Gquil Visuals

The top picture is my new favorite turtle in the world. He´s a little tough to see, but he's in the middle of the picture. The stupid crabs that he's chasing are towards the lower left hand side of the photo. Look hard! They blend in well. Good thing the turtle can see them.

Lisa and I on the mac attack. One of the best three dollar purchases I´ve made in a long time (expensive by Ecuadorian standards, but still well worth it). I would highly recommend going on the attack for those of you with clear blood vessels. How much is a Big Mac back home anyhow?

The bottom photograph is an old silo associated with the Pilsener factory beside the Guayas River in Guayaquil. I don´t know what the silo once held, but that doesn´t really matter now, because it´s not a silo anymore! We asked a security guard if we could get a tour of one of the apartments, and he said sure, but then we realized we had to be on our way to drop off Lisa and Bobbile at the bus stop. Perhaps another time....

Gquil & Day of the Dead

Not as much to say this week in comparison to others.

My weekend in Guayaquil was pretty sweet. I stayed by Carla and Tom’s place. They live towards the southern end of the city. On Friday night we all went to Guayaquil’s malécon, which literally means breakwater, but it’s more like hanging out on the boardwalk. Later on we met up with Lisa from Montañita and BobbiLe from Puerto Viejo who had also decided to spend the weekend in Guayaquil. We all ended up at this cool little place called The Dog’s Blue Eyes, which was this kind of hipster jazz bar. A small band was playing and I learned that the lead person was a really popular musician; his name is Napoleon, but everyone calls him just Napo.

On Saturday we did a whole bunch of really touristy things in Guayaquil. Around 10:30 we picked up Lisa and BobbiLe and went to Parque de las Iguanas, which is this park downtown that’s absolutely teeming with iguanas. Big ones, baby ones, whatever you want. They’re all over the place. You have to be careful walking under trees or you’ll get crapped on. They must have been feed around the time we arrived, because most of the iguanas were snarfing down cabbage on the grass, all clustered together with big hunks of the leafy vegetables hanging out of their mouths. Over a ways some children were feeding nuts to an animal I’ve come to call the “super-squirrel.” The super-squirrel is a black, brown and gray squirrel—mostly black—with the most interesting tail I’ve ever seen. It seems to have taken on another dimension that other squirrels back home can’t achieve. The coolest thing about the super-squirrel, however, is how gently it took the nuts out of the children’s hands. It’s a nice super-squirrel.

After that we all loaded up the Tiara and headed to El Parque Histórico, which is a sort of nature preserve in the middle of the city. It was way cool. Besides all of the interesting Ecuadorian animals I got to see, the park runs through a mangrove, which is a type of landscape I’ve never seen before. Because so many rivers touch the Pacific in the same location that Guayaquil’s at, much of the city is near mangrove. There’s actually a ferryboat that will take you across the main river running past the city, El Río Guayas, and into some thicker mangrove. I really want to take that ferry next time I’m in Guayaquil.

I would describe mangrove as a raised root system above a muddy plain. Species of trees spread their roots out above ground instead of below it, which creates a complicated wooden puzzle at ground level. As you might be able to imagine, this provides a lot of protection and cover for smaller animals. The most common animal I saw in the mangroves was crabs. They dig little holes in the mud and hide in them. Their little holes are absolutely everywhere. None of the ones I saw—and I saw a lot of crabs—was bigger my thumb.

The highlight of the day was watching a smaller-sized snapping turtle hunt down these crabs. It was hilarious because crabs are so stupid! Imagine me on top of a bridge hanging over the water, screaming at the stupid crabs because they won’t run away from the comparatively gigantic snapping turtle that’s chasing them into their holes. Now imagine the snapping turtle in the shallow water gaining enough steam to make a go at the comparatively faster crabs. A wave of crabs sidles sideways away from the turtle, attempting to keep the distance between them and dark-tongued death. Three feet later the turtle stops, and all the crabs stop too. Stupid crabs! Keep running! The turtle is only resting long enough to chase after you again! It won’t quit coming after you if it’s still hungry! I couldn’t have been happier when the turtle finally got one. I must have been watching for ten minutes. It opened its mouth up wide and chomped down on one of the little crabs, two gigantic bites, before swallowing. The chase continued until the turtle and the wave of crabs had disappeared beneath the bridge I was standing on. I was slightly disappointed until I’d walked fifty yards down to the monkey island.

We were all pretty tired and hungry after El Parque Histórico, so we took a little drive and Tom dropped Lisa, BobbiLe and me off to get some grub. Lisa had left me a somewhat confusing text message sometime on Friday that said something along the lines of, “I’m in Gquil now, Mark. I’m having mac attacks so we have to get our eats on today.” What was this “mac attacks?” I’d never heard that before. It turns out Lisa was talking about gorging ourselves on Big Macs at McDonalds. Places like Montañita and Santa Elena just aren’t big enough to have a McDonalds so you’ve got to get your mac on in a city. Let’s just say I was less than enthused about eating a Big Mac. I haven’t had one since I was like twelve. But Lisa was pretty convincing between all the mac attack talk and just being so damn excited about it.

Even if I doubted it at first, going for a Big Mac was the best thing ever! Besides the raw deliciousness and having the opportunity to say “mac attack” about half a million times throughout the process of actually eating it, going into McDonalds in Ecuador is like teleporting back to the United States. There’s ketchup everywhere (including over the advertisements of th wall), the menu is more English than Spanish and they even play North American music over the restaurant speakers. All the Ecuadorians that come into McDonalds dress like North Americans too. I was home again! It only took a Big Mac to bring me back.

We spent the rest of the afternoon checking out the colonial part of Guayaquil. Much of the city’s original colonial structures have burned down since those times, so this part of the city isn’t exactly what it used to be as far as sheer size is concerned. But the great news is that the city has gone through a serious renovation effort to beautify what does remain. Framed pictures hang on colonial buildings, showing what each of the structures used to look like only a short time ago. Each of the pictures seems to scream, “Look what I’ve done with myself!” The entire colonial center is like one of those wonderfully optimistic Weight Watchers commercials. My favorite part is the beer factory turned trendy apartment complex. Check out the picture above.

My class’s first midterm was this Monday. I’m quite pleased with the results. Minus some problems with some of the grammar points we’ve touched on, my students did a fantastic job. The test asked them to write a paragraph on a specific topic, and I was especially impressed with how each of them was able to write. Prior to taking the test, this was the section my students were most concerned with, but this section turned out to be their shining achievement. The final is scheduled for November 14^th, so I’ve got to power through another four chapters with them before beginning the next module.

We’re taking a little break today in class. They wouldn’t be able to concentrate today anyways, given that it’s Halloween and they just got finished taking the test. Once I’m done here I’m going to bake a boxed cake for them. We’re going to eat cake and watch The Exorcism of Emily Rose in English—only a buck twenty-five from my local movie store. I know they’re going to beg me to turn on the subtitles, but I think I’m going to be a hardass about it. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll crack. They did so well!

More importantly, I’m going to dress up. Since I don’t exactly have all the clothes I have back home, or the wardrobe choice that Madison has presented in past years, I’ve decided to take the lazy—yet cost effective—route. I’m going to wear a bunch of goofy beach stuff, put on sunglasses and swimming goggles, throw my camera case over my shoulder and smear a little sunscreen on my face. There’s no better costume that I can pull off here than being a gringo. All I’m really doing is making it more obvious. My students are going to love it. I bet my director and all the secretaries are going to love it even more than they do.

