins, but the deeper I venture into the stacks of books the older they get. A good chunk of them relate my dad’s college years, when he was perpetually flushed and wore huge brown-tinted glasses and short shorts. My favourite series documents a trip to the beach that my parents took with my dad’s two sisters. They wear buckets on their heads and stage sword fights with driftwood, my mom barricaded up in a massive sand castle making home improvements while some unclear division defends her and the royal family of crabs. A few of the albums, the dustiest ones, are full of black and white photographs of the missionary years: my uncle Tod decked out in Shuar gear, spears and headdresses and weapon belts; Jeff consistently looking put together, posing suavely for every shot; Lisa the wide-eyed baby, Lori with her wide gappy 8-year-old grin, and my dad always with a pout plastered onto his face.
We eventually made it up to la Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, or the City at the Center of the Earth. The village huddles around the monument laid by the Spanish explorers to mark the position of the Equator, but as it turns out they were much farther off the mark than the Incas, whose equatorial monument is across the road a little way. A group of children in brightly coloured masks and headdresses performed a wild dance involving fighting and flirting in the central plaza, which we passed on our way to the museum of Ecuador’s tribes. Starting at the top, we wound our way down the stairs, and when we reached the jungle tribes Grampi got excited. “Wait a minute,” he said, stopping in front of the Shuar and Huaorani exhibits. “Let me just see if I know any of these people.” Sure enough, the big greyscale photograph of a Huaorani man turned out to be a good friend of his, and the old woman reclining on the wall across from him was in the original group to make contact with the missionaries, and not kill them. “I knew them!” he exclaimed, and started telling stories.
Monday: The alternative health market tour, Mercado Artesanal, and the mall with the girls. In the morning we had our first field trip, catered to our discussion theme of health and medicine. Rocío gave us a tour of the market with special focus on fruits with medicinal properties and an intensive study of the health shop ladies, whose stalls are full of plants and oils and incense. Brent, the sick one, was also the most sceptical. He wanted to go to a “real doctor.”
Megan, Katie and I spent the afternoon shopping, for gifts and clothes to wear in the Galápagos. Before we left Megan said, “I have a feeling this is going to be a hundred-dollar day.” She was right. Katie and I bought hats and dresses, for Katie’s sailor-themed week, and Megan bought art. We didn’t get home until 8:30.
Tuesday: La policía, and Natalia turned 12. Our second field trip took us to the Matriz to interview Major Marcelo Cortez about his personal and institutional views on the death penalty and policies on carrying firearms. In Ecuador both are illegal, but as it turns out most of the people I talked to were in favour of both.
In the afternoon Lori and Juan Miguel had the whole Ecuador family plus Taylor over for pizza. Juan Miguel’s sisters and mother all showed up while I was setting the table and immediately started gushing and telling me that I have the same little face as always, that I look exactly like my mom, and asking what my dad is doing now. I also met an old playmate, Rosita, a cousin of the same age as me. Apparently we used to play together when I was three, and we joined forces with the kids to make a movie about a mean-spirited millionaire whose assistant wants to make off with her dough. Rosita speaks very fast Spanish, but I understood most of what she said. She likes to read philosophy, and though she wouldn’t admit it she was definitely the directora.
Wednesday: La Chispa and los mercados populares. After class Taylor and I had lunch at a Peruvian restaurant called La Chispa, or the Spark, and took the Ecovia downtown to buy cheap Colombian shoes. Rocío had just finished telling our class how the people from the malls buy their goods from these popular markets at $3 or so a pop, and sell them for ten times the price in the fancy stores in the mall. The clothes in those shops are imported from Colombia, which means they are high quality and we got them at the people’s prices. A pair of wedge sandals for $16!
At this point we are so close to the Galápagos that it’s hard to focus on anything, hard to do anything, but this morning I have to give an oral presentation on immigration. I’m sharing the topic with the son of an Ohio lawyer, and my presentation consists of stories of people I know. We’ll see how our takes fit together. Tomorrow we all have to be at the airport at 6am, heading off for a week in a hotel 20 metres from the beach, a few yacht cruises, snorkelling near sharks, hiking up a volcano, and learning about tortoise mating patterns. I could not be more excited. And after class today, it’s all Galápagos all the time. I’m going with the girls to get our nails done, and we have decided we’re going to have a very cute week in the sun, by the clear Caribbean-blue water. It’s been too long since I’ve seen that colour.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Besitos,
Clarita
14 July 2009
doing a death round of hemispheric limbo with the conga ants
Well friends,
I have returned alive and in one piece (with maybe a few small chunks missing) from my WILD JUNGLE ADVENTURE! Which turned out to be one of the most relaxing adventures of my life, and full of cousins.
We picked up Matt from the airport on Friday evening and took him back to Cumbayá for a lovely family spaghetti dinner. Grampi and Helen came too, and Grampi was in a very silly mood -- he kept on making weird faces and once pretended to fall off his chair, nearly giving Lori a heart attack! We had a regular laughing yoga session though, which lasted almost until our abuelos had to go home.
On Saturday morning there were crèpes, and then at the last minute we decided to carry one of the kitties to Venecia as a gift for Myriam, so we had to take one last photo with the four cousins and the four kitties, then assemble a double-box system with plenty of padding and load him into the truck taxi with the rest of the stuff. He meowed for the first hour, but then found his way back inside the box and napped in there until we reached Tena. Matt was very concerned that he would remain nameless, but we left it to Myriam who eventually started calling him Bugsy. If it were my cat, I would have called him Pilsener after the box he rode down in. Pil for short?
The Field Station is a rockin' place. On Saturday the students were in and out, but as usual it was full of kids, a whole horde of cousins whose mothers cook and whose fathers work on building projects in the area. They are as wild as they come, but I thoroughly enjoyed having them around all weekend. They play a lot of cards, so we exchanged a few games and dealt many decks over the course of the evenings.
