...because I absolutely refuse to believe that time moves this slowly on its own.
I have so many pages of school work to write over the next two weeks, and I did make a little bit of progress earlier, but I've hit a standstill. So now I'm blogging (obviously).
Back-tracking: On Sunday, November 15, we took a bus from Quito to Intag. We met Carlos Zorilla and traveled the last hour to his farm on foot while our luggage was transported on horseback. We had lunch right away, which was homemade and all vegetarian and completely amazing. Then we settled into our cabins and had a tour of the farm.
Carlos and Sandy have lived on their farm for more than thirty years. They grow over 70 crops as well as 50-60 native tree species, and their gardens are very diverse. It's totally normal to find pineapples, green onions, bananas, and tree tomatoes growing in the same plot. Everything they do is completely sustainable, and they haven't used pesticides, natural or synthetic, for over twenty years. The crops they grow don't actually provide enough income to live on, so they host ecotourist groups like us in their lovely facilities. The bathroom was an outhouse, but it honestly wasn't that bad. The shower was ice cold in the morning, but the water was nice in the afternoon after the sun had been shining for several hours. The cabins had no electricity, so we had to light candles after dark, but we had thick, alpaca blankets, and we were all nice and cozy. Everyone felt like we were in the Little House books or on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
We hiked all of Monday morning in the cloud forest, which is beautiful but full of insanely steep hills. Monday afternoon we were visited by some members of a co-op of local women who make all kinds of products out of agave fibers -- everything from bracelets to purses to belts to potholders to floor rugs. Not only do they make extra money from their efforts, they gain a sense of value beyond just being housewives and they know that they're helping the local economy to resist the advances of copper mining companies. Tuesday morning was spent on group projects, which meant I got to go out and dig through a muddy stream for insects again. Tuesday afternoon we met Mary Ellen Fieweger, a font of knowledge and a true jack of all trades. She's the co-founder and co-editor of Periódico Intag, a newspaper that reports on community and conservation news in Intag, and she just won the first-ever award for environmental journalism in Ecuador. She's translated books from Spanish to English, she's a member of DECOIN, the anti-mining organization Carlos started, and she's absolutely hilarious.
On Wednesday we left Carlos and Sandy's beautiful farm and went to the tiny town of Apuela, where we visited an organic coffee factory and also Mary Ellen's newspaper office. She and her colleagues explained some of the projects they've been trying to implement in the community, including a lending library, a youth center, and music and movement classes for little kids, but they're really strapped for funds. As soon as we left, we started coming up with fundraisers we could do on campus.
That's all the back-tracking I can handle at the moment. My brain is so fried and I want to come home NOW.
Days till I come home: 14
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
When is a train not a train? When it's a bus.
I feel like I've been hit by a bus on train tracks, which is, ironically enough, what I spent four hours riding on this morning.
I promise I'll come back and write about Intag, Junín, and Otavalo, but right now I'm going to write about Riobamba so I can put it behind me and not think about it ever again.
We got to the city of Riobamba on Monday night, after riding in the bus all day long. Our hotel was seriously the weirdest hotel I've ever stayed in. It was basically an 11-story maze, and there were weird displays of pots and tools and things behind windows in the hallways, and also lots of empty courtyards that I'm not sure you could actually get into.
On Tuesday we drove way up into the mountains. We spent some time walking through a polylepis forest to help ourselves acclimatize, and that was actually kind of fun, if difficult because it was so steep. Then we drove to Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador. We drove up to a climbing refuge around 4,800 meters above sea level, and from there we walked up to another refuge at 5,000 meters. Those were the hardest 200 meters I've ever walked. It was freezing cold and snowing a little bit. At that altitude, breathing sometimes seems like more of a wish than an actual functioning process. I nearly turned around a couple of times, but I did make it to the second refuge. I'm glad I did, because now I can say I've been higher than any point in the lower 48 states, but I don't ever want to do that again.
Coming down was a little easier, and the clouds had rolled in and completely surrounded us, which was neat. We got lunch at the lower climbing refuge, and it was good but I wasn't really in the mood to eat. We sat around the fire and sang Christmas songs while we waited for the ten or so people that had decided to go up higher than the second refuge. Good for them for being adventurous, but I just really wanted to get off the darn mountain.
We had some people suffering from altitude sickness on the way back. One person threw up on the bus, and my friend and roommate Natalie wound up with a horrendous migraine. I think just about everyone, including me, had at least a headache and a little dizziness.
Back at the hotel, I warmed up in the shower, put on my pajamas, and did some Internet-y things for a while. I went down for dinner at 7:00, and pretty much as soon as I got there I got really cold. I didn't feel like eating much, which is rare for me at any time and especially in Ecuador. I just felt completely dead...achy all over like I had strep or something. I went back upstairs before dessert, because I had reached the point where I was shaking uncontrollably. I got in bed about 8:30, and I was just all weepy and couldn't turn it off. I warmed up a little under the covers and had some random huge epiphanies about the story I would be currently writing if I could be doing NaNoWriMo, but I didn't fall asleep for ages. I woke up about five times during the night, alternately freezing cold and burning up.
We left the hotel at the ungodly hour of 5:45 AM, prepared to ride in the bus for 45 minutes before we got to the train station. However, after literally two minutes, the bus stopped and Narcisa announced we were there. So we scrambled, half-asleep, to get our stuff together, and went into the train station. I still felt awful and only had juice and tea for breakfast, and I was still all weepy. We had to sit through this long video about Ecuador's great railroading history, which just made me cry more because it made me miss my grampy. We finally went out to get on the train...and it wasn't a train. It was essentially a charter bus on railroad tracks. We were all very pissed off about that.
I had really been looking forward to the train ride, because my family has such a love of trains (courtesy of Grampy), but I was annoyed and sick and I slept most of the time. There was some really pretty scenery, but it kind of felt like a wasted morning. We got off the "train" and got back on the bus and drove several hours back to Cuenca.
I still feel really icky, but I'm glad to be back to my home-away-from-home. At this point, I can't wait for December 13, when I'll be home for real. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow. I'll be thinking about you while I'm sitting in class.
Days till I come home: 18
I promise I'll come back and write about Intag, Junín, and Otavalo, but right now I'm going to write about Riobamba so I can put it behind me and not think about it ever again.
We got to the city of Riobamba on Monday night, after riding in the bus all day long. Our hotel was seriously the weirdest hotel I've ever stayed in. It was basically an 11-story maze, and there were weird displays of pots and tools and things behind windows in the hallways, and also lots of empty courtyards that I'm not sure you could actually get into.
On Tuesday we drove way up into the mountains. We spent some time walking through a polylepis forest to help ourselves acclimatize, and that was actually kind of fun, if difficult because it was so steep. Then we drove to Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador. We drove up to a climbing refuge around 4,800 meters above sea level, and from there we walked up to another refuge at 5,000 meters. Those were the hardest 200 meters I've ever walked. It was freezing cold and snowing a little bit. At that altitude, breathing sometimes seems like more of a wish than an actual functioning process. I nearly turned around a couple of times, but I did make it to the second refuge. I'm glad I did, because now I can say I've been higher than any point in the lower 48 states, but I don't ever want to do that again.
Coming down was a little easier, and the clouds had rolled in and completely surrounded us, which was neat. We got lunch at the lower climbing refuge, and it was good but I wasn't really in the mood to eat. We sat around the fire and sang Christmas songs while we waited for the ten or so people that had decided to go up higher than the second refuge. Good for them for being adventurous, but I just really wanted to get off the darn mountain.
We had some people suffering from altitude sickness on the way back. One person threw up on the bus, and my friend and roommate Natalie wound up with a horrendous migraine. I think just about everyone, including me, had at least a headache and a little dizziness.
Back at the hotel, I warmed up in the shower, put on my pajamas, and did some Internet-y things for a while. I went down for dinner at 7:00, and pretty much as soon as I got there I got really cold. I didn't feel like eating much, which is rare for me at any time and especially in Ecuador. I just felt completely dead...achy all over like I had strep or something. I went back upstairs before dessert, because I had reached the point where I was shaking uncontrollably. I got in bed about 8:30, and I was just all weepy and couldn't turn it off. I warmed up a little under the covers and had some random huge epiphanies about the story I would be currently writing if I could be doing NaNoWriMo, but I didn't fall asleep for ages. I woke up about five times during the night, alternately freezing cold and burning up.
