Not all who are lost, wonder.



Thursday, September 28, 2006

Everything Ecuador II

hey y'all,

sorry this has been so long in coming.  but here it is.  so there.

just after sending that last check in ecuador thingy i got mugged.  i figured out that my bus wasn't running so i decided to catch another one that was conveniently situated on the other side of la Parque Carolina.  three guys vs me. no knives or guns, gracias a dios. they made off with all my electronic things but i managed to beg with them in spanish to leave me my backpack, schoolbooks, and the clothes i had been carrying from being away for the weekend.  oh and the clothes on me.  it would have been a drag to have my shoes stolen (as is pretty typical) because they don't sell shoe sizes above like 9 here (mine are 12-13).  i was physically unhurt but pretty shaken, and i still tense up at odd times walking around the city.  perhaps the worst part was that the following thursday, i was walking with Laura (she goes to Wesleyan, is on our program, is awesome) got robbed right outside of la Mariscal aka Gringolandia by two black guys with a butter knife.  but believe me, when a knife of any kind is pointed at your chest in the dark, you can only really see long and shiny and a strong arm behind it.  they only got ten bucks off each of us before one of the guardias came strolling up and scared them away.  probably the universe telling me that these things happen.

the weekend before last we went to Mindo which is in this tropical, jungly, mountainous area.  its gorgeous and was wonderful for soothing the anxious, "i've just been robbed... twice" soul.  we ate churrasco which is a local specialty of two fried eggs, beef, rice, and avocado, cucumber and tomato.  mix it all together and of course a healthy helping of Aji (i'm honestly thinking of setting up an importation business for Aji its the most amazing hot sauce ever).  it was really good.  we also hiked to a couple of the million waterfalls around, jumped off of a 36 ft high waterfall (WHAT a rush!), hung out at a reggae bar, and kicked it with the local hippie jewelry makers from all over the world (Carrie kept saying "i wanna go to the hippie plaza!").  its one of the first places in the world that i've actually fallen in love with.  we're going back again for my birthday weekend.

i found a capoeira class last week that meets in the evenings, which is making it even harder for me to see my host family ever which sucks, but its a lot of fun and i'm making a lot of local friends through it, not to mention kickass exercise.  Laura taking the classes too.  our mestre is Marco who is 22, which i just found out from Laura, but he looks like he's in his late 20s, maybe 30.  its weird, but his story checks out.  its so great to finally be playing capoeira again! (stupid rugby shoulder)


we went to the beach this last weekend, just north of the touristy beachbum town of Atacames, called Tonsupa.  we stayed in a house owned by Dane's host family and packed 8 of us in two rented cars.  we went a little nuts at the grocery store so we barely fit into the tiny tiny cars they gave us.  yknow those tiny cars they have in ireland to fit between the hedged wall and the oncoming mack truck?  that small.  the whole weekend was really relaxed.  the house was only a 5 minute walk from the beach and we met up with another part of our group that was staying in a hostel in atacames.  the water was really really warm (almost 80 degrees) but compared to the beating sunshine out of it, it felt wonderfully cool.

we ended grammar classes for spanish last week, and this week started studying Indigenous Cultures of Ecuador, basically an anthropology class all in spanish for 3 hours every morning.  we went back to the Museo Del Ecuador today for a look at colonial up until today art.  its a really interesting class and i'm grateful to be learning stuff, but we dont get much spanish practice, so we have to rely on our own devices for local practice.  the teacher is from the University of San Francisco de Quito, which is where the other Pitzer program is.  she's very nice but refuses to have people disagree with her ever, so we get to argue semantics with her in spanish which is fun.

thats all for now.  hope you all are doing great.  if you write me i swear i'll write you back, i'd love to hear stories from the homefront, whatever they entail.

smiles
Ben

Thursday, September 7, 2006

Everything Ecuador


hey there everyone,
 
as the title suggests, i´m in beautiful Ecuador at the moment!
it´s really hard to believe that i´ve only been here for two weeks.  wait, not even that, 11 days.  it always amazes me how differently time moves when you get to a new place.  there´s so much new information to absorb that its hard to keep up, never mind things like actually communicating in a different language and adapting to a new culture.  and believe me, they are many: our spanish teacher was absolutely astonished to here of all the liberties and options a woman has surrounding pregnancy, and namely abortion; its very, very normal, in fact in many cases actually encouraged, for a man to have a mistress while he also has a wife(amante, is the official spanish word for it, but only while married), or multiple girlfriends at the same time.
 
the food has also been a big surprise: someone i ran into while travelling with soni in guatemala had said that the food here was kind of bland and that they didnt have much hot, spicy things.  this could not be further from the truth.  everything here is so tasty, and they have this amazing sauce called Aji which they put on literally EVERYTHING, soups, vegetables, rice, meat, deserts, you name it, they do it.  it is some of the best hot sauce i´ve ever had.
 
we started off staying in a hostel with the whole group to kind of meet and get aclimated to each other and the altitude (i´m now sitting in the middle of Quito, at 9,300 ft above sea level.  in those first couple of days we would get winded just walking the stairs to our rooms, and i only had two sets of two stairs apiece.  now its a little bit better, but i still had a really hard time playing soccer with the kids at my volunteer sight yesterday, which is even a little bit higher into the mtns in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city (and therefore the stereotypically ¨BAD¨ neighborhood; we got warned not to carry backpacks and that our shoes might get stolen, even though no one in the country has feet the size of mine, unless they´re also studying abroad here).  but hands down, this volunteership is the coolest thing i´ve ever done.  the kids range from about 4-16 and are SO happy to see us there, and so eager to show us around and be patient with our varying levels of spanish.  working there are me, nathan, and devon from pitzer, and simone and dwight who both go to swarthmore college (how uppity is that name, i mean really! try saying it with a british accent).  although, now that i think about it, the hard of breath part may have been in part due to the fact that the soccer field is actually a dirt field, so i wasnt even inhaling air.  dwight and i had a black boogers contest at the end of the game.
 