On Sunday morning Matt and I spurred into action a hike into the Coto Cachi reserve. Coto Cachi means "Howler Monkey Lake" in... Kichwa? I didn't catch it. In any case, we saw and touched a cacao tree, an Amazonian skunk cabbage, a red root hardwood, a rare mahogany with seed pods for planting, among others. I caught sight of a red-bellied salamander on the path, but it squirmed out of sight before I could prove it. The best part about the hike was squelching the mud underneath my boots.
In the afternoon we got a group together to go tubing down the river. Everyone was a little bit scared, of anacondas in the water and of the massive whirlpool and of the so-called "penisfish," a very painful parasite that follows a urine stream up to 20 feet, crawls into the urethra and puts out barbs, so that it must be surgically removed. As it was, the rapids were relatively tame and mostly avoidable. The accident-prone member of our group fell behind and disappeared into the whirlpool. A hush fell over the group, and we had almost floated around the corner before his head became visible again. The anaconda did not rear its head. Fortunately. We emerged in Misahualli thrilled and dripping, threw our tubes in the truck and bought ice cream sandwiches to eat while we waited. The first run took longer than we expected, though, so we ended up standing on a street corner across from the famous monkey square, in bathing suits and lifejackets, barefoot, in the rain. A nearby store started blasting reggaeton and of course we had to dance. We had an audience, and were glad when the truck showed up. We piled eighteen people into the bed of the truck on the way home, the tubers plus the Cousins who went everywhere. And a few more in the cab.
The next morning school started up for the students again. Although I, unlike most college students, do not even drink coffee during finals, I had two cups of coffee every day this weekend, just because it was so good! It did help me stay awake through the lecture on psychoactive plants and mental health that Matt and I sat in on. It was interesting, but very long. I picked up a few trains on natural treatments for diagnosed mental illnesses. We'll see if they go anywhere yet...
In the afternoon we went into Tena with Eliza, Sindy and Mela, the trio of teenaged girl-cousins. They took us to a zoo called La Isla, which is, indeed, on an island. You have to walk across the bridge to get there -- and I got the first use out of my brand-new Ecuadorian ID! A $1 discount! La Isla is probably the coolest zoo I have ever visited. It's also the most disorganized. The first thing we saw coming off the bridge was an ostrich, and Eliza told us they call her dad an ostrich because of the way he runs in soccer -- which brings a hilariously undignified view of my uncle to mind. We said hi to the toucan, with his heavily blue-rimmed eyes. I learned that "toucan" is an unfriendly name for girls that come back from the city with too much makeup. And then we saw a huge tapir, just walking around on the paths. He looked like a cross between a pig, an anteater and a hippopotamus, and was probably three or four feet high. Matt thought he was going to charge us, but he was too busy snuffling around for something to eat. On our way to the next cages we almost stepped on a monkey who had burrowed into the roots of a tree. Either he escaped, said Eliza, or he's sick. We also saw these jungle pigs that make the grossest noise I have ever heard, which sounds like a scream in the midst of retching. Mateo said it sounded like the mandrakes in the Harry Potter movie. My favorite things were the jungle cats: a jaguarundi with a long body and long tail, and an ocelot, which is probably the most beautiful animal I have ever seen. Fortunately, those ruthless predators were well-secured.
When we'd had our fill of jungle screeching and tapirs running loose, we went for pizza at a famous Tena pizzeria. It was probably some of the best pizza I've had since coming here, and I had it with tomato juice, which wasn't bad. Not as good as tomate de arbol, but fresh juice is fresh juice. Most of the time. Matt wanted to look at shoes, which was probably a mistake on his part since I can't walk into a shoe store without trying on several pairs of delicious heels. It turned into quite a girly outing, and Sindy and Mela spent a lot of it teasing Mateo about being a girl. He took it rather well, though I think we can partly attribute that to the fact that he wasn't paying much attention to any of us. He got into it when we decided to buy bracelets of a matching style, so I think we can cut him some slack.
On the way back I got to be a pro at riding in the truck bed with the girls. Eliza turned on her Walkman-phone to some heavy beats and we passed around a Red Bull while bouncing over speed bumps and staging a mini dance party in the back of the truck. I think that was my official initiation into the gang, because after that I was the fourth. We bought a ton of junk food at a community store and hung out for the rest of the night.
The evenings were always interesting. Last night we visited a shaman, who drank some iowasca (which I think is a hallucinogen) before performing a healing ritual on two members of the group, as well as a general blessing. It was interesting, but my favorite part of the night was walking back with the girls and our music, choreographing so we wouldn't be afraid of snakes along the side of the road. Back in the dining area someone was showing a Daniel Craig movie, so of course I had to stop and watch before heading off to bed.
The best night was the time we played telephone in Spanish with a bunch of the cousins, who all speak Kichwa. Needless to say it was interesting, especially with Santi's (rude) 12-year-old-boy antics (which had me giggling to death) and the little girls and a few of the students understanding hardly anything.
I left this afternoon, and would have missed the bus except that the bus itself was 15 minutes late. Fortunately...? Es que, in the morning I was waiting for my gang to show up so we could go tubing one more time, so I learned some local pottery techniques from some skilled traditional ceramic workers. As it turned out, the mothers wouldn't let their daughters tube down to Misahualli because of the rumoured anaconda, so we walked along the road up to Coto Cachi and tubed down to Eliza's house. As it turned out, this shorter course was more fun, mostly because I wasn't scared anymore, and because we held onto each other's tubes to go through bigger rapids, and actually flipped out a couple of times. Well worth it.
