Slocomb's Vida Ecuatoriana

Galapagos: Las Islas Encantadas – Day One

2009-12-23T13:12:00.005-05:00

Day One of Leslie's and my week in Galapagos started in our hotel, Iguanazu, with the complementary breakfast and wifi. The hotel owner has a dog, some kind of big-headed lazy and obnoxious bulldog named Cacho (better suited would be the name "Chancho"), that at some point decided that my feet were very interesting things. At one point he tried to eat one of them, but instead of getting angry I just wrestled with him until he gave up and waddled away.
When we got to the airport in Guayaquil we were surprised by how rapidly we and our bags were processed by the extra Galapagos security as well as the regular airport people. We found a place to wait for our plane where we could charge Leslie's laptop and my i-pod and she could access the free wifi in the airport. The major hotels in Ecuador all have free wifi, and I think it's because they recognize that the majority of their customers are tourists with laptops and they want these tourists to want to come back through their airports.
When we were getting ready to board our plane, we realized that we had been assigned seats in the first aisle. We weren't sure if that meant the first aisle of first class or the first aisle of economy class. We had booked everything with a "last minute" deal at our travel agency so they were required to give us whatever seats were available on the plane that the all-inclusive rate they had offered us. Turns out the only seats available at the last minute were the bulkhead first class seats. It was awesome; I fit in my seat on the plane. And the seat reclined like a La-Z-Boy does. When we got to the airport, on what looked to be a desert island with a tiny open-air airport, we got off the plane as soon as we could (aided greatly by our front-row seats) to get through the special Galapagos customs lines. We had to pay a hundred dollars each just to enter Galapagos, because all the islands are a national park and our tourist money is what finances the upkeep of it all. On the other side of the hundred dollars was a National Park guide named Juan, waiting for us and two other people with distinctly more hispanic names than Laura Jenkins and William Reed. I went and grabbed our checked bags and we waited a little longer for the other two people who ended up never showing. Juan took us to the bus we had to take to get to the dock where we had to take a boat to another island where we had to take a taxi to get to the other side of the island to get to the other port and really the only city on Santa Cruz island, Puerto Ayora. Juan took Leslie and me to lunch and we decided to get the most traditional Galapagos/coastal Ecuadorian dish we could. We got the fish sango...

...which is kind of like a non-spicy fish curry that, like everything else down here, comes with a mountain of rice. The picture is of Leslie's plate after she'd decided she was full. Don't worry, the sango didn't go to waste :-P
We then got into a little speedboat that was supposed to take us to Isabela Island, the biggest of the islands, in about three hours. A few locals and two other tourist couples ended up on the boat with us and then we took off. The boat was miserable. The driver was going too fast and falling asleep most of the time because he didn't really have windows to look through, only his GPS. He kept going head-first into every wave we passed, sometimes sending the entire boat (engines included) out of the water and crashing back down into it. The English fellow named Simon (turns out we three tourist couples were gonna be together for a while) and I ended up getting incredibly soaked and at one point something big and round fell off the top of the boat and whapped me on the head. It was one of the things they use to keep boats from rubbing up against each other when they're stopped next to one another. I ended up having to hold the damn thing the rest of the way. Simon later said that he'd been sky-diving, bunjee-jumping and "the lot of it" and that the boat ride from Puerto Ayora to Puerto Villamil on Isabela Island was the most violent thing he'd ever been put through. The six of us ended up joking about it when we got off the boat, but the only joke I could make was "I'm sure I'll laugh when I can hear what you're saying." The guide for the six of us, named Javier, met us at the pier and helped us get our bags into the Hotel's truck...

...and we hopped in and were on our way. I think this was when we finally got to meet each other formally. The English couple traveling the world was Simon and Katy, the Venezuelan couple who now lives in Canada was Jose and Maria, and we were the Americans currently living in Ecuador. They ended up being incredible companions for our days on Isabela Island; we couldn't have asked for a better group. Everybody loved talking and had their own different but funny sense of humor and everybody could take a joke and give one too. We dropped our stuff off at Hotel San Vicente...

...and headed out to the Flamingo Lagoon. Turns out there aren't ever more than maybe five flamingos in the lagoon at any time anymore, due to the eruption of the volcano Sierra Negra (Black Mountain) and the fact that the people of Puerto Villamil (a town of only three thousand) needed the laguna for pumping fresh water into the city. Here's a picture of one of the three or four flamingos we saw.

After the Flamingo Lagoon, Javier took us into the center of town to show it to us and to explain to us that it's a very safe place. The people there want nothing more than to help you out. Then Javier took us for a short walk along part of the town's beach where he showed us a couple good bars to go to if we wanted a drink after dinner in the hotel. The only one whose name I can remember is "Coco Bar." We ended up at a place on the beach that had a lot of volcanic rock. We stepped up onto it and saw tons of little iguanas running around. They were actually as fascinated by us as we were by them, and around fifteen of them gathered in front of us to stare back. One little guy even popped up next to my foot to check me out.

I'm only putting the one picture here because we saw tons and tons of iguanas and I have better pictures to post that I took on later days. After walking on the beach, Javier showed us how to get back to the hotel and we ate dinner there. Afterwards, Jose and Maria decided to go for a run and Simon and Katy and Leslie and I decided to go try out the Coco Bar, see if we could get a drink. We get there, and there's crazy loud music playing and the place is empty. Everyone else just stepped out but I decided to cut off the music and see if anybody's notice. I mean, Javier said the people from his town were nice; I was sure the owner of the bar would understand that we only wanted to catch his attention and order some drinks. After a few minutes, somebody did show up and he did understand and we sat at a table outside on the beach and ordered our drinks and had a really nice conversation. After that, we just went back to the hotel to sleep.