We left the hotel at the ungodly hour of 5:45 AM, prepared to ride in the bus for 45 minutes before we got to the train station. However, after literally two minutes, the bus stopped and Narcisa announced we were there. So we scrambled, half-asleep, to get our stuff together, and went into the train station. I still felt awful and only had juice and tea for breakfast, and I was still all weepy. We had to sit through this long video about Ecuador's great railroading history, which just made me cry more because it made me miss my grampy. We finally went out to get on the train...and it wasn't a train. It was essentially a charter bus on railroad tracks. We were all very pissed off about that.
I had really been looking forward to the train ride, because my family has such a love of trains (courtesy of Grampy), but I was annoyed and sick and I slept most of the time. There was some really pretty scenery, but it kind of felt like a wasted morning. We got off the "train" and got back on the bus and drove several hours back to Cuenca.
I still feel really icky, but I'm glad to be back to my home-away-from-home. At this point, I can't wait for December 13, when I'll be home for real. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow. I'll be thinking about you while I'm sitting in class.
Days till I come home: 18
Monday, November 23, 2009
Aventuras en la amazonía
These past two weeks have been so incredible, and I really want to write about everything. We've been SO BUSY. I think there have only been two nights since leaving Cuenca that I've stayed up later than 10 PM. I'm afraid there's no way I'll be able to do justice to the awesomeness of all our experiences, but I'll do my best.
On Sunday, November 8, we flew from Cuenca to Quito, which is not that far (less than an hour by plane), but there are a lot of mountains in between. I sat in the emergency exit row for the first time in my life. Actually, all of the emergency exit row seats were taken up by B-W people, and you're technically supposed to be fluent in the language to sit there. Dr. Melampy, his wife, Nancy, and Professor Martin actually are fluent in Spanish, so they were probably okay, and I'd like to think I could have held my own in an emergency situation, but everyone else probably should have been seated elsewhere. I was a little nervous sitting in that row, actually, because that was probably the roughest flight I've ever experienced. There was a lot of turbulence, and about five minutes before we landed the cabin pressure dropped significantly for about fifteen seconds and I got really dizzy. We survived, though.
We spent the night in a beautiful hostel in Quito (it was way nicer than the hotel in which we stayed in Machala), and then we left at 5:15 AM for the Amazon. We had to wait a long time for our flight to Coca because of weather, but we finally boarded the shuttle bus that took us across the tarmac to our plane. The airport in Quito, Ecuador's capital city, has less than five gates. The airport in Coca is even smaller. Instead of a baggage carousel, they tossed all the luggage onto a wide bench and we had to go over and just pull ours out of the pile. We took a very short bus ride to a dock, which was right by a hotel. The hotel had a snackbar, and while we were waiting for our boat, we were entertained by the snackbar's resident toucans and spider monkeys. They hopped all over the place, including on some people's heads and shoulders. The toucans were particularly interested in untying shoelaces.
We had been waiting for three other people to arrive on a later flight, and once they got there, we set off to board the boat. That was something of a disaster. Professor Martin slipped in a big puddle of water; Angela lost control of her gigantic suitcase and it crashed down a huge, steep ramp; and yours truly took a spectacular tumble. My right ankle (the one I sprained a few years ago) occasionally decides to stop working without asking my brain's permission, and this occurred as I was going down a small set of stairs. I ripped a hole in my jeans and scraped up my knee pretty well, and everyone freaked out, but I was laughing. It did hurt, but my brain kind of experienced the whole thing in slow motion, so it was actually rather comical from my point of view.
The boat was a long, flat motorboat with an awning and two back-to-back rows of plastic lawn chairs. Each person received a life jacket and a really nice bagged lunch, and we had a very enjoyable two-hour cruise down the Río Napo. We arrived at what seemed to be some kind of military station, where we had to present our passports and go through security. Then we boarded our first chiva.
Chiva means goat in Spanish, but in this case it refers to an open-air, wooden trolley-kind-of-thing. All the luggage is thrown on top, and all the people are squished together on long, not-very-well-padded benches. It was noisy, hot, dusty, and bumpy for about an hour and fifteen minutes – easily the most uncomfortable form of transportation I've ever taken, with the possible exception of that awful overnight train ride in Spain two years ago. After the chiva, we were quite glad to get on another motorboat and sail two hours down the Río Tiputini.
We finally arrived at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, which is a joint project between Boston University and Universidad San Francisco de Quito. It's located right at the edge of Yasuní National Park, which is also a Biosphere Reserve, or an area recognized by the United Nations as a world heritage site. It's arguably the world's greatest biodiversity hotspot. It covers an area of about one million hectares (one hectare = 100 meters x 100 meters), and it's estimated that each hectare contains one thousand plant species and 100,000 insect species. It's also estimated that there are 1,200 vertebrate species in the area. All of this means that interference in this environment impacts more species than it could anywhere else on earth...Enter the oil companies.
Oil accounts for about fifty percent of Ecuador's annual federal revenue. In 2004, oil companies paid $811,000,000 to the state in taxes, royalties, etc. For this reason, the government often turns a blind eye when drilling occurs on “protected” land. There's a big oil station located inside Yasuní, about twelve kilometers from Tiputini, and we could often hear its motors humming as we were out hiking. In most oil operations, it's still a common practice to leave behind totally exposed pits of oil sludge which leeches nasty chemicals, and oil spills are also big hazards. Between 2000 and 2006, it's estimated that Petroecuador, a smaller, domestic company, was responsible for 850 spills, so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the big, international companies were responsible for a lot more. Also, there is only one oil refinery in the country. It's in Esmeraldas on the western coast, so the oil from the eastern lowlands has to be pumped through miles of pipeline across the seismically active Andes. And of course, to drill and transport oil, one must first build roads, which means cutting down trees. Deforestation or degradation occurs at a rate of one hundred hectares of forest per kilometer of road.
In addition, trees are still being cut down to be sold as timber. Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, has ordered a timber harvesting ban, but it hasn't been enforced at all. There's so much corruption in the region that it's really easy for illegal harvesters to receive forged papers to make their operations look legit. And then there's always the problems of commercial hunting and fishing (the latter is sometimes done via dynamite or poison) and the selling of insects, bird feathers, and animal skins to tourists. One million birds are shipped to the United States each year, but only five percent of them actually survive long enough to make it into the hands of pet owners.
Now that I've inundated you with unhappy statistics (courtesy of Dr. Kelly Swing, director of Tiputini Biodiversity Station and professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito), let me assure you that we had a fabulous time in the rain forest. It does rain a lot there, but not as much as you might think – certainly not as much as I was expecting. We were there from Monday evening to Friday morning, and it only rained Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon for a few hours. The humidity is relentless, however. My hair was never dry, and neither was my bath towel, which smelled strongly of mildew within twenty-four hours of my first freezing cold shower. Most species of the electronic family (laptops, iPods, cameras, etc.) don't appreciate the humidity in the Amazon, so they always spent the night in the dry boxes located in the station's library. Electricity, save for the lights in the library, was only available from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM and 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM every day, so sometimes we had to make do with candles or headlamps, which are a wonderful fashion accessory.
Most of Tuesday and Wednesday were spent hiking with our guides. We broke up into groups of six to eight people, because tromping through the jungle with a group of twenty-nine (twenty-four students, two professors, Dr. Melampy's wife and her friend, and the son of the director of Amauta) is a surefire way to scare off any and all wildlife. My guide's name was José, and he was fantastic. I don't think there was a question all week that he couldn't answer. Ashley Herman and I took turns translating his Spanish answers for the rest of the group, but he knew a lot of individual words in English, especially animal names. Sometimes we just hiked for hours, and sometimes we climbed up towers that nearly reached the top of the canopy. It was really cool to witness my friend Shannon conquering her serious fear of heights and then designing a project that required climbing up the tallest tower again. We saw a ton of insects and spiders, a few really beautiful birds, including an extremely rare curassow, which is kind of like a large, black goose with a red beak, and four spider monkeys, including a baby with its mother. Believe it or not, I ate some ants. There's this specific species of ants called lemon ants, because the tree species they inhabit makes them taste like lemon. José said it's a tradition for guides to offer the ants to their guests. Obviously we saw a lot of plants, but I was actually surprised at how interesting I found a lot of them. It was neat to see trees that we read about weeks ago in Ohio, and by the end of the week I was starting to feel a little like Neville Longbottom in a Hogwarts greenhouse.