The bus ride was nice, and I made it back alive, with some sweet banana chips from a roadside vendor and some nice company in the form of a Quiteña woman who moved to the selva with her husband "for health reasons:" to avoid the city pollution, which is considerable. Even I am starting to feel it in my throat. Good thing I learned how to hack in India...
I apparently missed the beginning of a shift, so I'll have to make it up -- but I would not have given up the weekend for the world. I have not felt so relaxed since arriving in Quito, with nothing to do except whatever I want, and lots of kids running around doing whatever they want, laughing and enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived. I feel refreshed and ready to return to the world of expectations, unfulfillable and otherwise, office politics, class, and the world on a watch. I can do it, because That Place exists. In many places. That's just the closest. It's like a Portal into a Magical World...
Novel?
Besitos,
Clarita
I have returned alive and in one piece (with maybe a few small chunks missing) from my WILD JUNGLE ADVENTURE! Which turned out to be one of the most relaxing adventures of my life, and full of cousins.
We picked up Matt from the airport on Friday evening and took him back to Cumbayá for a lovely family spaghetti dinner. Grampi and Helen came too, and Grampi was in a very silly mood -- he kept on making weird faces and once pretended to fall off his chair, nearly giving Lori a heart attack! We had a regular laughing yoga session though, which lasted almost until our abuelos had to go home.
On Saturday morning there were crèpes, and then at the last minute we decided to carry one of the kitties to Venecia as a gift for Myriam, so we had to take one last photo with the four cousins and the four kitties, then assemble a double-box system with plenty of padding and load him into the truck taxi with the rest of the stuff. He meowed for the first hour, but then found his way back inside the box and napped in there until we reached Tena. Matt was very concerned that he would remain nameless, but we left it to Myriam who eventually started calling him Bugsy. If it were my cat, I would have called him Pilsener after the box he rode down in. Pil for short?
The Field Station is a rockin' place. On Saturday the students were in and out, but as usual it was full of kids, a whole horde of cousins whose mothers cook and whose fathers work on building projects in the area. They are as wild as they come, but I thoroughly enjoyed having them around all weekend. They play a lot of cards, so we exchanged a few games and dealt many decks over the course of the evenings.
On Sunday morning Matt and I spurred into action a hike into the Coto Cachi reserve. Coto Cachi means "Howler Monkey Lake" in... Kichwa? I didn't catch it. In any case, we saw and touched a cacao tree, an Amazonian skunk cabbage, a red root hardwood, a rare mahogany with seed pods for planting, among others. I caught sight of a red-bellied salamander on the path, but it squirmed out of sight before I could prove it. The best part about the hike was squelching the mud underneath my boots.
In the afternoon we got a group together to go tubing down the river. Everyone was a little bit scared, of anacondas in the water and of the massive whirlpool and of the so-called "penisfish," a very painful parasite that follows a urine stream up to 20 feet, crawls into the urethra and puts out barbs, so that it must be surgically removed. As it was, the rapids were relatively tame and mostly avoidable. The accident-prone member of our group fell behind and disappeared into the whirlpool. A hush fell over the group, and we had almost floated around the corner before his head became visible again. The anaconda did not rear its head. Fortunately. We emerged in Misahualli thrilled and dripping, threw our tubes in the truck and bought ice cream sandwiches to eat while we waited. The first run took longer than we expected, though, so we ended up standing on a street corner across from the famous monkey square, in bathing suits and lifejackets, barefoot, in the rain. A nearby store started blasting reggaeton and of course we had to dance. We had an audience, and were glad when the truck showed up. We piled eighteen people into the bed of the truck on the way home, the tubers plus the Cousins who went everywhere. And a few more in the cab.
The next morning school started up for the students again. Although I, unlike most college students, do not even drink coffee during finals, I had two cups of coffee every day this weekend, just because it was so good! It did help me stay awake through the lecture on psychoactive plants and mental health that Matt and I sat in on. It was interesting, but very long. I picked up a few trains on natural treatments for diagnosed mental illnesses. We'll see if they go anywhere yet...
In the afternoon we went into Tena with Eliza, Sindy and Mela, the trio of teenaged girl-cousins. They took us to a zoo called La Isla, which is, indeed, on an island. You have to walk across the bridge to get there -- and I got the first use out of my brand-new Ecuadorian ID! A $1 discount! La Isla is probably the coolest zoo I have ever visited. It's also the most disorganized. The first thing we saw coming off the bridge was an ostrich, and Eliza told us they call her dad an ostrich because of the way he runs in soccer -- which brings a hilariously undignified view of my uncle to mind. We said hi to the toucan, with his heavily blue-rimmed eyes. I learned that "toucan" is an unfriendly name for girls that come back from the city with too much makeup. And then we saw a huge tapir, just walking around on the paths. He looked like a cross between a pig, an anteater and a hippopotamus, and was probably three or four feet high. Matt thought he was going to charge us, but he was too busy snuffling around for something to eat. On our way to the next cages we almost stepped on a monkey who had burrowed into the roots of a tree. Either he escaped, said Eliza, or he's sick. We also saw these jungle pigs that make the grossest noise I have ever heard, which sounds like a scream in the midst of retching. Mateo said it sounded like the mandrakes in the Harry Potter movie. My favorite things were the jungle cats: a jaguarundi with a long body and long tail, and an ocelot, which is probably the most beautiful animal I have ever seen. Fortunately, those ruthless predators were well-secured.
When we'd had our fill of jungle screeching and tapirs running loose, we went for pizza at a famous Tena pizzeria. It was probably some of the best pizza I've had since coming here, and I had it with tomato juice, which wasn't bad. Not as good as tomate de arbol, but fresh juice is fresh juice. Most of the time. Matt wanted to look at shoes, which was probably a mistake on his part since I can't walk into a shoe store without trying on several pairs of delicious heels. It turned into quite a girly outing, and Sindy and Mela spent a lot of it teasing Mateo about being a girl. He took it rather well, though I think we can partly attribute that to the fact that he wasn't paying much attention to any of us. He got into it when we decided to buy bracelets of a matching style, so I think we can cut him some slack.
