Ecuador

This week I went to the coast with my host mom and her boyfriend, Ricardo, on episode two of Zach as third party to parental dating. This however was a much more extended drive as we descended out of the Andes which calls for a much longer drive that the distance would suggest. But of course the trip was absolutely gorgeous. We stayed at the home of Ricardo's sister. The home is situated in Pasaje, the banana crop country. There were three brothers and it was pretty entertaining to be around kids younger than me, because I have never been an older brother to anyone. I think I will be satisfied with being younger, though. Too much call for your attention when you are the older sibling, but I think I have three new fans of my life here in Ecuador. At any rate, we went to the port of Machala, which is the banana capital of the world. Huge, HUGE barges were in the port that were full of bananas, and apparently they don't even ship like half of their banana crop because of bruises or imperfections of any sort. Only the perfect bananas are exported. But after seeing the extent of the crops in all my driving in the coastal land, I can believe it. They were around every bend. It was like going a constant grove of banana trees, narrowing highways and encroaching on the villages. Machala was pretty clean for the most part, outside of the port water which was littered with everything imaginable. That night I was "hooked up" with a "date" with the next door neighbor, in what seems to be quite common. It was more of a game for the parents to stir up relationships amongst their children. So I got led into it believing that I was going to get some salsa lessons. It is hard to describe with words what it was like being pampered by my parents for a date, but I think their incessant questioning on my interest in my date and a raise of the eyebrows when two children of the opposite sex were in the room gives you some idea of their behavior. But the three of us, Martín, my date, and I, all dressed for a prom, crammed ourselves in a car with the middle brother, Domingo, and Ricardo on a trip to find a discobar in Machala. When we finally decided upon one, after forty minutes of driving in circles around the equivalent to 6th street in Austin (I swear Ecuadorians can take the longest time to make a decision), we filled out into the throng of liquored Machalans out in the streets. We were given a little over an hour for our dates (as Martín paired up with my date's friend) until our safest ride home, a waiting father, would leave. Instead of salsa, we came to a discobar playing reggaeton. After an hour, I needed a drink. The following morning was more or less a slow one. It was falsely assumed that we would have an early morning trip to the beach. At around one, we arrived to more or less the "pristine" beach to the north of Machala. The culture was no less peculiar, but I can't give a current comparison to that of the states as I have avoided an effort to enjoy the ocean in recent years. The water was quite warm and loaded in silt and sediment from the closeby river. It is comparable to the Texas coast, however the water is much warmer still. I strayed away from spending my time neck deep in the ocean as everyone else tended to do. Instead I enjoyed a still different culture around me. There were vendors selling live baby shark, live crab, live shrimp, you get the idea. Everything still alive. I feasted on a banana cuisine, one of many types they had. This one in particular was cooked until charred on the outside, cut open, reveiling a soft inside, and then stuffed with queso. I was a little tenative at the idea of cheese with a banana, but I was pleasantly supprised by the lack of flavor from the banana. And of course it was cheap. The whole experience on the beach cost nothing more than $4, feeding the whole group with the banana con queso, drinks, and parking. It marked the end of my stay in Pasaje and the southern coast of Ecuador. I brought home with me my souvenir, sun burnt feet, what's new? But perhaps the most culturally and interesting part of the trip came in the drives to and from Cuenca. The culture shock was quite intense compared to what I have been prone to seeing here. Near our residence in Pasaje was a canal, entirely polluted with unsupervised children scrounging around for entertainment; in the high Andean valleys, I observed Qichua children, who still speak the Incan language, drinking alongside cows in troughs. Equally powerful were the geological and ecological areas we traversed as we ascended into the Andes. The Andes begin abruptly from the coastal flat land marshes up to four thousand meters. There were three ecological niches before we reached the summit of our drive as well. As we climbed out of the banana plantations, we entered what is called the dry tropical forests, which have naturally growing banana plants and high towering trees. Quite abruptly, as we curved around a significantly tall peak, were the dry mountains. No vegetation grows here, there is only the browns and grays of exposed rock that is steeper than any mountains I have seen. Here the tributaries leading into the brown river far below travel greater distances vertically than they do horizontally. And then at last we reach what is the cloud forest. At this time it was getting dark and the fog was so dense you could not see the pavement that your car drove on. It was unbelievably frightening and like a complete dream, driving as if in the clouds of a dream. Then we broke clear of the clouds, right as we reached the summit of our pass, and there was the full moon in a completely clear night. It was the brightest night I have seen since New Mexico last month, when we drove in the snow without having to use headlights. Coming out of the clouds and into this vast light of the moon was something like coming upon the pearly gates. Around us were yet higher peaks reaching further up into the heavens, blanketed in the fog that we escaped. It was quite an experience all around. I have another nine days in which I plan to make another local trip during the weekend, until I have a week of individual travel during Carnival. I am going to be going across the country to Esmeraldas by bus starting Friday night! I am, to say the least, estatic about the trip!