As far as how I’m doing personally, now that I’m almost exactly two months into this experience, things are going fairly well. I feel confident teaching and even if I do attract a lot of attention, I’m getting used to it. I do miss home a lot, but the good news is that I have a medical school interview at UW-Madison scheduled for December 21^st, so I will be home for Christmas. They’re the only school to get back to me so far, but I’m hoping I’ll get some more takers before all is said and done. Christmas is definitely I’m looking forward to.

The only thing getting me down lately besides life’s usual little tricks is the weather. I can’t remember how much I’ve discussed this, but where I’m located on the coast it’s pretty much eternally cloudy this time of year. In all the time that I’ve been here, I can only remember one day of consistent sunshine and one day where it was off and on, peaking out from behind sheets of cloud. I joke that I have to travel to see the sun. It kind of sucks, though, knowing that I’m going to have to wait another month before the clouds recede. And, even once they’re gone, the sun is going to be relentless. I can’t say that I’m going to appreciate this new climatic extreme. Oh well. For the time being, I’m patiently awaiting the sun’s grand unveiling. The way everyone’s explained it to me is that, on whichever day Mother Nature deems best, the clouds part and that’s it. The sun is out to stay until the beginning of July. This is going to be a good day for Mark.

My host mother is currently in the United States with her sister. I mentioned a number of posts ago that Sarah’s sister, Paula, is pregnant. I don’t know how they’ve done it or which state they’re in, but the two of them are somewhere in the U.S. now, so the child will be born a citizen. According to Elsi, Paula has reached the fifteen-day mark. We’ll see how close she actually comes to the doctors’ prediction.

What’s more, I’m going to have a new neighbor! An English twenty-two-year-old is going to be living here as of tomorrow. I have no idea what program he’s with, but he’s going to be doing the exact same thing that I’m doing now; he’s even teaching at the same school. I just got a call from Tom telling me to hang around tomorrow morning because he’s pretty sure the new guy speaks close to zero Spanish. Guess who gets to be his translator. I hope I don’t mess anything up for this guy! I’m excited not to have to think in Spanish all the time.

This weekend I’m headed to Cuenca, a city in the mountains about five hours east of here. It’s supposed to be a beautiful city—something like four rivers run through it. I’ll actually be able to take off for Cuenca on Friday morning because it’s a national holiday, Day of the Dead. I’ve talked to my students about it and the people that choose to celebrate the holiday bring flowers and food to the graves of their relatives and family members. But, beside the three-day weekend, Day of the Dead isn’t the real reason I’m headed to Cuenca. The city is celebrating their Independence Day on November 3^rd, and I’ve heard it’s supposed to be a pretty culturally cool thing to check out. I’ll find out.

The Making of Province 24

The top photo was taken along 9th of October street in La Libertad. Notice the yellow and green flag to the left in the picture; these are the new provincial colors I was talking about in the last post.

The middle picture is the wedding we went to. A little dark, but you get the idea.

Finally, the third picture is BobbiLe and me in a lookout tower near Puerto Lopez. Even though the sun never shines in my part of the country, I swear I´m getting tanner.

Another Little Mountain Weekend

Last night was only the second bad night of sleep I’ve had since arriving in Ecuador. I woke up this morning with little picaduras (insect bites) all over my right ankle and foot. I still don’t know what crawled up in bed, but my suspicion is that it was one of those little biting spiders. I found one in my room today and smashed it into a fine pulp. This was revenge, but it’s just as likely it wasn’t even one of his kind.

I’ve been sleeping with a mosquito net over my bed for the last week or so. It will remain this way for the rest of my experience. Elsy put it up for me after the first bad night of sleep. I showed her my arm the morning thereafter and that was when I became acquainted with the word “picaduras.” Then she told me she was going to dig out the net.

Stupid mosquitoes. I swear they are quieter here than they are back in Wisconsin, because I never hear them buzzing around my head. Even when I am lying awake in bed, fully aware that they are hovering invisibly in the darkness above me, I can’t seem to make out the sound of their wings. Only when I wake up do I find that my right elbow is bumpy from being repeatedly stabbed over the course of the night.

Don’t worry, though, because, besides the netting, I’ve taken other preventative action. Permethrin is a chemical that “repels and kills ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes”—whatever the hell a chigger is. I’ve sprayed some around the borders of my bed, so we’ll see if that works. I’m confident it will help. I want to sleep; I will win this war.

Moving onto larger matters, a lot has happened in the last week. I mentioned in the last few posts that Santa Elena was vying to become its own province, the same general idea of this area turning into a state. This was the reason for all the strikes that I talked about last time—democracy in action. Well, guess what. It worked! Last week Tuesday, Santa Elena became the 24^th province in Ecuador. The protests must’ve helped!

It was pretty cool to watch the celebrations commence in Santa Elena that day. Everyone had been waiting for Congress to reach a decision on Tuesday morning, but the nothing happened until later that afternoon. I had gone outside at around 3:00 and was waiting to catch a bus into Santa Elena. That’s when I heard some noise gathering from ahead of me, past the church and down the hill that runs into the main street that runs through La Libertad’s commercial center. First only one motorcyclist came buzzing over the hill. Then came another three. Soon a long procession had begun and all of the riders were whooping and hollering. After the motorcyclists came the trucks filled with screaming Santa Elenans. You couldn’t hope to see fifty feet down the road without catching a glimpse of about a hundred regional flags.

The streets became so crowded the bus had to turn down a side road so that we could continue towards Santa Elena. I hung out the window and snapped a few pictures. When the bus finally arrived in Santa Elena, whoever wasn’t riding around waving flags was gathered near the town’s square. They’d pieced together a rally. A few people were drinking in the streets, but not as many as I expected. Some people were dancing, but most were just watching the people up on stage dance. One man on the stage was dressed like a dark yellow and green bird. I can’t say I know what type of bird he was supposed to be, but these two colors have become the new provincial ones. I’ve seen a million dark yellow and green flags since that time.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks now what the advantages are to having earned provincial independence, and I still haven’t figured them out. From what I’ve gathered, most of the reasons are financial. This will mean more governmental money is doled out to the area. Furthermore, people won’t have to go all the way to Guayaquil to secure a loan. On the other hand, much of what has happened—from what I understand—is purely bureaucratic. Provincial independence means that someone must govern the new province, so many of the local leaders who have been enticing citizens to protest and make “their” voices known are in a prime position to be in charge down here. Job creation comes about by creating committee after committee after committee, which is where the dollars flowing out of Guayaquilanos hands are probably ending up. Many of these city folks are refusing to travel to the beaches in Salinas because they’re so bitter about what’s happened. They’d rather not support Province 24 and will instead spend their summers in Playas, a not-as-pretty beach that’s further down the Ecuadorian coast, but, more importantly, outside the new province’s boundaries. I’ll let you know if the beach is any less packed once temporada comes. I can’t say I would mind a few less people.

Classes have been going much better lately than compared to the first week. I missed a day last week Wednesday because of the celebrations in Santa Elena, but who’s going to argue with that? The fact is that my students have been showing up consistently and, for the most part, are willing to learn. I try to keep things as interesting as possible by thinking up a variety of semi-creative activities, and they seem to recognize the effort. Our mid-term exam is coming up next week Monday, so we’re going to spend today and Thursday doing some review. Many of my students have secondary (or high) school during the day, so my English class is added on top of that. I know they won’t spend a lot of time studying for my class, so I thought it was smart to schedule a few days where I helped them through the review. Learning is the ultimate objective here, and I know I’m not the highest priority for some of my students.