On the way back I got to be a pro at riding in the truck bed with the girls. Eliza turned on her Walkman-phone to some heavy beats and we passed around a Red Bull while bouncing over speed bumps and staging a mini dance party in the back of the truck. I think that was my official initiation into the gang, because after that I was the fourth. We bought a ton of junk food at a community store and hung out for the rest of the night.
The evenings were always interesting. Last night we visited a shaman, who drank some iowasca (which I think is a hallucinogen) before performing a healing ritual on two members of the group, as well as a general blessing. It was interesting, but my favorite part of the night was walking back with the girls and our music, choreographing so we wouldn't be afraid of snakes along the side of the road. Back in the dining area someone was showing a Daniel Craig movie, so of course I had to stop and watch before heading off to bed.
The best night was the time we played telephone in Spanish with a bunch of the cousins, who all speak Kichwa. Needless to say it was interesting, especially with Santi's (rude) 12-year-old-boy antics (which had me giggling to death) and the little girls and a few of the students understanding hardly anything.
I left this afternoon, and would have missed the bus except that the bus itself was 15 minutes late. Fortunately...? Es que, in the morning I was waiting for my gang to show up so we could go tubing one more time, so I learned some local pottery techniques from some skilled traditional ceramic workers. As it turned out, the mothers wouldn't let their daughters tube down to Misahualli because of the rumoured anaconda, so we walked along the road up to Coto Cachi and tubed down to Eliza's house. As it turned out, this shorter course was more fun, mostly because I wasn't scared anymore, and because we held onto each other's tubes to go through bigger rapids, and actually flipped out a couple of times. Well worth it.
The bus ride was nice, and I made it back alive, with some sweet banana chips from a roadside vendor and some nice company in the form of a Quiteña woman who moved to the selva with her husband "for health reasons:" to avoid the city pollution, which is considerable. Even I am starting to feel it in my throat. Good thing I learned how to hack in India...
I apparently missed the beginning of a shift, so I'll have to make it up -- but I would not have given up the weekend for the world. I have not felt so relaxed since arriving in Quito, with nothing to do except whatever I want, and lots of kids running around doing whatever they want, laughing and enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived. I feel refreshed and ready to return to the world of expectations, unfulfillable and otherwise, office politics, class, and the world on a watch. I can do it, because That Place exists. In many places. That's just the closest. It's like a Portal into a Magical World...
Novel?
Besitos,
Clarita
08 July 2009
the latest from limbo: you can find me in the club
...and in countless other places!
Mis queridos amigos,
I am learning and doing so much that I hardly have the time or focus to sit down and escribir about it! The more I do, though, the more I want to write about it, and the more opportunity I have to be reminded of all of you, things that would interest you or gross you out or make you feel something...
My story starts, as usual, on Friday. My class finished early, at 10am, and I found myself carrying a large chocolate heart-shaped cake (out of the sun!), pulling off an incredible balancing act into the backseat and across town to El Condado, the posh country club where Natalia was costar of a 12-year-old birthday party. There were probably around 30 girls and a few boys there, running back and forth from various swimming pools and water slides to the cotton candy machine and lollipop bowl. Fortunately, I get along great with 12-year-old girls, and am tall enough to be something for them to grab onto in the just-too-deep section of the pool where they set up camp.
I caught a ride back to the hotel with one of the girls and her mother, neither of whom I knew; but her husband is a sociologist and her daughter is 19 and studying in Sorbonne, so we had enough in common to basically be family. Fortunately it was a quiet Friday night, because I had to get up early to see off some of the guests on their weekend trip, and meet up with the OSU kids for our Saturday excursion to Cotopaxi, one of Ecuador's active volcanoes, the summit of which is the furthest point from the center of the Earth. The activity?
Mountain biking. Something I had never done and never thought I would ever do. At the base we stopped to gear up on alpaca winterwear, hats and gloves and sweaters, which we needed when we got to the starting point in a cloud of face-stinging sleet and bone-chilling cold. It was a 30km ride, the first 8km being nearly straight downhill over loose gravel, sleety mud and ruts like you've never seen. The challenge of the next 12km was shifting sand, and the last stretch was loose rock. We rode through all four seasons, saw wild horses, mountains, rain snow sleet clouds and beating sun; a hummingbird nest in the wheel well of a tractor; and Megan and I between us ate at least 7 baby bananas. For the next 2 days my entire body hurt, all my muscles and my joints and the rest of me covered in bruises... but it was 100% worth the pain.
When we got back to the school we heard some raucous music winding over from the Plaza, and Don Carlitos the guard told us that Ecuador was celebrating Gay Pride Weekend! Which was especially funny since I had just been reading in the Rough Guide about traveling for same-sex couples, and from what I'd read I never would have expected anyone to dare show their face at the parade, two scantily clad drag queens tossing their hair around onstage, and a whole troupe of drag queens dressed as indigenous Otavalan women! For us students, of course, it was the Fourth of July. I managed to get half the night off and met up with some friends at PapayaNet, the superhangout for hip foreigners who like the internet. And massive amounts of beer. Megan, Tyler and I got there first and decided to take advantage of the 2x1 cerveza deal of Pilsener's from the tap... Thinking we were getting single drafts, we ordered four beers for the price of two. They turned out to be pitchers. Fortunately our friends showed up and helped us finish them off... and a few more too.