Galapagos: Las Islas Encantadas – Day Zero

2009-12-23T13:11:00.000-05:00

I'm starting with day zero because the week leading up to our vacation in the Galapagos Islands is a whole damn story in and of itself. We signed the contract for our new apartment, which has gorgeous views of the city and is overall incredible even though I've had to spend the last few days fixing everything in it, and we spent most of Thursday and Friday (up until our buseta left for Guayaquil) just getting all our stuff from the Coloma's house into our apartment. Fortunately, we were able to spend the night in the apartment Thursday night before spending a (useless) half-day at work on Friday. After work, we bolted for the apartment to get all the rest of our errands run before our buseta left in five hours. We didn't even eat lunch, or at least I didn't, and we packed food for dinner to eat on the way to Guayaquil. There was a construction delay on the highway somewhere along the descent from the mountains, but we didn't mind much because we were watching a movie on Leslie's laptop. When we finally arrived into Guayaquil, our hotel sent their car to pick us up at the buseta company's office (normally that costs too much more than a taxi, but we got a deal for booking it with a travel agency in Cuenca), and we cut rhough town over to the hotel Iganazu. It's a great hotel in an incredible location on a mountainside overlooking the town. It has wifi and breakfast is included with your room. Depending on the day, the best part of the hotel is either that it has a pool (because it's so damn hot in Guayaquil, Ecuadorians call it “El Horno”) or that you can't even tell you're in Guayaquil where you're at the hotel. I have another great story about Iguanazu but it'll have to wait until I write about the day on which it happened. They ended up giving us the “family” room, with two bunk beds (4 beds total) and a double bed upstairs in a loft. Everything in Guayaquil has air conditioning, so our hotel room did as well. We ended up going to sleep pretty much immediately after arriving to the hotel, and that should be enough of a leadup into day one of our Galapagos trip.

The Galapagos Islands

2009-12-22T16:27:00.002-05:00

So, we don't have internet at our apartment right now but we will have it soon. I'm out using public internet right now and I don't have much time until my laptop battery is gonna die, so I was just posting to let you know I'll be posting sometime soon and to show you a picture of the newest addition to the Ninja Turtles.

The Whitewater Girls

2009-12-11T14:22:00.000-05:00

CEDEI had seven student teachers from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater come visit CEDEI School for six weeks to help us international always-English-speaking teachers out and so that they could learn from the educational style of the school. The ones with whom I had the chance to work were incredibly helpful in showing me lots of different ways to engage with the children in English. For example, all of the classes to whom I teach English now have a Word Wall: a place on the wall where the students can look to find words they already should know in English and help remind them how the words are spelled. You should remember, I have no particular training for this job, neither teaching children in a elementary school setting nor teaching children English. Having the Whitewater girls visit and teach and help me teach was an incredible learning experience for me as a teacher. I am very grateful for them and for the time they spent with us here in Ecuador.

Our New Apartment

2009-12-08T21:34:00.002-05:00

So Leslie and I just finished the process of getting an apartment in downtown Cuenca. It's an incredible apartment with the most beautiful views of the city that I have seen from anywhere other than Turi. However, since we have to get moved in before Friday and on Friday we're leaving to spend a week in Galapagos, I'm not going to have time to write about either the apartment or the Galapagos trip until after December 18th. Just so y'all know, I'm not ignoring my blog, just entering into a very busy couple of weeks. I have a couple of pre-written little posts saved up from one night that I couldn't fall asleep, so maybe I'll post one of those soon. Again, I'm sorry I won't be able to write for my blog for probably a couple weeks.

Leslie's Birthday in Otavalo

2009-12-06T17:41:00.015-05:00

I've decided that with this post I want the pictures to tell the story. So I'll start by saying that we decided to visit Otavalo for Leslie's birthday because we had heard that we could get a good dose of indigenous Ecuadorian culture, history and heritage there, because they have the country's biggest artisan market and because of the inn we could stay at that has cabins instead of hotel rooms. We flew between Cuenca and Quito and took the Panamerican Highway between Quito and Otavalo. A couple typical Leslie and Slocomb things happened en route, of which I don't have pictures. The first is that I got sick on the flight home from Quito (I'm better now though) because I am afraid of heights and I refused not to look out of the window the entire flight because I am trying to break myself of my fear. The second is that on the bus ride back from Otavalo to Quito Leslie decided to sleep instead of take in the beautiful mountainous countryside.

This is a picture of me and the cabin chain we stayed in. We were they only people in the building, which was nice both for the privacy and for stealing the other room's firewood for our chimney.

I decided it'd be worth it for Leslie's birthday to spring for the cabin that came with wine and flowers and a good view of the mountains. The view didn't end up being anything special, but the rest was spot on.

WARNING: Llamas are not generally this nice. You'll see that this one is tied to a tree (at our hotel), and it took a lot of effort and patience from me to get the llama to be willing to walk up to me. Llamas can be aggressive and I've heard that they also spit like camels.

But nothing can change the fact that this baby llama is adorable.

Here are a couple pictures of the Otavalo market on a Sunday afternoon. Saturday is the big market day, but we didn't end up eating in any 2nd-floor restaurants on Saturday so we only have pictures from Sunday.

On Saturdays, the market also branches out into all the streets that intersect with it for at least a couple blocks.

We bought enough stuff from this lady that she offered to be in a photo with her little setup in the middle of the market.

One evening we decided to "dar la vuelta" around downtown Otavalo. This is a picture of the city cathedral and the statue of Rumiñawi, considered the strongest Inca ever to rule over this region of South America. Remember the face, it shows up again later in the post.

On Sunday, after our second round of shopping (going back for everything we decided we still needed), we went to Peguche, a small town outside Otavalo know for it's indigenous Andean music. The best place to go for the instruments is this "taller." Unfortunately, Leslie and I can't remember the name of it (because it's in Quichua, the Inca language) and it's not the one you can find online. This lady gave us a tour of the "taller" (pronounced "tah-yér") and a sample of what all of the instruments sound like.

After learning about traditional Andean music, we headed over to the Peguche waterfall. You can barely see them, but there are two men at the top of the waterfall playing different styles of Andean reed flutes. There should be water where they're standing; I think they're playing to bring us out of the drought.

There are over eight people in this picture. You just can't see the rest of them because I had to frame the photo in a way that they'd all be behind Leslie.

This is the Cuycocha Lake, a volcanic laguna created when a snow-topped volcano imploded several thousand years ago before South America was inhabited by humans. The laguna is the result of all the snow falling into the resulting crater and being continually through the ages by the still active volcano below the water. The laguna is consistently ten to fifteen degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than the outlying areas because of the heat produced by the volcano. Cuycocha means "Laguna of the Guinea Pigs" in Quichua, and there are several legends as to how this laguna received that name. Originally it was the Laguna of the Gods (don't remember the Quichua word from our boat tour), because all the peoples who lived here before the Spaniards believed it to be a holy place where people could communicate directly with the gods and make the most holy sacrifices.

Does this face look familiar? It's Rumiñawi. Legend has it that when the Spaniards attacked the Incas in order to conquer and enslave them and take all their gold back to Spain, Rumiñawi lead all of his people to Cuycocha to bury all their gold beneath the laguna, inside the volcano, so that the Spaniards could never steal it away from it's proper home in the Andes. He then lead them through life in the moutains, in places they could live without being disturbed (or conquered) by the Spaniards. After his death, the Incas following him came back to Cuycocha and carved Rumiñawi's face into a rock in the laguna to let him live among the gods. Apparently, the Incas used to joke about Rumiñawi that he had a gigantic nose. So this carving is exaggerated on purpose.
History books will tell you that Atahualpa was the leader of the Incas when the Spaniards arrived to South America. Almost all books aren't completely correct because the Inca Empire was split into factions at the time and the Spaniards only every interacted with those who still followed Atahualpa. The Incas who followed Rumiñawi at that time were lead deeper into the mountains to places like Cuycocha to continue their lifestyle without European interruption.