Last weekend was another one worth talking about. I went back to Montañita; this time getting there was much easier. Because I teach until 9:00 P.M. on Friday nights and the last buses leaving up the coast are gone by 5:00, I had to wait until Saturday morning to get going. Lisa, the Montañita volunteer, had been calling me earlier in week, telling me to come because she was house-sitting for some friends, so whoever could make it there would have a free place to stay the weekend. Some wealthy Americans owned the beachside home she was staying at, but, for whatever reason, they weren’t able to use it as much as they wanted to and are currently looking to sell it (anyone interested?). I’m not sure how Lisa met the owners of the house, but they asked if Lisa would be willing to watch the place on weekends, and she most certainly agreed. A bunch of other volunteers, four currently working in the mountains and one working further up the coast, were planning on meeting Lisa and going surfing. They had gotten together on Friday night and traveled up the coast Saturday morning to a place called Las Tunas. Unfortunately, the bus I had taken out of La Libertad only took me as far as Olon, an hour south of Las Tunas. When I had asked the bus driver if the bus would take me to Las Tunas, he told me my best bet was to get off the bus and find a “carrito.” I didn’t know what this meant. I later found out he wanted me to hitch a ride to Las Tunas—the bus I was on wasn’t going that far north.

After following the driver’s advice, I soon found myself stuck in Olon. I called one of the girls’ phones in Las Tunas and was able to get in touch with Lisa. Our conversation went a little something like this:

“Lisa, I think I’m in Olon. How do I get to Tunas?”

“Oh, you took a blue bus, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“You need to find a green bus.”

“A green bus?”

“Yeah. Wait for a green bus. You’re about forty-five minutes away. Get off near the soccer field.”

So after learning about how Ecuadorians color code their transportation routes, I went across the street, bought a bottle of water, positioned myself along the side of the road and waited, all the while staring down the road from the direction I’d come.

Sure enough, not more than twenty minutes had gone by before a green bus came rolling toward me. I asked the bus attendant (every single bus has two people working on it: the driver and another guy who collects passengers’ fares) if the bus went as far north as Las Tunas, and he eagerly waved me on board—in order to secure this job, you must know only two words: venga and vaya, or come and go.

The ride beyond Montañita is much prettier than it is further to the south. There must be more precipitation, because everything is green and lush instead of gray or brown and desert-like. When I finally arrived in Las Tunas, I asked the driver to let me off near a soccer field, and—sure enough—I was eating cerviche with Lisa and the rest within minutes.

Later that day we took a general tour of the coast north of Montañita. Some Ecuadorian friends Lisa had made owned a van and offered to drive us around if we each chipped in a dollar for gas (what are gas prices back home like now?). We traveled as far as Puerto Lopez, which is a beautiful city about halfway up the Ecuadorian coast. The place was a little different because the general building theme was red brick as opposed to bare gray concrete, which is a construction staple of seemingly everywhere else in the country.

By the time we got back to the home Lisa was house-sitting, everyone was pretty beat. BobbiLe, a volunteer from Minnesota, and I decided to play Frisbee on the beach while everyone else rested in the house.

That night, another one of Lisa’s friends gave us a ride into Montañita, which is only about ten minutes north of the village itself. The thing about Montañita is that it’s so small everyone knows your name. As such, Lisa can’t walk down the street without having at least three children yelling out, “Teacher, teacher, teacher!” This is, in fact, Lisa’s nickname. We all call Lisa “the teacher” now. Another of Lisa’s friends and students had invited us to his bar—he’s a twenty-something-year-old surf instructor/entrepreneur. This guy had a DVD of some of his surfing highlights, so we all started telling him that he should play it over the television above the bar. It took me a while to realize that this guy was a member of the national Ecuadorian surf team. In fact, a bunch of Lisa’s friends who slowly but surely made their ways into the bar were members of the team. Before I knew it, about a quarter of the members of the group of people framed in the picture on the wall were right in front of me. Waiting for the green bus to appear over the hill in Olon, I had no idea I’d be drinking with the national surf team that same night.

I would have been willing to call it a night after that, but everyone else had different plans. We’d been invited to a wedding reception! Ecuadorian weddings are different from ones back in the states in that (forgetting what we’ve learned from Wedding Crashers) you don’t need an invitation to attend. I should say, in a place as small as Montañita, you don’t need one.

The surfers, all the other volunteers and I headed towards Montañita’s residential area, that is, where the non-tourists live. Down the dirt road I heard loud music playing and saw a line of neon lights held high beneath a huge tent. This was the wedding celebration in progress. If I was tired from running around all day and stressing over getting to Las Tunas, I wasn’t tired anymore. When we got closer, I realized how loud the music was actually playing. Imagine standing next to the speakers during a concert at Summerfest. No one asked any questions as us seven gringos walked into the tent. We did, however, attract quite a few looks, but I’m getting quite used to that.

The setup underneath the tent was something like a simple sandwich. To either side, comprising the “bread” of the wedding sandwich, the guests were seated. Round, plastic tables were arranged in a more-or-less orderly fashion and people were sitting in plastic chairs or on tiny wooden stools. We were able to find our spot in a semi-circle of these tiny wooden circles, somewhere near the entrance of the tent. The “meat” was then the dancing couples in the middle, moving beneath the colorful neon lights. At the far end of the tent, opposite the entrance, was a stage, and on top of the stage was the MC. It was his job to make announcements between songs and dance goofily by himself where no one else could come near him. I don’t know where they controlled the music from, but only about two or three songs would play at a time before everyone would clear out of the center aisle and the MC would say some things, none of which I could have hoped to understand because of a thousand different distractions. When the dancers cleared out, the only people moving about throughout the tent were the food servers. Teams of two ran back and forth, carrying an enormous wooden tray covered with plates of food between them. The bride must have been directing them. She was located at the entrance to the tent, speaking to guests and family members from behind a table off to the right side. She was partially hidden behind a tree holding white cakes that I was really, really hoping they would be cutting into shortly. For as long as we were there, they never touched the cakes. I searched and searched throughout the entire evening for the groom, but I never once saw him (or, if I did, he wasn’t wearing anything to set himself off from anyone else).

I danced a few time with the other volunteers, but, for those of you who know me well, dancing isn’t exactly my most favorite event in the world (not to mention I really suck at it—thank you, Steph). Instead of dancing, I spent most of my time taking in my surroundings and drinking with my new surfer buddies. A lot of drinking goes on at an Ecuadorian wedding, and everyone drinks out of these very small plastic cups (which is really no different than any other occasion). As soon as I’d entered, in fact, the man who welcomed us to sit next to his table offered me one of these plastic cups filled with a shot of whiskey and top off with water. It’s customary for one person to take a drink and then pass it on to the next person. When the cup is emptied, it’s given back to the person controlling the bottle of whiskey, who then fills it back up with however much whiskey he deems prudent and the little round robin starts again. When the bottle of Johnnie Walker was finally gone, I thought the game was over. That’s when the man pulled out a bottle of Scotch from his secret hiding spot beneath the table.

For the most part, I was able to avoid excessive amounts of hard liquor by keeping near the surfer guys. They stuck to beer, which makes more sense for someone from Milwaukee. Where at social gatherings back home, we usually go for twelve ounce bottles or cans of beer, they do things slightly differently here. First, everything is metric, but, besides that, they drink it slightly differently too. One person will get a twenty-ounce bottle of beer and he’ll pour it into these small plastic cups for everyone to drink from. At the wedding we drank beer almost the same way other people around us drank the whiskey. One person controlled the bottle and would fill the cup up usually about a quarter of the way, or about two healthy gulps of beer. He or she would then pass the cup to whomever he wanted, and that person was expected to drink it. I learned quickly that being in control of the beer was a very wise idea. This way, I could make all of the surfers drink as much as I wanted and they couldn’t make me drink in return.

We sat in our semi-circle, doling out beer for one another and destroying our cochlear hair cells until around four in the morning. The bus that would take us back north to the house Lisa was looking after started running again at five. Some of the other volunteers went to a club to dance, but knowing what we’ve learned about Mark, I decided to pass out at Lisa’s house in Montañita.

