Could you pass the salt?

So for anyone else out there who´s keeping a blog, you know that sense of security you feel every time blogspot so nicely autosaves your post for you?  Well when the computer I was working on crashed a few hours ago I learned that here it doesn´t do that.  Which is a bummer since I´d almost caught up on everything from the past 2 weeks.  Now I´m going to do this in stages and I´ll try to muster the enthusiasm to make it as good as it was before...

I think I left off on my way to Cochabamba.  Cochabamba is Bolivia´s 3rd largest city and as a center of "agriculture" both legal and illegal its citizens enjoy a little higher standard of living than most Bolivians.  I had a meeting with my Bolivian contact (which involved much less espionage than the word "contact" would imply, unfortunately) who was very helpful if a little rushed and impatient.  I also checked out the Christ statue which stands over the city.  It´s actually taller than the Christ in Rio (sorry Leah) which at 33 meters tall has a meter for every year of Jesus´ life.  Cochabambans say theirs is taller because Christ lived "33 years and a little."  Cochabamba is also home to the largest open-air market in the Americas which after having experienced dozens of South American markets amazed even me.  Standing at the entrance (the decorated cakes section) I couldn´t even begin to see the end of the stalls in the distance.  Cochabamba also reinforced one of the greatest personal mysteries for me here.  Last fall I commented on how Quito and other Ecuadorian cities seem to be commercially organized by the services or products for sale.  While this is true in most cities in the region Cochabamba took it to a new level when I stayed on the funeral home/custom hat shop street.  Curiouser and curiouser...

After Cochabamba I made a quick, spontaneous stop in Sucre, the official capitol of the country.  Although it was a beautiful city with all of its white-washed colonial buildings I was there on a Sunday when almost everything in the city was closed.  I did manage to check out a really famous and scientifically important site of fossiziled dinosaur footprints.  Techtonic action since the footprints were laid has today left them on an almost perfectly vertical cliff at the local cement factory.  They were neat.

From Sucre I took a quick busride to Potosí, the highest city in the world of its size, whatever that means.  Due to the once silver-rich mountain which looms over the city, Potosí was in the 16th and 17th centuries the largest city in the Americas and one of the richest in the world.  For 2 centuries millions of dollars of silver were carried out on the backs of indigenous slaves and when the silver veins more or less dried up the city went with them.  Now silver mining is still the most important economic activity in the region but affords the miners paltry earnings.  Also, due to the toxic chemicals used for centuries in the mine and the obvious dangers of mining in general a miner has approximately 20 years to live from the day they first enter the mine.  Obviously with such a rich history and interesting I decided to take a tour.  It was pretty much as I´d expected: enclosed, dark, hot, and difficult seeing the 15-year-old kids toiling in such awful conditions.  We bought alcohol, coca leaves, and dynamite (all the necessary things to work in the mine for more than 12 hours a day, and yes, I was carrying dynamite in my backpack for about 3 hours) as gifts for the miners before we left.  I also ran into my Irish friend Emma for about the 4th time and it was really great being able to catch up on our past few days.  I´ve definitely missed traveling with her and our "boys" these past couple weeks.

After Potosí I took a bus to Uyuni, probably the most remarkable/haunting/beautiful/ridiculous place I´ve seen on this trip.  The town is absolutely post-apocalyptic (more Cormac McCarthy than Mad Max) with its wide, dusty streets, low and functional buildings, and people rushing around bundled against the cold.  I´d been warned about this cold at several points in my journey but by now I´m a hardened Minnesotan and just couldn´t be convinced that South America could produce a cold that could phase me.  I was wrong.  It routinely gets down to -5 or -10 at night in Uyuni and the wind blows about 30 or 40 mph constantly.  Luckily I´d purchased a coat in the massive Cochabamba market.  In the 19th and early 20th century Uyuni was actually a pretty important city for Bolivia as a stopping point for trains from Argentina and Chile.  When the railway gave way to the highway Uyuni more or less dried up.  As a testament to this past a huge train cementery lies about a kilometer from the town where trains in various stages of corrosion are just falling apart in the desert.  I think walking around the trains at 7 in the morning (before tourist groups got there) with stray dogs and old men walking around and plastic bags floating in the breeze was the most powerful part of the trip.  Absolutely, hauntingly beautiful.  

Most people only stop in Uyuni on their way to a tour of the Salar de Uyuni and southern Bolivia.  That next morning I joined mine with 3 middle-aged Belgian women and a Dutch couple.  The Salar de Uyuni is the highest (like everything here) and largest salt lake in the world.  During the wet season a little water covers the surface but for most of the year it´s just an enormous expanse of blindling white salt plain.  We made a stop at the salt hotel (really just a hotel made entirely of blocks of salt) and then stopped at Isla de los Pescadores, a cactus-covered island in the middle of the salt wasteland.  The island was beautiful with many cactuses standing over 9 meters tall and thousands of years old and the geography made for some good rock-climbing and hiking (Katie not that I have you pigeon-holed as "the geologist" but I´ll have to describe this trip in geological detail to you, it was amazing).  From there we spent the night in a simple but comfortable hotel on the edge of the Salar and settled in for the plunging nighttime temperatures.  The next day was full of high-altitude lakes with various species of flamingo (yes, flamingo) and the most bizarre rock formations I´ve ever seen.  I have pictures of all these things but don´t have the cable for Lauren´s camera (mine was stolen back in Ecuador), so those will be up in a week or so.  The second day ended at Laguna Colorada, a lake turned entirely red by the reaction of light with the algae living in the lake.  This in itself is pretty amazing but the red of the lake was contrasted by the complete whiteness of the borax shores.  I climbed around the borax (which I just wikipedia-ed and found to be only mildly toxic) cliffs and it really felt like I was on another planet altogether.  The next morning we had to get up at 5 to see some really disappointing geysers, especially considering the temperature that greeted us at that hour.  On a positive note though I did see a shooting star that night in the fantastically clear sky with a really wide, long tail; sort of like the shooting stars in kids´ drawings.  After the geysers we stopped at a hot spring and I decided stripping in the still far below freezing weather was worth the experience of a thermally heated bath.  After all, if you refer to one of the first posts from this trip a physically shocking early morning bath was nothing new.  Afterward we saw a white lake and a green lake (which at this point I´m too tired to explain but they also were weirdly beautiful) and I hopped in a van for Chile.  

Although I originally wasn´t planning on staying in Chile, San Pedro de Atacama was a really nice town albeit expensive (I spent more money just surviving for 3 days in Chile than I spent living the high life in Bolivia for a week!).  I tried sandboarding a bit (basically snowboarding down massive sand dunes) and watched the sunset over the beautiful and aptly named Valley of the Moon.  I caught a bus to Arica, taxied across the border to Tacna, Peru, and was on a bus to Nasca within the hour.  In Nasca I looked at the famous Nasca Lines from a lookout (majorly disappointing, they would have been better had I splurged for a plane ride) and saw some really interesting pre-Incan cementeries with the mummies still intact.  The graves had actually been plundered by grave-robbers for years before archaeologists discovered them so the desert was just littered with bone fragments.  A very creepy experience.  Finally I visited a little desert oasis called Huacachina where I sandboarded for an hour or so before leaving for my present location.  Huacachina is near the top of the list of places I plan on spending more time soon.

After a quick stop-over in Lima I´m now in Chiclayo, Peru.  Today I visited a really big witch´s market and got great explanations from a local healer on the uses of monkey claws, various types of amulets, and dragon blood.  This afternoon I checked out more ruins and decided a little late that I´m pretty ruined-out.  

Now I basically just have a straight shot back to Ecuador and my flight on Monday.  Blogspot and my brain are probably going to crash after this most epic of epic posts but I guess it´s been a good and story-worthy couple weeks.  I hope this finds everyone extremely well and that I find you as such when I return in a few days.  Love to all.

Coming soon: A return to Ecuadorian friends and maybe some closing thoughts

The Highests and the Mosts

What. A. Week. Seriously. I´ve now started on the portion of my trip in which everything seems to end in "-est" or start with "most" so to organize this post I think I´ll structure it around that theme (sort of like "This American Life" Jess!). 1. The highest lake 2. The highest capital city 3. The most dangerous road and 4. the most fun. Corny? I don´t care.

1. I left Puno, Peru about a week ago and after a reasonably stressful border crossing (they raised the price of a visa the week before and I´d only brought correct change!) I arrived in Copacabana, Bolivia. I climbed the hill over the town to watch the magnificent sunset over Lake Titicaca and met Emma from Ireland. It was a pleasant surprise the next morning to find her on my boat to Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) along with two Dutch guys, Paul and Jocham, with whom I talked for the really long boat ride. Lake Titicaca was almost smooth enough to water-ski on (which was on my mind since family vacation started the same day) but with a temperature just above freezing water sports haven´t really become popular yet. The four of us hiked the length of the island together and saw the Incan ruins on the island. Incan legend says that the first two Incas rose from the island at a sacred rock shaped like a puma so we all touched the rock for some positive energy. We then hiked to the south of the island where we ordered some pizzas, having been assured by the owner that they would be ready well before our boat left for the main-land at 4:00. When this turned out to be false we ended up eating our entire pizzas literally on the run down the impossibly steep Incan stairs down to the water. Paul even hurdled a donkey. That night we had a fun night on the town and woke up the next morning to see a unique Copacabana tradition. Every Sunday people pull their vehicles in front of the cathedral all decorated in flowers and ribbons and the priest blesses every surface of the vehicle to protect it against accidents. Anticipating an upcoming adventure we made sure to receive a little blessing ourselves...

2. That afternoon we arrived in La Paz, the highest capital city in the world. The city reminds me of Quito a bit since it´s in a valley surrounded by snow-capped peaks but the atmosphere is much different. The boys had actually come from La Paz to Copacabana for the weekend so they showed us around the witch´s market, some churches, and ended with a meal in an open market. Emma was a little turned off by the relative squalor of the market but at Paul and Jocham´s insistance I had a plate of maybe the most delicious food I´ve had on the trip. It was just like greasy sausage and some yucca but I´m probably going back for more after this post. That night we enjoyed our hostel´s nice bar/restaurant and headed out for a wild night. The next day we visited the Coca Museum which provided a history of the coca plant with lengthy but informative displays. Coca leaves (cocaine is produced from coca but coca leaves aren´t, or rather shouldn´t be, considered a drug) are chewed throughout the Andes to help deal with the altitude and the museum gave a really interesting history of the medicinal use of this plant along with its more modern drug applications. We explored the city a bit more and reserved our spot for part 3.