On Thursday we did student-designed group projects, which we have to turn into Spanish presentations when we get back to Cuenca. I'm not particularly fond of scientific research, so I made sure I was working with people who knew what they were doing. My friend Natalie, a biology major, wanted to find out about aquatic insects in the Amazon, so I went with her because digging in the mud sounded like fun. Our group went out to a small stream and spent a few hours scooping up the bottom in sieves of various sizes and poking around for little critters. We also recorded the temperature and pH of the water and the mud and tested for the presence of nitrates, phosphates, and dissolved oxygen. There were no phosphates, which was good, because that means the area is pretty much undisturbed by humans, and there was dissolved oxygen, because without that, there would have been a problem. We found ten or so little wriggly things, mostly dragonfly larvae.
Wednesday night we went out on the river in the boat and went hunting for caymans. We saw about four, including a huge one that didn't actually try to get away from us. It just stayed where we found it, peeking up above the water in the shallows. Some people touched its tail, and the guys from the station fed it a large slab of meat. Thursday night our guides took us on short hikes after dark. We saw a lot of insects and spiders, ranging from interesting to gross and creepy. We found this gigantic female orb weaver in her web, and José sacrificed an unlucky cricket so we could watch her in action. He threw the cricket into the web, and the poor thing didn't even have a chance to struggle before it was wrapped up and being eaten. It was disgusting and oddly fascinating. We didn't see any owls, but we heard them, and we found an adorable frog on a leaf on the way back to the cabins, so I was a happy camper.
I think my personal highlight of the week was swimming in the river. The current was fairly strong, so all we had to do was bob along in our life jackets and literally go with the flow while the boat followed a ways behind. The water was absolutely the perfect temperature, and we were all having so much fun...until we were attacked. We were all floating along, kind of spread out, and Mark was right ahead of me. All of a sudden he started freaking out. I thought he was just kidding, because he jokes around a lot, until I felt something very heavy slam into my hip. The current was still carrying me, so my legs scraped along it too. I screamed, Mark was still freaking out, and then it hit Paul, so everyone in the water started flipping out. We eventually realized it was just a tree, and there are a lot of fallen trees in the river, but most of them are not completely submerged. When you're swimming in the same water in which you saw caymans the night before, you're bound to be jumpy.
After that, I decided I was done swimming. I paddled against the current and stayed in the same place until the boat got to me. When I got out of the water I had some pretty minor scratches on my right calf and a big, nasty scrape on my right hip. It bruised up nicely. That hip just has no luck, apparently, because that's almost exactly the same place where I wiped out in the Galapagos. Still, though, I was essentially swimming in the Amazon River, and I think that's awesome! The log monster just adds a touch of drama.
After everyone got back in the boat and we had turned around to head back, we saw a dolphin! It was definitely playing with us, because it would come up at the front of the boat on one side, and then when it surfaced again it would be at the back on the other side. River dolphins are pretty rare, because a lot of indigenous groups kill them to use some part of their bodies as an aphrodisiac. We were lucky enough to see another one Friday morning when we were leaving. River dolphins are really not all that attractive, but they're pink, which is cool!
Well, that's certainly enough for now. I'll post about Intag and Junín as soon as I can.
On Sunday, November 8, we flew from Cuenca to Quito, which is not that far (less than an hour by plane), but there are a lot of mountains in between. I sat in the emergency exit row for the first time in my life. Actually, all of the emergency exit row seats were taken up by B-W people, and you're technically supposed to be fluent in the language to sit there. Dr. Melampy, his wife, Nancy, and Professor Martin actually are fluent in Spanish, so they were probably okay, and I'd like to think I could have held my own in an emergency situation, but everyone else probably should have been seated elsewhere. I was a little nervous sitting in that row, actually, because that was probably the roughest flight I've ever experienced. There was a lot of turbulence, and about five minutes before we landed the cabin pressure dropped significantly for about fifteen seconds and I got really dizzy. We survived, though.
We spent the night in a beautiful hostel in Quito (it was way nicer than the hotel in which we stayed in Machala), and then we left at 5:15 AM for the Amazon. We had to wait a long time for our flight to Coca because of weather, but we finally boarded the shuttle bus that took us across the tarmac to our plane. The airport in Quito, Ecuador's capital city, has less than five gates. The airport in Coca is even smaller. Instead of a baggage carousel, they tossed all the luggage onto a wide bench and we had to go over and just pull ours out of the pile. We took a very short bus ride to a dock, which was right by a hotel. The hotel had a snackbar, and while we were waiting for our boat, we were entertained by the snackbar's resident toucans and spider monkeys. They hopped all over the place, including on some people's heads and shoulders. The toucans were particularly interested in untying shoelaces.
We had been waiting for three other people to arrive on a later flight, and once they got there, we set off to board the boat. That was something of a disaster. Professor Martin slipped in a big puddle of water; Angela lost control of her gigantic suitcase and it crashed down a huge, steep ramp; and yours truly took a spectacular tumble. My right ankle (the one I sprained a few years ago) occasionally decides to stop working without asking my brain's permission, and this occurred as I was going down a small set of stairs. I ripped a hole in my jeans and scraped up my knee pretty well, and everyone freaked out, but I was laughing. It did hurt, but my brain kind of experienced the whole thing in slow motion, so it was actually rather comical from my point of view.
The boat was a long, flat motorboat with an awning and two back-to-back rows of plastic lawn chairs. Each person received a life jacket and a really nice bagged lunch, and we had a very enjoyable two-hour cruise down the Río Napo. We arrived at what seemed to be some kind of military station, where we had to present our passports and go through security. Then we boarded our first chiva.
Chiva means goat in Spanish, but in this case it refers to an open-air, wooden trolley-kind-of-thing. All the luggage is thrown on top, and all the people are squished together on long, not-very-well-padded benches. It was noisy, hot, dusty, and bumpy for about an hour and fifteen minutes – easily the most uncomfortable form of transportation I've ever taken, with the possible exception of that awful overnight train ride in Spain two years ago. After the chiva, we were quite glad to get on another motorboat and sail two hours down the Río Tiputini.
We finally arrived at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, which is a joint project between Boston University and Universidad San Francisco de Quito. It's located right at the edge of Yasuní National Park, which is also a Biosphere Reserve, or an area recognized by the United Nations as a world heritage site. It's arguably the world's greatest biodiversity hotspot. It covers an area of about one million hectares (one hectare = 100 meters x 100 meters), and it's estimated that each hectare contains one thousand plant species and 100,000 insect species. It's also estimated that there are 1,200 vertebrate species in the area. All of this means that interference in this environment impacts more species than it could anywhere else on earth...Enter the oil companies.
Oil accounts for about fifty percent of Ecuador's annual federal revenue. In 2004, oil companies paid $811,000,000 to the state in taxes, royalties, etc. For this reason, the government often turns a blind eye when drilling occurs on “protected” land. There's a big oil station located inside Yasuní, about twelve kilometers from Tiputini, and we could often hear its motors humming as we were out hiking. In most oil operations, it's still a common practice to leave behind totally exposed pits of oil sludge which leeches nasty chemicals, and oil spills are also big hazards. Between 2000 and 2006, it's estimated that Petroecuador, a smaller, domestic company, was responsible for 850 spills, so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the big, international companies were responsible for a lot more. Also, there is only one oil refinery in the country. It's in Esmeraldas on the western coast, so the oil from the eastern lowlands has to be pumped through miles of pipeline across the seismically active Andes. And of course, to drill and transport oil, one must first build roads, which means cutting down trees. Deforestation or degradation occurs at a rate of one hundred hectares of forest per kilometer of road.
In addition, trees are still being cut down to be sold as timber. Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, has ordered a timber harvesting ban, but it hasn't been enforced at all. There's so much corruption in the region that it's really easy for illegal harvesters to receive forged papers to make their operations look legit. And then there's always the problems of commercial hunting and fishing (the latter is sometimes done via dynamite or poison) and the selling of insects, bird feathers, and animal skins to tourists. One million birds are shipped to the United States each year, but only five percent of them actually survive long enough to make it into the hands of pet owners.