We woke up around 11:00 the next morning, paid our quarters to get back to Montañita and I was surfing by noon. I’m getting better, but, overall, I still suck. After getting pummeled for long enough by the ocean, I walked back ashore and started back towards town when I ran into a couple of my new surfer friends from the night before. They were seated at a table, apparently watching the high tide diminish. “¿Estás chuchaqui?” I asked one of them (Are you hungover? “Chuchaqui” is a Quichan word; it’s derived from the indigenous dialect). “Sí,” he said, and I continued down the beach, laughing to myself.

This weekend is going to be much different than the last. I’m heading into Guayaquil on Friday with Pedro, my host mother’s nephew. We’re going to stay by Tom and Carla’s place. If I came, they promised to show me a little of the city. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to top the wedding last weekend in Montañita, but we’ve got to try!

There and Back Again

After a thirty-minute nap, I feel ready enough to write about what’s been going on this last week in Ecuador. This was a big week for me because it was my first week of teaching at my host site in Santa Elena. Let’s just suffice to say that the week did not meet up to my expectations.
Last Monday, I was all pumped up and ready to go. I’d worked on Sunday to create my lessons plans and had everything all lined up for a great start. I went into ESPOL, my new school, two hours ahead of time and made sure, once again, that I had all of my ducks lined up. My class begins at 6:00, and by 6:15, when no one had showed, I just blamed it on my students’ general tardiness (people here aren’t nearly as timely as we are in the states). By 6:25, my director, Humberto, began to check on me. “This happens sometimes,” he said. “Don’t worry.” I promised him I would try not to.
Then, finally, sometime around 6:30, one student did arrive, Santiago. Santiago is my new favorite person in the world, because Santiago was the only one to show on my first day of classes. I waited another hour, chatting with him in English about Santa Elena and Ecuador in general, before Humberto returned to tell me we’d have to try again tomorrow. Needless to say, I was slightly disappointed. If my students weren’t willing to learn (or even show up for that matter), what exactly was I doing in Ecuador? I still don’t know if it was an administerial problem at the school (schedules are whipped together pretty quickly there) or whether it was that Guayaquil’s Independence Day (which is a holiday that people celebrate pretty much all week) had something to do with it. I’m going to go on believing it was a combination of these reasons, just so I don’t have to believe that no one was purposefully skipping out on my class (I’m such a fool…).
Tuesday, on the other hand, went much better. Seven of my ten students showed. I kept things pretty simple. We did some semi-fun icebreakers and a bunch of simple English review before I introduced our first topic: acquiring services in English-speaking countries. My class is an intermediate one, and everyone is already pretty skilled at speaking, writing, reading and listening to English. That is to say, as an inaccurate measure of their comprehension, anyone back home could—for the most part—understand what they’re talking about. You could easily carry on a lengthy conversation with any of my students. There are, of course, a lot of pronunciation problems, which is probably the biggest issue we have to face in these six-week courses, but it’s not bad enough that they can’t get their points across. One of the things I’m really going to be able to help my students out with is their pronunciation. A big problem with learning English from a non-native speaker is that the non-native speaker may say many words incorrectly as well. These infelicities are then translated to his or her students. I’m providing my students with a real opportunity just by having them hear me speak (which is kind of a scary thought in itself). A lot of the people who trained me insisted that you have to enjoy listening to yourself talk to be a good teacher, a roundabout way of saying that, if I do nothing else correctly as a teacher, I just need to keep talking.
Wednesday went well too. My second normal class. This made me believe that things were going to be fine from then on out. I—as I so frequently am—was wrong.
Thursday’s class was cancelled because of huelgas, or strikes. Whoa! Hold on, Mom! Don’t panic. Strikes in Latin America are actually a pretty routine thing. Basically what happens is that, when people are upset about something, they get a bunch of dump trucks together and pour sand, stones or piles of concrete or other junk into the middle of the major roads, and then proceed to guard the roads at those points. This is what happened on the roads from Guayaquil to Santa Elena, and in a number of other locations near the coast or the big city. Where I’m located, I could have pretty easily gotten to school on Thursday, but transportation had been cut off from many of my student. Therefore, a call from Humberto early on Thursday while I was readying lesson plans to tell me that class was called off. This is why I’m now enjoying an unplanned four-day weekend. School was called on Friday because the Independence Day of Guayaquil is a national holiday.
It’s slightly more complicated than I’m willing to admit I know (because it’s still tough for me to translate all the details the newspapers have added to their accounts), but the strikes started because Santa Elena badly wants to become a province, and Ralph Correa, the president of this country, and the Congress his party largely dominates have consistently denied their request. So what does that mean that Santa Elena wants to become a province? Basically, what states are to the US, provinces are to Ecuador. Right now, Santa Elena is part of the Guayas province, which is the same province that contains the city of Guayaquil. It’s a big province with lots of people. But Santa Elena and a bunch of the other coastal cities near here want to be on their own. I’m not totally certain why, but through my discussions with Elsy, the maid that works for my host mother, one word stuck out—recursos, or resources. Santa Elena is a pretty important industrial center for Ecuador. One of the more lucrative products that come out of the sea in this part of the country is oil, and Santa Elena is home to a big refinery that—not surprisingly—draws a lot of dollars. People here want the split because becoming a separate province will translate into more money for people in Santa Elena, La Libertad, Salinas and all the other little places in the general area (and who doesn’t want more money, eh?).
What makes matters worse is that Santa Elena has been asking this request of their government for quite a number of years now, and they continually get rejected. (I’m quite sure more money here means less money for somebody somewhere else.) Just recently, another area of the country was granted its provinceship ahead of Santa Elena, even though Santa Elena has been pulling for the change for a longer period of time and has an arguably stronger claim. Imagine how that makes everyone here feel. So the bottom line is that now is a fantastic time to put the pressure on Mr. Correa and his Congress by rising up and blocking the hell out of some major roads. From my point of view, this couldn’t have come at a worse time. Not only did the strikes ruin one of the days in my first week of classes, but it also ruined my travel plans. Aargh! I was going to head to Guayaquil to hang with a couple of volunteers there and check out the Independence Day celebrations, but that’s kind of difficult when the buses that take you there can’t tread over giant mounds of red Earth.
I was beginning to feel hopeless until Tom and Carla showed up late Thursday morning. It took them three hours (about double the time it normally takes) to arrive, but they’d managed to avoid the blocks by opting for some back road action. Despite the flags arising in my mind, they suggested we check out Montañita this weekend. I wasn’t sure how they intended to do that, but I wasn’t in the mood for Ney saying.
We got up Friday morning and loaded up everything we needed for the beach. Not only were Tom, Carla and I going, but also Pedro, my host mother’s nephew, who happens to live in a small home very, very close to mine. We packed into Tom and Carla’s Chevy Vitara, which is basically an insect compared to the big honking SUVs we fly around in on our super highways back home, and hit the open road… at least for a while. We made it only about 50-60 kilometers north along the coast (the Ruta del Sol is a beautiful and extremely popular course hugging the length of the Ecuadorian coast) before we ran into our first roadblock. I was convinced this was the end of the journey, and other than learning that ballenita is the Spanish word for whale, it hadn’t amounted to much of a weekend adventure. Fortunately, the four of us loaded in that Vitara weren’t quite ready to call it quits.