3. Before I left for home there was only one thing my mom told me I couldn´t do: visit the most dangerous road in the world in any capacity. Oops. After seeing plenty of tourists throughout my trip wearing the famous "I survived" shirts and talking with Paul and Jocham we decided we couldn´t really be in La Paz and miss out on such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We booked through Gravity Tours, the oldest, safest, and most respected mountain biking company and set off at 7:00 on Tuesday morning. Unfortunately Emma came down with a pretty bad bug so she had to stay in La Paz but the boys and I had a fantastic day. The bike ride starts at like, 4,000 meters where the lakes are frozen over in the morning and the snow-capped peaks are only a couple 100 meters above. We got all suited up and watched a herd of 100+ alpacas run across the road as Alistair, our guide and the founder of the dangerous road bike ride (10 years to the day, which was cool), gave us the first of many "Fear of God" speeches. We started off down the newer highway which still afforded us views of spectacularly steep and high mountains and a pretty perilous drop off the edge. Within an hour we´d dropped enough to shed some layers and hopped onto the "most dangerous road in the world." Thankfully a new, two-lane road was built a few years ago but for several decades this one-lane, dirt road with 600-meter cliffs plummeting from the very edge of the road was the only connection between La Paz and the rainforest. The new road has more or less absorbed all of the traffic from the dangerous one but the road is still used by a few mountain bike groups and the more than occasional truck or car. Our bike group had amazingly nice mountain bikes with great shocks and brakes and set out. Heading down the cliff is on the left but you also have to stay on the left side because the up-hill traffic has the right-of-way and they´re coming up on your right. So for about 60 km I was flying down this mountain road with a 600 meter fall about a foot to my left. For obvious reasons we had to dismount on the right side of the bike...Although the road is certainly deserving of its title (two people started crying in fear at the beginning of the ride and one woman saw the road and stayed in the bus) it was a really fun day and for the most part I never felt too out of control or in danger. We never saw any traffic besides our own mini-bus and Alistair´s 800+ trips down helped assuage our fears. The trip ended at 4.

4. After the exhilerating and exhausting (psychologically more than physically) ride we ended up in La Senda Verde, an animal refuge outside of Coroico, Bolivia. The refuge takes in animals abused in the Bolivian trade in animals and tries to rehabilitate them. Right now the refuge has about 15 monkeys, an ocelot, 2 coatis, dozens of parrots and macaws, tortoises, dogs, cats, a boa constrictor, a goat, a donkey, and various other bird species. It was amazing. They also have a few cabins so Paul, Jocham, and I decided to stay. We´ve spent the past two days and nights reading and drinking beer by the pool and having a ridiculously good time with the spider monkeys and coatis. All of the animals are completely vaccinated and several have been raised by humans since they were born so they will just jump on you from the trees for a ride or pull themselves up and take a nap in your lap. We had a lot of fun and really bonded through the past 6 days. Unfortunately the boys are continuing on to the rainforest from Coroico while I had to return to La Paz to head south. We all became really close traveling together and I´m excited to get together again in Amsterdam, the US, or a more exotic locale.

And thus concludes this post. Thanks for hanging in there, hopefully I´ll still have a bed at home after Mom reads this. I hope the summer´s going well, I have about 2 1/2 weeks before head home so you´ll be seeing or hearing from me soon!

Coming soon: an interview in Cochabamba and Potosí, a city with a lot of "mosts" and "-ests"

Thoughts Cusqueño

Today I finally had an extremely successful meeting with Elena Pardo, director of an organization called CEPROSI which works specifically with rural schools to help indigenous students learn to value their own culture and language...basically exactly what I want to learn about. Unfortunately Elena has been traveling on business for the last week so we weren´t able to meet until today; the day before I leave. It was great talking with her though and she almost immediately suggested that I live with a Quechua family and do a few community talks in a cultural exchange. Why couldn´t this have happened a week ago?! I´m pretty sure that I´ll have to come back this year to take advantage of that awesome opportunity. I think Elena was as enthusiastic about it as I was too.

I´ve been in Cusco for over a week now and have gathered some interesting observations, anecdotes, and quotations. Starting with the quotations I´ve overheard on the street, ahem:

British girl: I´m going to have to go wash my face now, I can´t believe this!
British friend: Oh my god I know, that was probably the most disgusting thing I´ve ever seen.
British girl: Right?! I mean, he kissed me! I wasn´t expecting that, I´m going to go Purell my whole head right now.

British guy to street vender (in English): No, no thanks, I already have an alpaca sweater. Yeah, but it´s better than the ones you have.

American girl to mom: Wait, was this the Incas or Aztecs?
Mom: Oh come on sweetheart.

Angry Southern woman waiting for bus to Machu Picchu: They were saving seats for their friends! We couldn´t get on because they were saving seats, you can´t save seats! That´s not fair!

Same woman in line to Huayna Picchu: Hey, no cuts! Hey come on! We´re all waiting too!

Same woman as I passed her climbing Huayna Picchu (thankfully this was our final interaction): Well fine, if you´re in such a rush push me over the edge, see if I care!

Australian woman climbing Huayna Picchu: No wonder the Incas had a shorter life span; their knees went out by age 25.

American dad at Machu Picchu: So, do they have a Machu Picchu in Vegas yet?

...and finally and favoritely...

Woman to friend during a Machu Picchu tour: Do you think I can ask where the red-light-district was?

Although I have definitely enjoyed my time here in Cusco and absolutely intend to return (possibly even within the year) a brief respite from the blinding tourism of this travel epicenter will be nice. Even the beggars and people drawing business into restaurants are more tourist savvy. When you walk past beggars they call after you "come back, please, come back" while drug dealers call you "buddy" rather than "friend" when you walk by. The former is certainly more effective but both still surprise me.

Another interesting aspect of Cusco is the international/confusingly cosmopolitan feel it tries to cultivate. I´ve seen Korean, Turkish, Japanese, and Israeli restaurants and I´m pretty sure I´ve heard most languages spoken on Cusco´s streets. Also, I think one of the more memorable images I have from Machu Picchu would have to be the Japanese women carrying their high-heels and I´m sure complaining in Japanese about the Incas´ fashion insensitivity with their impossibly cobbled streets.

Finally, I´m staying in a hostal right now with 65-year-old American, Bill. He´s been an endless source of entertainment for the past couple days as he regales me with stories of his recent adventures and in general, crazy life. He says he´s traveled through every town in Canada and the US and is just walking around Peru until they kick him out for visa violations (which by most indicators will happen soon). For various reasons I sleep with one eye open but he´s been hilarious and informative.

And now I head to Bolivia. Chao amigos (or, buddies)!

Coming soon: Lake Titicaca, Islas de Sol y Luna, and probably La Paz

Alpaca-the other other white meat?

It´s only been about a week since I posted last but it´s definitely been one of those weeks in which I shouldn´t have procrastinated since now this will be a pretty epic post. I´m writing right now from Cusco, Peru which is a beautiful and historic city full of colonial buildings, Incan ruins, and foreign tourists. Ecuador is touristy but it always seems like at least the Ecuadorians out-number the tourists. I´m not so sure about Cusco. Nevertheless it really is deserving of its status as a tourist Mecca. Beyond even the obligatory Machu Picchu visit Cusco has several amazing churches and Incan ruins within walking distance that rival their more famous neighbor in many ways.

I arrived in Cusco 5 days ago and immediately tried to find out if I could join a group to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Apparently tours fill up around 6 months in advance (which I actually probably should have assumed) and so I had several humorous interactions with tourist agencies when I´d ask for an Inca Trail trip and they would ask when I wanted to go. I said "well, when´s the soonest I could go?" and they answered "um, October." I usually followed that up with, "so nothing leaving like, tomorrow then?" which received a wide range of responses. With that option scratched off my to-do list I set about tackling the sights around Cusco.

The first place I visited is a a site on the mountain just above Cusco called Saqsehuaman which was a large ceremonial complex. Although considerably smaller than Machu Picchu Saqsehuaman was mind-boggling for a different reason. The compound is composed of three terraced levels which lead to the top of the mountain where three huge stone tours stood before the Spanish arrived. What´s crazy about this place is that the terraces are about 10 meters high and composed of enormous blocks of stone weighing up to 30 tons. Obviously the entire place was built before modern machinery and imaging the process of cutting the stones only to drag them several kilometers over ramps and rolling logs is impressive to say the least. Saqsehuaman is also an amazing site because of the seamless stonework involved. Each stone is so perfectly carved to fit with the next one that it creates almost perfectly smooth walls that have survived centuries of earthquakes as the colonial buildings crumbled about them.

The next day was a huge national strike protesting the rising cost of living and failed promises on the part of the government to improve the Peruvian quality of life for its millions of citizens living on $1.50 a day. Since I was already in Cusco I only knew of the strike as a huge protest in the city with most of the shops closed but several travelers were stranded throughout the country due to the striking transportation workers. I´ve heard so much grumbling from people on planned tours whose entire vacations were messed up by the strike which made me feel better about traveling by the seat of my pants. The tourist congestion made Machu Picchu much busier when I finally got there, but I´ll get to that in a second.

After Saqsehuaman I bought my bus ticket to Aguas Calientes, the town closest to Machu Picchu. I arrived at the train station thinking I was just within the "30 minutes early" request for my 12:30 train but when I showed the guard at the train station my ticket he said, "you´re just on time, there goes your train." Apparently I´d confused my 9:30 return with my 12:10 departure and got to the station just in time to jump onto my moving train. Woops.