Now that I've inundated you with unhappy statistics (courtesy of Dr. Kelly Swing, director of Tiputini Biodiversity Station and professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito), let me assure you that we had a fabulous time in the rain forest. It does rain a lot there, but not as much as you might think – certainly not as much as I was expecting. We were there from Monday evening to Friday morning, and it only rained Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon for a few hours. The humidity is relentless, however. My hair was never dry, and neither was my bath towel, which smelled strongly of mildew within twenty-four hours of my first freezing cold shower. Most species of the electronic family (laptops, iPods, cameras, etc.) don't appreciate the humidity in the Amazon, so they always spent the night in the dry boxes located in the station's library. Electricity, save for the lights in the library, was only available from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM and 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM every day, so sometimes we had to make do with candles or headlamps, which are a wonderful fashion accessory.
Most of Tuesday and Wednesday were spent hiking with our guides. We broke up into groups of six to eight people, because tromping through the jungle with a group of twenty-nine (twenty-four students, two professors, Dr. Melampy's wife and her friend, and the son of the director of Amauta) is a surefire way to scare off any and all wildlife. My guide's name was José, and he was fantastic. I don't think there was a question all week that he couldn't answer. Ashley Herman and I took turns translating his Spanish answers for the rest of the group, but he knew a lot of individual words in English, especially animal names. Sometimes we just hiked for hours, and sometimes we climbed up towers that nearly reached the top of the canopy. It was really cool to witness my friend Shannon conquering her serious fear of heights and then designing a project that required climbing up the tallest tower again. We saw a ton of insects and spiders, a few really beautiful birds, including an extremely rare curassow, which is kind of like a large, black goose with a red beak, and four spider monkeys, including a baby with its mother. Believe it or not, I ate some ants. There's this specific species of ants called lemon ants, because the tree species they inhabit makes them taste like lemon. José said it's a tradition for guides to offer the ants to their guests. Obviously we saw a lot of plants, but I was actually surprised at how interesting I found a lot of them. It was neat to see trees that we read about weeks ago in Ohio, and by the end of the week I was starting to feel a little like Neville Longbottom in a Hogwarts greenhouse.
On Thursday we did student-designed group projects, which we have to turn into Spanish presentations when we get back to Cuenca. I'm not particularly fond of scientific research, so I made sure I was working with people who knew what they were doing. My friend Natalie, a biology major, wanted to find out about aquatic insects in the Amazon, so I went with her because digging in the mud sounded like fun. Our group went out to a small stream and spent a few hours scooping up the bottom in sieves of various sizes and poking around for little critters. We also recorded the temperature and pH of the water and the mud and tested for the presence of nitrates, phosphates, and dissolved oxygen. There were no phosphates, which was good, because that means the area is pretty much undisturbed by humans, and there was dissolved oxygen, because without that, there would have been a problem. We found ten or so little wriggly things, mostly dragonfly larvae.
Wednesday night we went out on the river in the boat and went hunting for caymans. We saw about four, including a huge one that didn't actually try to get away from us. It just stayed where we found it, peeking up above the water in the shallows. Some people touched its tail, and the guys from the station fed it a large slab of meat. Thursday night our guides took us on short hikes after dark. We saw a lot of insects and spiders, ranging from interesting to gross and creepy. We found this gigantic female orb weaver in her web, and José sacrificed an unlucky cricket so we could watch her in action. He threw the cricket into the web, and the poor thing didn't even have a chance to struggle before it was wrapped up and being eaten. It was disgusting and oddly fascinating. We didn't see any owls, but we heard them, and we found an adorable frog on a leaf on the way back to the cabins, so I was a happy camper.
I think my personal highlight of the week was swimming in the river. The current was fairly strong, so all we had to do was bob along in our life jackets and literally go with the flow while the boat followed a ways behind. The water was absolutely the perfect temperature, and we were all having so much fun...until we were attacked. We were all floating along, kind of spread out, and Mark was right ahead of me. All of a sudden he started freaking out. I thought he was just kidding, because he jokes around a lot, until I felt something very heavy slam into my hip. The current was still carrying me, so my legs scraped along it too. I screamed, Mark was still freaking out, and then it hit Paul, so everyone in the water started flipping out. We eventually realized it was just a tree, and there are a lot of fallen trees in the river, but most of them are not completely submerged. When you're swimming in the same water in which you saw caymans the night before, you're bound to be jumpy.
After that, I decided I was done swimming. I paddled against the current and stayed in the same place until the boat got to me. When I got out of the water I had some pretty minor scratches on my right calf and a big, nasty scrape on my right hip. It bruised up nicely. That hip just has no luck, apparently, because that's almost exactly the same place where I wiped out in the Galapagos. Still, though, I was essentially swimming in the Amazon River, and I think that's awesome! The log monster just adds a touch of drama.
After everyone got back in the boat and we had turned around to head back, we saw a dolphin! It was definitely playing with us, because it would come up at the front of the boat on one side, and then when it surfaced again it would be at the back on the other side. River dolphins are pretty rare, because a lot of indigenous groups kill them to use some part of their bodies as an aphrodisiac. We were lucky enough to see another one Friday morning when we were leaving. River dolphins are really not all that attractive, but they're pink, which is cool!
Well, that's certainly enough for now. I'll post about Intag and Junín as soon as I can.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Did I actually leave the US?
The influx of Western culture here is astounding. I'm at the mall again, and they just randomly turned on the TVs here in the food court. So far they've shown music videos by Christina Aguilera (well, at least she's Latina), The Fray, and Pink. American songs play on the radio all the time. The other day I was walking down the street and I heard “Single Ladies” coming from some car. When we went to Machala and Guayaquil we heard something by Pink Floyd, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” “Kung Fu Fighting,” “It's Raining Men,” and “Summer Lovin'” from Grease on the charter bus. I've heard Switchfoot, and I've even heard Across the Sky, which you almost never hear at home. Disney Channel is everywhere, especially High School Musical and Hannah Montana. My host nieces love Mickey Mouse, Barney, and Hello Kitty (and I realize the latter is Japanese, but I bet it became popular here after it became popular in the U.S.). It's really weird and sometimes a little frustrating to still be surrounded by so much American culture. I've seen twelve-year-old girls wearing T-shirts with the Play Boy logo, and I have to wonder if they understand what that actually means. From where I'm sitting, I can see a Burger King, a KFC, a GNC, and a Sony store. There's a soup and sandwich shop down the street from here that's called PoPe, but its logo is almost an exact copy of the logo for Panera Bread.
The obsession with our culture even extends to product manufacturing. Ecuador is the largest exporter of bananas in the world (Brazil and India actually grow more but they use most of them domestically), and a lot of those bananas come to the United States to be processed into pudding, baby food, and other products, which are then shipped back to Ecuador and sold in the stores. Ecuador would really benefit if it processed its own bananas. Jobs would be created and money would be saved, both on shipping and because American goods are just a lot more expensive. There's this general attitude, though, that American (or European) products must be better than domestic ones, so Ecuadorians continue to buy expensive, American-made, Gerber baby food. The one thing that I'm surprised that I haven't seen is Starbucks. Ecuadorians are so obsessed with their instant coffee and their NesCafé, though, that I'm not sure they would allow Starbucks in the country.
This will probably be my last blog for at least a week. Tomorrow we have an all-day trip to Ingapirca, a town with a lot of Inca ruins in a neighboring province, and then we're leaving Sunday evening. We're flying to Quito, spending the night, and then flying to the Amazon on Monday. We'll be at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station until Friday, when we come back to Quito for a day and a half. Then we're going to Intag to go to the cloud forest, we're going to the city of Junín (and I'm honestly not sure what's there), and we're going to Otavalo, a town very famous for its artisans – so that means shopping! Then we come back to Quito once again, and then we travel down the Avenue of the Volcanoes. We'll stop in Baños, which is famous for its natural hot water baths, and we'll end up in Riobamba, where we'll get to climb Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador (we're only climbing up to the glacier line, which is at 5,000 meters above sea level). After that, “we hope to catch a train” (direct quotation from Dr. Melampy – he inspires a lot of confidence sometimes) back to Cuenca. It's a seventeen day trip in total, and hopefully I'll have Internet at least while we're in Quito, but no promises.
Today marks the halfway point of my time in Ecuador, and when we get back from this long trip we'll have less than three weeks left. Sometimes it seems like time is going really slowly and other times it seems like everything is flying by. I'm still having a blast and I'm really looking forward to everything we're about to get to do, but I'll admit that I'm anxious to get home too. Sometimes it's hard not to think about things I'm missing, like NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. It officially began on November 1, and there's obviously no way I can write a novel in a month if I'm spending 75% of that month traveling around a foreign country. There's always next year, but I have novel ideas (pun indented!) right now! Also, I wish so much that I could go back to the States just for this weekend, so I could go to Wrockstock III, a huge wizard rock festival in Missouri. It's basically summer camp plus music and magic, minus the summer part.