Where we were the ocean was to the north, the main road ran to the east, the way back home was west and a small village lay to the south. The roadblock to the east was really nothing more than a few dump trucks stretched across the asphalt. A few people were hanging out around the trucks, eating or talking or listening to the radio. Probably the main source of communication about the strikes comes from the radio. A Democratic talk show host who works for the station that broadcasts out of either Santa Elena or Salinas does a lot to incite the people in this pursuit for provinceship. I’ve listened to him for a number of hours myself because Elsy really enjoys local politics and always has the radio on as she does chores around the house. I can’t understand much of what the radio personality is saying because he speaks so quickly, but listening to him reminds me very much of listening to old sound clips of Hitler or Mussolini inciting the masses around the World War II era. He’s so loud and authoritative sounding, I’m sometimes frightened. I’ve commented on this to Elsy, but she assures me this is just how the way he speaks. For accuracy’s sake, I should really put my fear into perspective. I don’t know that this man is any worse than, say, Russ Limbaugh when he really gets going. I guess the part that really scares me is that he offers incentives—food packages and other commodities—for the people who make a commitment to travel to Quito to protest. (It was a good day when a woman called in to give this man a mouthful for having the audacity to encourage their fellow citizens to travel to Quito when he himself was locked away comfortably in the studio office.) Half of his program is chewed up in the time it takes to record callers’ cedula, or voter registration card, numbers into some sort of lottery. I can’t think of a political parallel in the US, but maybe someone who reads this can help me out.
So, returning to the story at hand, we couldn’t get passed these trucks without getting creative. We were busy turning around, in search of a different avenue around the roadblock, when a pickup truck filled with surfers and surfboards pulled around us, charged over a sandy lot and rolled up to the dirt roads cutting through this small village. The pickup stopped, three young guys popped out and, before I knew any better, they’d moved aside the logs blocking the roads into town. Pedro helped them keep one log out of the way as the pickup pushed through the sand; Tom followed closely behind in the Vitara. We continued east through the town with a number of very suspicious looks from the locals and then cut back to the main road. At first, I was under the impression that we were doing something quite sneaky and we were the only ones in the country clever enough to figure out this strategy. By the time we hit the next roadblock, a line of trucks parked sideways across a bridge, I realized from the off-road tracks spanning away into the surrounding fields, that we weren’t the only people out there dodging these blocks. The protesters aren’t concerned with closing down the entire region of the country; they are more concerned with making a powerful statement to their government. That these other roads existed around the roadblocks without protesters traveling to block them too just shows what they’re really meant to accomplish.
The second roadblock we hit was a bit more challenging to find a way around than the first. After finding our way onto the beach near the main road, we were stopped after traveling only so far because the tide was quickly approaching and a rock shelf pinched the gap of land between dry sand and water too deep to drive through. After a time, we were forced to take the Vitara off-road and into the scrub desert that lies to the east of the beach. We passed cows with huge horns, green cactuses and a million of these dry bushes that looked like they’d been scorched by fire years prior until we saw a few cars ducking away under the brush and into the distance. We soon discovered the impacted dirt road blazed through the desert landscape they were moving along and continued following their tracks. We drove first through a garbage dump, which was little more than old, gray piles of garbage long since flattened by the wind, then passed a lone home out in the middle of nowhere, around which roamed five or six gigantic turkeys, and finally came to a closed fence guarded by two local boys. The fence was made of wire and one boy held what was the door, a log around which two stretches of wire was wrapped, as the other older boy approached the vehicle. Pedro and Carla knew what needed to happen miles before we’d encountered a soul along the country road. A dollar was handed up to Tom, he rolled down the window, exchanged a few friendly words with the boys and the younger one peeled back the gate. We joked about the exchange as we continued forward, dipping into a dried up riverbed that snaked it’s way into another town nearby where we had to pay another dollar, what Tom told the Ecuadorians blocking the road there would pay the price for the colas.
After some wrong turns and a lot of questioning of the locals in the tiny place we’d arrived at (we even crossed the Dead Donkey bridge on our quest into nothingness), we finally made it to a small coastal town very near Montañita (the same place where Tom and Carla had met years before at a party along the beach) before we ran into the third and final roadblock we would encounter that day. This time, electing to use the beach as our road worked. Again, we turned left down the dirt streets that divide seemingly every Ecuadorian village into geometrical units and watched the ocean grow in the windshield. I was again under the impression that we were doing something covert, illegal or at least worth remembering until I saw the tire tracks ranging down beach’s horizon. Apparently, vehicles are allowed to drive on the beach here. The Vitara was going 90 kilometers per hour and the waves were lapping at the sand fifty feet to the left of us before I had the chance to voice the tinge of concern pulsing in the back of my mind. Even the people jogging or biking over the sand hardly took notice of us. Even as we zoomed by, the shore was wide enough that we didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us.
Tom had to throw the Vitara into 4-wheel drive again to gain the oomph necessary to power through the shoulder of sand that stood between us and the dirt road cutting into another small Ecuadorian village. We eventually emerged on a main road, backtracked a bit and finally came out on the road that took us north into Montañita. It took us about twice the time it would have normally, but we finally made it.
Making the trek was worth every bit of effort we put into the drive. Given the opportunity, Montañita is one of these places you’ve got to see before you die. It’s incredibly small, but its reputation is huge. You really can’t talk to someone who’s been here before or look through an Ecuadorian guidebook without failing catch some mention of Montañita. The place itself is one of these stunning contradictions of space. Only two blocks down from the hostels and bars is the residential sector. Moving just these two blocks down the road, you’d never have the impression that the little village is what it is. Not to exaggerate it too much, but the place is essentially the Ecuadorian equivalent to Amsterdam—minus the prostitution. The hippie culture thrives in Montañita (the word hippie actually translates over as is into Spanish). I’m not quite sure how they’ve established it, but the police just sort of dar a vuelta (literally, give a turn) and bypass the two main drags that travel through the town. I’ve been told by a number of sources that Montañita is the perfect place to party as hard (or as serenely) as you want to. The people there embrace either lifestyle choice.
The other huge draw to Montañita is surfing. The beach there is great, and if you travel far enough to the northeast, you’ll learn why the place is called Little Mountain. Over the ages, the ocean has worn a patch of rock away from the shore, like a stone pocket carved out of the beach. On the top of this raised earthen pocket is a large, naturally created stone formation, chestnut brown, about the height of a rich person’s home. Out near this point, the waves are supposed to be bigger and faster, which explains why a huge surfing competition is held there every February. Surfers from all over the world come to compete, and, as if Quiksilver, Billabong and Reef didn’t have enough of a presence in the youth clothing trends anywhere along the Ecuadorian coast, sponsors from these huge companies are on hand for the competition too. My ears perked when Pedro told me that a bikini contest takes place around the same time of year. Montañita’s carnival at this time during the temporada (warm season) is supposed to be legendary. I guess, when the time is right, I’ll have to find out for myself.