I have been keeping these encounters under the table since arriving in South America just so that anyone reading can know that I am still safely in one piece, but now that you are aware of my safety, I wanted to share some of my quick and intermittent confrontations with the darker side of Cuenca. Going back to the last night that Katie was here in Cuenca, last Tuesday, our group had our first experience with thievery. We were having a fantastic dinner at a Columbian restaurant that I think I previously mentioned. We were all pretty absorbed in our own conversations but with a little bit of examination of our atmosphere I spotted two pretty sketchy characters. They appeared not to be devoted to a dinner in this restaurant, and one of the two men seemed to concentrate his attention on our group. It was really our own fault for he even had an appearance that should provoke some cautious behavior. But at any rate when we left the restaurant one of our group members had their backpack stolen during the time we had dinner. The group came to the conclusion that it must have been the wiry-haired man who left prematurely from the restaurant. Wednesday, was caulk full of encounters. Over the noon hours, I decided to skip lunch back home and make an effort to get things done around the city. I went to the post office which is stationed only four blocks from school in order to drop of some letters I had accumulated. After exiting the post office, having felt successful of my transaction, I had an encounter with a quite physical beggar. This man spotted me from across the street as I left the post office and took the effort to hassle me for money. He stepped in front of me and gave the motions of every beggar pulling his had out of his pocket, palm up. But this was different than the other encounters because he impeded my travel. The sidewalk, first of all, was narrow, sandwiched between a high wall and the busy traffic of the street. My directions of escape were simply straight forward or backward, and I wanted to give him no opportunity for him to steal anything from my backpack, so I made a motion to the mute beggar that I was not going to give him any money, and went for my first option of walking by him. But he pushed me back and up against the wall, and again indicated his intentions only this time more aggressively desiring my donation. Again I tried to walk by but he blocked my passage. I just took that to mean I can do the same so I pushed him aside and walked by. That was it, but it makes me a little more wary of even the dangers on the same block as the post office and now I understand the absurd security measures they've taken at the post office. Then further on in the day I saw the same wiry-haired criminal from the night before in front of me on my walk home from school. We stared each other down and I kept my eyes trained on him even as I passed, and he tried to break the aggressive tension with an "Hola." It is common, now that I have found myself in some predicaments and taken a more aggressive stance when confronting others, that these characters do not like to maintain that aggression and try to break it by becoming friendly. But the look on his face conveyed to me that he was clearly the thief from the prior night. And then my last little scare came last night. For the past two nights, I have been testing the waters of curfew, and walking closer and closer to 8pm. It gets dark here around 715, and significantly dark on the last half of my walk from school. But I have always been wary of this and kept vigilant while walking by the hospital and the dark abyss that is the park during the day. But last night, gave me more reason to be concerned about the night walks. I approached the front gate of the hospital which marks roughly the halfway mark on my walk home, and there was a man standing at the gate peering in, which is not entirely uncommon, as many people look to be more suspicious than they are, but as I approached he turned towards me and I got a clear look into his face. He said to me, "Ayudame! Ayudame!" ("help me! help me!). His nose was broken and flowing from was fresh blood that you could clearly seen in the faint light from the bridge lights I had already past. It appeared that he had had a tussle with someone and was punched squarely in the nose. Of course I wanted nothing to do with him, so I passed him by, but the night life on the last half of my walk can be clearly represented by him. I've been much more wary of the cars here as well, mainly because of "bombas de agua" which can fly when you least expect it. Those are water balloons that everyone throws as a game primarily during Carnival, but not limited to it. Eggs, buckets of water, and balloons filled with pig's blood are apparently added to the weaponry during Carnival, when no one is spared. I don't really look forward to that, but I guess it is all in the wild anarchy of that week.

Anyway, I just wanted to relay some of the stories that clearly make this experience much more interesting. On a lighter note, I am going to be going to the beach this weekend with my host mom and her boyfriend (another awkward date that I will be a part of, but I couldn't resist a free trip to the beach). I have also decided on my plans for Carnival, which is now in two weeks. I am going with three others to Esmeraldas and other coastal towns further north than the huge city of Guayaquil. I'll keep you posted on the events of the coming weeks, but Carnival is where my attention is being spent. I expect a well-rounded trip with Afro-American music, the Pacific Ocean, the Equatorial Sun, and the dirty city of Esmeraldas.