A cute photo of Leslie and me on our boat tour of Cuycocha.

Later I will also have a picture of everything we bought and give you a ballpark figure on how much we spent, thanks to my brilliant haggling skills :-P Right now, there are too many Christmas gifts in the pictures so it cannot be posted until January.

Thanksgiving in Cuenca

2009-11-30T08:28:00.002-05:00

Right now, it's Sunday night and I'm up late in our hotel room (that's actually a cabin) just outside Otavalo where we've had a wonderful weekend that I'll write about in my next post. I'm nursing a fire that I've had to build with wet wood and I can't sleep because Leslie and I accidentally took naps this afternoon. So I figured I'd get out my laptop and write about our Thanksgiving experience in Cuenca.

There is no Thanksgiving in Cuenca. Most of the people in the city have never heard of it and almost none of them have ever experienced it. It's so far off the radar that not only did we have to work all of Thanksgiving week, there were parent-teacher conferences scheduled for Thanksgiving night and the American director of CEDEI told us that sometimes you've just gotta go without celebrating American holidays. Well fortunately, those parent-teacher conferences got rescheduled off of Thanksgiving and since Leslie wasn't going a full year without celebrating Thanksgiving we decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner party at the Coloma's house for the CEDEI School staff. All the other American teachers were really excited and all wanted to bring a dish or help out in some way and the Ecuadorian staff was excited as well although they had no idea what to expect. In fact, I don't think as many of them as came were planning to come until I started advertising the party by talking about how much time Leslie and I were spending cooking all the traditional dishes.

We started dry-goods shopping on Monday, Leslie having decided on the menu at least a week in advance. We were going to cook a turkey (15-lb. because those things are expensive down here, a couple varieties (four casserole dishes) of dressing, green-bean casserole (2 dishes), real macaroni and cheese (2 dishes), mashed potatoes (big serving bowl), sweet potato casserole (1 dish), biscuits (like a ton) and pumpkin pie (3 pies). And Livia made two incredible corn casseroles as well. Jen also came and made some Ecuadorian fruit juices and we invited people to bring wine or Coke if they felt the need, because dinner parties in Ecuador are almost always pot-luck parties. And after at least five shopping excursions, six hours of cooking on Wednesday night (because we had to work Wednesday) and five more hours on Thursday of cooking and getting the downstairs ready and the music together right up until the party started (because we had to work on Thanksgiving day as well), we had 21 people come to the party plus us two plus the Colomas who only got a chance to try the food before they left for their own party. They were very gracious about letting us use the house for our party (after all we are paying them to live in the house) and Nellie even helped us clean all the dishes after everyone had gone. Angel said that Leslie's cooking (because in all honesty she really did all the cooking) was so good that he couldn't appreciate the food they were served at the party they went to.

All-in-all, the party was an incredible success and definitely worth all the labor that went into it. Even cleaning until 1:30 in the morning on Thanksgiving night, because we couldn't leave the cleaning until Friday (because we had to go to work) and because there's no dish-washer in the Coloma's house. Fortunately, we used almost exclusively plastic plates, cups and utensils and all of our baking dishes were aluminum Reynolds-style disposables so we avoided a lot of cleaning that way. All the food was delicious, including the purple sweet potato casserole that ended up being purple only because that's the color sweet potatoes are in Ecuador. I hope to be able to post pictures from the party soon so that you can see how much fun everybody had; unfortunately I can't do it right now because I'm at our hotel in Otavalo that only has internet in the lobby and only when the internet feels like letting you connect. The pictures will be up soon.

Everybody enjoying the food.

Trying to pose for a picture.

A good group photo of most of the people who came for the party.

The more chill last-minute crowd. We just hung out, drank wine and listened to '70s rock music for a couple hours.

A Few New Things

2009-11-18T16:09:00.001-05:00

So Leslie and I ended up having a great time this past weekend. Friday night we had our dance class, and since we're the only teachers who attend it (even though it's free) we get to spend some time learning how to dance together. What that really means is that Leslie is learning how to follow instead of lead when we dance. On the whole I don't agree with machismo, it does provide a few advatnages that I'm not yet quite willing to give up.

After our dance class, we grabbed a bite to eat from Betu's place and went and got in line for the Friday night free party bus. There is a company, Pazhuca Tours, that does a two-hour double-decker bus tour of Cuenca two or three times a day. The tours cost fives bucks and (if you're thinking like a tourist) it's definitely worth it, especialy because the bus takes you up to Turi. Every Friday night at 8, the six-o-clock tour gets back and there's a long line of people of all ages – little kids with their parents, people our age, grandparents, etc. – waiting to get on for free and take a one-hour bus ride around downtown with party music and canelaso and balloons. Leslie and I got on to the top of the bus and had a great view of everything going on both on the bus and around us. After the first round, which lasted around an hour, Leslie decided she was to tired to stay out with us (some other international teachers and some student teachers from the US came with us) and ended up getting a taxi home. I made her text me from Skype when she got home so that I'd know she was safe. And she was. The second time around we took a longer rout around downtown, we played louder music, we drank more and we had a lot more fun. It was also around 95% people our age on the bus, which was definitely helpful. We all got off on Calle Larga (gringo-friendly bar and club area) and ended up getting some schwarma and going to Once, a bar next to one of the CEDEI buildings. None of the drinks were two-for-one, so I ended up getting the chocolate one (that's made with ice cream) just to see how it would be. It was pretty good, and I wasn't trying to get drunk so I didn't mind that it was weak. After Once, we all just went home.

On Saturday I did abslutely nothing. Leslie had been invited to one of her kindergardener's birthday party, so she went there in the morning and I just stayed in bed. The only thing I really did all day, aside from eat and rest, was listen to Arkansas pound Troy in football. That may not sound too significant to you all, but we became bowl-eligible and the spread was only 14 points; we beat them by 36. It was a great Saturday.