For dinner that night I decided to try out the tiny new restaurant, 4 Ases, that opened kiddie corner from the hotel. It had five small tables crammed into a little space and was run by an Otavalan family, who all greeted me cordially and introduced themselves. As soon as I sat down, a whole band piled in with three guitars, three flutes, and various other everyday objects used as percussion instruments. They all greeted me too, offered me cigarettes and picante chips and caramelos, and then when the other tables filled up they started sitting down at my table. I met a girl (whose name I am now kicking myself for not remembering) who makes jewelry. She made me a green bracelet, to bring hope to my life, and a warm-colored necklace that matched my sweater, and I gave her a dollar. She chatted away while I ate my huge plate full of good solid dinner, with yucca and meat and salad and everything else I could ask for. The most well-balanced plate I've had since arriving.
By Sunday, needless to say, Taylor and I were both exhausted, and we had to get up early to serve a 30-person breakfast to the student group from ASU. Instead of sleeping all day, though, we decided to catch a cab through the empty streets to El Panecillo, a strange bump in the middle of the city on which is stationed la Virgen de Quito. As it turns out, she is actually La Mujer del Apocalipsis, from Revelation 12, a monstrosity of a woman with a crown of twelve stars, perched upon a giant globe and crushing beneath her feet a dragon. El Panecillo, Taylor tells me, is also one of the best kite-flying sites in the world -- so of course I pull out $1.50 for a cheap little cometa and we fight to keep it in the air and away from wires and other kite strings, laughing as we hide our faces from the pros with miles of high-quality thread, whose kites literally disappear into the clouds. We wonder what would happen if it crossed paths with a plane...
La Mariscal is eerily silent when we get back to the hotel, and nothing is open. Without thinking I plunge wholeheartedly into a shop that says "cebollados" on the awning, and we buy $1.75 bowls of the soup of the day. Taylor is so afraid of stomach bugs that he hardly finishes half of his bowl, but I pour several spoonfuls of salsa picante on top of mine and inhale it. I spend the rest of the afternoon (and my first busride back to Cumbaya, solo) hoping I don't get deathly ill. I don't, and I am very grateful.
On Monday after school we drive up to North Quito to visit Grampi and Helen, and Natalia and Nicolas' other grandmother, and to pick up the three kids that are sleeping at our house tonight. We don't get back until after dark, but I volunteer to put up the tents for the kids while Lori cooks and Juan Miguel builds a fire. It is total chaos, of course, but everyone is happy, and presumably not too cold, and I drift off to sleep to the lullaby of boys and girls screaming and laughing back and forth across the yard.
Tuesday after class the students and I go on an excursion to the fruit market, where we break up into teams and go on a scavenger hunt for a few different types of fruits each. I'm not quite sure how to bargain for it this time, but my food buddy Megan and I take notes. She buys a bunch of baby bananas and I buy some frozen chocolate-covered baby bananas, and we vow to return, find a nice little bakery, and thoroughly enjoy the next two months.
I have been noticing the grafitti, which smacks less of art and more of politics on the walls of this city. It seems that those wielding the spray cans are sometimes poets, often agitators, and almost always aware of their social and political context. I have noticed the pervasive public religiosity, after trying to escape from being converted by my Seventh Day Adventist coworker, the afternoon guard Javier. His passion is inspiring, until he starts trying to literally pass some of it onto me. Today on the bus on the way to the Registro Civil to get my Ecuadorian ID, two guys jump the bus with shoulder boomboxes and start rapping a prayer to God about all the things that are going on here now, and on the way back a man stands in the front of the bus and recites the Parable of the Prodigal Son in a way that made me see new parallels with Jesus' story like I never had before. After their performances they walk the aisles asking for "ayuda" -- help. More directly, money.
The business is picking up considerably, and I have just taken on some more heavy-duty marketing and research projects. At the same time, I'm starting to plan trips and pack my days full of everything and everything I could possibly want to do. A trip came up very quickly this weekend, to take a taxi down to the jungle with my cousin Matt to visit Uncle Tod and his biology field station. I am also looking forward to a week in the Galapagos, and a couple of weekends at hot springs, day trips to Otavalo and the Cloud Forests full of hummingbirds and ziplining.
I hope I have not gone on forever. I'm starting to think more about the things that are happening, and I am kind of in awe of it myself, everything I am doing and everything I could do if there were more hours in the day. As it is I have been trying to mail some postcards for at least a week, and my journal has only a few pages left in it! I have a few trips to the Mercado Artesanal on my brain, and the hotel phone waits to ring until the moment when three people are waiting to talk about different things, two more guests come back and need their keys, and I absolutely have to go to the bathroom. I am happy, though, I am finding the strength I've been missing and I am becoming more independent, while more confident to ask for help when I need it. I can't believe how much the world holds, and all it takes is the guts, or the one moment where you just close your eyes and hope, and jump, to grab onto it and ride it like the wind, or the water.
As I have said before, I love hearing back, about what is going on in other corners of the world or what is on your minds. You are in my brain at different turns and in my heart at all of them.
Abrazos,
Clarita
Mis queridos amigos,
I am learning and doing so much that I hardly have the time or focus to sit down and escribir about it! The more I do, though, the more I want to write about it, and the more opportunity I have to be reminded of all of you, things that would interest you or gross you out or make you feel something...
My story starts, as usual, on Friday. My class finished early, at 10am, and I found myself carrying a large chocolate heart-shaped cake (out of the sun!), pulling off an incredible balancing act into the backseat and across town to El Condado, the posh country club where Natalia was costar of a 12-year-old birthday party. There were probably around 30 girls and a few boys there, running back and forth from various swimming pools and water slides to the cotton candy machine and lollipop bowl. Fortunately, I get along great with 12-year-old girls, and am tall enough to be something for them to grab onto in the just-too-deep section of the pool where they set up camp.
