4:23 AM-- Aeropuerto

[Well, guys, this is almost it. I wrote this last entry in the airport terminal. It is pages and pages of reflections in Spanish that may be too complex and laborious to try to translate. I'll include the part about the end of our beach trip.]

Our days at the beach were undeniably tropical. Remember the strange man on the sofa? Well, he turned out to be a medical student friend of Gabriel's family who is currently doing his rounds at a hospital nearby Gabriel's house (I think). He told us that he has a friend living in this spacious, luxury-seeming beach-side apartment right on the beach, so we all got to stay for free right on the beach (instead of taking a taxi 20 minutes every morning from Gabriel's house). We ate fried fish and ceviche, and drank fresh-made coconut shakes. Under a thatched roof on the sand, I slurped rum raisin and strawberry ice cream, chunks of pineapple, and a rich berry syrup out of a fresh pineapple shell. We danced salsa and reggaton and merengue in a similar hut on the sand while a hot rain fell on the steamy kabob vendors outside. All the food was a little richer- a little more spice to make me sweat. We laughed and talked voraciously- mostly us girls. I truly loved Julia and Lisa. Julia got stung rather artistically by a jellyfish and we smeared fresh lime pulp all over it. The sun set on the ocean (I don't believe I had ever witnessed this pacific pleasure before).
We took a bus back at midnight and arrived to a dimly-lit Quito at six in the morning. That day was spent saying last-minute goodbyes (to Lau Lau and Daniel) and buying last-minute gifts at the artesianal market. Sara's apartment mates had a party with musical chairs and noise makers. It was fun, but I decided to turn in at about midnight and try to get at least three hours of sleep before waking for the airport. Esteban and Sara accompanied me in taxi and in the darkness of 3:30 AM, we said our last goodbyes.
sad.
what a trip.

early next morning.

following my last entry, there was a procession of slightly humorous and slightly interesting nightly happenings

1. A strange bug visited Lisa (with whom I am sharing a bed) and I in the night and appears to have crawled up and down our body, taking a bite incrementally every two inches.
   
2. Sara and Gabriel and Esteban came back from the concert at 2:30 AM and I did my creepy pop suddenly and energetically up in bed while still asleep thing (that always freaked out Bianca). Evidently we chatted about how we have been getting bitten, we changed the sheets, etc, and I think I was asleep the whole time.
   
3. This morning Lisa got up to use the bathroom and was making this weird hissing breathing noise. I thought she might be sleepwalking. Then, she left and it was still going on so I realized there was a strange hissing animal in the room. When she came back, i said "Lisa, there's a strange animal in the room. We timidly peeked under the bed and the hissing stopped.
4. When I went to the bathroom a few hours later, I returned to our room, confused, saying "Lisa, there's a strange man on the sofa." Sure enough, his shoes were on and he was just lying there with his eyes closed. weird. we still haven't figured that one out
   

Saturday, August 2

Can you believe it? I'm lounging comfortably in shorts and a t-shirt, couched in the friendly pressure of warm moist air. I just took a cold shower and feel extremely refreshed and content. Whew. We have arrived at the coast in the small, poor city of Esmeraldes, where Gabriel spent much of his childhood and his father still lives.
Last night we went to the airport to pick up Julia and Lisa (Sara's friends from Macalaster). I think I teared up about ten times just being int he airport and seeing people reunite. I have determined that these bursts of excessive emotion (that i've been consistently experiencing on this trip) are not bursts of pent-up sadness, but are exclusively confined to moments in which I witness expressions of hope. What a cornball. Anyway, Lisa and Julia did not have my "five-minutes through customs" luck and we ended up waiting on the floor of the airport for hours. A bit stressful, but bearable.
Todays' six-hour bus ride cured all! The second half became balmy and as I took off my shoes and socks and released each toe, coiled my hair up to cool the building moisture on my neck, I felt...gosh! What was it? A little like I was going home, a little like I was headed off into tropical paradise, and mostly like my body was freeing from the tepid clench its been in for a month. I sat with Esteban and once again we chatted--I mean really really chatted in Spanish. I was pleased with how fluid it felt. During all this, platano and palm groves were flashing by out the windows- big leafy green seas and shacks with plants growing out their ears and fertile flowery sweaty smells.
When we got there we immediately went out to eat--directly in the city of Esmeraldes (a harrowing 15-minute taxi ride from Gabriel's house on the outskirts). A fascinating tidbit: Esmeraldes is the only place in Ecuador in which black people constitute the majority. Evidently a slave ship headed for the Caribbean crashed in Esmeraldes and the slaves escaped and populated the city. It is an interesting place. The attitude here appears to be much less polite than in the Sierra (the term for the portion of Ecuador in the Andes). I had been told this ahead of time, and at our restaurant I noticed it--it seemed to be trendy for the waiters to assume an expression of utter indifference and sort of slink around, bringing us things we didn't order, walking or turning away blatantly when we were in the middle of ordering. Sort of like a weird pervasive teenage mindset hanging around the faces and movements and words of all those I've interacted with thus far. Who knows. my perceptions could certainly change.