Sunday was loaded with things to do. We decided to sleep in again, so we didn't end up leaving the house until 1pm – having made and eaten breakfast and showered and gotten ready for the day – when we headed down to the Mall del Rio. It was Leslie's first time going to the mall, which is incredibly boring because it's almost exactly the same as any small-town mall in the states. Except that the food court has more interesting options. We were there fo a fund-raiser event, FASEC's international food festival. FASEC is a cancer research group that puts on the festival every year, and since Nellie had made and served the Dutch food for them a few years ago she recommended we go and told us it wouldn't be too expensive. Apparently, something had changed since she worked the event because we had to pay just to get in and all the plates were four or five dollars. For five dollars both Leslie and I can get soup, bananas, fruit juice and a plato fuerte (main dish) at a Colombian restaurant with nice owners and incredible food. The Dutch table ended up, in my opinion, being the only one with food we tried that was really worth what we had to pay. Leslie and I shared a plate of incredible Dutch mashed potatoes made with bacon and cheese and enough butter (even enough for mommom). The mashed potatoes, which filled the plate, also came with some decent Dutch sauage. The plate was four dollars: still on the expensive side of eating here, but definitely worth it. We also tried something from Taiwan, which I won't attempt to explain except to say that they were balls of fried something, we had sushi made by cuencanos who are training to be professional chefs, we got a slice of strawberry cheesecake from the USA table that serves almost every traditional dessert we have back in the states, and we had paella from “Spain.” I saved the paella for last because it was horrible. A plate of paella, which came from a gigantic vat oh which I hope to have a picture for you soon, was five dollars. And when I asked the people who were working the booth they al claimed to be “half-Spanish” which, after trying their paella, I just cannot believe. I've lived in Spain. I've eaten real paella. So yeah, maybe I'm biased, but even Leslie didn't like it. That shit was disgusting.

We went straight from the mall, where we learned that Deportivo Cuenca will be playing in the national championship at home in the next couple weeks (I'll be going, you can be sure of that, and I'll be sure to post about it too), straight into downtown to La Universidad de Cuenca (La U) to meet up with a couple guys from work. An interesting note: in Cuenca, “el centro” (downtown) is the entire area in the center of town that has cobblestone streets. Once you're on a cobblestone road, you're officially in “el centro.” Leslie came to La U with me to do some exercise swimming while I played racketball with Pepe and Jonatan. I'd like to note that is was the second time I'd ever played and that Pepe has been playing for years and Jonatan was a tournament competitor a couple years ago. Yeah, not gonna write about how racketball went.

We were going to go to Mark Odenwelder's (CEDEI director) house to watch an NFL game after racketball, but he ended up being too busy to have us over. So we ended up getting Indian food on Calle Larga instead and just going home. The game ended up being on cable, so I watched the Spanish commentator version as I went to sleep Sunday night.

Monday's classes went well, but the important thing that happened on Monday was that I played in a soccer game Monday night that I had been invited to at Once on Friday night. A really cool guy, a cuencano named Javier who teaches English at a high school and always wants to practice with me, picked me up from my neighborhood and took me down to his father's canchas sinteticas (turf soccer fields) to play with his friends. It was a lot of fun, especially because I didn't suck all that much. I was a defender and I made several good plays. At the very beginning of the game, when my head was still spinning from trying to take in everything going on around me, I gave up the first goal of the game because I wasn't aware of what was going on around me. After that I was okay. The other guys on my team kept telling me that I was doing well, making good stops and good passes, even when I didn't think I was getting the job done. In the end, what it really comes down to is that when my opponents had the ball they respected me because they knew I could steal it if they didn't act fast and I'm pretty sure they'd all be fine with me playing every Monday night with them. To them I wasn't just some random gringo who sucked at soccer and was only trying to play because I'm living in Latin America, I was just another guy who was a little worse than them. That's the respect I was hoping for and I can't explain how glad I am that I got it.

I think that's all I wanted to say in this blog post. I'm not quite sure right now why I wanted to title it “A Few New Things,” except that I've finally found a weekly soccer game to play in. Anyways, I'm sorry it took me so long to put another post on my blog and I hope to eventually have enough time to finish the Vamos Ecuatorianos posts. Between work and class and saxophone lessons I really don't have much time or energy left for my blog, though I do consider it a major priority and try to write on it as often as I can. I hope y'all're enjoying reading about how my life is going.

The New Schedule For Daily Life

2009-11-08T20:36:00.001-05:00

Monday:
We get up every day around 6am to be ready to go to school a little after 7. We take two city buses to get to school and arrive around 7:30-7:40 to be ready to teach at 7:50. On Mondays, I teach 3rd- and 4th-grade English and 5th-grade gym class. We get done every day around 1:30, and Monday through Thursday we take another bus into downtown, eat lunch at one of a few restaurants and one of us has Spanish class. On Mondays, Leslie has class so I either hang around (like I'm doing right now) and use the internet or go home. Spanish classes are from 3pm to 5pm. Normally on Mondays I go home while she's in class to rest before my saxophone lesson at 6. Although I think it's getting bumped up to 5:30 which is great because I'm paying (five bucks) for hour-long lessons and the conservatory closes at 6:40 every day. That's pretty much it for Mondays.

Tuesday:
Same morning routine, except that I start the day teaching 2nd-grade English and spend the rest of it in gym class. On Tuesdays I have Spanish class, and right now Leslie almost always sticks around for the internet because she's in the process of applying to grad schools. The three places we normally go to eat are Moliendo Cafe, a Colombian place a couple blocks down from the CEDEI building where we take our classes (great coffee), Mambos, a sandwich place run by our Cuban friend Betu. He makes the only real batidos in the city, so we end up there very often. Batidos are like milkshakes, but made with fruit and not nearly as bad for you. The third place we usually go is the market 10 de Agosto. Food there is good and cheap and the goodness and the cheapness make up for the fact that we stand out so much not only for being gringos but for obviously being of at least the middle class here. Cuencanos with money are way to class-ist to eat in the market, regardless of how good the food is. School and class are pretty much it on Tuesdays.

Wednesday:
Wendesday is pretty much the same as Monday, the only difference being that I only have to teach two class periods and they're both gym. Every other day of the week I have five periods, which makes Wednesday an incredible day at work. Also, I should note that for one reason or another the saxophone lesson gets canceled about once a week, which is fine because we move really fast and sometimes I just need more practice before I'm ready to move on.

Thursday:
Thursdays are pretty much the same as Tuesdays, except that I teach four periods of English (to 2nd and 4th) and only one of gym. My stress and energy level really aren't affected by the gym classes, and we do the same things in all the gym classes (tuned to the physical abilities of the students, of course), so it really doesn't matter which classes I teach gym to any day except sometimes on Friday. The other interesting thing about Thursdays is that they are the official night for partying in Cuenca. Sometimes we go out on Thursdays, but we never stay out too late (we always get really tired at 10 because that's when we go to bed on school nights) and we never drink enough to be affected by it in the morning.