I caught a ride back to the hotel with one of the girls and her mother, neither of whom I knew; but her husband is a sociologist and her daughter is 19 and studying in Sorbonne, so we had enough in common to basically be family. Fortunately it was a quiet Friday night, because I had to get up early to see off some of the guests on their weekend trip, and meet up with the OSU kids for our Saturday excursion to Cotopaxi, one of Ecuador's active volcanoes, the summit of which is the furthest point from the center of the Earth. The activity?
Mountain biking. Something I had never done and never thought I would ever do. At the base we stopped to gear up on alpaca winterwear, hats and gloves and sweaters, which we needed when we got to the starting point in a cloud of face-stinging sleet and bone-chilling cold. It was a 30km ride, the first 8km being nearly straight downhill over loose gravel, sleety mud and ruts like you've never seen. The challenge of the next 12km was shifting sand, and the last stretch was loose rock. We rode through all four seasons, saw wild horses, mountains, rain snow sleet clouds and beating sun; a hummingbird nest in the wheel well of a tractor; and Megan and I between us ate at least 7 baby bananas. For the next 2 days my entire body hurt, all my muscles and my joints and the rest of me covered in bruises... but it was 100% worth the pain.
When we got back to the school we heard some raucous music winding over from the Plaza, and Don Carlitos the guard told us that Ecuador was celebrating Gay Pride Weekend! Which was especially funny since I had just been reading in the Rough Guide about traveling for same-sex couples, and from what I'd read I never would have expected anyone to dare show their face at the parade, two scantily clad drag queens tossing their hair around onstage, and a whole troupe of drag queens dressed as indigenous Otavalan women! For us students, of course, it was the Fourth of July. I managed to get half the night off and met up with some friends at PapayaNet, the superhangout for hip foreigners who like the internet. And massive amounts of beer. Megan, Tyler and I got there first and decided to take advantage of the 2x1 cerveza deal of Pilsener's from the tap... Thinking we were getting single drafts, we ordered four beers for the price of two. They turned out to be pitchers. Fortunately our friends showed up and helped us finish them off... and a few more too.
For dinner that night I decided to try out the tiny new restaurant, 4 Ases, that opened kiddie corner from the hotel. It had five small tables crammed into a little space and was run by an Otavalan family, who all greeted me cordially and introduced themselves. As soon as I sat down, a whole band piled in with three guitars, three flutes, and various other everyday objects used as percussion instruments. They all greeted me too, offered me cigarettes and picante chips and caramelos, and then when the other tables filled up they started sitting down at my table. I met a girl (whose name I am now kicking myself for not remembering) who makes jewelry. She made me a green bracelet, to bring hope to my life, and a warm-colored necklace that matched my sweater, and I gave her a dollar. She chatted away while I ate my huge plate full of good solid dinner, with yucca and meat and salad and everything else I could ask for. The most well-balanced plate I've had since arriving.
By Sunday, needless to say, Taylor and I were both exhausted, and we had to get up early to serve a 30-person breakfast to the student group from ASU. Instead of sleeping all day, though, we decided to catch a cab through the empty streets to El Panecillo, a strange bump in the middle of the city on which is stationed la Virgen de Quito. As it turns out, she is actually La Mujer del Apocalipsis, from Revelation 12, a monstrosity of a woman with a crown of twelve stars, perched upon a giant globe and crushing beneath her feet a dragon. El Panecillo, Taylor tells me, is also one of the best kite-flying sites in the world -- so of course I pull out $1.50 for a cheap little cometa and we fight to keep it in the air and away from wires and other kite strings, laughing as we hide our faces from the pros with miles of high-quality thread, whose kites literally disappear into the clouds. We wonder what would happen if it crossed paths with a plane...
La Mariscal is eerily silent when we get back to the hotel, and nothing is open. Without thinking I plunge wholeheartedly into a shop that says "cebollados" on the awning, and we buy $1.75 bowls of the soup of the day. Taylor is so afraid of stomach bugs that he hardly finishes half of his bowl, but I pour several spoonfuls of salsa picante on top of mine and inhale it. I spend the rest of the afternoon (and my first busride back to Cumbaya, solo) hoping I don't get deathly ill. I don't, and I am very grateful.
On Monday after school we drive up to North Quito to visit Grampi and Helen, and Natalia and Nicolas' other grandmother, and to pick up the three kids that are sleeping at our house tonight. We don't get back until after dark, but I volunteer to put up the tents for the kids while Lori cooks and Juan Miguel builds a fire. It is total chaos, of course, but everyone is happy, and presumably not too cold, and I drift off to sleep to the lullaby of boys and girls screaming and laughing back and forth across the yard.
Tuesday after class the students and I go on an excursion to the fruit market, where we break up into teams and go on a scavenger hunt for a few different types of fruits each. I'm not quite sure how to bargain for it this time, but my food buddy Megan and I take notes. She buys a bunch of baby bananas and I buy some frozen chocolate-covered baby bananas, and we vow to return, find a nice little bakery, and thoroughly enjoy the next two months.
I have been noticing the grafitti, which smacks less of art and more of politics on the walls of this city. It seems that those wielding the spray cans are sometimes poets, often agitators, and almost always aware of their social and political context. I have noticed the pervasive public religiosity, after trying to escape from being converted by my Seventh Day Adventist coworker, the afternoon guard Javier. His passion is inspiring, until he starts trying to literally pass some of it onto me. Today on the bus on the way to the Registro Civil to get my Ecuadorian ID, two guys jump the bus with shoulder boomboxes and start rapping a prayer to God about all the things that are going on here now, and on the way back a man stands in the front of the bus and recites the Parable of the Prodigal Son in a way that made me see new parallels with Jesus' story like I never had before. After their performances they walk the aisles asking for "ayuda" -- help. More directly, money.