I really should stop complaining. Sorry. Oh, the rough life of a world traveler.
The obsession with our culture even extends to product manufacturing. Ecuador is the largest exporter of bananas in the world (Brazil and India actually grow more but they use most of them domestically), and a lot of those bananas come to the United States to be processed into pudding, baby food, and other products, which are then shipped back to Ecuador and sold in the stores. Ecuador would really benefit if it processed its own bananas. Jobs would be created and money would be saved, both on shipping and because American goods are just a lot more expensive. There's this general attitude, though, that American (or European) products must be better than domestic ones, so Ecuadorians continue to buy expensive, American-made, Gerber baby food. The one thing that I'm surprised that I haven't seen is Starbucks. Ecuadorians are so obsessed with their instant coffee and their NesCafé, though, that I'm not sure they would allow Starbucks in the country.
This will probably be my last blog for at least a week. Tomorrow we have an all-day trip to Ingapirca, a town with a lot of Inca ruins in a neighboring province, and then we're leaving Sunday evening. We're flying to Quito, spending the night, and then flying to the Amazon on Monday. We'll be at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station until Friday, when we come back to Quito for a day and a half. Then we're going to Intag to go to the cloud forest, we're going to the city of Junín (and I'm honestly not sure what's there), and we're going to Otavalo, a town very famous for its artisans – so that means shopping! Then we come back to Quito once again, and then we travel down the Avenue of the Volcanoes. We'll stop in Baños, which is famous for its natural hot water baths, and we'll end up in Riobamba, where we'll get to climb Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador (we're only climbing up to the glacier line, which is at 5,000 meters above sea level). After that, “we hope to catch a train” (direct quotation from Dr. Melampy – he inspires a lot of confidence sometimes) back to Cuenca. It's a seventeen day trip in total, and hopefully I'll have Internet at least while we're in Quito, but no promises.
Today marks the halfway point of my time in Ecuador, and when we get back from this long trip we'll have less than three weeks left. Sometimes it seems like time is going really slowly and other times it seems like everything is flying by. I'm still having a blast and I'm really looking forward to everything we're about to get to do, but I'll admit that I'm anxious to get home too. Sometimes it's hard not to think about things I'm missing, like NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. It officially began on November 1, and there's obviously no way I can write a novel in a month if I'm spending 75% of that month traveling around a foreign country. There's always next year, but I have novel ideas (pun indented!) right now! Also, I wish so much that I could go back to the States just for this weekend, so I could go to Wrockstock III, a huge wizard rock festival in Missouri. It's basically summer camp plus music and magic, minus the summer part.
I really should stop complaining. Sorry. Oh, the rough life of a world traveler.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Recap part 2: Don't sweat the big stuff; you won't have a chance anyway
I literally saw the blind leading the blind today. I was walking down the street and there was a string of three blind men holding hands and making their way through the crowd. I just thought it was amusing and deserved to be noted.
So on with the recap:
Saturday:
We took a trip to Cajas National Park, about an hour from Cuenca. It's incredibly beautiful, but a little hard to breathe when you're climbing up the mountains, since we started out at nearly 4,000 meters, which is nearly 13,000 feet. It was freezing in the morning! There were a few snow flurries, which our guides said they had never seen in Cajas before. I was very grateful for my made-of-awesome Under Armor shirt. (You wear it one way and it keeps you cool; you turn it inside out and it keeps you warm!) Since we can't go anywhere here without doing something academic (I know, I know, it's a 17-credit hour school trip. That doesn't stop me from wishing I didn't have to do work), we had a scientific activity to do for Dr. Melampy. Admittedly, it wasn't bad at all. We broke up into groups of four, and each group made an X on a patch of ground with two long pieces of string. Each group member chose a quadrant and counted the number of open flowers and the number of potentially flowering species within that area. We stuck a thermometer into each quadrant to measure the ground temperature. We did all this twice, once on a west-facing slope and once on an east-facing slope. Apparently we were expecting to have a higher average temperature and more flowers on one side (west, maybe? I forget. I'm not very scientific), but when we combined all the data yesterday both sides wound up being about even.
After lunch we took a four-mile hike. The temperature was probably up to the low 50s (Fahrenheit, of course, not Celsius like they use here), and once we got moving most people took their jackets off. It was definitely an adventure – there was a big dark cave, a few streams to be crossed by leaping from stone to stone, large piles of llama dung to avoid, and a big patch of mud that tried to suck people in like the molasses guy in Candy Land. I, fortunately, managed to get only my boots and the edges of my pants muddy. Poor Natalie and Antonia got stuck up to their knees. Everything was so green, and it was eerily quiet – except when we were getting yelled at by Professor Martin for speaking too much English! Unfortunately we had a few headaches and one person throwing up due to altitude sickness by the end of the hike, but I think everyone would still agree that it was mostly a very fun trip.
All last week through yesterday, the city of Cuenca was celebrating its independence, which it won 189 years ago. Our big projects that are due Friday all have something to do with the fiestas. I have to write about las Noches Cuencanas (Cuencan Nights), or the little celebrations that are held in all the different neighborhoods, so Saturday evening I went to a local mall for one of the Noche Cuencana fiestas. It was in the parking lot. There was a banda del pueblo, or local town band, playing traditional music – two clarinets, an alto sax, two trumpets, a trombone, a snare, a bass drum, tenor drums, and cymbals, for all of you band geeks. There was food for sale, and a lot of people were drinking zhumir. I unfortunately couldn't stay long enough to see them set fire to the castillo, which is a big tower built out of some kind of flammable material and decorated in the colors of the flag, but there were fireworks being set off periodically, not nearly far enough away for my comfort. (I forgot to mention that when we went to the rodeo, they were setting off fireworks from inside the ring. We tried explaining to some of the Ecuadorians that you couldn't do that in the U.S., and they were like, “Why? It's not dangerous!”)
Everyone wanted to go out that night for Halloween, and I didn't want to be the only one staying home, so I went. It was fine when we were at the bar just talking and things, but then we went to a club, the same one we went to last time. In all honesty, going to the club last time was not nearly as fun as I made it sound when I wrote about it. I am just not meant to be a club-going person. It's dark and loud and the lasers are too bright and there are too many people and everything smells like alcohol and cigarettes. In my opinion, what people do in a club qualifies as dancing in the same way that rap qualifies as music – maybe-kind-of-sort-of-a-little-bit-if-you-really-have-low-standards. I was not having any fun at all, so I left around midnight and took a cab home. At least I only had to pay $3 to get in instead of $5 – because certain girls in our group are willing to flirt shamelessly enough with the bouncer to get us all a discount. These are the same people who seem to feel it's necessary to get up on the little stage at the club and promote the idea that all American women are stupid and promiscuous. Can you tell I don't appreciate it?
Sunday:
Sunday was just a rough day and I already wrote about it. It did get better once I got home from the aunt's house and went to an Internet café with Lauren. I got to look at pictures of my two-week-old pseudo-nephew all dressed up for Halloween. I'll admit I cried a lot about that too, but it was out of happiness.
Monday:
The school was closed for the fiestas!! Sleeping in was a welcome treat. I went to Milenium Plaza to use the free wifi and actually started researching for my project. (By the way, the mall's name actually is spelled “Milenium.” I do know how to spell the word in English. I feel this compulsion to uphold my reputation as winner of the fourth grade spelling bee.) There were huge fairs of artisans all over the city, and there was one near the mall, so of course I had to check it out. Prices are so amazing here, and I'm not even good at bargaining yet. I spent less than $35 and got a pair of earrings for myself and Christmas or birthday presents for seven people. I was thrilled!
Monday night I went with my friend Lauren to another Noche Cuencana celebration, this time in a park not far from the school. There was a much bigger crowd there than there was at the mall. A huge stage was set up, and it had a set of amazing smart lights. (Am I a theater geek? Do I spend huge amounts of time with the master electrician? No way.) A guitar trio played and sang for about an hour, and then las reinas del barrio, or the girls who had been elected queens of the neighborhood were introduced.