Friday:
Friday I teach English to 3rd grade in the morning and end the day, and the week, with three straight gym classes with the three oldest grades in the school (3rd, 4th and 5th). This is only particularly stressful when we have a free day in class, because that means all three classes want to play a game of Tio Slocomb vs. everyone soccer. And since these three classes come right after the second recess (the day's big soccer match for the kids, in which I play whenever I can to even out the teams and remind them that you can't win without playing defense), some Fridays I end the day with three and a half straight hours of soccer. Thank God we get to go home after school on Friday. We usually go to La Fornace, a pizza place with good ice cream and usually a good deal on a personal pizza, ice cream and a coke. Friday is also payday, but only once a month. There's a bank right next to La Fornace where we can cash our checks without any fees, so we always go there whenever we get paid. After lunch, we try to rest as much as we can before our dance class at 6pm downtown. We've been learning the bachata and the merengue so far and will be moving on to salsa as soon as the instructor thinks we're ready. It's an especially nice dance class because Leslie and I are almost always the only people who go (it's provided for all the international teachers at the elementary school), so we actually get to learn and practice dancing together.

Weekends:
We are going to try to travel a lot on the weekends, seeing all the Ecuadorian sights we can this year. When we're in town, Pepe Luna and I play racquetball for a couple hours either on Saturday or Sunday. We really don't go out to party all that much, but when we do we prefer to got with Pepe and his friends because they drink less and dance more and go to places that aren't full of gringos.

Special Notes:
There's really only one. One thing that has majorly affected our schedules recently is the power outages around town. We're in the rainy season right now, and it hadn't rained in over three weeks until just now after I started typing this blog post (it's Monday afternoon btw, even though the post says something different). I was so excited when I realized it was raining, that I interrupted Leslie's Spanish class to inform them it was raining. Everyone was really excited, because hopefully they'll stopp cutting the power now. The electrical grid in Cuenca is powered by the rivers the run through the city, and the rivers have been running so dry that they've had to cut off power to different neighborhoods at different times during the day in order to not have a complete system failure. They announce in that morning's paper which barrios will have their electricity cut off when so as to inconvenience the people of the city as little as possible with these necessary power cuts. We're hoping they won't have to cut the water supply. Also, when there's no power there're no street lights, which is a major problem right next to where we live and it really messes up the city bus schedules. We've been getting to school late every once in a while because the streets the buses come in on are so backed up.

So this didn't end up being all that happy a post, but that's life here sometimes. There's a reason why countries like Ecuador are referred to as developing.

An Afternoon in Paute / El Hornado

2009-11-08T16:33:00.003-05:00

Sunday afternoon Leslie and I decided to take an afternoon trip to Paute, a small town to the north in Cuenca's province. We had heard that the best hornado in the world, a traditional Ecuadorian dish I'll talk about in a minute, could be found in Paute so I was on a mission. We took the city bus over to the terminal terrestre, which cost us $.25 each as usual. The terminal tax was ten cents, and the hour-long bus ride to Paute cost us $.75 each. It helps that Ecuador produces its own petroleum. When we got to Paute, we checked out the Sunday market, which was interesting even though there weren't too many people there. Paute is a vacation house spot for middle-class Cuencanos, who all went on vacation last weekend so I think the normal Sunday crowd in Paute was still in Cuenca this time.

We made change for a 20 in a CD/DVD store, where I bought 12 hours on merengue music on an mp3 cd for a dollar. Then we headed over to "La Plaza del Hornado."

Hornado means two things here. One thing it means is pulled pork, pulled directly from a whole roasted pig. Hornado is also a traditional dish: hornado served with mote (a kind of corn), a tomato-onion salad, a piece of the pig's roasted skin (which tastes like pork-flavored extra crunchy cheese-it), and llapingachos. Llapingachos are fried potato balls; I'm not sure how they're made. This lady was kind enough to let us take our pictures with her and her hornado. While we were taking the pictures, she said "Hornado is so cute, isn't it?" to which I replied "Of course it is." That makes a lot more sense in Spanish, but it's a lot funnier in English. The lady also tols us that she has sisters who live in the United States and that she would tell them that we took her picture and put it on the internet. At the end of this post, I'm going to put a list of keywords so that her sisters will be able to find this post if they do end up looking for it.

After eating a couple different plates of hornado from a couple different booths in the plaza, and yes they were definitely worth the trip, we got some salchipapas (a plate of french fries served with a little sausage, mayonnaise and ketchup) and ice cream and Leslie did some vegetable shopping in the market and we came home. Paute isn't really a site the needs to be seen like some other towns around Cuenca, but it was definitely worth the trip to try the best hornado in the world. If any of you reading this ever plan to come visit us down here, we probably won't spend an entire afternoon going to Paute but I'd love to take you to a market in Cuenca to give it a try.

(Hornado - Paute - La Plaza del Hornado - mercado de paute - señora que vende el hornado - mujer que vende el hornado - llapingacho - that should do it)

Pacific Paradise: Playas Villamil / Cuencan Independence

2009-11-07T17:37:00.011-05:00

So this past week we had both Monday and Tuesday off from school for the celebration of Cuenca's independence. We decided, instead of stay in town and party for 5 straight nights until well after sunrise (how all our young cuencano friends spent the weekend), to go to the beach and relax and rest and eat good food and wake up whenever we wanted. We didn't end up leaving town until Sunday, initially because we wanted to do a little partying with our friends here in Cuenca, but we ended up just being too tired to do anything Friday or Saturday night. I actually called in sick on Friday because I was too fatigued to teach. I woke up really early, not by choice, to go to the bathroom and by the time I got back to bed I was exhausted. I spent the day laying in bed trying to sleep, eating high-calorie food and writing on my blog.

So back to the fun stuff. First, I would like to thank Uncle Joe and Aunt Susan for paying for Leslie's and my weekend at the beach. When Joe gave me my graduation gift, I told him it would be enough for Leslie and me to spend a weekend at the beach in Ecuador and that that was what I'd do with it. So thank you very much for last weekend in Playas. I hope my description of the weekend is enough to let you enjoy last weekend with us. We left Sunday morning, having to go through Guayaquil to get to our eventual beach town, Playas Villamil. We decided to take a van from a private tourism company into Guayaquil, because for $12 each (instead of $8.50 per person on a public bus) our ride would be faster, more comfortable and more scenic. We didn't realize nearly how much faster, more comfortable or more scenic it would be until we had to take a public bus from Guayaquil to Playas. We lucked out as well, because we ended up getting the van to ourselves and the driver was a great guy named César from Machala who loved explaining to us all of the different agricultural plants we were seeing and where all the best views of the mountains are from the road. The road itself was built over the old Incan trail from Cuenca to the coast in the '80s. The Incas preferred to live in up in the mountains but they needed to go to the coast for commerce, so they cut themselves a trail through the mountains that would be both fast and simple for them. From the Cuenca side, the trail starts by cutting and winding through Cajas, the National Park and arguably the most beautiful place in the Andes. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of the mountains here, but you can see them in the post about our camping trip in Cajas.