Down the two roads that go through the little surfer village are a plethora of hostels, the bottom floor of which has almost invariably been converted into a bar. Between these are the convenient stores, restaurants and surf shops. In the muddy streets are the souvenir tables and the street vendors. From what I understand, it’s usually much more difficult to get a room (especially during temporada), but the four of us checked out a bunch of rooms at a hostel called Montezuma, picked out two—$7 a night for each person, an extra dollar to have them fill the hot tub with water—and headed for the beach. Tom, Carla and Pedro all agreed this was as empty as they’d ever seen Montañita, and it had everything to do with the strikes and nothing to do with the cloudy weather.
On the beach Tom and I tossed around a Frisbee I’d brought from home for about five minutes before I ran down to meet Lisa, a thirty-year-old volunteer from California who’s been living in Montañita since last March. She was stretching on the beach with a friend, limbering up before taking on the ocean with her surfboard. I’d talked to her for about two minutes before I got impatient and told her I wanted in too. She pointed a few hundred yards down the beach to a group of people. “Go talk to Carlos,” she said. Four dollars later and a longboard was mine for an hour.
This would have been my first time surfing had I not taken an hour-long lesson on Wednesday of this week. Last weekend, Tom and Carla had driven me into Salinas, and we stopped into a small place, a glorified garage turned surf shop, where you could pay for surfing lessons at Punto Carneo, a beach near my home, for $12 an hour, $2 of which pays for transportation there and back. To make a long story short, my experience with surfing lessons consisted of two main elements. First, imagine a short, well-built and extremely tan Ecuadorian man putting a surfboard into your hands and leading you out to get repeatedly slapped in the face by the ocean. Next, imagine your eyes burning from saltwater (I hardly realized how spoiled I’ve been by the Great Lakes and their delicious non-saltiness) and your shoulder muscles aching from paddling, all the while behind you is the constant insistence upon one thing and one thing only—rema! This is the Spanish command to paddle, and my instructor repeated the word so much that I will not forget the word’s meaning even if I become senile in old age. For me, this is the hardest part of surfing: paddling hard and often enough to catch the momentum of an incoming wave. Otherwise, in my opinion, the standing part is simple. Turning the board, however, is still beyond me. Another battle for another day.
Jesse, Du or whoever else is interested, don’t be discouraged by my somewhat pessimistic description of surfing. I’m only exaggerating for comic effect. Surfing is the most fun activity I’ve done since coming down here. I’m slightly obsessed with it. It’s a pretty incredible feeling to actually catch a wave and feel it driving you forward.
In Montañita, however, catching a wave without a push from the surf instructor was one of those things that’s easier said than done. I’d say I caught about a wave and a half (and by half I mean I stood up for about half a second before slipping off the board) before I got tired of battling to get far enough away from shore and had to stop to take a rest. I went to talk strategy with Lisa and her friend before Lisa agreed to come back out with me. She stood in the water and gave me some tips that helped me to catch another wave or two on my own. Lisa’s been surfing for five months now, and she’s a pretty damn good teacher too.
That night, I hung out with a couple of other volunteers from my program whose bus had been stopped where protestors blocked the road, but managed to make it to Montañita by hitching a ride the rest of the way. We drank mojitos during happy hour at a bar decorated with tropical flare, and then Tom, Carla, Pedro and I went to eat these huge vegetarian pizzas we bought for $5 at a little restaurant. Later that night, we met back up with Lisa, who owns a two-seater bike an Ecuadorian friend converted for her. We used it to dar some vueltas around Montañita through the drizzle. Around midnight or one o’clock, all of us went to this really cool bar. The bar itself was completely sheltered, but the bar walls also enclosed an open section of beach, where a band played on a stage and a stick fire burned in the sand a step below. People slowly began to meander into the bar as the band continued playing, so, before long, the sandy area was packed with all manner of surfers, locals and almost every nationality of gringos you can throw out there.
The band itself is worth talking about. The same group went through three changes in the lead singer. First, a thin, modern-looking Ecuadorian sang a bunch of popular Latin American songs. Then the band played some songs that are more popular in the Northern Hemisphere—Maroon 5 and Counting Crows, for instance. After that, they changed lead singers, and a chubbier Ecuadorian with long, nappy hair began playing North American rock favorites. I was jamming pretty hard when he busted into Toxicity. Soon, the bar was packed. The stick fire was little more than a hidden stash of neon embers dusted over by the sand kicked in from its edges by the time a short man who—without my knowing any better—I can only assume came from Esmeraldas (Ecuador’s northern beaches contain a significantly greater population of people of African American descent) or somewhere in the Caribbean. The reggae music that they played was definitely the best received by the people in the bar. The other really popular music in Montañita is electronic music, which is a lot like techno, but not nearly as cool (but that’s just me talking). By the time the band had decided to call it a night and the electronic music started pumping over the speakers, Mark decided to call it a night. I think I made it to bed sometime around 3:00 in the morning. This was the first time I’d been out since arriving in La Libertad.
The four of us woke up this morning, ate a breakfast loaded to the gills for around $3 a head and hit the road by noon. Tom elected to keep to the beach road, which was fun as hell to watch stretches of beach fly by, and we even drove passed a group of fishermen hauling in their morning catch. At least a hundred pelicans were flying in the air high above us, and as a young man carried a crate of fish in from the sea over his shoulder, a few of the birds would swoop down and gently lift one of the silver fish from the top of the crate. Tom, meanwhile, kept his eyes on the “road,” driving the Vitara between the fishermen and their boats. I almost wished we had stayed to watch, but I’m quite sure Tom, Carla and Pedro had witnessed this scene a million times before.
We paid the same two boys guarding the gate in the middle of nowhere another dollar to return the way we came, and asked a motorcyclist and a man in a truck to point us in the right direction at a crossroad where a new set of tire tracks had sprung from the soil. I crashed into bed upon our return to La Libertad, and slept for a bit until gaining the motivation to write this.
I stopped once since this afternoon to run to a convenience store with Tom. We picked up some things to eat for the soccer game that’s on tonight. The last World Cup was played in 2006, which means the next championship game will be played sometime in 2010, but that doesn’t exclude the preliminary matches leading up to the main event. Ten Latin American teams are vying for five spots in the actual World Cup tournament. Before any team officially enters the tournament, the players will have played something like seventeen or eighteen games. As I punch away at my keyboard, the Ecuadorian national team is playing against Venezuela. The game is taking place in Quito, which is a huge advantage for the Ecuadorian players because the city is located at such a high elevation that players from other countries who aren’t acclimated to the mountains have real trouble breathing. And, not to mention, that Venezuela isn’t supposed to have a very good team. As far as the rest of the country is concerned, this is a pretty huge deal. Many things that usually take place here have come to a screeching halt. Coming home, many of the businesses in La Libertad were already closed—hours in anticipation of the game—and that wasn’t any effect the strikes were having.
Listening for about the last forty-five minutes, I haven’t heard a ton of cheering from the house or cars beeping their horns as they pass, which makes me think that the score is still probably zero to zero. Maybe I ought to check things out for myself instead of hiding myself away like this.
Chuta! Wrong again. Ecuador already lost.