Well, since it has been a while since I last update this, I will try to get you back up to speed. Thursday night I arrived in Cuenca in good spirits, but the following morning I woke up to a sore jaw from a long night of grinding my teeth, a reminder of how nervous I am about the coming days. Friday morning was spent cooped up in a room taking a Spanish placement exam. This was, however, not just an ordinary computer administered exam, in fact to make it even more unique of an experience I sat down next to Marty, the professor joining our trip as the Lewis and Clark faculty representative. It was an interesting experience watching him, among others, squirm at the various tests of our knowledge of Spanish. In no way do I intend to say that I did even remotely well, but I came into the test with a mindset that anything I don't feel comfortable with would not truly exhibit my base of Spanish. And I am beginning to learn a lot about the flaws in my previous tactics of getting around learning the language. Afterwards, I spent most of my time at home settling my nerves. At night, I needed a drink so to relax myself and resist the temptations of another night grinding my teeth. I had an Ecuadorian brew which is nothing to write home about called Pilsener or something like that. The bar is your typical German tourist bar that is by no means a local joint. That was not what I am looking for at this point in my time in Cuenca, I was looking more for a reprieve from the total uneasiness of speaking entirely in Spanish. My host family is very congenial, though. My brother had a hernia on friday though, trying to lift something too heavy. He was absent for nearly three days before I saw him again. He is learning English in order to become a teacher here. Teaching, apparently is a good profession and is paid well in comparison to many of the jobs in this country, however, some statistic I heard said that 95% of the country's population earns less than $7500 dollars per year. On Saturday, I got to experience the town of Cuenca more in a tour. There were two parades running through town, both of which seemed to be insignificant, but they had a parade nevertheless. One was an anniversary for a high school where all the alumni marched in their graduation year and the other was a celebration of January 6th I believe, which seemed odd to have a parade on the 12th, but it is a day similar to Halloween in the States. There have been constant pops from fireworks nearly every day. At first I thought it was because of this holiday but now I am thinking otherwise. And yes, fireworks in the city limits are illegal. In addition to the fireworks, there is a tradition of throwing water balloons at unsuspecting people. This is supposed to be a Carnival tradition but it has spread to a year round thing apparently. I saw on my tour the grandeous cathedral stationed in the center of town and also a Panama hat factory, but the tour was really nothing more than walking through the streets on a Saturday. That afternoon I sought to find notebooks for my class and the entire city had closed down by 3pm. So rejected, I got offered to spend the day with my host mom, Eulalia, on what happened to be a date with her boyfriend. I was the unintelligible third party. We went far from Cuenca into the higher points of the hoyas that are sandwiched between the parallel mountain ranges of the Andes. There we stopped at a plaza of a small town of which I did not figure out the name. At every tienda surrounding the plaza was a jewelry shop filled to the brim with silver jewelry. Here is one of the largest silver mines in South America and you can buy unbelievably cheap jewelry of high quality because of the intense competition in town. On Sunday, I slept in and woke up to my host sisters heading north to pick up my host brother in order to bring him back home to Cuenca. I meet more and more family it seems, everyday. On Saturday afternoon, I went into the higher country to celebrate the birthday of Eulalia's father. There were probably forty or more relatives packed into the small farm house. Too many conversations to keep track of, and far to rapid Spanish being spoken, so I spent most of my time sitting down and soaking in the festivities by my keen sense of sight. On Sunday, I met more family, Wellington's, my host brother's, inlaws. But now, I settle in. I have classes every weekday. Spanish is every morning followed by anthropology in on Monday and Wednesday and biodiversity on Tuesday and Thursday. I also have a night class for Salsa on Monday and Wednesday. The classtime is very laid back but the outside work is much more rigorous. It will keep my time more structured, instead of slipping away on weekdays to far away places. I'll keep you better up to date on my personal experiences as I go, but that is where I stand today.