After going through Cajas we passed a place we had heard about, a restaurant called "El Mirador de Los Andes" that is apparently (it was apparent just from seeing them from the van) the best place to stop and drink mate de coca and take in the view. It's located at an incredible spot, from which you can see both the blankets of clouds below and above you and also several unfolding green mountain ranges. We didn't stop, but I plan to take my parents there when they first get to Ecuador.

After crossing through the lower blanket of clouds, which seems way more dangerous than it really is the first time you do it, all of a sudden we saw flat earth. By that, I mean a place where the earth was flat. Even flatter than Ohio there were mountains and the there was flat not even hills just straight flat. We had to pass through several kilometers of heavy vegetation before we saw anything humanized: which were small highway towns and the agricultural fields surrounding them. We saw banana fields, cacao fields (cacao is the plant, cocoa is the fruit, chocolate is the product), sugar cane fields and fields for other plants I can't remember off the top of my head. I remember the banana fields because you could see the huge stalks with bunches and bunches of bananas hanging from the trees. I remember the cacao fields because come on it's chocolate of course I remember the cacao fields. And I remember the sugar cane fields because César explained to me that it takes almost three months to completely grow a crop of sugar cane and you can do it four times a year. No wonder sugar cane is the plant they make their liquor from.

This is a picture taken of a cacao field from the van. If you can see them, admittedly they're really blurred, there are purple shoe-size pods hanging from some branches. That's where the cocoa is.

In the little towns we passed through (Ecuador's version of one-stoplight towns) there were tons of little set-ups where people were selling their fruits, and veggies, freshly picked from their fields and gardens that morning. We didn't stop, so I can't attest from personal experience to how cheap it all is, but Angel once brought home a bunch of oritos (about 50, check Strange New Fruits) that he said he'd bought for a dollar at one of these places. The following picture, also taken from the van and unfortunately blurred, is of one of these set-ups.

Needless to say, the ride into Guayaquil was incredible and beautiful. The van company's Guayaquil office was just a couple blocks from the "terminal terrestre,"
so we walked downto pick up a bus to Playas. The whole place was packed. And when I say packed, I mean packed in a way you can only experience in "developing" countries. These people almost never believe in lines, they just believe in big bunches. And it definitely didn't help that we had a suitcase with us that either had to be rolled or carried; we decided that the next time we have to take public buses here we can only take with us what fits in our backpacks. So if I want to take a jug of water or if Leslie wants to take a purse they have to go in the backpacks too. We finally got our tickets bought, and finally got to the place where our bus would show up, and there was a mob of people waiting to get on the buses. What happens is, as soon as the bus shows up (it's already empty praise the Lord, and I'm serious about praising the Lord people would be crushed if the mobs were trying to get both on and off the bus at the same time) a mob of people try to shove their way onto the bus and the driver and the bus manager and a terminal manager try to only let the people with tickets on to the bus. When all the people with tickets are on the bus, they let the rest of the mob try to fill the empty seats. The bus doesn't leave the terminal until there's one person for every seat and only one person for every seat on the bus. We were fortunate enough to see another bus before ours go through this process before we had to dive in. One nice thing about mobs of Ecuadorian people is that all Ecuadorian people are considerably smaller than me, which makes maneuvering through mobs of them considerably easier. Es como si fuera yo un oso. Me llamaría un gorila pero ellos no tienen barba como yo. We finally go onto the bus, into our assigned seats (thank God we were sitting next to each other. And I'm serious about thanking God, especially that I had the aisle seat, I'll explain), and eventually the bus left the terminal.

I tell you what, riding public inter-city buses in Ecuador deserves its own blog post. Our first time, on the way to Playas from Guayaquil, a couple women had their dogs with them on the bus. Granted, they were little dogs that could be easily carried in both arms, but they were still living breathing dogs. All the buses pick up people off of the street, and charge them a little less than the full fare to go wherever they need to on the route. I think that's how the bus drivers and managers make enough money to do their thing and I personally to blame them or complain because it's their way of getting by. Eventually, the bus manager will come by and check your ticket or your money (for some inter-city buses, you don't pay until after you're on the bus. Ojalá que tengas el suelto propio.), and they come back through every twenty-ish minutes to collect from whoever they've picked up off the street. But not only do they pick up extra passengers, they pick up street vendors too. And the street vendors are selling all different kinds of things. From iced-down coconut juice, to coconuts themselves, to fried potatoes and plantains to cds and dvds. They just hop on the bus, sell whatever they have, and get off at a later stop. I'm pretty sure they must have some system, especially because we saw the same guy on both trips, to and from Playas, selling grapes on both buses. It's gotta be some sort of organized commerce. And it's acutally failry common for the passengers on the buses to buy the food for the ride to wherever they're going. Maybe next time I'll try to make sure I'm hungry when I need to take an inter-city bus.

Eventually we got to Playas, which is a definitely mainly a resort-y beach town designed for Ecuadorian vacationing. Fortunately, our hotel was in the middle of everything. It was two blocks from the bus station and it was on El Malecon (Spanish for sea-side road) so we were right up on the beach as well. We were solo un pasito from everything we wanted to do. Unfortunately, we didn't have a view of the beach from our room. Just a view the bars behind the hotel and the loud music they played all day and all night. As soon as we had our room, which had air-conditioning for which we had to pay a little extra, we put on our beach gear and headed out. Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures of the restaurants on the beach, but there were tons and each of them had a woman kissing and waving at you to get you to eat in her restaurant. From outside they just look like shacks but we ended up letting a hisser lead us to her restaurant, through the middle of another restaurant, so we got to see what the kitchens looked like and the shack-like buildings are actually permanent structures with cement and mortar and the whole shebang. There were also other restaurants, ciruclar and up on poles a couple feet above sand-level. They were more official-looking and we ended eating in one of those too. I'll talk about that later.