The next day I arrived at Machu Picchu at around 6:30 in the morning. It was really cloudy and misty but that really just made the experience that much more magical. MP is perched on this mountain with the Urubamba River roaring thousands of feet below on both sides. The place is so amazingly well preserved I could hardly believe it. When you first walk in you see the agricultural terraces that fed the city and then you enter the royal living sector and the temple section. Everything was just so beautiful,tragic, and alarming in its way thinking of how such an advanced civilization was toppled in a matter of months. I battled the tourists for the whole morning (between 1500 and 2000 people visit Machu Picchu every day!) and unintentionally disrupted tons of pictures. People didn´t seem to understand that with 2000 other visitors walking around they weren´t going to get their pristine postcard picture. I also got there early enough to be one of the 400 people allowed to climb Huayna Picchu, the mountain looming behind Machu Picchu when you picture the famous view, and it was amazing. It was a reasonably strenuous hike but it ended in this little tunnel that ends up at the very peak of the mountain. From the top I could see all of Machu Picchu (it was built to resemble a condor from above while Cusco was originally built as a puma with Saqsehuaman as the head) and the mountains surrounding. I have a ton of pictures to share when I get back but I can tell you that Machu Picchu is absolutely deserving of its hype. Hopefully I´ll be able to get back some day.

After all of the Machu Picchu hustle I settled into a café in Ollantaytambo for a quick lunch of alpaca kababs. They were actually really really delicious but I realized a couple minutes into my meal that an alpaca was actually staring at me through the window of the café. Although the cows at home obviously never bothered me, this alpaca seemed to understand what was going on and its piercing gaze was a little unnerving. I still finished the amazing kababs though.

Then I walked around the fantastic ruins at Ollantaytambo (a town in the Sacred Valley en route to Aguas Calientes) which were almost as inspiring as Machu Picchu itself. The Ollantaytambo ruins are situated really precariously on the cliffs overlooking the town and were one of the last outposts of Incan resistance after the Spanish invasion. The place was refreshingly empty after Machu Picchu and I had a great time walking around the terraces and climbing the mountain for a better view. Getting from Ollantaytambo to Cusco was almost another transportation disaster when I went to buy a bottle of water after the van driver told me they would be leaving in 20 minutes. When I came back 5 minutes later the van was pulling away and only stopped for me when I banged on the door and jumped out in front of it. People in the van were yelling for it to wait but I´m sure the driver thought he could make something out of the backpack I´d loaded before I left. Oh South American transportation...

Now I´m back in Cusco for a while hanging out and seeing a few more sights. Hopefully I´ll have another meeting with a friend of Juan Carlos who will be able to help me out with information on my research and maybe even a family to stay with for a few days. We´ll see what happens. Thanks for sticking with this post to the end, more coming soon!

Coming soon: "Overheard in Cusco," and Peruvian families or Lake Titicaca

Lima is for lovers (of smog and poverty and bad weather and...)

Well it has certainly been a whirl-wind couple of weeks. My mom and sister arrived in Ecuador last Friday night, a day late after they missed a connection in Houston. We had a great time traveling for a week and they got to see several of my favorite places in the country. I don't know how much they appreciated the extensive bustime and I had to remind myself at points to value safety over budget but I think all three of us had a fun, comfortable time.

The first day they were in Ecuador we hopped on a bus for the Saturday market in Otavalo. It was kind of an intense introduction to Ecuadorian souvenirs but they were much better at keeping their eyes on the prize than I usually am. After that we had a day of walking around Quito seeing all of the churches and whatnot before we had dinner with Charo and family. It was a really really fun evening seeing everyone again. It was amazing how easily, despite significant language barriers, Charo and my mom ganged up to get the "rest of the story" and jointly fret about my current travels. Apparently the maternal language transcends linguistics.

The next day we headed to Canoa for a couple days at the beach. It was super relaxing, just like every time I´ve been to Canoa and it was just cloudy enough to preserve our porcelain skin. There were some (just) complaints about the 7ish hour night busride but we agreed the end justified the means. We then had another day in Quito in which we had lunch with Martha, the director from my program last fall, and visited Sol de Primavera. I wasn´t really sure what to expect (I was pretty sure most of the kids wouldn´t remember me) but as we walked up the street and Gonzalo saw me from the balcony we were quickly surrounded by my kids yelling "Nata! Nata!" and, almost as frequently, "Zancos! Zancos! (Stilts! Stilts!)" We played new games for a bit and I tried in vain to explain why I couldn´t stay for longer than a couple hours. It was harder than I´d anticipated to see them again and see how they´ve grown physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Hopefully I´ll be able to visit again in August. The next day we went to Mindo for a visit to the cloud forest. The first day was spent walking around and visiting orchid farmers but the next day we had a lot of fun. We hiked down to a beautiful waterfall where Lauren and I jumped from the 9-meter cliffs and Mom braved the slide into the freezing water. We were tempted to jump the 12 meters right into the waterfall but at the time I couldn´t remember whether my traveller´s insurance covered repatriation or not. I looked it up and for future notice: it does.

Mom and Lauren flew back home (and arrived safely) on Saturday and I departed on my long and windy journey to Cuzco. Because originally we were planning on visiting Manuel and his family in Riobamba but didn´t have enough time, I made a quick stopover to say hi and mend any miscommunications/hurt feelings. Manuel actually wasn´t home but it was nice to see the rest of the family for a few hours. I dropped off a few gifts from home (including some rose quartz which is used in traditional healing) and tried to leave for Loja. Unfortunately the connection I assumed I could make in Riobamba didn´t stop there so I had to go round-about to Cuenca first. I arrived in Cuenca around 1:30 in the morning and resigned myself to sleeping in the bus station for the night. After a few minutes I decided to walk around for a bit and as I passed by the bus stop there was only one bus in the terminal. One bus marked ´Loja.´ The driver was just standing there like he was waiting for me and called me over. I was therefor able to arrive in Loja at 7:20 in the morn in time to leave for Piura, Peru at 7:30. The border-crossing went fine and I caught a sleeper bus in Piura to Lima. The woman sitting next to me was disgusted that I traveled in buses with "chickens and things" and described our bus (with beds, meals, and AC) as "more or less." We traded travel tips (her giving me the names of up-scale buses and hotels and me advocating travel on the cheap) and slept through almost all of the 14-hour bus ride.

So far Lima has been more or less what I imagined and had heard from others. At 8 million people it{s a sprawling metropolis and there´s a gigantics, visible division of wealth. Coming in to the city you pass mile after mile of run-down neighborhoods and slums while farther to the south are suburbs more reminiscent of Europe than other Latin American capitals. The weather during the winter (which is now) is mostly cloudy which does little to improve on the general feeling of smog and grime. My bus companion had also warned me that people in the city speak very quickly, which I quickly learned to be true. Today I walked around Miraflores (one of the wealthier suburbs and more or less the tourist center) to the ocean and then around Central Lima and Chinatown. It was a lot of walking but I saw a lot of the city. Even though Lima is unappealing to the passerby-tourist, it´s still a very interesting city and I´m sure it has a lot more to offer given more time and patience.

Tomorrow I´m heading off to Cuzco where hopefully I´ll spend one and a half to two weeks exploring the city, visiting the sites around Cuzco, and hopefully doing another home-stay with a Quechua family. In 2-4 days I´ll be at Machu Picchu! Very soon I´ll have more to update than bus schedules (which I realize are boring but are basically all I´ve done the past few days).

Coming soon: a little more Lima and Cuzco: An Introduction

Nate ñuca shutik kan (my name is Nate)

Well I´m back in Quito after spending a week in Riobamba. Originally Manuel, the man with whom I spoke in the last post, was going to set me up with a friend of his to stay for the week. After I stayed with Manuel´s family for a night and we all connected really well, we just decided that it would be the best possible situation if I just stayed with their family instead! It´s always amazing how drastically things can differ from your expectations. My first meeting with Manuel was nerve-wracking and discouraging but by the next day we had become very good friends.

Alright, so the day after my meeting with Manuel I went back to his house for another chat. There was another miscommunication about meeting time so I ended up spending the afternoon with his 17-year-old son Luis (or Israel) talking, playing chess, and making lunch. When Manuel got home that afternoon he suggested that I just stay the night with them since he didn´t have a family. After I got settled Manuel invited me to the preparations for a wedding to be held the following day. Manuel is an extremely important community leader (he actually had two meetings with Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa during the week I was with him) and conducts many of the more important ritruals in the community. That night Manuel led a few prayers for the marriage and led a really interesting pre-matrimony ritual that involved the fiancés force-feeding each other, much like the American wedding cake tradition. We also met Manuel´s parents that night and had a beautiful view of the Southern Cross constellation.

The next day we woke up at 4:30 (the normal wake-up time for the family) and headed back to the groom´s house for a ritual bath. As we were sitting around waiting for the bath and watching the sun rise an ancient Quechua woman came hobbling out of the house dragging a large bucket. When I got up to help her carry it I realized the bucket was full of probably 70 skinned guinea pigs for the wedding feast. The night before I´d explained to Manuel that guinea pigs are only used at pets in the U.S. and he very somberly replied, "Many pets will die tomorrow." Manuel, Luis, and I collected herbs and plants from the garden to use in the bathing and then headed out into the field behind the guinea pig hut. The bath consisted of Manuel dripping, splashing, and throwing alternating ice cold and luke warm water on the bather (the bride actually broke out in tears from the shock of the cold). Not having woken up at 4:30 for nothing, I too was brought close to tears as, standing in a field in my underwear, I was thrashed with cold water and orange peels.

While the bath in itself was definitely refreshing, being ritually cleansed also allowed me to help Manuel with the actual marriage ceremony that afternoon. It was held outside La Balbenera, the oldest Catholic church in Ecuador, were Manuel, Luis, a friend Pati, and I set up the ritual space with a fruit border, an offering of geometrically arranged food at the center, and a special burning. It was a very elaborate ritual lasting about 40 minutes in the noon sun. The ritual burning had to be lit by a non-menstruating woman and only people who had been bathed could even enter the sacred space. All in all a very interesting afternoon. When we got home I had lunch with Rosario (Manuel´s wife) and the kids, Ruth (20), Luis (17), and Koreths (13) where we traded Quechua and English words and phrases. That evening I went to a youth service at Ruth´s evangelical church which was very interesting.