Homes in Passing

The top one is a photograph of a bunch of Miguel's paintings in the entry room of my former home in Quito. A number of them are depictions of matadors, but Miguel always makes sure to emphasize that there are rodeo alternatives where the ¨killers¨will merely rope the animal to the ground.

The middle picture is my new home in La Libertad. It is very nice, to say the least. Carla and Tom are in the doorway, but you can't really see them.

I've included this last picture for Brandon. Sana Sana is a pharmaceutical chain in Ecuador and they are more ever-present here than Walgreen's is in the United States. Incredible. I always joke that whoever owns all the Sana Sana´s owns Ecuador, which is only partially true. I don´t know why it´s called Sana Sana, though, because the chain´s mascot is clearly a frog, and the word for frog is rana. I´m thinking sana is some hybrid of salud (health) and frog (rana), but I could just be making things up to appease myself.

Pilsener Beer & Crabs

Well, my time in the mountains has come to an end for a while. I’m in Santa Elena now (for good) which is located about 120 kilometers to the west of Guayaquil on a small peninsula that forms the westernmost part of the entire continent. I’ve been here since Thursday morning, having taken the Trans Esmeraldas night bus out of Quito at 9:30 P.M. (we’re actually on Central Time in Ecuador too). I wished someone had been able to get a picture of me on that bus. When you purchase your ticket, you get to choose which seat you want on the bus. Our directors continually recommended that you choose one about a third of the way towards the back and on the right side of the bus so that you can watch what’s going on with the luggage whenever the bus stops. So, in line with this recommendation, I chose seat number 16. Unfortunately, Ecuadorian buses aren’t built to exactly the same specifications as buses in the United States—let’s just say there isn’t as much legroom in the Ecuadorian counterparts. I was packed into seat number 16 like a sardine, and, to make matters worse, the mother and father sitting in the seats directly in front of me had reclined their seats to the maximum (I can’t exactly blame them because they had a rather lively young child with them). For my part, I couldn’t recline my seat because when you hold down the lever and push the back support backwards, your knees come forward. And when you’re as tall as I am, your knees can only come so far forward before they’re jammed into the seat in front of you. I was able to improvise, however, and slept as much of the way as I could by leaning forward and using the seat in front of me as a sort of forehead pillow—that was how tight it was. The man sitting beside me was kind of grimy too, and he had a habit of spreading his legs out as far as he could in his sleep.

I find it amazing, though, how well Ecuadorians are able to sleep on these buses. As soon as the lights had gone out and the “in-flight” movie (I can’t even remember what movie it was) was over, I turned back and looked down the length of the bus. Everyone was pressed against a window or had propped a hand to support his or her face.

I arrived in the bus station in La Libertad early on Thursday morning and called up Sara, my new host mother, for instructions. She told me to just hang out in front of the station while she drove to pick me up. I had to fend off the taxistas with about a million no thank yous before Sara pulled up. Before the end of the afternoon, I had organized my room and ate some breakfast.

People in the Sierra and people living on the coast—where they are very different in certain ways—can at least agree upon some things. Jugo, or juice, is one of those things. Juice in Ecuador is fantastic, way better than anything you can buy in a store back home. My personal favorite comes from a regional type of tomato, tomate de árbol. You peel a few of the fruits, throw them in a blender, add some sugar (and you thought people down from down south added a lot of sugar to things!) and strain the mixture.

On the other hand, as far as food is concerned, the people living on the coast disagree with the people living in the mountains in some respects. Potatoes are eaten much more commonly in the Sierra, for instance, where seafood (and you just might be able to figure out why) is eaten much more here. (We drove into Salinas just yesterday and had to slow down as we reached the city’s main stretch. There, a man held out a pair of lobsters, displaying them for sale.) It’s easier to get yucca in the mountains too. Yuca is a type of root that has a bit more flavor than a potato; it’s good, but very filling. I’ve also heard people in the Sierra eat more hamburgers and pizza. The hamburger trend I can confirm, but I really can’t when it comes to pizza. There are little hamburger places all over Quito. Don’t get your hopes up too much though, these hamburgers are nothing like we’re used to. All the hamburgers I’ve had are much smaller, much thinner and don’t come with all the classic hamburger compliments—no bun, no ketchup, no mustard and no cheese. Just straight up fried cow. Kind of boring by comparison, but you take what you can get. Like I said, Ecuador definitely has us trumped when it comes to juices. As for pizza, the only time I ate it with my host family was when I bought a bunch of ingredients and suggested we all make it together (thanks, Steph). I was happy Miguel knew more about yeast than I did, otherwise things would not have turned out well. He ended up spelling an M with the pepperoni, which was supposed to be for Marco Polo, my nickname in Quito.

I’m amazed, however, at the unavailability of Ecuadorian coffee in this country. Ecuador does grow quite a bit of coffee, but keeps very little of it for its own people—it all goes right out the door. All of the coffee I’ve drunk here is of the instant variety, and it invariably comes from Colombia. No one cares about coffee here the way we do in the states. I was explaining to my host family in Quito that every business on State Street is either a bar or a coffee shop. He looked rather surprised. In the overall scheme of things, the Pazmiños definitely prefer tea.

The differences between the costeños and the Sierrans go much deeper than just foods, however. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about these personality differences to prepare myself for what the next ten months are going to be like. Costeños, for instance, tend to be more outgoing, more direct in the way they speak (to the point of being offensive), much friendlier and generally more liberal. They also speak ridiculously quickly compared to Sierrans (which is as fun as you might imagine for someone who has enough trouble picking up just bits and pieces of the conversations he hears). Sierrans tend to be a bit more sheltered and private, but extremely genuine and very kind. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to that many Ecuadorians from the coast, but I did meet one man, Kleber, who immediately fit all of these stereotypes. He had a lot of very interesting questions about the United States and seemed extremely preoccupied with proving to me how much American history he was familiar with. I’m not sure how I feel about Kleber yet.

Being in La Libertad, (who would have thought I’d live in a city called Liberty outside of the US) I live between where I work and where I’ll play. About 5 kilometers to the east is my school in Santa Elena, and then about 8-9 kilometers to the west is Salinas, which is this really touristy beach city. During the high season, which starts sometime in November and lasts until the end of May, Salinas is crazy. Now, it’s just a pretty average place. Not too many people are out, and not all that many tourists can be found. Santa Elena, on the other hand. is a pretty run-of-the-mill Ecuadorian town. La Libertad is somewhere between (though much closer to Santa Elena than to Salinas) these two extremes. I actually live in the one tourist attraction in La Libertad, el Museo León Ricaurte: it’s both an archaeological and an artistic museum. My host mother’s husband was a pretty incredible artist during his life and their home reflects this. I’m not going to lie, I have it pretty damn good here. The place is gorgeous. I’ll include a couple pictures in a future post (if they decide to load this time… arrgh). I live in what I’d compare to a pool house (where there’s no pool, the Pacific Ocean is only a stone’s throw from the edge of the property) that’s not connected to the main building, but is still very close.

The only crummy thing about my living situation is that Sara is taking off next week to visit her pregnant sister in Mexico for a couple of months. Sara’s sister is scheduled to be having the baby soon and Sara wants to be there for as much of the child’s birth as she can. (For a gift, we picked up a bunch of children’s DVDs yesterday. Who likes Disney movies?) Luckily, Sara’s nephew lives here too, so I’ll be hanging out with him a bunch next week. I only met Pedro for a second, but he’s a really nice guy. He’s letting me use his mountain bike for the year, which might not seem like the best idea right off the bat because I’m so much bigger than everyone else in this country, but Pedro is actually taller than I am, so the bike fits me well. Kind of depressing that Sara won’t be around though….

So I’ve spent the last couple of days acquainting myself with the area. I’ve gone out running the last couple of days, and not a single dog chased me either time. I’m beginning to see that it’s just a matter of never challenging an animal with your eyes. Furthermore, Sara drove me around to a bunch of different places in Santa Elena and Salinas. She showed me all of the different beaches that are within driving distance and where I can go for this or that.

By Friday night Sara’s daughter, Carla, and her husband, Tom, had showed up to stay for the weekend. Carla and Tom are awesome. Tom is actually English and came down here to teach English something like seven or eight years ago. He fell in love with Carla and he’s been living here since. He’s in charge of an English school in Guayaquil, where they live permanently, but he’s actually also in charge of the school where I’ll be teaching. So, in a way, Tom’s my boss (it really doesn’t seem like that, however). Carla works in the tourism industry, so when whale-watching season comes around, guess where I’ll find out about the cool spots to go. Tom’s English is perfect and Carla’s is pretty damn good, but they’re both happy to speak Spanish with me, which I really appreciate. Little by little, I’m getting better at communicating.

Tom had brought along a string of crabs from a market in Guayaquil, which he started to prepare upon his arrival Friday night. In addition, he drove to show me where I can get my family’s Pilsener bottles filled near a local beer distributor. It’s eight dollars for twelve grande beers (which are each 16 oz., I think) served cold out of a couple refrigerators at a local store. You can get your bottles filled across the street from the actual factory for seven dollars, but they give them to you warm as hell.