Last night I arrived into Cuenca where I will be stationed for three months for school. I say last night because AeroGal, my airlines decided that a three and a half hour delay was acceptable when confronted with moderate rain. I spent most of my time in the airport getting my fill of cribbage and gin. I have to admit I felt I had amnesia because I could not remember for the life of me how to play cribbage until it was far too late. The flight to Cuenca, when it finally did leave, was no longer than my flight from San Antonio to Houston, a light thirty five minute flight over the Andean highlands. I had this misconception that fertile valleys stretch across the entirety between the two parallel mountain ranges, but there is far more geologic formations than that. I overheard while eavesdropping, which I am getting quite good at, that a drive from Quito to Cuenca is more like a twelve hour odessy. So scratch that out as an idea in the future. But from the sky, it was a little more smooth, even though the turbulance was horrendous. From my side of the plane I was able to see the perfect conical shape of Cotopaxi, one of two volcanoes in the world with such perfect shape, the other being Fuji. Supposedly I would be living in the booneys farthest from the school, so there were plenty of jokes pertaining to the distance of my walk that lies ahead of me five days a week. We landed at el aeropuerto de Cuenca, if you can even call it an airport. I think I was expecting more out of the third most important city in Ecuador. I had a lot of misperceptions about this trip. The plane stopped alongside the side of the airport next to the baggage claim. A terminal did not exist. The baggage claim was equally pequeño. As there was only one plane on the ground within hundreds of miles, there was just one baggage claim track that seemed absolutely absurd. Moving along, I met my host family in mi escuela which is a villa in the heart of "downtown" Cuenca. I met my host family in spurts, actually to be more accurate, I met them basically one at a time on their own. Leslie, who is the daughter of Eulalia, my host mother, is a calm genuine Cuencan who I have not figured out precisely her occupation. Her husband, Wellington, has been the most readily accessible family member to talk with because he is learning English in order to become a teacher. He however, has been laid up since he left last night with a hernia in his stomach, but is supposively in better health. My host mother I met late a night when she arrived back home at around nine. She is a teacher of math at a local high school. Today we had our Spanish placement test which I can't place whether it went over well or not, but I am not too worried. I have no vocabulary for verbs I have become quite well aware of. Tonight, because we only have a tour tomorrow and it is the weekend, I am having a night on the town, well sort of. I plan to go and see a movie and perhaps go to a local bar one of the host families recommended. I feel quite at home here. A huge sigh of relief.

So far this trip has managed to satisfy my hunger of bland and general tourism. That is about as far as it goes. Housed in the "Gringoland" district of Quito, there is nothing much to see by foot but a couple of sour faces from taxi drivers and occationally the large group of tourists exhibiting the meager Spanish they know, something I can truly relate to. But this is not really any test of Spanish for every sign, menu and service provider displays its grammatically incorrect English, just enough to get me food from the ethnic resturants I've been endulging upon. It doesn't seem fair at this moment of my life to pocket enough money to give me three meals and be able to last in the "richest" areas of Ecuador. To give you some idea, it cost eight soiled dollar bills for a three person meal in the heart of the tourist mecca.

At any rate, we have been customary tourists upto this point. Nothing but sightseeing and travelling in the littered streets of Quito in our rented bus. The streets can only be characterized as Russian Roulette. Honking is pushed as much as the gas pedal, and that usually gives the right for drivers here the right away to speed through pedestrian crosswalks. Yesterday was highlighted with a travel across the north valley of Quito and back over the equator. What I recall seeing as located in the heart of urbanization was similar to your Walmart, clearcut and built next to Boring, Oregon. I can't really put into words the fallacy of the monumental construction to mark the "precise" location of the equator. Afterwards, we travelled back across town to the central hill that divides the upper, old Quito, from the new and much more delapadated side of town. I was unable to capture the true grandeur of the view from atop the hill. Housing and construction crept up the steep slopes of the towering mountains surrounding the city and the pollution shielded the view of the three gigantic volcanic peaks neighboring the city of Quito. At the crest of the hill stands the third largest statue in the world, following the Statue of Liberty and the mammoth of a statue overlooking Rio in Brazil. The statue is the Virgin of Quito, or Virgin Guadalupe. The would have been the highlight of my exhausting day but I happened to see what is heralded as the greatest church in the Americas called the La Compania. The interior was blanketed in gold leaf, making the experience like finding the golden city. Yesterday was capped off with a little rain and some passing philosophy about life on the patio atop our hostel.

Today was an investigation of the most famous artist of Ecuador, Oswaldo Guayasamin. We chugged along the steep hills to reach his museum. This box like ediface was fabulously decorated in his artwork. I failed to purchase anything from the gift shop but I hope to return on this trip. We returned from the trip with much more energy, only to have it sucked out in a stuffy meeting room to discuss the history of Ecuador's politics. I did give me a fantastic lead on my hopeful senior thesis however. The lecturer, Yuri Guerra, who works with an ecological foundation located here in Quito. I am excited about this lead in order to learn more about the ITT proposal. The proposal seeks to earn money from the international community for the protection and restraint from continued oil exploration in Yasuni National Park.

I have a bit of an upset stomach about tomorrow, or perhaps the strong curry from my Indian food tonight. Tomorrow I meet my host family whom I will be staying with for the next three months. I am all but ready.

Enter language immersion.