The next we also woke up obscenely early and headed off to an Inti Raymi (the summer solstice festival, inti=sun and raymi=festival in Quechua) ritual in Cacha, a traditional community high in the mountains above Riobamba . When we got there we were immediately put to work making breakfast for a group of visiting American medical students and the community leaders who would be attending the ritual. It was a lot of fun to be on the inside, making the salads and traditional drinks and getting to serve people instead of being served. Most of the Ecuadorian attendees got a kick out of being served by the American visitor and were really patient. The Americans were just confused. The breakfast was followed by the actual Inti Raymi festival where Manuel was once again leading the proceedings. It combined several of the same elements of the previous day´s ritual but was much better attended. On the ride home Manuel and I talked about indigenous politics and tourism after so many of the people at the ritual were either foreigners or Ecuadorians from the city with little interest in the actual ritual. I was amazed at how carelessly and disrespectfully the Americans and Europeans would push there way through the crowd to get a view, walk through the sacred space, and snap pictures despite Manuel´s request that they not.

The rest of the week passed relatively calmly with cooking, cleaning, reading, birthday parties, Incan exercises, Quechua/English lessons, community visits, a marriage offer from a Quechua woman, conversations about politics, religion, academia, and background, walks, and views of Chimborazo, Tungarhua, and El Altar (the highest mountains in the country) from my bathroom window. It feels incredible that I became so close with this family after such a short period of time but saying goodbye was much more difficult than I´d ever anticipated. I´m sure we´ll stay in touch as I want to improve my Quechua and everyone in the family is very enthusiastic about learning English. Manuel is also very interested in American indigenous politics and would like to make a connection between Jatun Sacha Wasi (the Quechua university in Riobamba of which he is the director) and a Sioux college in South Dakota. Hopefully something will work out.

Sorry for the long post but if you can believe it I´ve left out tons. After a week of waking up at 4:30 (ssoo the opposite of what I´m about) I´m headed for a nap. My mom and sister will be arriving in Quito soon for a week after missing some connections so I´m sure I´ll have more to tell soon. I hope this finds you all well and stay tuned! Yopaichani (Thanks) and ashta kama (until later).

Coming soon: a week with Mom and Lauren in Ecuador

Intimidation in "Frio"bamba

So I have finally arrived in Riobamba, the main site of my time here in Ecuador and a chilly city (it´s a national joke to call Riobamba "Friobamba" because "frio" means "cold" in Spànish) due to the winds that blow down from Chimborazo, the highest mountain in the country. The first week in Quito was sort of boring as I was mostly just trying to connect with my host family from last fall and get the information I need for the rest of my trip. It was relaxing though and I got to reacquaint myself with most of the city at a very leisurely pace. After 4 days of phone tag Juan Carlos and I got together on Tuesday and I got all of the contact information I needed. Although a lot has changed in terms of my family and my place here it was nice to catch up with people and hear about what´s happened in the 6 months since I left.

Now I´m in Riobamba where I met today with Manuel Puma Kiru, the director of the university where Juan Carlos teaches. Although he had a ton of information and eventually connected me with a Quechua family Manuel is a rightfully intimidating man. Almost the very first thing he asked me while maintaining complete eye contact was, "So, why are you here? What do you want to know?" Both valid questions but a bit terrifying and surprisingly direct as I stumbled through my startled responses in Spanish. We talked for 3 hours about the state of Ecuador´s indigenous peoples and the role of foreigners, explicitly including anthropologists, in visiting the country. Talking with Manuel was a strong and necessary reminder that his people (or any people for that matter) aren´t tourist attractions or "lab animals," as he put it. He was very direct in saying that I should know exactly what I´m doing here and to remember that doing research or carrying out a study carries with it implicit power dynamics. While I knew this all along, I think I´d sort of talked myself into thinking that my research was worthwhile and that my position in doing the research validated. Especially at my undergraduate level of anthropology where the difference between research and ethno-tourism is minute, I´m going to have to really re-evaluate if and how I can do this research at all. Luckily though, I can do everything I wanted to do originally only as an experiential cultural exchange (which is the project outline in my fellowship anyway).

The moral of the story is that after an hour and a half of Manuelo interviewing me about my intentions in visiting his community he was confident enough to help me out. We´re meeting tomorrow at 10 to meet the family with whom I will be working and living for the next week!

I´ll probably be out of contact for that time (assuming this works out like I´m hoping it will) so I´ll update you all again in a week when I return to Quito and start the week with my mom and sister! I hope everyone´s doing well and I should have plenty to tell in a week´s time. Until then!

Back to Quito!

If by some miracle I haven´t told you or much more astoundingly my mother hasn´t told you I will be back in the Andes for the summer traveling and doing research on indigenous education thanks to a generous fellowship from Carleton. I´m starting out in Ecuador (I´m actually writing from an internet café in Quito right now) where I´ll stay in a village outside Riobamba for a week and a half before my mom and sister arrive. After we tour around Ecuador for a week I´ll head to Cuzco, Peru where I´ll visit Macchu Picchu and sites and stay for another week+ in a rural village. Finally I´ll end my trip with a quick stop on Lake Titicaca (the highest lake in the world navigable by ocean-faring vessels) and in La Paz, Bolivia before I head to a village outside Cochabamba a little farther to the south. Hopefully then I´ll have just enough time for the 2-3 day bus ride back to Quito to catch my flight home!

Last night I arrived back in Quito, surprisingly pleased that the sounds (car horns, dogs) and smells (gasoline, roasting meat) haven´t changed a bit in 6 months. My taxi driver from the airport said my Spanish was great as we talked about politics and the weather but then again, I was paying him. Otherwise I´m just hanging out for a couple of days until I head down to Riobamba. I´m planning on having lunch with my host dad from the fall tomorrow and hopefully dinner with Charo, my host mom. I´m excited to reestablish contact with everyone.

Well, I´m going to go walk around for a while and get a feel for things again. I´m not sure how often I´ll be able to update but stay tuned!

A Review, An Overview, A Preview, and A Worldview

Well everyone, after 36 hours of travel and far too many disgruntled airport employees and pampered Houstonian princesses, I've arrived safely in South Dakota. Thanks again to everyone for reading my blog, as a final send-off I've made some lists of, well, various things.

Things I will miss from Ecuador: warmth, $1 beers, llapingachos, my family, fresh fruit, the language, cheap travel, real mountains, my kids, historic buildings, sunshine, beaches, vanilla Konitos, Pingüino ice cream, plazas, fresh bread, music, my friends, Martha, Sarita, María, and Adriana (professors/program assistants), 25 cent public transportation, chochos, smells, futbol-mania, balconies, Pingüino ice cream (it deserves two), bus adventures, newness, soup, the G-Spot, Rafael Correa, indigenous remedies, open-air markets, the black market, tarantulas, year-round flowers, flexible schedules, Juan Car´s movies, South American Coca-Cola, protests, hope, familiarity, $3 movie theaters, flexible due dates, fresh juice, humitas, dozens of banana varieties, city life, chocolate milk

Things I won´t miss from Ecuador: bus exhaust, rain, child street workers, staring, creepy taxi drivers, Nestle instant coffee, racism/homophobia, buses packed to over-capacity, low doorways, barking dogs on roofs, El Jardín, reggeaton, sunburns, my electricuting shower, too-short blankets, dog poop on the sidewalks

Things I still want to do in Ecuador: learn Quichua, visit the Galápagos Islands, canoe in the Amazon, learn to cook, drive somewhere, bungee jump, see an erupting volcano (with lava, Tungarahua doesn´t count), scuba dive,

Things I´m looking forward to at home: peanut butter, space, exercise, real coffee, the language, my family, driving, Christmas, friends, my pets, coffee shops, consistently warm showers, reliable postal service, independence, extra-long twin size beds, snow, stars, good Indian food, Carleton, sharp cheddar cheese, the ability to use the bills the ATM gives you, skiing, macaroni and cheese

Foods I like (as in actually crave and search for on menus) now (mostly for Paula Ensz and Susan Langlee): tofu, tomatoes, avacado, hot salsa, onions, cucumbers, peppers, pineapple, spicy things, figs, shwarma (I know, who comes to Ecuador and eats shwarma?), cuy (guinea pig),

Foods I still really don´t like: mushrooms and mayonnaise

New names I go by: Nath (how Charo spells "Nate"), Nata (everyone), Natan (my boss), Net (Myriam and the kids in the street), Leche (Gabby), Milk (Gabby), Natita (Elizabeth when she wants something and Eli´s mom), and, as spelled phonetically in Spanish by my neighbor, Neith

Things I lost in Ecuador: timidity, weight, inhibitions, two scarves, idealism, direction

Words I might start using in English: chévere (cool, but better), chuchaqui (hangover), bacán (cool, again), chao (ciao, but how we spell it here), sigue no más (like, "go ahead" or "move along" or really anything you could possibly need to express verbally), a ver (used like, "look here")

Things I care less about now: my appearance, what other people think of me , personal comfort, promptness

Things I care more about now: education, Spanish fluency, GLBT rights, personal awareness, good ice cream (you laugh, but Pingüino´s up there twice), South American politics, economics, philosophy (Juan Car talks about it all the time), tranquility, and if possible, travel

My Last Day

Yesterday was the last day of my internship and although I was anticipating difficult goodbyes, the day completely surpassed my expectations. All day I was waiting and hoping for one of my kids to act completely immature, preferrably starting a fight or disrespecting me in any way, to make the departure a little bit easier. Instead I got 80 kids on their best behavior, hundreds of questions of when I will be coming back, requests to stay, and an afternoon-long party...the moral of which being that if you were interested in seeing a grown man cry last Friday around 4:30, Venezuela Street in Quito would have been a good place to look.

When I got to my internship, Julio was in a really really awful mood. When I asked him about it he wouldn´t talk to me and just said that he hadn´t slept well and was worried about his exams that day. When he was standing alone later that morning, my co-worker Elena told me to talk with him. Julio paused for a second before he looked up with teary eyes and said, "Por qué no puedes quedar con nosotros? (Why can´t you stay with us?)." This interaction was repeated several times throughout the day, most notably with Narcisa, Gaby, Gustavo, and Jesica. The difficult day culminated in a party for Dario´s, one of my co-workers, birthday and my departure. We had a three big cakes and treats of all kinds in addition to music performed by my boss and his music class and speeches by some of the kids. When they gave me some of their cards, I read the first one to find, "We wanted to give you a universe of stars but since we can´t, we gave you our smiles." After that I just stared firmly at the wall, waiting for it to be done. When I thought I´d escaped it all with a more or less dry face, I said goodbye to Myriam, my closest co-worker. We hugged and as we were both starting to tear up she whispered in my ear, "No nos olvides Net (Don´t forget us)." And thus commenced the falling apart of Nate.