At this moment, Sara and Gabriel and Esteban have gone to a rock concert and Lisa and Julia and I have been left here to drink water and bond. They've gone to bed now and I'm not sure if it's 9:30 or 1 in the morning. None of the clocks work. For hours we've been sitting in these low seats around a high bar drinking water and talking up a storm about recycling projects and boys and Alzheimer's and Lisa's farming program and languages and toe movments and Julia's brother. What a wonderful time! We finished a gallon between the three of us.

Friday, August 1

Well, I'm propped up on Sara's floor mattress listening to beloved music! Can you believe it? I'd say this is a much-needed de-stress session. Last night, in classic Ecuadorian fashion, I waited up till 1:30 AM for Azu and Fabri to get home. They told me "stay up because we'll be back in 40 minutes and we want to help you burn those picture CDs. So I ended up waiting, droopy-eyed, for hours and hours and then when they got home the computer was locked in Juan Carlos's room, who had evidently been there the whole time and could have helped me. so it all unfolded like usual in this silly slapstick "this could have been done in five minutes three hours ago" kind of way. Long and short of it, I had to get up at 6 Am the next morning to do it then and they were in such a rush to leave for the beach that all our final goodbyes were rushed and unsatisfying and then I got ripped off by a cab driver. whew.

OK, BANOS!
The bus ride was stunning in the same way the changing of seasons is for me--I've come to expect it but it still takes my breath away. The other thing that is to be expected on Ecuadorian bus rides is trashy, violent, sex-filled movies that are unfit for the children on the bus (or for any of us for that matter) in which Asians are bad guys and buff white men satiate their lust for Asian blood and guns and women. Sort of a weird juxtaposition with the serene mountain scenery.

We arrived in the evening and found our $5 a night hotel. Contrary to what one might expect from such a price, our room was generously furnished with four beds, a private toilet/shower and a stunning view of hte steamy, waterfall-laden mountains. Beneath the waterfall was a group of thermal baths. We steamed around in these for a while, until about 10.

Then we played heated rounds of card games. Gabriel and Esteban like to make fun of the current trendy intellectual jargon used at such esteemed liberal arts colleges as Sara's and mine, to distinguish "third world" countries. So Sara and I took them on in the game "cuarenta" as a team, chanting "yeah global north!" to counterbalance their whooping and high-fiving and general "global south" jubilation.

IN the morning over a $1.20 breakfast, Sara convinced us to rent bikes (instead of taking an open air bus) to venture through the mountains to various waterfalls. The minute we started out it began to rain pretty substantially. The next half an hour was a mix of misery and exhilaration. Wet cold clothes sticking to legs trying to pedal while we're cruising wildly through the moist valley clouds between lush expanses rising up around us. At one point, part of the path was blocked from a small waterfall above us, drowning the path and rushing town to the river below. We had to take off our socks and shoes and wade through. I would say it was a couple of hours of riding. It stopped raining after about half an hour and the steam rose around us. We were relatively alone for most of the trek, although we came across a crowed of gogglers at the bungee jumping bridge and stopped for a while to clutch each other and witness potential doom. When we got into a sort of mountain town, we left our bikes at a restaurant and took the jungley path to this huge waterfall (that was much more tourist-infested than any of our previous journey). Following the advise of a friendly ecologist we crawled through a sort of rock ledge cave that took us directly underneath the roaring waterwall of the 200 ft. cascade. wow!
We ate back at the restaurant we left our bikes at (that was the deal) and took a hitched a ride with our bikes on a paid truck. I had been a little sick the whole day and rested in the room for a while (thinking about parasites) while they rode around the town a while and watched from a safe vantage point as a semi-distant volcano spewed ash into the air (evidently Baños has period evacuations due to the lava expulsion of this particular volcano). The rest of the evening was relaxing- watching a soccer game, more card-playing, dinner, and a lengthy Spanish chat with Esteban while Sara and Gabriel were off catching up.
The return trip was significantly more stressful. I was really cripplingly sick already, which wasn't helped by the mountain-ledge careening of the bus. Then, burn rubber filled our noses and we all had to evacuate the bus and pile into a different one with standing room only. I managed to get a seat, though (next to a woman with a chicken clucking plaintively under some cloth.)
Then Sara and I sort of argued with Gabriel (my first real argument in spanish!) who was being really vague about my sickness and parasites in general.
Overall, weird stomach troubles aside, it was a glorious trip! I'm so glad we decided to go at the last minute.