Then it was time for the second musical act, whom the emcee introduced as “one of the most sought after artists in Ecuador.” Her name was Lady Laura, and she was a vision in a bright yellow sleeveless unitard with gold and pink sequins and purplish-red hair. She actually sang and danced very well, and the whole crowd seemed to know the songs, but between the outfit and the two back-up dancers, two big tough guys dressed all in black and doing super-cheesy hip-hop moves, Lauren and I found it absolutely hilarious. It got even better when I realized that one of the dancers reminded me of someone from our group. Also, all three of them were periodically chucking CDs into the crowd, and man, could they get some distance with those things! They were just like square Frisbees with dangerously sharp corners. I took video of one of the songs on my digital camera, because I just didn't think I would be able to adequately convey the cultural experience without it. Don't worry; it will make its way to YouTube eventually.
Once again, we didn't stay long enough to see the castillo burning. It was getting both very late and very cold. I'm not a huge fan of fire (I know, I too wonder why I hang out with the people that I do), and I had already had my fill of open flames. There were lots of people wandering through the crowd with boxes full of candy and cigarettes for sale, and some of them were had lit candles nestled down among the mints and gum. Totally exposed flames being carried in cardboard boxes through a crowd of a few thousand dancing people. Forget being kidnapped or mauled by a jaguar – you won't die from the big things in Ecuador. The little stuff will do you in just fine.
So on with the recap:
Saturday:
We took a trip to Cajas National Park, about an hour from Cuenca. It's incredibly beautiful, but a little hard to breathe when you're climbing up the mountains, since we started out at nearly 4,000 meters, which is nearly 13,000 feet. It was freezing in the morning! There were a few snow flurries, which our guides said they had never seen in Cajas before. I was very grateful for my made-of-awesome Under Armor shirt. (You wear it one way and it keeps you cool; you turn it inside out and it keeps you warm!) Since we can't go anywhere here without doing something academic (I know, I know, it's a 17-credit hour school trip. That doesn't stop me from wishing I didn't have to do work), we had a scientific activity to do for Dr. Melampy. Admittedly, it wasn't bad at all. We broke up into groups of four, and each group made an X on a patch of ground with two long pieces of string. Each group member chose a quadrant and counted the number of open flowers and the number of potentially flowering species within that area. We stuck a thermometer into each quadrant to measure the ground temperature. We did all this twice, once on a west-facing slope and once on an east-facing slope. Apparently we were expecting to have a higher average temperature and more flowers on one side (west, maybe? I forget. I'm not very scientific), but when we combined all the data yesterday both sides wound up being about even.
After lunch we took a four-mile hike. The temperature was probably up to the low 50s (Fahrenheit, of course, not Celsius like they use here), and once we got moving most people took their jackets off. It was definitely an adventure – there was a big dark cave, a few streams to be crossed by leaping from stone to stone, large piles of llama dung to avoid, and a big patch of mud that tried to suck people in like the molasses guy in Candy Land. I, fortunately, managed to get only my boots and the edges of my pants muddy. Poor Natalie and Antonia got stuck up to their knees. Everything was so green, and it was eerily quiet – except when we were getting yelled at by Professor Martin for speaking too much English! Unfortunately we had a few headaches and one person throwing up due to altitude sickness by the end of the hike, but I think everyone would still agree that it was mostly a very fun trip.
All last week through yesterday, the city of Cuenca was celebrating its independence, which it won 189 years ago. Our big projects that are due Friday all have something to do with the fiestas. I have to write about las Noches Cuencanas (Cuencan Nights), or the little celebrations that are held in all the different neighborhoods, so Saturday evening I went to a local mall for one of the Noche Cuencana fiestas. It was in the parking lot. There was a banda del pueblo, or local town band, playing traditional music – two clarinets, an alto sax, two trumpets, a trombone, a snare, a bass drum, tenor drums, and cymbals, for all of you band geeks. There was food for sale, and a lot of people were drinking zhumir. I unfortunately couldn't stay long enough to see them set fire to the castillo, which is a big tower built out of some kind of flammable material and decorated in the colors of the flag, but there were fireworks being set off periodically, not nearly far enough away for my comfort. (I forgot to mention that when we went to the rodeo, they were setting off fireworks from inside the ring. We tried explaining to some of the Ecuadorians that you couldn't do that in the U.S., and they were like, “Why? It's not dangerous!”)
Everyone wanted to go out that night for Halloween, and I didn't want to be the only one staying home, so I went. It was fine when we were at the bar just talking and things, but then we went to a club, the same one we went to last time. In all honesty, going to the club last time was not nearly as fun as I made it sound when I wrote about it. I am just not meant to be a club-going person. It's dark and loud and the lasers are too bright and there are too many people and everything smells like alcohol and cigarettes. In my opinion, what people do in a club qualifies as dancing in the same way that rap qualifies as music – maybe-kind-of-sort-of-a-little-bit-if-you-really-have-low-standards. I was not having any fun at all, so I left around midnight and took a cab home. At least I only had to pay $3 to get in instead of $5 – because certain girls in our group are willing to flirt shamelessly enough with the bouncer to get us all a discount. These are the same people who seem to feel it's necessary to get up on the little stage at the club and promote the idea that all American women are stupid and promiscuous. Can you tell I don't appreciate it?
Sunday:
Sunday was just a rough day and I already wrote about it. It did get better once I got home from the aunt's house and went to an Internet café with Lauren. I got to look at pictures of my two-week-old pseudo-nephew all dressed up for Halloween. I'll admit I cried a lot about that too, but it was out of happiness.
Monday:
The school was closed for the fiestas!! Sleeping in was a welcome treat. I went to Milenium Plaza to use the free wifi and actually started researching for my project. (By the way, the mall's name actually is spelled “Milenium.” I do know how to spell the word in English. I feel this compulsion to uphold my reputation as winner of the fourth grade spelling bee.) There were huge fairs of artisans all over the city, and there was one near the mall, so of course I had to check it out. Prices are so amazing here, and I'm not even good at bargaining yet. I spent less than $35 and got a pair of earrings for myself and Christmas or birthday presents for seven people. I was thrilled!
Monday night I went with my friend Lauren to another Noche Cuencana celebration, this time in a park not far from the school. There was a much bigger crowd there than there was at the mall. A huge stage was set up, and it had a set of amazing smart lights. (Am I a theater geek? Do I spend huge amounts of time with the master electrician? No way.) A guitar trio played and sang for about an hour, and then las reinas del barrio, or the girls who had been elected queens of the neighborhood were introduced.
Then it was time for the second musical act, whom the emcee introduced as “one of the most sought after artists in Ecuador.” Her name was Lady Laura, and she was a vision in a bright yellow sleeveless unitard with gold and pink sequins and purplish-red hair. She actually sang and danced very well, and the whole crowd seemed to know the songs, but between the outfit and the two back-up dancers, two big tough guys dressed all in black and doing super-cheesy hip-hop moves, Lauren and I found it absolutely hilarious. It got even better when I realized that one of the dancers reminded me of someone from our group. Also, all three of them were periodically chucking CDs into the crowd, and man, could they get some distance with those things! They were just like square Frisbees with dangerously sharp corners. I took video of one of the songs on my digital camera, because I just didn't think I would be able to adequately convey the cultural experience without it. Don't worry; it will make its way to YouTube eventually.
Once again, we didn't stay long enough to see the castillo burning. It was getting both very late and very cold. I'm not a huge fan of fire (I know, I too wonder why I hang out with the people that I do), and I had already had my fill of open flames. There were lots of people wandering through the crowd with boxes full of candy and cigarettes for sale, and some of them were had lit candles nestled down among the mints and gum. Totally exposed flames being carried in cardboard boxes through a crowd of a few thousand dancing people. Forget being kidnapped or mauled by a jaguar – you won't die from the big things in Ecuador. The little stuff will do you in just fine.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Finger painting and rodeos, but hopefully no schizophrenia
Next week we'll be in the Amazon basin, which is an area at risk for malaria, so I had to take my first mefloquine pill last night. You take one pill the week before you go, one pill each week you're there, and one pill a week for four weeks after you return. Hopefully I won't have any funky side effects. I have a friend who has been taking the pills since we got here, just in case, and she has been fine. Still, though, I have to recall the conversation I had with a family friend, Delia, who is a doctor, that took place shortly before I left for Ecuador:
Delia: What kind of medicine do you have for malaria?
Me: Mefloquine. I've got six pills.
Delia: Mefloquine, hmm. If you start acting schizophrenic, stop taking it, okay?
Me: Um...okay. Sure thing.
Delia is always so helpful with her free medical advice. ;)
The past few days have been so busy and full of interesting things that I really want to write about everything. It's going to take a while, though, so here's the first bit.