Without care or fear of sounding cliché, these 4 months in Sol de Primavera have really been a life-changing experience for me. Working day after day with such inspiring kids and co-workers has had an enormous impact on me and today I felt completely lost (even though it was Saturday and I wouldn´t have been there anyway) knowing that quite possibly, but by no means for sure, I will never see them again.

Also, as I near the end of my blog (for this adventure anyway), I want to thank everyone from the US, Czech Republic, India, Ecuador, Egypt, Indonesia, Argentina, Poland, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, France, Jordan, Portugal, and Singapore who has been reading. Just to creep you out with the wonders of Google Analytics (a program that tracks from where people have visited the blog) a little bit more, thanks also to readers from South Dakota, Minnesota, Nevada, Missouri, Iowa, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Wisconsin, Alabama, Florida, and NewHampshire.

Coming on Tuesday: Tena and the last goodbyes

Fiestas, Baños, Zapatos

Alright everyone, the goal is to not go to bed until I have brought this blog into the present. I would give myself 15 minutes until I decide to abandon that goal and go to bed, but we´ll see...

Alright, so after our return from Cotocachi, we entered into the week of the fiestas de Quito. For the majority of the city, the week means bullfights, concerts, and drunken debauchery in the streets and the prospect of a week-long party went more or less the same for me in the months leading up to it. The only problem was that Dec. 6, the official date of the fiesta, celebrates the day the Spanish arrived in Quito. What isn´t usually discussed is that following their arrival, they proceeded to rape, plunder, and murder the already established Incan empire in the area. For that reason I´d been hearing from my family and from meetings with our kids in my internship that really, the fiestas de Quito weren´t something to be celebrated in the usual way. In that spirit, I spent most of my fiestas de Quito finishing my independent study project (which is entirely finished and turned in at this point, more later) and attending rock concerts at Quitu Raymi and Quitofest, both huge rock festivals fighting against the Spanish-centric history of the holiday. In one tiny aside, we also decided to get our shoes shined for the first time by the kids who have been asked us for 4 months. Rebecca´s shoes turned out really well, so when the girl told me that, yes, in fact she did know how to polish the suede on my shoes, I accepted the offer. After the very first stroke of her brush and the sight of my already stained shoes, she quickly beckoned over 4 of her shoe-shining comrades. Within seconds I had an army of shoe-shiners, all equally willing to water-stain and incorrectly color my shoes. They look awful right now, but don´t worry, I had to pay the most for them because it took so much powder and oil to ruin them.

The week passed more or less normally, with more activity, noise, and visitors in the city before we left for Baños on Friday. Baños is one of the places in Ecuador that people always ask, "Have you visited it yet?", so we´ve all felt pretty obligated to visit. Baños sits more or less on the transition between the Andes and the Amazon, with some famous thermal baths thrown in. Baños is also right next to the volcano Tungarahua which has destroyed the city several times in the past. Tungarahua is actually erupting right now, as we could see from the bus as we approached the town, but it was too cloudy while we were actually in Baños to see eruption or the lava during the night. We (Anna, Kristen, Danielle (a friend from Carleton volunteering in Ecuador for a month), and myself (Marge and her, our, friend Rebecca got there later that night)) got to Baños on Friday afternoon, checked into our hostel, and explored the city a bit. By some strange coincidence Friday night was fiestas de Baños (my 4th city fiesta) and we enjoyed some street dancing and canelazo drinking. The next morning Kristen, Danielle, and I left for a bike ride through the mountains with a very tentative goal of reaching Puyo, a town officially in the rainforest, out of the mountains, and 60 km away. The entire bike ride was fantastically beautiful and at one point I just had to decide that I´d taken enough pictures of picturesque waterfalls. When we´d reached the end of our bike renter-provided map much earlier than we were supposed to have arrived, we just decided to keep going until Puyo. Afterall, how sweet is it to be able to say you biked out of the Andes mountains into the Amazon rainforest. The trek was longer and much, much more uphill than we´d been told, but we arrived in Puyo around sunset, just in time to see the Andes looming above us far in the distance. Needless to say, we caught a bus back to Baños...60 km was definitely enough for me.

The next morning, while Anna, Margaret, and Rebecca got massages, Danielle, Kristen, and I decided to go bridge jumping. It was more or less like bungee jumping, only the cord didn´t bounce us back, we just fell for 150 feet (from the 300 ft bridge) until the rope caught us and we swung under the bridge. It was a really fantastic experience and I can´t wait to try real bungee jumping. I may or may not have punched myself in the face during the fall and blacked out, but unfortunately, the difference between blacking out and falling 150 feet is very minute, and I can´t really decide what happened. Nevertheless, we all enjoyed our falls and I got a full body massage as a reward afterward.

This week I not only finished my 24-page independent study project paper in Spanish along with an 8 page final in Spanish, but was actually content with both of them upon their completion. The completion of those looming projects was kind of a shock, leading to a "well, what do I do now?" crisis. Tonight we also cooked dinner for all of our families and had a great time. We made chili, enchiladas, salad, guacamole, various appetizers, and wine (the most crucial part of the dinner as it turns out) and everything was met with great success. We cooked/shopped all afternoon and despite some unnecessary stress for the last week, I had a great time drinking and cooking with everyone. After the dinner we received the shirts we designed to represent our term (you´ll see me wearing it plenty) and watched a quick CD of pictures from the program. Although the beginning of the end has been an ongoing process for a while now, tonight I actually had to say goodbye to important people from the program and my friends´families...I don´t think I like this "goodbye probably for forever" thing.

On a concluding note, and to be continued later, tomorrow is the last day of my internship. I´m more than a little worried about leaving my kids, even though this entire week has been something of an emotional rollercoaster as they alternate between hair-wrenchingly bad behavior and tear-inducing moments of incredible interactions. The low point definitely came today when, as I was saying goodbye to Julio for the day (I really need to describe Julio and his situation one-on-one, just because I can´t quite write it out yet) and he apparently had missed the memo that "Nata" was leaving tomorrow. Julio and I have become very much like brothers and when he asked if we were doing zancos next Monday and I had to explain that I wouldn´t be there next Monday, his surprise that I would be in the US on Monday absolutely broke my heart. If the walk home today was as difficult as it was, maybe tomorrow I´ll just take the bus.

I also put a ton of pictures on the site, so check that out. Juan Car was in charge of my camera tonight at the dinner so I´ll be posting all of those great pictures after I get back from Tena next Tuesday. See everyone soon!

Coming soon: Last day of the internship, Tena, and closing remarks

Cotocachi+Fiestas de Quito+Baños=you might want to take a seat

Alright, pay attention everyone, a blog post of this magnitude is what happens when you neglect to update during times of frenzy...

Last Thursday, the 29th, we left for our last class trip to Otavalo and Cotocachi. Otavalo is one of the top tourist testinations in Ecuador because of its huge artesanal market but Cotocachi is the name of the Cantón (county) and community around Otavalo. Although these communities embraced tourism earlier and now have a larger tourism infrastructure than most Ecuadorian towns, all of the tourism was extraordinarily-well integrated into the normal, daily life.

The first thing we did upon our arrival in Otavalo was to visit Jambi Huasi, a medical clinic that offers both traditional forms of medicine and the more modern, occidental medical practices. We talked with some of the healers, watched Martha, our program director, receive a medical diagnosis involving an egg and about a gallon of oil, and was spiritually cleaned by the "shaman" of the clinic. After that we visited an Andean instrument workshop and an alpaca workshop. Everyone in this community spoke Quichua, usually as a first language, and the incredibly ancient couple who ran the alpaca workshop told us in their best Spanish that they had been working on the same sides of their yarn-making machine for over 50 years...50 years working on the exact same side of the exact same machine, wow.

That afternoon we met our host families for the weekend. I stayed with Anna and Emma since there weren´t enough houses for each of us to stay independently. Our family was fantastic, María (the mother), Carlos (our dad), and Isabel (the 10-year-old daughter) were all very welcoming and tried to include us in the family as much as possible. Our first activity was to help with dinner, where María laughed in a very endearing way at every single thing we did. Cutting the tomatos? Not right. Making juice? Definitely wrong. We had a really fun time talking and learning some Quichua (most of which I´ve forgotten at this point).

The next day we visited la Asamblea de Unidad Cantonal de Cotacachi (Assembly for "County" Unity), a really important citizen-directed body in Cotacachi. We were only there for the opening ceremony, but it was interesting to see so much citizen participation. It was also cool that the entire proceedings were carried out in both Spanish and Quichua, something very rare even in Quichua-heavy areas like Cotacachi. After the assembly we headed to el Lago Cuicocha, a huge lake in the caldera of an ancient volcano. When the volcano exploded thousands of years ago, the mountain collapsed upon itself, created the lake. The volcano then erupted again, giving rise to the two islands in the middle. We took some pictures and took a boat ride around the islands before lunch...definitely the most important part of this day.

Although I´d eaten cuy (guinea pig) prior to this visit, I´d only ever eaten it as left-overs heated up in our microwave, never fresh and it´s it complete form. That all changed the day at Cuicocha when several of us ordered cuy for lunch. Cuy is actually a really good, really unique tasting meat. It was hard to eat because it´s served like chicken, so we had to peal the meat off the little guinea pig legs. Because the brain is traditionally eaten, I tried a little hoping there isn´t a guinea pig strain of mad-cow disease. Unfortunately, the restaurant was out of roasted cockroaches for dessert...

That night we had a dinner and dance/music performance with our families. The next morning we left the family (and Cuchari, the family dog) for the famous Otavalo market. Even after 4 months of Ecuadorian artesanal markets, Otavalo was an impressive/overwhelming experience. I think I managed to finish most of my Christmas shopping but it really was a little too much. When a town of 20,000 hosts the largest market in the country every Saturday, you know you´re in for something big. We shopped until we literally dropped and headed home to rest for fiestas de Quito.

Sorry I´m not doing very well on updating, with one week left here things are getting a little hectic and I just haven´t been able to find the time or interest to keep the blog updated. Right now I´m just too tired to catch up, so I´ll try very hard to bring you up to date with the fiestas de Quito and Baños tomorrow. Ciao!