Thursday, July 31

My last night with my host family. Sophia and Campanita (the dog whose name means little bells) are on my bed with me as I write, each shrieking in their own ways. I will write about our Baños trip soon.

[ok...that was all I wrote for that entry]

Monday, July 28

Whew! I'm exhausted, possibly a little drunk, and have a stinging slice in my writing thumb from a sharp crab I just ate. this morning Daniel took Sara and I to check out an orphanage run by nuns and inquire about working there in the coming week. We thought that even though Ecuador was in their period of vacationing that surely the orphans could not be on vacation! But, sure enough, they had been sent off to stay with their godparents (which seems like kind of a tantalizing thing to do to kids who are told they have no one to care for them!)

Then to sara's chic apartment with old fashioned furniture- dark wood and wine-red velvet, artsy sculptural ashtrays, a vase of bright flowers and a large Picasso print. The monsoon of discussion began, as it always does when our mouths and minds are put in the same room. We decided we'd go back to my house to read on the terrace. We had only just settled down before my family, then Gabriel and Estaban, and then Lau Lau all showed up. We lounged around on my bed and debated the new Ecuadorian consitutional reforms (well, not my family but the rest of us). Miryam, my volunteer liaison, called and confirmed that absolutely all the volunteer organizations I was interested were absolutely and positively on vacation. I, musingly, said to sara "maybe we could go to Baños tomorrow" and before I knew it a trip had been planned for the very next day to visit this beautiful village with thermal baths and waterfalls!

The plan for the evening was that Lau Lau and I would meet Daniel at five, go to a café and have a drink, and then meet back up with Sara and Gabriel for the new Woody Allen movie in the casa de la cultura. I should mention that this Woody Allen movie is one in a string of many timely coincidences that have been occurring. One night a couple weeks ago I had a sharp craving for a Woody Allen movie (sort of strange, since I'm not really an aficionado or anything). The very next day, I went to the cinema in the Casa de la Cultura to check out the showings and in the middle of the week of Brazilian cinema, they had stuck a Woody Allen movie!
ANYWAY Daniel was about an hour late (suprise suprise). He picked us up in his car and said we were going to pick up a friend. I said "look- that's all I have time for because I have to make it back to the movie theater in 10 minutes to meet my friends." Daniel and Lau Lau then embarked on the most obnoxious campaign of hornswaggling in which they tried incessantly to convince me to go out with them instead. "You're gonna see these friends all the time." "It's just an American movie." "They're a couple--they'll want ot go by themselves." I should have called to mind my D.A.R.E. peer pressure resistance tactics (cold shoulder, strength in numbers, etc). Instead, I said politely "I really don't like to just change my plans on people at the last minute" (perhaps reacting to what's become somewhat of a cultural frustration for me here of chronic plan-changing at the last minute). They kept at it for seriously another ten minutes despite my continued polite but firm "no thanks. sounds great, but I already have plans" before I hauled out the harsher voice and said "Please! I can make my own decisions!" Then Lau Lau said "well, if you don't go, I can't" which I found extremely frustrating that she hadn't told me that from the beginning because of course then I felt bad and that dampened my conviction a little. Ironically, all this was for naught because at that very moment Sara and Gabriel called and said they might come into the movie part way into it because they wanted to talk alone for a while. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I went with Lau Lau and Daniel and Daniel's friend, and it ended up being a blast. First, we wound our way down these spiraling, European cobblestone streets into this tiny village with a Quitchuan name. It was very surreal because we got there, we looked into a dark church with only the holy figures lit up, and then left, and I never had any idea where in the world we were or how this cute Euro-town was able to emerge at the bottom of hill. Then we went to an ancient colonial street in the Centro Historico that has been beautifully preserved--lights strung above, between whitewashed buildings with geraniums flooding out the windows. Because it was Monday, all the "cultural bars" with live bands, were closed, so we climbed endless stairs to a talltall restaurant with a vista of the entire glittering city rising up and around us into the mountain tops. The waiters lit heaters and served us this drink of hot liquor, fresh squeezed oranges, and brewed cinnamon. It was an interesting mix of people- these nice 30 year old men (a professor and a banker) and these two 19 year old foreign volunteers. But a rollicking good time, nonetheless, with laughter to spare!