Thursday:
A very good day. Activities in class included finger painting our vision of the perfect world, writing sentences backward using the subjunctive tenses, and walking separately to the park near the school and then telling each other about everything we observed. Then Julia bought us ice cream. Also, the school got a new, secure wireless network, and it runs a little faster than the previous one. We had salsa class in the afternoon, and though I didn't really want to go because I had so much research to do for my 1,000 words about Bolivia (and you know it's rare when I don't want to dance), it was really fun. Mark and I make a good salsa team.
I also bought a cell phone. It's the cheapest model available and it's prepaid. It costs eight cents a minute to call or eight cents per text to anyone else on my same network, Movistar. It costs something like twenty-five cents to call landlines or other cell phone networks in Ecuador, and I could conceivably call outside of Ecuador (aka the U.S.), but it would be a dollar a minute for me and I don't know if whoever I called would be charged as well. Here's the stupid part, though: only a small percentage of my prepaid minutes can be used to call outside of Movistar. Once that percentage is used up, you simply can't call landlines or other networks till you put more money on the phone. Fortunately I don't anticipate having to do that too much, and now I have a phone that should function anywhere in the world as long as I have the appropriate country's sim card.
I now understand why a lot of Ecuadorians have multiple cell phones. My host mom has one for Movistar and one for Porta. There are monthly (or whatever) plans available, but apparently most people just go with the prepaid option.
Friday:
Exam day at Amauta. We presented our papers to each other (and for the amount of complaining we did, it really wasn't that horrible), and that was half of our exam. The other half was a group activity in which we each wrote twenty sentences about the way a perfect class should function, then we paired up and chose the twenty best ideas from our individual lists, and then we all got together and made one final list of twenty things. Halfway through our morning break, Julia came back from running an errand and said (in Spanish, of course), “There's a big parade two blocks down! Take your cameras and go!” So we did. While the other three Spanish classes were taking a hefty written exam, we were down the street watching a parade.
The parade was really long and we didn't stay to watch the entire thing, but it was really cool. All through last week and continuing into this week there have been all kinds of special events in the city to celebrate the founding of Cuenca 189 years ago. The parade seemed to consist of all the high schools in the city, each group dressed in some kind of traditional dress and usually doing some sort of dance routine. Some of the music was live, played by students on traditional instruments, and Sara and I decided we were seeing the ancient Incan ancestor of marching band. There were also contestants for la Chola Cuencana sprinkled throughout the parade, dressed in the traditional brightly colored skirts, white bowler-style hats, and long double braids of the cholas, or women of both Indian and European descent.
Friday afternoon I went to an Internet café and called my mom for Halloween, since it's her favorite holiday of the whole year. I managed to reach my sister on her cell phone too. She was running around trying to get ready for the football game in the dark, since apparently someone blew a fuse at the high school. Typical. There are very few things that happen at BVHS that surprise me anymore. I also got to talk to Knox and Kala while Phish (aka my sister) was trying to find Emily for me. I didn't get to talk to Emily then, but she wrote on my wall later and told me everything went really well for Senior Night. Missing Senior Night this year was one of the things that I took into serious consideration when I was thinking about coming on this trip. This year's senior class really means a lot to me and it was hard to miss their big night.
Friday night I went to a rodeo. I'm not sure whether it's more funny or sad that it took a trip to Ecuador to get me to my first rodeo when they happen all the time at home. The entire evening was a bit of a fiasco. First, my friend Caitlyn and I had to walk across the city in the rain to get to our friend Katy's apartment. Katy's host brother, Eduardo, was supposed to take us to the rodeo. He isn't actually part of Katy's family here in Cuenca, though; he's also a student staying with the same host parents. Eduardo is actually from Loja, a few hours from here, and when Katy got home that afternoon he was gone. His room was a mess and a lot of his things were gone, like he had packed really quickly. Katy called her host sister and found out that Eduardo had gone back to Loja and hadn't said why. I still don't know how all of that worked out, but we decided to go to the rodeo anyway. Sara and Liz got there, and we set off.
Katy had a general idea of where we were going, but she wasn't super-familiar with that corner of town. We were close to where we needed to be when we encountered two thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girls walking together. We asked them if they knew where the rodeo was and they said they were heading that direction and could take us there. So we started following them. After about ten minutes, things started to feel really sketchy. Nobody else was out on the streets and the girls kept whispering to each other. I was starting to wonder if they were thinking it would be really fun to get a bunch of gringas totally lost. Katy got my attention and I dialed her cell phone from my pocket. She “answered” the phone in English and acted like one of our other friends had called and needed help, so we weren't going to be going to the rodeo anymore. We popped into a brightly-lit store and asked directions, and it turned out we had actually been going the right way. All five of us agreed, though, that the situation had felt really weird and we were glad to be rid of the two girls.
We found the correct place and bought our tickets ($10 each...expensive for a night out in Cuenca). We found Sara's host brother and his friends, whom we had been planning to meet. They were all decked out in their cowboy hats and boots. Sara had described her brother as “Fonzie, only a lot dorkier,” and as weird as that sounds, it seemed to fit once I met him. He pretty much ignored us, but his friend Andrés talked to us and made sure we followed the group inside and got seats. (By the end of the evening, it was clear Andrés had his eye on Katy. She already has a boyfriend, however, and he's South American to boot.)
I've seen bits and pieces of rodeos on TV before, but I guess I wasn't really prepared for how scary they actually are. The bulls and the broncos were equally violent and frightening. I kept thinking about all the guys on the rodeo team in high school...some of them were pretty tiny, and I don't know how their families could stand to watch them do that. I thought about Spencer Smith, our “Little Cowboy,” a lot. He was in my class and was killed in a car accident junior year. I didn't know him really well, but he was a great guy and he sure loved to ride in the rodeos. There were some nice parts to the rodeo, like the little kids who rode horses in formations to music, but all in all it wasn't my cup of tea. It didn't help that I was freezing...I left my sweatshirt at Katy's because when it's cold outside in Ohio, they have rodeos inside hot, stuffy buildings. In Ecuador, rodeos are apparently outdoors despite sprinkles of rain and low 50s/high 40s temperatures. Caitlyn also didn't have a sweatshirt, but Andrés gave her his jacket to wear. I was also surrounded by a disproportionate amount of drunk people, thanks to the several bottles of Zhumir (a really strong Ecuadorian liquor) being passed around by Sara's brother and his friends. None of the other gringas had more than a couple of sips. By the time we left, I was pretty much frozen solid and I was pretty sure my cold was coming back.
We took taxis back to Katy's and got our things. We were planning to take more taxis back to the center of town, but Katy's host mom insisted on driving us, which we appreciated. Katy's host sister came too, so we piled four people into the backseat and two people in the passenger seat of a Honda CRV. That's pretty typical for Ecuador. There was such a traffic jam, though, that we got out and walked the last four blocks or so. We got to the bar where the others were going, and I caught a cab home. It was one of those nights that will make a great story someday, but I never want to do all that again.
Delia: What kind of medicine do you have for malaria?
Me: Mefloquine. I've got six pills.
Delia: Mefloquine, hmm. If you start acting schizophrenic, stop taking it, okay?
Me: Um...okay. Sure thing.
Delia is always so helpful with her free medical advice. ;)
The past few days have been so busy and full of interesting things that I really want to write about everything. It's going to take a while, though, so here's the first bit.
Thursday:
A very good day. Activities in class included finger painting our vision of the perfect world, writing sentences backward using the subjunctive tenses, and walking separately to the park near the school and then telling each other about everything we observed. Then Julia bought us ice cream. Also, the school got a new, secure wireless network, and it runs a little faster than the previous one. We had salsa class in the afternoon, and though I didn't really want to go because I had so much research to do for my 1,000 words about Bolivia (and you know it's rare when I don't want to dance), it was really fun. Mark and I make a good salsa team.
I also bought a cell phone. It's the cheapest model available and it's prepaid. It costs eight cents a minute to call or eight cents per text to anyone else on my same network, Movistar. It costs something like twenty-five cents to call landlines or other cell phone networks in Ecuador, and I could conceivably call outside of Ecuador (aka the U.S.), but it would be a dollar a minute for me and I don't know if whoever I called would be charged as well. Here's the stupid part, though: only a small percentage of my prepaid minutes can be used to call outside of Movistar. Once that percentage is used up, you simply can't call landlines or other networks till you put more money on the phone. Fortunately I don't anticipate having to do that too much, and now I have a phone that should function anywhere in the world as long as I have the appropriate country's sim card.