Coming very, very soon: Fiestas de Quito, the inherent evil of fiestas de Quito, Baños, and the continuied ruination of my shoes

Rock concerts with Mom

Alright everyone, sorry I haven´t posted in several geological ages, but for the first time I´m going to use that famous study abroad excuse that I´ve just been too busy. With that in mind, I´m posted a couple quick stories before I leave for Baños in a half hour and then I´ll have a monstrous update on Sunday when I get back.

I´ll start with last Sunday when Charo and I went to what she described as "an indigenous women´s market in the park." This week is the fiesta de Quito and I was pretty sure that there was a large rock festival in the park she was talking about, but I also figured that she probably knew what was going on. So we climbed up to Parque Itchimbia and as we crested the hill, an field of thousands of moshing, black-clad Ecuadorian youth appeared before us. I started to think, "Uh oh Charo, what are you going to do now?" but before the thought could even form in my mind she was squealing, "¡Que lindo!" How could I have forgotten that Charo loves seeing anyone under 30 doing anything other than committing a crime? Not only did she love the amount of youth participation at the event but claimed to honestly enjoy the screaming metal...who is this woman?

That night when we got home we talked about Ecuadorian politics, as we often do, and both got a little teary as we talked about her hope for her country and the future of the Ecuadorian people. As I´ve mentioned, Ecuador is in a process of rewriting the constitution right now and the Asamblea Constituyente (the body charged with writing said constitution) was inaugarated last week. The assembly will be held in Montechristi, a small town in Manabí where one of the country´s greatest heroes, Eloy Alfaro, was born. Besides this pretty sweet symbolism, the placement also follows through on Correa´s promises of decentralization and political inclusion. So, Sunday was the inagauration and Correa gave his speech in front of Alfaro´s newly constructed tomb. He based his speech off a letter from one of Alfaro´s captains, telling his general, "don´t worry, everything is ok, we´re upholding everything you worked for." Imagine the power of that! Charo and I both agreed that the US could use a leader as charismatic and uplifting as Correa.

One final little story from the week, Juan Carlos called me son...which affected me much more than I would have thought. "Hijo" is kind of a general term of endearment but he never uses it like that and called me the other night saying, "son, we´re meeting in the house in 30 minutes." Nothing big or special, but I definitely feel as though this was like, my last step to being accepted and integrated into my family.

And with that I leave you to head to Baños. I´ll catch everyone up on everything when I get back on Sunday. Hope you´re all doing well, I´ll be back in a week and a half!

Coming soon: Cotocachi, Baños, more stories from fiestas de Quito, the impending termination of my program, and the ruination of my shoes

And Now, More Thoughts from the Equator

1. Does anyone remember pogs (anyone who went to middle school between 1995 and 2000 should be nodding their heads)? Because for whatever reason, they´re huge here right now. Most of my kids bring them out at least once throughout the day and I always see kids playing them in the street. I remember having a vague notion that they were ridiculous when I cared about them, but watching it now from the other side all I can do is scratch my head that the phenomenon continues.

2. As any of my female friends here can tell you, Ecuador is still more or less a bastion of machismo despite improvements in recent years. Men shout and whistle from windows, the sidewalk, and passing vehicles regardless of whether women have male companions or not (not that they should need them). I´ve been amazed at how quickly and passively these traits are picked up by boys too. I´m constantly scolding my boys (ages 10-16) for whistling at passing girls or smacking their lips disgustingly. So far none of them seem to understand why this is a problem but more than any other lesson, this is the one I want to get through to them.

3. Quito is unofficially divided into distinct economic districts. This applies to food markets, the touristy center, business center, and usual divisions that might immediately come to mind but extends to much more specific areas of the city. For example, every day on my walk to my internship I walk up a street completely lined with shoe stores, including an enormous open-air market entirely devoted to the sale of footwear. I also live in the middle of the construction/home improvement area (oddly located around the Basílica), there is also a string of personal hygeine product stores on my way to work, and a couple weeks ago as I was leaving the bus station I stumbled upon three extremely militant army surplus stores, all in a row. The funny thing about all of these similar stores sharing such a small space is that it doesn´t really seem to affect how prices are set. You would think that increased competition would result in lower prices or at least an equalizing of prices (or so my highly developed, largely intuitive knowledge of economics tells me) but prices very widely for the same products in stores right next to each other...very curious...

4. If you´re waiting for a bus in the 4-6 in the afternoon range, especially going south, you´d better be prepared for a very close encounter with approximately 100 of your Ecuadorian comrades. When the bus rumbles up, you can tell immediately how full it is by the amount of bulge in the doors. Regardless of the density of the crowd, everyone on the bus stop pushes in, resulting in this ridiculous situation in which everyone is absolutely mashed together, like potatoes. The buses to the south are more crowded because (I think) the south is the traditionally poorer part of the city and I´m sure that there are more workers from the south in the commercial part of the city who don´t own cars. As a result, when you´re waiting for your hot, smelly, and crowded southbound bus you have to watch almost empty buses pass by heading north.

5. For my independent study project, as I´ve mentioned, I´m looking at how the process of mestization in indigenous youth is reinforced by their experience in school. I thought it might be helpful to visit some of the parents and see what they thought about their childrens´schools and their participation in them. I tried to organize some visits through Sol and some other schools and nothing really would work out, so I just decided to right to the source: the markets. Last Saturday I visited two big markets in Quito where I was planning on interviewing some of the indigenous women about their feelings on education. I´d already been told by Martha, the program director, to clearly and quickly explain myself to anyone I might interview just because they would assume that I´m there on behalf of the government or something else that could be trying to get them in trouble. So I approached three different women and explained who I was, what I was doing, and that by all means, anything they told me would only be used for my paper. The first women started out speaking to me in perfect Spanish, but after the first question of the interview switched to Quichua and pretended like she didn´t understand. The next woman told me that "yes, she had children in the school system here," but when I asked if I could ask a couple quick questions, she corrected herself and said, "Oh, well actually, I don´t have kids." The next woman did the exact same thing. So maybe parents visits aren´t really necessary for this paper after all...

Translating is Hard

So tonight instead of spending the evening doing my homework, which I really should have done, I stayed up and talked with Juan Car instead. He was asking me to translate some words of his favorite Ben Harper song, "Just Another Lonely Day" because he wants to use it for a short movie he has in mind. I only needed to translate a few of the words because he speaks pretty good English and it´s a simple song, but we went through several of our favorite lyrical songs. We brainstormed about the movie (about a retired American couple visiting Ecuador and just going through their touristic motions, listen to the song and image it...fantastic) while listening to the song and actually acted out in the living room how we thought it should be and what scenes should be included.

The song changed to a live Ben Harper song in which fans were screaming enthusiastically and so we started imitating them instead. We were yelling (in a whisper because Juan Carlos is sleeping) about how much we loved Ben Harper and the usual things rowdy fans yell at concerts, when Juan Car imitates taking off his bra and yells "I´m throwing you my breasts!"

Now although I know for a fact that I make very similar mistranslations every day, I fell on the floor laughing. I explained that he probably meant "bra" instead of "breast" and after a little more laughter we continued with our movie planning. Next on our list, finding out how to get movie rights for a Ben Harper song...

Cultural Immerson #1298: The Mullet

So although my hair´s been longer than I usually like it for a couple weeks now, I´ve been assured by JuanCar and Juan Carlos (both of whom have hair past their shoulders) that my hair has been a perfectly acceptable, almost too short length. I finally decided this past weekend that enough was enough and that regardless of the outcome, I needed a haircut. I went to a place recommended by a friend and $2, 15 minutes, and several questionable sighs from the barber later I was mullet-clad. I haven´t decided yet whether to cut it off or just embrace my new style as a cultural adaptation...probably the former...

I´ve felt my time quickly slipping away here for a couple weeks now, but today it really hit. Although my kids were kind of punks today for some reason, they are all starting to ask, "When are you going back to the United States?" and I don´t think in a "Can´t you just leave already?" way. I´m usually pretty skeptical when people come back from study abroad or a summer experience gushing about their fantastic kids and their amazing time but I´m afraid I´m in danger of becoming one of those people myself. I´m not going to pretend that my kids are angels or that I´ve enjoyed every minute of my internship, but several of my kids have quickly worked their ways into my heart. I´m getting ready to leave my internship and several aspects are starting to wear on me, but at the same time, I´m going to miss Narsisa´s hug in the morning, Julio´s beaming smile, Sergio´s chess challenges, Gustavo´s gripping handshakes, Ricky´s swearing, Jesica´s questions, Jaqueline´s criticisms, Gabriela´s nicknames and English, and maybe even Hector´s constant nagging about stilts.

Today was also a difficult day in that I ran into Paúl, a kid from Sol who had to leave because he was too direspectful and got in too many fights. I was walking up to the park with my boys on stilts (they can climb stairs now) when we saw Paúl and his brothers playing. When Paúl was in Sol he was my biggest problem and left me frustrated with his disrespect and violence every day. Today when I saw him I was with his group of zancos and it was a real shock to see what exactly it´s like for these kids outside of our foundation. In Sol the kids get 2 meals a day, plenty of activities and always have to practice good hygeine. When I saw Paúl today, he was just playing on the street on a Tuesday morning and obviously hadn´t washed his face or hands in days. Even though he was my biggest problem a few weeks ago, today he ran up to me and asked about things in Sol and if people had been asking about him. I was really taken aback by his eagerness, especially since he was my "llorón" (whiner) when he was actually attending Sol. Seeing him again really made me appreciate, if not what I´m doing here, the pretty incredible work of which I´m a tiny part.

This weekend is probably my last "free" weekend in Quito and I´ll probably spend most of it writing my independent study project. I haven´t really had the motivation I might have hoped for in the project, but I´ve become really interested and am excited to write the paper. So little time for everything...but what else is new?

Still coming soon: Sumo, Thanksgiving, and Quitu Raymi

Some Guano

OK everyone, sorry I haven´t posted in quite some time...lately I have been overtaken by a wave of blog lethargy, this changes now (after some prodding from 4 continents).

I now impart to you another segment of the eternal battle over my eating habits with my host mom...in dialogue...