The beach was packed; it looked like that the whole time we were in Playas, at some times even more full of people. Fortunately, we never felt like we had to fight anybody to have some space to ourselves on the beach. Sunday afternoon, we just hung out out there for a couple hours so we didn't do or eat anything too serious. We just sat on our towels and at one point I got up and got us encebollado. I'm not quite sure how to explain ecebbollado. It's probably a soup, because it's served in a bowl-like dish and there's enough liquid in it that everything else is always submerged. The liquid is some kind of vinegar-onion-tomato-cilantro concoction, and it had mote, fried potato, fish and a couple other indecipherable solid food things in it as well. I'm not quite sure what all was in it because I only had a couple tastes. I don't really do vinegar, and like I said everything else was submerged in it.

Sunday night, we went out to a dinner with some of our US friends from Cuenca, and we ended up drinking and hanging out with them in their hotel that night. I still think our drinking games are superior to the Ecuadorian ones I've tried.

The next morning, well I don't know when we woke up because it was whenever we felt like waking up. We got our stuff together and headed out to the beach. We ate breakfast in one of the shack-looking places, which was nothing to write home about, and then we headed to the beach. We got there later than most, but early enough to snag a beach umbrella with a couple chairs. There are people on the beach who own the setups and charge five dollars to use their umbrellas and chairs, but as soon as you pay the five bucks you've got a spot to yourself until you leave. So we posted up right there for over six hours, basically until Leslie got too cold and wanted to go back to the hotel and get ready for dinner and a walk along the beach. Whenever we wanted something, we left one at a time. We could have left our stuff under the umbrella and gone and done stuff together, but we had a cell phone and a book and cash and other things that we didn't feel like leaving and it was never too great a burden for one of us to get whatever we needed or go back into town by ourselves.

So that's pretty much what I did all day. Every once in a while, I'd go get in the water and ride or jump over or swim under some waves and come back to our spot and dry off and tan and

drink beer. I also drank beer pretty much all day, relaxing under our umbrella eating various beach foods. There was a Pilsener vendor who would walk by every fifteen minutes or so seeing who all needed more beer and she'd bring us a liter-bottle of Pilsener and two cups with ice (Pilsener is one of those [cheap] beers that has to be really cold to be enjoyed) for a dollar twenty-five. Normally a liter of Pilsener only costs a dollar, but somebody had to haul those bottles and bags of ice down to the beach and she was bringing them straight to us so we were glad to pay the extra quarter-a-piece. Back to the beach food. Maduros fritos are fried breaded plantains that we ate ever single time somebody walked by that was selling them. They taste like the richest moistest densest most flavorful pancakes you've ever eaten, they're about the size of two bananas and they cost between forty and seventy-five cents each, depending on how good your Spanish is and how much you can cut your words to sound like a coastal Ecuadorian. I also went into town and brought back a ton of empanadas for lunch. They were phenomenal, completely filled with things like cheese, chicken and veggies, beef and veggies, the napolitanas had cheese, tomato, olive oil and oregano, and we had some that had shrimp and cheese and oil and oregano. They were incredible.

Okay, so it's about time I do this. Here's a list of potential slogans I've thought up for Pilsener. They're all particularly appropriate because they're all true. Maybe one day I'll translate them and submit them for official use:

Pilsener: It's only a dollar!
Pilsener: It's what you do after Sunday mass.
Pilsener: It's what you do after anything.
Pilsener: It's also what you do before anything.
Pilsener: Hell, it's what you were doing anyways.
Pilsener: One for the walk home from the bar. (That's legal here.)
Pilsener: For when you wake up drunk. Every Friday.
Pilsener: It's better with ice!
Pilsener: Because you don't want to remember that your country sucks at soccer.
Pilsener: Official sponsor of Ecuadorian burps and farts.

Back to the weekend. Tuesday morning (we're not going in chronological order anymore, just talking about the stuff we did while we were chilling on the beach all weekend) while we were at the beach, I was in the water and I kept stepping on these smooth rock or shell-feeling things and I had no idea what they were. A dad was out there with his probably 9-year-old son and I watched him pull out of the water what looked to me like a sand dollar, except that it was the wrong color. He explained to me, in Spanish of course, that that's what it was, except that it was still alive.

This is what their shells look like. This is the side of them that faces up, the side I kept stepping on.

This is the side of them that is actually alive. Thousands of little prickly things that move around. Leslie thinks there must have been a storm the night before, because I brought over twenty of these living sand dollars back to shore to show Leslie the differences in their sizes and shapes and the ways their little star patterns look. I threw them all back, of course, and continued to feel more under my feet but didn't worry with picking them up after that.

Leslie wanted to make a sand castle Tuesday morning while I was out collecting sand dollars (that I threw back because they were living creatures), so while I was on the shore I took a few pictures of her making her castle. I posted this one because I timed it just right to capture the truck full of Ecuadorian military passing by as they patrolled the beach. Normally there were just pairs of navy-looking guys with billy clubs strolling the beach together, I assume just being a presence, but for some reason this morning there was a truck full of guys in cammo and kevlar and helmets. I guess they were just doing drills.

We really didn't do much more than relax and take in the sun and eat great food and drink, well, cheap beer while we were at the beach. We didn't do banana boats or anything like that; we just took in the sun and enjoyed being where we were.

Monday evening, during the hour sunset and the hour after, Leslie and I went for a walk down the shore. We collected several cool-looking shells, which eventually we plan to make into a wind chime like the ones we saw at all the little stalls where people were selling all sorts of touristy beach stuff like shell bracelets and shell wind chimes and big hats and dresses and sunglasses. We didn't buy anything, because there are plenty of places in Cuenca that have all that stuff for significantly cheaper.

This is a picture of me in the water while we were on our walk. Leslie wanted us to take pictures of each other at the shore because it was our last night and we hadn't been taking pictures of ourselves yet.

This is the best of the pictures I took of Leslie because I finally caught her when she wasn't posing. I had to get her to walk backwards into a small wave without looking so that she wouldn't be ready when it got to her feet.

We ended up on one end of the beach, where there were a bunch of people partying on the beach as it was getting dark. There were bars and dance floors and everything over there: too bad we hadn't gone earlier. Leslie and I both got a cocktail and continued on our walk, back towards our hotel. We ended up getting dinner ate one of the bigger more official-looking restaurants on the beach. We got there just as they were closing up shop, but they were happy for our business. I got a beer and we split a ceviche as an appetizer. Ceviche is a seafood soup, another vinegar-based soup, though I really liked this ceviche despite the high concentration of poison. Leslie was still on a shrimp thing, so she ordered some shrimp thing and I ordered "Arroz Marinero" after the waiter told me it was fried rice with a ton of seafood names and a "cangrejo completo." I figured it'd be a winner.