much to do before I leave for baños!

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Overall a very uneventful weekend. Earlier this morning my family went out out to the movie theater and I stayed back to finish reading my book. Made some lunch and wandered around the park and the market. At the free exhibit in the Casa de la Cultura, someone had decided it would be a good idea to do a hybrid exhibit---part poorly rendered modern geometric art and part ancient Incan sculptures--completely intermixed. The ancient sculptures were wonderful, with the oddest variety of expressions. I faced each ancient carved face and waited till no one was looking. then I assumed, in turn the expression of each carving. This went on for about 30 sculptures. Jolly good solitary fun! I stood in for a little while on this big family music concert and then Sara came over and read Bel Canto aloud to me out on the terrace.

Saturday, July 25

When we got to the guardaria today, Veronica had not shown up. The other womens' solution was to shove all the kids into the hands of Lau Lau and I with zero instructions. After wringing our hands for a few minutes, we began to organize songs and games. In the end, though we ended up combining all the groups at the guardaria (significantly fewer on account of the vacations that started that day) and playing with them outside while one other woman supervised. It was really wonderful wrestling with the kids, pretending I couldn't quite grab their shoes when they were on the swings. Giggles galore. Sara and Gabriel came to visit, since they had worked at this very center last summer, but hardly recognized anyone.

After that was a delightful day of "hanging out with friends"--something I'd almost gotten out of the habit of doing. We wandered Parque Carolina and Sara and I shared some Durham Bulls reminiscing over cotton candy. We climbed the tallest spine of the Basilica and talked for hours (mostly in Spanish). In the evening we watched a Brazilian movie (Portuguese with Spanish subtitles) that was a little too artsy and obscure even for my taste--although it provoked an interesting conversation afterwards with Gabriel who is hyper openminded.

settled back in

ooook. well, I'm home, basking in tomatoes from the garden and sweaty skin and solitary dips in the river and all the smells and tastes and sounds of this life. Music! Summer rain! Mediterranean food! I seem to have avoided most of the culture shock potentially awaiting me upon my return. You know, I think that may be partly because I was feeling pretty negative about the American way of life before I left, I was sort of expecting the onslaught of consumerism and apathy upon my arrival in the Miami airport. too-big houses and too-many things and a forgetfulness here sometimes, an unthinkingness about privilege. Of course this is a cynical blanket statement- not even beginning to sum up the complexities of lifestyles and cultures in the US. I already knew that, too, but I think being forced to defend my country and my people against this very stereotype that most of the rest of the world holds made me reflect so much more on all the interesting and varied facets of our culture (or cultures, more accurately). Mostly what I feel right now when I think about Ecuador is a sort of contented secret feeling. Kind of silly, I know, but secret in that (despite the fact that I have kept you all updated so thoroughly) there is so much about my little nook in this little part of the world that is simply unable to be recounted. Relationships and smells and the mundane patterns I learned in my daily routine. As simple as they are I have this small greedy feeling that they're mine, packed away and locked with this foreign tongue. On a less new age flaky woman-sounding note, another notable change is that I find myself to be even more of a tight wad than usual...lunch for more than $1.20?? Whadda rip off!

Well, I have several weeks worth of undocumented journal entires that I feel like I should probably get on out there, so here's the final installment. It feels a little weird doing this now that I'm back, but for closure's sake, I will press on.

A tantalizing snippet

I´m at a chic internet café and don´t have the time to record all of my wonderfully stereotypical tropical adventures of the last bunch of days (including salsa on the beach and eating ice cream out of a hollowed out pineapple) but I think I might write when I get home just for closure´s sake.

I come home tomorrow, by the way. I can´t wait.

love, lily