Charo: So do you want me to make you something for dinner?
Nate: No, that´s ok, I´m just going to make a ham sandwich, I´m not very hungry.
Charo: No omelette? I could heat up some soup?
Nate: No, I´m really ok.
Charo: Ok, I´ll just make you some fried bananas and heat up some rice...
Oh well, I guess it´s nice that someone´s looking out for me...I guess.

Does anyone know that Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine about New York cab drivers (this serves a purpose, I promise)? In said routine he talks about how cab drivers can be driving 50 mph backwards the wrong way up a one-way bridge and instead of feeling fear you just laugh and think, "Well, I wouldn´t do that in my car." Although this sketch comes to my mind often here, never was it more pertinent than this weekend when (after realizing the road had been washed out) we were part of a huge line of vehicles snaking up a windy side road from Juan Carlos´university to return to Riobamba (I´ll explain later). The woman driving had a splitting headache and we couldn´t stop to change drivers but she was still passing semi-trucks on jack-knife turns with a hundred meter ravine on the inside of the curve. I´m sure that at several points (probably the ones where we were 3 abreast on a road built for 1) we had a tire over the edge but we were laughing the whole time and at no point did I even clench my fists (which I do in the US riding with anyone in the calmest conditions).

Alright, back to the beginning. On Sunday night I got back from a whirlwind weekend in which I travelled four hours north of Quito for Thursday and Friday and four hours south Saturday and today (four hours doesn´t sound very substantial by US measurement but I easily traversed half the length of the country and visited three distinct climate/culture zones). Thursday morning we left early for our second program outing to Mascarilla in Chota Valley. These visits are for a class called "Democracy and Social Change" and we´ve been spending a lot of time talking about the roles and experiences of minorities in Ecuador. We visited Mascarilla to look at an Afro-Ecuadorian community and specifically a women´s cooperative that has culturally and economically revitalized the town. It was an interesting visit and I think everyone had a good time, but the trip left everyone a little uncomfortable with the concept of ethnotourism.

Immediately when we arrived in Mascarilla we headed to a preschool where we served as living, breathing jungle gym equipment for a couple of hours. When we got there the kids sang a few songs for us and then came our turn to entertain them. We sang a few songs and then played Duck, Duck, Goose (or Pato, Pato, Ganzo), which was met with huge success. I´m used to working with older kids here so I´d kind of forgotten all of the songs and games...now if they´d started punching each other in the face or had wanted to learn to walk on stilts, that would have been a different story. After the preschool we took an afternoon-long tour of the cooperative and visited various workshops, including those of shampoo/lotion, jewelry, pottery, and card-making. It seemed like a pretty cool organization but again, I´m not quite sure what I think about the commercialization of culture, which I´ve experienced a lot here.

That night before dinner we were treated to a dance performance and tried to learn a little bit ourselves. Anyone who knows me won´t be surprised to know that within 5 minutes I was dancing with a bottle balanced on my head with the best of them...most of the town turned out to watch us struggle (what better way to pass an evening?) and it was almost refreshing to have the oggling-tables turned. The next morning we made clay masks (mine was an angry Frenchman, but not really purposefully) and visited the town store where the cooperative sells their various products.

We then drove back to Quito, went out, got home late, and I left for Riobamba at 7:00 the next morning. The Riobamba trip really reminded me how much I love travelling alone. I was going to meet Juan Carlos but it was fun to get lost and ask around and only have to worry about myself, I really enjoyed it. Anyway, when I got there I hopped on another bus to la Laguna de Colta and Santiago de Quito. Santiago de Quito was the original capital of Ecuador (it´s seriously about 15 houses now) and is home to La Balbanera, the first Catholic church in Ecuador. Juan Carlos teaches at Jatun Yachai Wasi ("wasi" is one of three Quichua words I know...ahem, "wasi"=house, "yaku"=water, and "sisa"=flower), a university next to Laguna de Colta that teaches traditional Andean knowledge in areas such as agriculture, medicine, and construction. I visited with some of the students for a while, chatted with the llamas, and sat in the cold and read while Juan Carlos held class.

The next day I walked around Riobamba looking for the party celebrating the city´s independence day (I told you, every day you can find a different one) but only encountered closed museums, full churches, and quiet parks it being Sunday and all. It was a really pretty though and from anywhere in the city you can see snow-capped volcanoes and the volcano Chimborazo (the point farthest from the center of the earth because the planet bulges a little at the middle). I then found another bus to visit the town of Guano, touted by many as the friendliest town in Ecuador. Guano is also known for a long history of rug-making. I found the store recommended by my guidebook and talked with the owner for about an hour. He´s a fourth-generation rug maker (he emphasized several times that everything is made by hand) but none of his sons are interested in taking over the business. As with many industries in Ecuador, when the country underwent dollarization, the process by which Ecuador adopted the American dollar, rug-makers couldn´t afford to stay open. Guano, which was once home to more than 80 different rug-making workshops, now only supports about 15. Needless to say, I bought a rug.

That night we drove back to Quito in time to start another week. This week I really have to start my independent study project and start organizing interviews and school visits. It´s also really hit me lately how little time I have left here. Two more normal weeks, a half week before another class trip, a week vacation, and my last week...my kids are already starting to ask when I´m leaving (and not in a "can you just leave already?" kind of way) and although some things are starting to wear on me or frustrate me here, it will definitely be hard to leave. With that, I´ll try to post again within a sooner time frame! I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving and I´ll see most of you in less than 5 weeks!

Coming Soon: Sumo (a friend from Carleton) comes to visit, and taking into account my lack of blogging expediency, Thanksgiving

How I Became a Sea Cucumber Poacher

Well devoted readers, after a third of Ecuador, 10 buses, 2 beaches, a resemblance of a tan (or more appropriately, a migration of tan lines), a full-body suit of mosquito bites, tidal pool fishing, hiking, fiestaing, eating/drinking/sleeping in general, and a little baby puke, I have returned to Quito and an internet connection capable of accomodating blog updates. Today I concluded a 10 day vacation with a 10 hour bus ride (love the symmetry) from Cuenca back to Quito. The whole day on the bus I felt really excited to be returning to Quito, even though the vacation was great and I could have stayed longer. I´ve been referring to Quito as ¨home¨for months but after my longest stint away from the city, I really started to miss my family, apartment, bed, internship, kids, and familiarity. It was a nice realization to stumble upon.

I also just realized that I began my blog-hiatus about a week before I actually left for vacation...woops. The only real event worth notice during that week was a trip with my co-workers back to Mindo. Originally I thought we were going with a group of our kids but when I got there I realized it was just a volunteer/employee outing. It was pretty fun (it´s hard to make a natural waterslide with a 10 foot drop at the end unfun) but it was definitely different than I was expecting. For starters, I spent the whole day with my bosses, who I adore, but who grilled me on what I thought of the foundation and what suggestions I had. It was fun to hang out with the other volunteers without the kids but they spoke in French a lot of the time. All in all it was a worthwhile trip but not as exciting as I´d hoped. I posted some pictures of the trip (and the vacation) along with some pictures from stilts 2 Wednesdays ago.

Now back to the vacation...last Friday night I left Quito again for the beach town of Canoa with five other people on my program (Anna, Kristin, Emma, Jon, and Kiersten). The stay was more or less the same as last time only with better weather. We ate our breakfasts at the same little restaurant (which had the best pancakes I´ve ever eaten) and actually stayed in the same hostel (although the cornucopia of hammocks had been removed, grumbles all around). Other than that, Canoa consisted entirely of beach time, shrimp ceviche (a cold, seafood soup/my favorite Ecuadorian food), and more Pilsener (Ecuadorian beer). On the topic of Ecuadorian beer, there are two main labels, Brahma and Pilsener. Pilsener is more common but Brahma is better and the last time we visited Canoa Brahma was practically flowing in the streets. This visit however there was no Brahma to be found. When I asked for Brahma from a vender on the beach, she actually went to far as to say, "What do you think we are, Quito?"...quite baffling. After a beach bonfire and an extremely enjoyable time, leaving Canoa ended up a little more complicated than intended or was necessary...

We had bus tickets for 8:00 in the morning, which shouldn´t have been too difficult to make, but we had trouble finding our bus/boat to the bus station in Bahía a half hour away and arrived 10 minutes late. We then bought our second ticket for an hour later and as we were eating breakfast by the road a bus pulled by and the man yelled at us, "Jipijapa?! Ven, rapido, rapido!" It wasn´t quite the time on our tickets yet but we were going to Jipijapa (pronounced "hippy hoppa," the name is really the only fun thing about the town) and having suffered under a sporadic Ecuadorian bus schedule before, we didn´t question. When we showed the man our tickets a good hour into the trip, he told us we had tickets for a different bus company. Although I yelled at him for a good 10 minutes that he was the one who told us to get on the bus, he insisted it wasn´t his fault (which it wasn´t, not entirely anyway) and we bought our 3rd round of tickets to Jipijapa.

The trip went smoothly after that and we arrived in Montañita that afternoon. Montañita is one of the best beaches in Ecuador (it´s actually home to an international surfing competition in March) but also one of the more touristy. Unfortunately, neither of these descriptions ended up affecting us much because it rained the two days we were there. This didn´t entirely stop us from having a good time and we enjoyed the rainy beach and the cool tidal pools. One morning Anna and I were walking down the beach and ran into a bunch of people walking around in the tidal pools. After inquiring we learned they were hunting for oysters, squid, octupi, and most interestingly, sea cucumbers. I have a vague notion that sea cucumber hunting is illegal, but the two men assured us that it´s legal one day a month (this being that day) so we joined in. We spent about a half hour lifting up mossy rocks to reveal the fat sea cucumbers (or, pepinos del mar) underneath. They were really disgusting and enthusiastically employed their only means of self-defense: squirting water out of both ends. The sea cucumber trade is actually really interesting. They aren´t really eaten in South America, but are caught in Ecuador, shipped to Peru for processing, and finally sent to China and Southeast Asia where they are considered a delicacy. I´m pretty sure I learned this in a documentary about the awful/incredibly illegal trade in shark fins (also caught off Ecuador and sent to China for shark fin soup) and I seem to recall the sea cucumber trade being portrayed in the same light...oh well...

