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.