The business is picking up considerably, and I have just taken on some more heavy-duty marketing and research projects. At the same time, I'm starting to plan trips and pack my days full of everything and everything I could possibly want to do. A trip came up very quickly this weekend, to take a taxi down to the jungle with my cousin Matt to visit Uncle Tod and his biology field station. I am also looking forward to a week in the Galapagos, and a couple of weekends at hot springs, day trips to Otavalo and the Cloud Forests full of hummingbirds and ziplining.
I hope I have not gone on forever. I'm starting to think more about the things that are happening, and I am kind of in awe of it myself, everything I am doing and everything I could do if there were more hours in the day. As it is I have been trying to mail some postcards for at least a week, and my journal has only a few pages left in it! I have a few trips to the Mercado Artesanal on my brain, and the hotel phone waits to ring until the moment when three people are waiting to talk about different things, two more guests come back and need their keys, and I absolutely have to go to the bathroom. I am happy, though, I am finding the strength I've been missing and I am becoming more independent, while more confident to ask for help when I need it. I can't believe how much the world holds, and all it takes is the guts, or the one moment where you just close your eyes and hope, and jump, to grab onto it and ride it like the wind, or the water.
As I have said before, I love hearing back, about what is going on in other corners of the world or what is on your minds. You are in my brain at different turns and in my heart at all of them.
Abrazos,
Clarita
30 June 2009
limbo #4: not a girl, not yet a woman
Mis queridos,
Things are picking up. I have no intention of flooding you with esoteric stories, but this weekend has been full of adventures that I thought you would all enjoy. The Spanish classes are going so well -- I am getting very confident speaking and the more confident I get, the better I get. Because I actually speak, so people correct me without feeling bad about it. A tip for any future language learners... I am also much busier, a fact which will soon become apparent. (FORESHADOWING!)
On Friday night I took my dinner break with the Ohioians at a famous restaurant called La Boca del Lobo: the mouth of the wolf. A brightly painted colonial style corner house enclosed by glass, with a tree growing right up the middle of it, right behind our long low table. Y que rico la comida!
On Saturday I caught a taxi to the kids' school, a French school called La Condamine, for Nicolas' final program. The theme was the history of Ecuadorian dance. The gym was stifling and crammed full of people, none of whom I knew, and the campus was covered with stalls of junk food and drinks, games and people selling their crafts and old stuff. I don't know what they did with the pet llamas, who normally graze in the yard, but I didn't see them in the crowds. I also met the president, and kissed him twice! He is a fascinating political figure, intensely hated and intensely adored by nationals and foreigners alike, with a pretty vivid socioeconomic divide. Based on my social class, I probably should not be a fan of him; but he is the president of my country of origin, and I kissed him. Twice.
We had some friends over for lunch in the afternoon, and after dessert I was sitting outside reading Harry Potter. Suddenly the neighbor's dogs appeared in the yard, two golden retrievers. One of them returned when he was called, but the other one was on the hunt. When I realized where he was headed I started yelling at him and running after him, but he had already snatched up one of the kittens in his mouth and ran off with it while I tried to hit him, to no avail. I will spare you the gory, traumatizing details, but the kitten died several minutes later. We buried him and drew pictures to stick on his grave.
Fortunately I had plans to go out with my coworker Marisabel that evening. She is 25 and divorced. I met her entire family in Calle La Ronda, in the Old Town. It used to be one of the most dangerous streets in the city, the red light district, but recently the mayor has put a lot of resources into making the city a little safer and it is now a well-lit, lively old road. We went with Papá and Mamá, Tío y Tía, Estefano her 5-year-old son and Jorge Luis her boyfriend, into a few little restaurants where we drank mora-flavored canelazo (blackberry sugar cane liquor) and ate fried empanadas with sugar, drank vino hervido or boiled wine and shared platters of meat and potato appetizers. I felt properly Ecuadorian, even though they all kept making fun of me for being drunk, which I was not, especially compared to Tío who kept pouring more vino and inviting guitarristas to play for us, and singing along very raucously. After La Ronda, we left Estefano with his abuelos and headed off to a karaoke. Marisabel and I did our makeup in the car, and it was, suprisingly, one of the best makeup jobs I have ever done. At the karaoke we met up with two other couples -- I was the seventh wheel, but didn't feel left out at all. The Ecuadorian style of hanging out with friends makes so much sense to me. We ordered a round of cerveza nacional, Pilsener's, and as we were finishing it up a fourth couple appeared, the guy calling out, "Oy hombres, a bottle of whiskey!" Everyone groaned, but it appeared and we slowly polished it off over the next few hours, singing raucously and dancing the night away. On our way out, we saw the parking guard sleeping on the stairs, all his tips spread out around him in careful piles. I slept in Estefano's bed that night, in Marisabel's beautiful departamento on the North side. In the morning, Jorge Luis appeared at the breakfast table blaming Marisabel for the gum in his hair.
Upon reaching home I found myself second-in-command of a storm of preparation for a 14-person trilingual dinner party. Some French friends from the school had their cousins and grandparents over from France, and we'd invited the whole brood over for a grill on Sunday afternoon, to the tiny 2-bedroom house in the middle of a fickle rainstorm. I took a break to race my cousin Nico along the path where our guests were apparently walking; we didn't meet them but reached home soaked, flushed, and happy. The six little boys immediately transformed themselves into a Crusading army, turned the floor black with mud, and disappeared into the trees, plastic swords clanging. After dinner someone put in "A Knight's Tale" in French, and Natalia and I spent the end of the afternoon getting hit on by the very rambunctious four-year-old Timoté. I think everyone was rather relieved when the whole bunch of them marched off into the gathering dusk.