The big waves of Montañita come from a rocky point that juts out at the end of the beach. I was feeling adventurous and started around the point to see what was on the other side. The tide was coming up and I felt a little like that guy in every Baywatch episode who ventures out onto the rocks only to be swept into the sea (there is no Ecuadorian David Hasselhoff by the way) but when I got around the point I found that the entire rock was covered in fresh flower petals and little candle altars. I´m not sure who put them there or why and didn´t take my camera because I was fairly certain I would fall into the ocean, but it was an impressive sight.

After two days of rainy lounging in Montañita, we left for the last leg of the trip in Cuenca. Cuenca is the third largest city in Ecuador (we stopped at the bus station in Guayaquil, the largest city, and live in Quito, #2) and the hometown of our director and professor, Martha.

An update on what´s happening RIGHT NOW: We´re watching a ridiculous Latin American reality dance competition (they play the couples´national anthem before they dance so we´ve been laughing for about a half hour now) and Juan Carlos is salsaing around the living room. He´s been really sick for a week and everytime he wants to eat something, Charo takes it away and scolds him. He responds by sneaking food from my plate and moping. Today´s the first day he´s felt better so we´re all cheering on the dancing. Back to the trip...

Every Ecuadorian city has their own Independence Day fiesta (you could probably hit a different 4th of July-style party every week, pretty cool) and we made sure to be in Cuenca for their fiesta. We´d been to a town fiesta in a smaller town before and the big city version was much more subdued and cosmopolitan. In Guapalo we lit things on fire, drank in the streets, and danced in the plaza. In Cuenca, professionals lit things on fire, business types went to clubs, and we went to bed. Cuenca was a really beautiful city though, we spent one day just visiting churches and napping on the bank of the river that bisects the city. Cuenca seemed much more cosmopolitan to us than Quito and at several points it felt more like Europe than South America. There were trees blooming purple flowers all over the city and the weather was more or less perfect.

The second day in Cuenca we went to a national park an hour away called Parque Nacional Cajas. The park was full of enormous rock formations and glacial lakes. It was really beautiful and it was fun to be away from civilization for a while. We hiked around for about 4 hours and headed back to Cuenca.

Yesterday morning we boarded our tenth and last bus and returned to Quito. Prior to this bus we´d been taking night buses to save time but a day bus was a great way to see the country. After this trip I can tell you with complete confidence that every inch of Ecuador is amazingly beautiful. Our 10 hour ride flew by as we passed indigenous villages, colonial cities, mountains covered in farming terraces, and more snow-capped volcanoes (including Cotopaxi, the world´s tallest active volcano) than you could hope for. I´ll definitely be returning to several of the places we passed. One downside of the trip was when the little girl I was holding on my lap (buses are always filled to overcapacity) threw up. Luckily she aimed for the aisle and we had a bag ready but monitoring the possibility of future throwup helped keep me awake for a few hours.

I posted some more pictures, I was kind of picture lazy on this trip but I think other people took some good ones. My friend who I´ve been counting on for a CD of really good pictures later had her camera stolen in the bus station (huge bummer, but the first theft on the program). Sorry I hadn´t written in so long, I feel pretty rejuvinated after my vacation so hopefully I´ll get back in the groove of things. Hope everyone´s well!

Coming soon: Chota

Where do the umbrellas come from?

And now, some things I think about in my day:

1. Somehow, whenever it starts to rain, the streets are rapidly inundated with umbrella venders. I have no idea how these women do it as they´re selling other dry-weather goods when it isn´t raining and carry everything with them for their day. Several of them work quite a way from their homes so either they´re storing these umbrellas somewhere or they conjure them out of thin air. Either way, I´m keeping my eye on these umbrella venders...something fishy is going on here.

2. Several of the streets here are one-way, especially in the tiny, built-for-horses streets of Old Quito around my house. This in itself doesn´t present a problem, but the direction of the one-way seems to change sporadically. I´ll be walking down a one way street, sure that I´m facing the oncoming traffic, only to have a bus come up on me from behind and blow me aside. It also seems like the one-wayness may change from day today. Everyday on my way to my internship I´m absolutely positive about the direction of traffic, only to be proven wrong once again. Que misterioso...

3. Continuing with transportation, as I walk to my internship I often practice how I´m going to argue with my next taxi driver about prices. When the family went out to dinner the other night, the starting price for Charo was $2 (a full dollar below my cheapest ride) and she bargained down to $1.50! Although I really don´t mind paying the extra dollar or so, I consider it part of my integration process and a step toward "fitting in." With that in mind, I´m going to demand $2 when I go out this weekend and see what happens...most likely I´ll just be stuck in the rain without a taxi...

4. I realize that my Spanish is hardly flawless, but in most of my daily interactions I´m pretty confident that I´m putting together a convincing combination of vocabulary and grammar. However, whenever I go to the bank or a restaurant, people often completely misunderstand what I´m saying regardless of whether I´m expressing my needs clearly or not. For example, when I went to the bank the other day for change ($20 bills are completely useless) I asked (in perfect, clearly enunciated Spanish) for 2 tens, 3 fives, and 5 ones in exchange for the 2 twenties I´d just gotten from the ATM. The man looked at me and asked, "4 tens?", which is about as far from my order as he could have been. We then progressed to "2 tens and 4 fives?", finally arriving at the correct order after I yelled what I wanted for the third time. I guess we´ll just have to deal with it.

5. I´ve also been wondering if 5 boys in Sol de Primavera think about anything other than stilts...ever. The first thing they say to me in the morning (even before "buenos dias", because respectful greetings are really important in the foundation) is "When are we doing zancos?!" regardless of whether it´s their turn or not (which they all keep track of meticulously). This continues for about 20 minutes, during which I´m saying, "We´re not going to talk about stilts right now, no, seriously, not now, I don´t care, do you have lots of homework today?, no, you don´t have stilts today, no, we´re not talking about this, stop" I hear the same thing all day from these 5 boys...these kids need a hobby.

6. Speaking of my kids and hobbies, I´ve been teaching several kids how to play chess (a few already knew and Sergio is really really good) and we play other games all the time. The problem is that if I look away from the game for a second, which I always do to keep track of the other 15 kids in the room, the game is suddenly, miraculously shifted to the advantage of my opponent. When I explain to them that just because my Spanish isn´t perfect, it doesn´t mean that I´m stupid and that I´m completely aware of their cheating, they admit to cheating and after a quick reprimand continue with the game. This wouldn´t be so bad but the cheating is ssooo rampant, with the same kids playing the same games cheating the same way! I´m going to continue my crusade against this but so far haven´t gotten through to them why they can´t cheat in general, not only in the specific case...

Also, an update of what´s happening RIGHT NOW! I´ve been watching the Ecuador/Brasil fútbol game with Charo and JuanCar and Charo reminds me sssooo much of my mom with sports (although you´ve gotten better over the years, I know Mom). She cheers when anyone scores a goal (even though the score right now is 5-0 Brasil) and has mentioned several times how she doesn´t like Ecuador´s uniforms, preferring Brasil´s bright yellow. Also, whenever we finish eating Charo says, "Time for the dishwashing minga!" The minga is the traditional indigenous system of reciprocity and means communal work in general but for us it means that Charo washes, I dry, and JuanCar puts away. This is pretty much what every family does but it´s way cooler here because it´s called a minga...

Fruit Truck Holiday

Worry not friends, although I very seriously considered never leaving the ideal surf town of Canoa ever ever again (seriously), I have returned to the real world...but only begrudgingly. Of course, in Quito right now it´s raining and the temperature is hovering right around 45 F...if anyone has a suggestion as to why I should be here as opposed to napping in a hammock in a cabaña on the Pacific...let me know.

We left for Canoa (a little surfing town 30 minutes north of Bahía de Caraquez, home of my host mother) last Thursday night at around 11:30 in the night. Needless to say, the bus ride was painful. As I´ve repeatedly learned, the Ecuadorian infrastructure wasn´t built for people over 5´8" and my 7 hour bus ride served as a great reminder. It was pretty amazing that we dropped almost two miles in 7 hours and arrived at the ocean right at sunrise. Our bus dropped us off in Bahía and we took the ferryish boats to San Vicente (the ugly cousin of Bahía after it was destroyed by El Niño) and hopped on a bus to Canoa.

After looking around for a little bit we found an amazing hostel a few blocks from the beach called Hostal Posada de Daniel (check out the pictures, it really was pretty sweet). Everyone quickly settled into one of the many hammocks around the hostel for a mid-morning nap. The nap attempts were hampered by some kind of school parade that marched around our block for about 2 hours...very bizarre. After a quick nap we found a restaurant that Kristin´s guide book guarenteed would have amazing pancakes. We definitely weren´t disappointed and ate breakfast there all three days (they also had a cat that looked exactly like my cat Duke from home, check out the picture Lauren, you´ll freak out).

We finally found our way to the beach in the afternoon and settled into our oceanside routine. Although the weather wasn´t typical good-beach-weather, it was almost perfect for what we were looking for. In the morning it was usually pretty raining and chilly so we didn´t feel bad sleeping in, playing pool, and generally lounging (preferrably in hammocks). After brunch it would start to clear up so that by the time we got to the beach it would be pretty warm with partly cloudy skies. The beach was also more or less perfect; not crowded at all but with a sufficient number of people, very long and clean, and with warm Pacific water and impressive waves.

The only other distinct part of the weekend (seriously, 3 days of just beach, hammocks, and beer) was when Anna and I, after struggling to find a bus back to Canoa after we went ATM-hunting in Bahía, hopped in the back of a fruit vender´s truck and ate watermelon with his son, Marcelo for the whole ride. The man wouldn´t let us pay but we bought two delicious watermelon from him instead. We took another fruit truck when we left Canoa and got really good oranges out of that trip.

This week has been pretty standard: internship, homework, class, hanging out with friends/family, internship again. My relationship with my internship has been pretty up and down lately. One day I´ll feel completely useless, frustrated, and entirely lacking in anything resembling Spanish skills. The very next day however, the kids will listen to me and tell me about their families, my Spanish will be practically flawless, and I feel completely content. I guess as long as sides stay balanced (with an increasing shift to the positive) I´m doing ok. This week we´re also supposed to start on our independent study projects so I´ll keep you updated on the progress. Hope everyone´s well!

Coming Soon: taking my kids to Mindo