my host family is very very nice and welcoming but pretty upper crust.  they had to ask the live-in maid, Maria, about the buses that i should take to get to my classes because they´re the top percent of the population that only drive everywhere, like maniacs, dare i say it, even more maniacly than costa ricans.  i have my own section of the flat with my own bathroom and shower.  my ecuadorian mom, Lucia, and dad, Gustavo, work they´re own company, she´s an architect, he´s an engineer.  and no moms, i havent told them yet that you´re a landscape designer, and that grampa was an engineer.  i havent really found an appropriate moment to talk about my family with them yet, cuz that stuff is very shush shush here.  but dont worry i will.  so because they own they´re own business, and have a live-in maid, neither of them really work with a real definite schedule, so these last couple of days i havent seen them more than to just say hi, because i leave before they do on the bus in the morning, and they don´t return until right around the time that i´m leaving to go meet up with friends.  i´m also one of the furthest from the school so i dont have time to make it back home for lunch like others do.  its definitely nice to have the alone, down time, but it gets kinda lonely too.  i was excited to stay in quito this weekend to spend some more time with them, but they already have plans to go to the beach, and won´t be returning till monday morning which is when i have class.  my host brother is also very nice, Juan (but they call him Juannico) and clearly the baby of the family.  he´s in his second year of university as a med student, and his mom still treats him like he´s seven.  she calls him her ´rey´ or king for the nonspanish speakers.  i also have a host sister named Ana Lucia (or Analu), who´s 26 and has two darling little girls seven and five who´s names are escaping me at the moment.  i watched Lady and the Tramp dubbed in spanish with them the other night, and got to say EEEEW at the spaghetti kissing part with the five-year-old as she jumped under the covers of her grandma´s bed.  the seven-year-old just thought we were being way too immature.
 
classes are classes, that at least has a familiar sense of boredom surrounding it.  we´re finally kicking into our normal schedule next week (what we´ll have for the months of sept and oct, then travelling the entire month of nov).  so that will be nice.  it is interesting to learn about the new culture and to begin to express myself in spanish, but classroom learning it so monotonous, especially when you´re in a different country.  is there really a point to studying a different country your in from a classroom?  why can´t we be outside all the time?  and yeah i´m definitely aware that that ruins the necesity for tests, but why does book knowledge have to count for so much more than the experiential kind?  doesnt that kinda defeat the purpose of studying abroad other than just an escape from the classrooms that you´re used to?  i can´t wait to go back to my volunteership.  sorry i´ll step down from the soapbox now.
 
last weekend we went to the Festival de Yamor, which was a very touristy indigenous festival of some kind in a town called Otavalo, just north of Quito.  it featured a parade on friday night, tons of dancing and suspiciously similar music (i still say they used to same song over and over again, but that might just be me being culturally insensitive), and literally endless street markets.  i couldnt help myself, i bought some really really comfy house-pants that i wear around the house every chance i get, even though everyone makes fun of me for it, especially juan and maria.  they have a similar solstice celebration up there on the 21st of sept to celebrate the fact that the sun is directly in the middle of the sky, so we´re definitely going back with all the people that for whatever reason couldnt go last time.
 
my spanish is definitely better than it was at the beginning of the costa rica program this summer.  and as marcus so eloquently put it, i´m beginning to actually have a personality when speaking it, not constantly monotonous translation and information exchange.  i´ve met some pretty cool people here, striking up conversations with taxi drivers and the guard that sits in the wooden box on my street to guard us from the dangerous have-nots.  eveyone says quito is super dangerous, but its not any more dangerous than san francisco, berkeley, boston, new york, definitely not more dangerous than oakland.  of course i´ve now doomed myself on the walk home tonight (straight up hill by the way, and i´m not talking about claremont uphill, this is like lombard street steep without the switchbacks).  i´ve been feeling kind of lonely and homesick lately, but its probably because i´m tired, we´ve been going out to the party district a bunch(Gringolandia as the locals love to call it); its definitely not for lack of food!  the other night, Dane´s host brother, jaime, was out with us at a club, grabs me and throws me at this pair of girls dancing together.  he strikes up a dancing conversation with one, forcing me into a dancing conversation with the other.  she was from Cuenca (just south), which i happened to be a recent expert on, since that was where my taxi driver was from on the way over, very conveniently.  i left with devon not long after that, which was good because jaime later told me that the boyfriends of the two girls were eying the two of us a little intensely.
 
alright already, thats enough for now, should keep you busy trying to read that whole thing for the next couple of weeks until i have more fun stories to tell.
i wish you all the best this semester and whereever you may be.  and write me back please, it lets me know that you´re actually recieving this (i dont entirely trust the computers in this country, this one randomly shut down on its own while i was trying to write this, thank god for gmail autosave), and i love to hear of any and all things going on back on home turf.  i promise write back if you do, there´s your incentive carrot.
 
love and miss you all.
 
smiles
Ben