Today I finally visited the downtown area with the student group, Ohio State + Clara -- we're getting closer, crammed on top of each other into a little yellow bus and adapting our growing inventory of in-jokes, slang terms, and personal historical accounts. At the center we climbed up onto the colonnade of el gobierno, the government building, looked down uncomfortably on a protest against the Honduras coup, bright green flags popping out of the mass of Ecuadorian flags and colorful indigenous dress. I have not toured the churches yet, though it is still higher on my list now that we have seen the outsides of some of them. There is something about churches...
My adventures continue, and I hope your summers are picking up as quickly as mine is. This email is in a better state now than it was when I started -- apparently as I get better at Spanish, my English deteriorates. Or maybe it's just bedtime...
Con mucho cariño,
Clarita
Things are picking up. I have no intention of flooding you with esoteric stories, but this weekend has been full of adventures that I thought you would all enjoy. The Spanish classes are going so well -- I am getting very confident speaking and the more confident I get, the better I get. Because I actually speak, so people correct me without feeling bad about it. A tip for any future language learners... I am also much busier, a fact which will soon become apparent. (FORESHADOWING!)
On Friday night I took my dinner break with the Ohioians at a famous restaurant called La Boca del Lobo: the mouth of the wolf. A brightly painted colonial style corner house enclosed by glass, with a tree growing right up the middle of it, right behind our long low table. Y que rico la comida!
On Saturday I caught a taxi to the kids' school, a French school called La Condamine, for Nicolas' final program. The theme was the history of Ecuadorian dance. The gym was stifling and crammed full of people, none of whom I knew, and the campus was covered with stalls of junk food and drinks, games and people selling their crafts and old stuff. I don't know what they did with the pet llamas, who normally graze in the yard, but I didn't see them in the crowds. I also met the president, and kissed him twice! He is a fascinating political figure, intensely hated and intensely adored by nationals and foreigners alike, with a pretty vivid socioeconomic divide. Based on my social class, I probably should not be a fan of him; but he is the president of my country of origin, and I kissed him. Twice.
We had some friends over for lunch in the afternoon, and after dessert I was sitting outside reading Harry Potter. Suddenly the neighbor's dogs appeared in the yard, two golden retrievers. One of them returned when he was called, but the other one was on the hunt. When I realized where he was headed I started yelling at him and running after him, but he had already snatched up one of the kittens in his mouth and ran off with it while I tried to hit him, to no avail. I will spare you the gory, traumatizing details, but the kitten died several minutes later. We buried him and drew pictures to stick on his grave.
Fortunately I had plans to go out with my coworker Marisabel that evening. She is 25 and divorced. I met her entire family in Calle La Ronda, in the Old Town. It used to be one of the most dangerous streets in the city, the red light district, but recently the mayor has put a lot of resources into making the city a little safer and it is now a well-lit, lively old road. We went with Papá and Mamá, Tío y Tía, Estefano her 5-year-old son and Jorge Luis her boyfriend, into a few little restaurants where we drank mora-flavored canelazo (blackberry sugar cane liquor) and ate fried empanadas with sugar, drank vino hervido or boiled wine and shared platters of meat and potato appetizers. I felt properly Ecuadorian, even though they all kept making fun of me for being drunk, which I was not, especially compared to Tío who kept pouring more vino and inviting guitarristas to play for us, and singing along very raucously. After La Ronda, we left Estefano with his abuelos and headed off to a karaoke. Marisabel and I did our makeup in the car, and it was, suprisingly, one of the best makeup jobs I have ever done. At the karaoke we met up with two other couples -- I was the seventh wheel, but didn't feel left out at all. The Ecuadorian style of hanging out with friends makes so much sense to me. We ordered a round of cerveza nacional, Pilsener's, and as we were finishing it up a fourth couple appeared, the guy calling out, "Oy hombres, a bottle of whiskey!" Everyone groaned, but it appeared and we slowly polished it off over the next few hours, singing raucously and dancing the night away. On our way out, we saw the parking guard sleeping on the stairs, all his tips spread out around him in careful piles. I slept in Estefano's bed that night, in Marisabel's beautiful departamento on the North side. In the morning, Jorge Luis appeared at the breakfast table blaming Marisabel for the gum in his hair.
Upon reaching home I found myself second-in-command of a storm of preparation for a 14-person trilingual dinner party. Some French friends from the school had their cousins and grandparents over from France, and we'd invited the whole brood over for a grill on Sunday afternoon, to the tiny 2-bedroom house in the middle of a fickle rainstorm. I took a break to race my cousin Nico along the path where our guests were apparently walking; we didn't meet them but reached home soaked, flushed, and happy. The six little boys immediately transformed themselves into a Crusading army, turned the floor black with mud, and disappeared into the trees, plastic swords clanging. After dinner someone put in "A Knight's Tale" in French, and Natalia and I spent the end of the afternoon getting hit on by the very rambunctious four-year-old Timoté. I think everyone was rather relieved when the whole bunch of them marched off into the gathering dusk.
Today I finally visited the downtown area with the student group, Ohio State + Clara -- we're getting closer, crammed on top of each other into a little yellow bus and adapting our growing inventory of in-jokes, slang terms, and personal historical accounts. At the center we climbed up onto the colonnade of el gobierno, the government building, looked down uncomfortably on a protest against the Honduras coup, bright green flags popping out of the mass of Ecuadorian flags and colorful indigenous dress. I have not toured the churches yet, though it is still higher on my list now that we have seen the outsides of some of them. There is something about churches...
My adventures continue, and I hope your summers are picking up as quickly as mine is. This email is in a better state now than it was when I started -- apparently as I get better at Spanish, my English deteriorates. Or maybe it's just bedtime...
Con mucho cariño,
Clarita
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