I now understand why a lot of Ecuadorians have multiple cell phones. My host mom has one for Movistar and one for Porta. There are monthly (or whatever) plans available, but apparently most people just go with the prepaid option.
Friday:
Exam day at Amauta. We presented our papers to each other (and for the amount of complaining we did, it really wasn't that horrible), and that was half of our exam. The other half was a group activity in which we each wrote twenty sentences about the way a perfect class should function, then we paired up and chose the twenty best ideas from our individual lists, and then we all got together and made one final list of twenty things. Halfway through our morning break, Julia came back from running an errand and said (in Spanish, of course), “There's a big parade two blocks down! Take your cameras and go!” So we did. While the other three Spanish classes were taking a hefty written exam, we were down the street watching a parade.
The parade was really long and we didn't stay to watch the entire thing, but it was really cool. All through last week and continuing into this week there have been all kinds of special events in the city to celebrate the founding of Cuenca 189 years ago. The parade seemed to consist of all the high schools in the city, each group dressed in some kind of traditional dress and usually doing some sort of dance routine. Some of the music was live, played by students on traditional instruments, and Sara and I decided we were seeing the ancient Incan ancestor of marching band. There were also contestants for la Chola Cuencana sprinkled throughout the parade, dressed in the traditional brightly colored skirts, white bowler-style hats, and long double braids of the cholas, or women of both Indian and European descent.
Friday afternoon I went to an Internet café and called my mom for Halloween, since it's her favorite holiday of the whole year. I managed to reach my sister on her cell phone too. She was running around trying to get ready for the football game in the dark, since apparently someone blew a fuse at the high school. Typical. There are very few things that happen at BVHS that surprise me anymore. I also got to talk to Knox and Kala while Phish (aka my sister) was trying to find Emily for me. I didn't get to talk to Emily then, but she wrote on my wall later and told me everything went really well for Senior Night. Missing Senior Night this year was one of the things that I took into serious consideration when I was thinking about coming on this trip. This year's senior class really means a lot to me and it was hard to miss their big night.
Friday night I went to a rodeo. I'm not sure whether it's more funny or sad that it took a trip to Ecuador to get me to my first rodeo when they happen all the time at home. The entire evening was a bit of a fiasco. First, my friend Caitlyn and I had to walk across the city in the rain to get to our friend Katy's apartment. Katy's host brother, Eduardo, was supposed to take us to the rodeo. He isn't actually part of Katy's family here in Cuenca, though; he's also a student staying with the same host parents. Eduardo is actually from Loja, a few hours from here, and when Katy got home that afternoon he was gone. His room was a mess and a lot of his things were gone, like he had packed really quickly. Katy called her host sister and found out that Eduardo had gone back to Loja and hadn't said why. I still don't know how all of that worked out, but we decided to go to the rodeo anyway. Sara and Liz got there, and we set off.
Katy had a general idea of where we were going, but she wasn't super-familiar with that corner of town. We were close to where we needed to be when we encountered two thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girls walking together. We asked them if they knew where the rodeo was and they said they were heading that direction and could take us there. So we started following them. After about ten minutes, things started to feel really sketchy. Nobody else was out on the streets and the girls kept whispering to each other. I was starting to wonder if they were thinking it would be really fun to get a bunch of gringas totally lost. Katy got my attention and I dialed her cell phone from my pocket. She “answered” the phone in English and acted like one of our other friends had called and needed help, so we weren't going to be going to the rodeo anymore. We popped into a brightly-lit store and asked directions, and it turned out we had actually been going the right way. All five of us agreed, though, that the situation had felt really weird and we were glad to be rid of the two girls.
We found the correct place and bought our tickets ($10 each...expensive for a night out in Cuenca). We found Sara's host brother and his friends, whom we had been planning to meet. They were all decked out in their cowboy hats and boots. Sara had described her brother as “Fonzie, only a lot dorkier,” and as weird as that sounds, it seemed to fit once I met him. He pretty much ignored us, but his friend Andrés talked to us and made sure we followed the group inside and got seats. (By the end of the evening, it was clear Andrés had his eye on Katy. She already has a boyfriend, however, and he's South American to boot.)
I've seen bits and pieces of rodeos on TV before, but I guess I wasn't really prepared for how scary they actually are. The bulls and the broncos were equally violent and frightening. I kept thinking about all the guys on the rodeo team in high school...some of them were pretty tiny, and I don't know how their families could stand to watch them do that. I thought about Spencer Smith, our “Little Cowboy,” a lot. He was in my class and was killed in a car accident junior year. I didn't know him really well, but he was a great guy and he sure loved to ride in the rodeos. There were some nice parts to the rodeo, like the little kids who rode horses in formations to music, but all in all it wasn't my cup of tea. It didn't help that I was freezing...I left my sweatshirt at Katy's because when it's cold outside in Ohio, they have rodeos inside hot, stuffy buildings. In Ecuador, rodeos are apparently outdoors despite sprinkles of rain and low 50s/high 40s temperatures. Caitlyn also didn't have a sweatshirt, but Andrés gave her his jacket to wear. I was also surrounded by a disproportionate amount of drunk people, thanks to the several bottles of Zhumir (a really strong Ecuadorian liquor) being passed around by Sara's brother and his friends. None of the other gringas had more than a couple of sips. By the time we left, I was pretty much frozen solid and I was pretty sure my cold was coming back.
We took taxis back to Katy's and got our things. We were planning to take more taxis back to the center of town, but Katy's host mom insisted on driving us, which we appreciated. Katy's host sister came too, so we piled four people into the backseat and two people in the passenger seat of a Honda CRV. That's pretty typical for Ecuador. There was such a traffic jam, though, that we got out and walked the last four blocks or so. We got to the bar where the others were going, and I caught a cab home. It was one of those nights that will make a great story someday, but I never want to do all that again.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Venting/Whining
I've had a really fun week, and I promise I'll write about it all very soon, but right now I'm going to take a moment and complain about how not-fun this afternoon was.
We went to my host aunt's house for lunch today. There were at least 35 people there, a very few of whom I'd met before. I was prepared for a bunch of new family members, but not that many. I was expecting to have to answer a ton of questions...but it was just the opposite. Nobody talked to me for about two hours, except for Rita, my host mom, explaining what the food was. Everyone was talking so fast and at the same time and I couldn't understand anything. I didn't know what to do, so I just sat in my chair. Some of the people, especially the ones my age, would make eye contact and maybe smile a little and then look away. They knew I knew Spanish because they heard me greeting my host sister and niece when they came in. I felt so lonely!! I tried to look like I was interested in the conversation, but all I could think about was how much I miss my family. I tried to sing songs in my head and do other things to distract myself, but I kept having to look away and pretend to be interested in the paintings on the wall and keep myself from crying. I think Rita and Jaime could tell that I wasn't doing so well, and we didn't hang around too long. We got in the car and I just cried. They were very understanding. Rita gave me a tissue and let me cry for a little bit and then they started pointing out things we were driving past like they usually do.
So it's just been a lonely day. I can handle it. This is the first day I've been really terribly unhappy since the very beginning of the trip. I just needed to get that out of my system.
We went to my host aunt's house for lunch today. There were at least 35 people there, a very few of whom I'd met before. I was prepared for a bunch of new family members, but not that many. I was expecting to have to answer a ton of questions...but it was just the opposite. Nobody talked to me for about two hours, except for Rita, my host mom, explaining what the food was. Everyone was talking so fast and at the same time and I couldn't understand anything. I didn't know what to do, so I just sat in my chair. Some of the people, especially the ones my age, would make eye contact and maybe smile a little and then look away. They knew I knew Spanish because they heard me greeting my host sister and niece when they came in. I felt so lonely!! I tried to look like I was interested in the conversation, but all I could think about was how much I miss my family. I tried to sing songs in my head and do other things to distract myself, but I kept having to look away and pretend to be interested in the paintings on the wall and keep myself from crying. I think Rita and Jaime could tell that I wasn't doing so well, and we didn't hang around too long. We got in the car and I just cried. They were very understanding. Rita gave me a tissue and let me cry for a little bit and then they started pointing out things we were driving past like they usually do.
So it's just been a lonely day. I can handle it. This is the first day I've been really terribly unhappy since the very beginning of the trip. I just needed to get that out of my system.
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