Once they’d turned a deep red, we hung around Friday night eating crab and talking Ecuadorian politics. It turns out that eating crab is actually more about drinking beer than it is about the seafood because it’s such a time-consuming process to pick a crab apart with nothing but a small wooden hammer and your fingers. The four of us had gone through all of the grandes and probably about 12-15 crabs before we started to argue about the US presidential candidates. The Ecuadorians and English alike are skeptical about an African American and a woman having a realistic shot at the presidential office. They wonder if the American people are ready for that.

Democratic Elections

Yesterday was a big day for Ecuador—Election Day! The country is going through a ton of political reform and this was just the start of it. The ultimate goal—at least for the time being—is the creation of a new constitution that better suits Ecuador’s needs. To begin this process, Ecuadorians had to vote in around 130 new asemblaístas, or assembly members, who will be in charge of drafting the constitution in the upcoming months. What’s different about the vote here is that it’s obligatory. If you don’t vote, you don’t get your voter’s registration card, which essentially means that you lose all of your basic human rights in this country. As you can imagine, that card is kind of a big deal.

Obligatory voting presents a whole new set of problems that voluntary voting doesn’t have. For instance, for the people who don’t care who’s in office, which is probably a pretty significant portion of the population, how do they vote? The answer is, of course, that they just fill in whatever, or that they just leave the ballet empty. The other problem is transportation. Everyone has to vote in a certain area, and Ecuador is not as flexible as the United States in that sense. Where you vote all depends on your last name. So, even though all of my host family does everything else together, they don’t vote together because everyone has a different last name (naming rules/choices are fairly complicated here). In line with Ecuadorian law, Marcia, my host mother, went to vote yesterday afternoon, and she invited me to come along. We hopped onto a bus off la calle Occidental, the biggest street near the Pazmiño’s home, and fought our way past the people blocking the door. Because everyone in the country has to vote where they reside, public transportation was as packed yesterday as I’ve ever seen it. And that’s saying something, because every single morning of orientation was a fight to stake out a spot on the Ecovía.

At length, we arrived at a children’s school, where the classrooms had been turned into makeshift polling stations. People voted at card tables, the ballots hidden by large sheets of cardboard proclaiming “la vota es secreto,” or the vote is secret. As the Ecuadorians flooded into the school grounds, Marcia and I were eventually able to spot the classroom she was supposed to vote in. She got in line with the other women (A separate line had formed for men, which was significantly longer. It was nice to see that whenever a pregnant woman, or a woman with a child would come to vote, she didn’t have to wait in line and got to go inside to vote immediately.) and was off to the races in a matter of minutes. I hung outside the second story classroom and tried not to look too much like a gringo, which is completely impossible for me. I think about thirty Ecuadorians would’ve asked me what the hell I was doing there if they felt I would have actually been able to respond.

Voting itself is no easy task in this country. When I think back to the 2000 election and all that confusion the people of our country faced in filling out relatively simple ballots, I realize none of these elderly or confused individuals would’ve been able to cast a single correct vote with on an Ecuadorian ballot. Where, in the United States, it’s basically a choice between two parties, here there are literally hundreds. In the election of 130 assembly members, guess how many candidates there were. Over 3000. The ballot was bigger than a map. Each candidate’s photo was smaller than a dime. Completed ballots were dropped into boxes through slots that could fit some laptop computers. Even though the vote was supposed to be secret, I was able to watch one man fill out his ballot through the window. I imagined he was trying to navigate his way to Mars instead of voting for Correa.

The country should be handed the final results in about three days, which is when the reform begins. As a big gap has formed between the rich and the poor in this country, there are some definite competing interests motivating how the new constitution will be written. From what I understand, however, the people are relatively content with their current president, Raphael Correa, (and I should adjust this to the people in the Sierra) so no major power swings are probably going to take place as a result of this vote. I was watching the news this morning, in fact, and Correa’s party has been very effectively kicking butt. Where things might start to get sticky is when, months from now, the people are handed their newly drafted constitution and must vote to approve it. I’m probably definitely going to see some demonstrations, but demonstrations—in general—are extremely common in Latin America and they don’t tend to be violent. They do, however, tend to muck up transit.

All in all, besides the buses, yesterday was very peaceful. It’s really encouraging to watch the democratic process operate so smoothly outside of the United States. Yeah, democracy!

The other big news, which is bigger for me than the country, is that my month of orientation is now over, which means I’m as qualified as I’m going to be as an English teacher in Ecuador. The group of volunteers and I finished up Wednesday last week and many people have already shipped out to their various sites within the country. It was kind of sad to watch a lot of the people I’ve become fairly close to leave. I really won’t see most of them until we reconvene at the coast for our mid-service meeting sometime in January.

Wednesday night the entire group ate at a Cuban restaurant here in Quito. It was kind of a cool place because of the décor (and because my meal was something like glorified sloppy joes, which all of my old roommates will be happy to hear because I used to go through sloppy joes like nothing else). The walls were wood, flat like particleboard, but without being made from a million individual pieces. Everything was covered in graffiti: the walls, the supports, the tables, you name it. Someone had brought a Sharpie along and I choose to write “que ricas arepas” in a spot that only someone as tall as me could reach. What delicious arepas was a tribute to Isaac—a volunteer that I’d gotten pretty close to not only because we lived together, but also because we hung out a lot—who will be more difficult to see than most because of his site placement. We’d been out twice for arepas, which are pretty much the most delicious things on the face of the Earth. Basically, they are deep-friend pancakes, wrapped around the meat of your choice and topped with an avocado sauce and a super-spicy red one. You feel like a total Ecuadorian when you buy them too, because no one but people in the know go to the little street stand where you can get them. The place is kind of out of the way too. Isaac and I had turned getting these arepas into a huge joke between us, so whenever we talk now, we can’t get through more than five sentences without saying ¡que ricas (fill in the blank)!

The day after orientation, we went hiking up the Teleférico, which is this gondola that takes you to the top of this mountain. From the height you reach, you have access to the Ruca of Pichincha, which is a ¨two and a half¨ hour hike to the top of beautiful mount Pichincha. I put two and a half in quotes because that must be by Ecuadorian standards. I think it took Rob, a super-chill volunteer from Minnesota, and I about four hours altogether, and he’s something like 6´5¨and in pretty good shape. I’m going to attach a photo from the Ruca to the next post.

Other than that, there’s not so much to say about what I’ve done so much as what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to hang out in Quito for the next couple days and then I’m taking the night bus from Quito to Santa Elena Wednesday night. I just bought my bus ticket—only $9 to cross half the country. The night bus is my only choice for a direct route to Santa Elena; otherwise I have to dink around in the Guayaquil bus terminal, which is pretty much an invitation to get my stuff jacked when I look the way I do. The night bus is much safer, even if it does travel through the darkness. Fortunately, it makes very few stops along the way. My teaching position starts up next week Monday, the 8^th, so I’m going to have only a few days to open a bank account (which I’ve heard is going to be a bitch and a half) and get my lesson plans together before things get hectic again. I tried to call my host mother, Sara, just a little while ago, but I can’t reach her. I’m very excited to reach a point of stability in Santa Elena. And I can’t wait for more cerviche!

Thinking just about today, I’m going to relax a little with a couple of Quito volunteers. One of the girls is a big time mountain climber and she wants me to come with her to this climbing gym. I’ve never done any climbing before, but it should be fun. After that, Marcia is going to take me to a suburb of Quito where a bunch of vendors sell traditional Ecua-gifts. It’s kind of touristy, which I don’t really like a ton, but Marcia is so cool I’ll pretty much go anywhere she wants. Out of everyone in my host family, she understands me the least, so she’s really great for me to practice my Spanish with. If Marcia can understand it, anyone can!