So it turns out cangrejo means crab. And my dinner came with a complete crab. It also had shellfish, scallops, shrimp, some fish, and some other stuff whose flavors got lost in the flood. It was an incredible dish and I was definitely completely satisfied when I finally finished it. Leslie and I went walking all around El Malecon and Via Data (the two main roads in town, both of which follow the shore), looking at all the touristy stuff that was being sold. We eventually ended up back in our room, tired and ready to fall asleep through whatever noise was coming in our windows. We got up Tuesday morning in time to head to the beach for a couple hours, take showers, get checked out of the hotel, go get a ton more empanadas for lunch, and pick up the next bus into Guayaquil. We got back into Guayaquil in time to get on a van to Cuenca in time to arrive just in time to head downtown for the last major event in celebration of Cuencan Independence, after going home to change back into cold-weather clothes of course.

It turns out President Correa was in town giving a speech in a building on the central square. All I lreaned from his speech, though I understood everything, was that he loves the sound of his own voice. This is a picture of him on a balcony watching the pyrotechnics stuff going on on the square.

After the speech and the two-story tower that was paraded around with all sorts of little things on it exploding, Leslie and I hit up a restaurant on the square for dinner. THe only notable thing that happened there was that they served us Colada Morada con un Guagua de Pan. Colada Morada it that purple drink that's very thick and very sweet and made with tons of different kinds of fruits. A Guagua de Pan is a bread baby. It's a tradition for All Souls Day. I have no idea what it has to do with anything, just that it's a traditional sweet food eaten after Ecuadorians commemorate their dead ancestors by visiting them in the cemetery.

After the Colada Morada and Guagua de Pan we went over to the stage, where a bad was playing traditional Cuencan music. We heard "Por eso que te quiero Cuenca" for the first time. It's one of the most famous and most popular of the traditional Cuencan songs. A lot of our friends told us we'd have to hear it at some point before leaving the country.

I'd like to close this long blog post by thanking Joe and Susan again for their gracious graduation gift. I hope this blog post allows me to share the wonderful experience Leslie and I had this past weekend and I hope it fully expresses my gratitude to you.

Vamos Vamos Cuencanos

2009-10-30T07:50:00.009-05:00

This past Friday night Leslie and I went to a Deportivo Cuenca soccer game. They're currently in the playoffs, well they're in "cuadrangulares" but the simplest we to translate the into American is playoffs. Playoffs with group play, if you follow soccer at all you'll know what that means. The game was against Deportivo Olmedo, which is a team from a city called Riobamba. I think Cuenca was expected to win, but I didn't do any research before I went to the game. I just bought a fake Deportivo Cuenca jersey for five bucks. (I promise, that's the biggest sports jersey they make south of Texas.) The game was a lot of fun. We went with Jonatan, one of the cuencano teachers at the school, and we sat in Tribuna which means we couldn't get rained on and they people were all very calm and not too excitable. It was the exact opposite experience of sitting in General at the Ecuador-Uruguay game. Still, there was some chanting and some cheering and some noise makers and things like that. They took the national chant and cuencanized it: "Vamos, Vamos Cuencanos. Esta noche, tenemos que ganar." They crazy fans, "La Cronica Roja," take up a section on the General side and do all the crazy chanting and singing and have a little parade with flags and torches (flaming newspapers) around the stadium before the game starts. Hey, if you can't really have a student section, somebody else has to set the mood.

Deportivo Cuenca won 2-1 because they played better than Olmedo. Cuenca is on a hot streak right now, best possible time to start a hot streak considering they needed it just to get into the playoffs. And now they're playing like the best club team in Ecuador. After Cuenca went up 2-1 with around 20 minutes left in the game, Olmedo started playing dirty. And when I say dirty, I mean two direct red-card fouls and around six yellow cards in the last 20 minutes of the game. All the fans in the stadium were booing the team, calling Olmedo's players things like "matón" and "negro matón." I haven't mentioned this yet, but Cuenca is a very conservative place. Not conservative the way we think of conservative in the United States, more just closed off to the idea of new things. And the majority of cuencanos are racist. They openly hate black people. Not gringos so much, and I'm not sure why, but most cuencanos hate black people. They avoid them on the street and they'll point and snicker when the see them and do several other passively mean and stupid things as well. So of course there were lots of racial slurs flying around the stadium; at least they waited until Olmedo's players actually were playing like savages, just running into Cuenca's player when they had the ball and tackling for absolutely no reason. But Deportivo Cuenca's stadium is about to get sanctioned for all the racial slurs that were going on during the final several minutes of the game. This means they probably won't get to play their next couple home games at home.

After the game, Leslie and I met up with the Wisconsin-Whitewater student teachers to go out and drink a little bit, which was fun and definitely nothing over-the-top.

Cuenca, don't be stupid. And don't be racist. Racism is stupid and if you haven't figured it out yet, your racism will cost you your soccer team.

"It comes in pints? I'm getting one."

Pilsener is the official sponsor of Deportivo Cuenca.

An Olmedo player is trying to take a free kick out of the toilet paper the fans are throwing onto the field.

We're out at a bar called ONCE (eleven) with the Whitewater girls.

La Cronica Roja
Sorry it's such a short video but you still get a taste of what they're like and it takes forever to upload videos.

Surprising Things About Life In Cuenca

2009-10-30T07:25:00.001-05:00

1) You can get a good cheeseburger in Cuenca. Well, let me explain this because I like the burgers down here for different reasons. The meat itself isn't as good; it's not as juicy, big, or any of the qualities I look for in burger meat in the States. But all the ingredients are always fresh in a way you just can't find in the US. Even if you had your own garden with lettuce, onions and tomatoes, and you picked and cleaned it all yourself the day you served the burgers, they still wouldn't be as fresh as they are down here and I wish I had an explanation for why. Also, they do cool things to the cheese before they put it on the burger, and they always use good cheese. And finally, they uses lots of herbs, spices and sauces here with their burgers that are all new flavors to me and so far almost all of them have been phenomenal.
2) There are stray dogs everywhere, all over the city and outlying areas, and they are all gorgeous. When we take the bus to school, we have to walk a couple hundred yards on a dirt road and we can't do it without passing at least five stray dogs. And it almost seems like they're different dogs every time. Unless the gang is out. There are like eight dogs that always hang out together (and hump each other) and scare off all the other stray dogs. They don't growl or bark at Leslie and me though because the one time they did I yelled back and was louder (and bigger) than them so now they respect us.
3) You can get a pirated copy of anything here. Any movie you can imagine, you can find here for a buck fifty. Any music cd, including mp3 compilations of up to a hundred songs, one dollar. I bought a Rosetta Stone copy, which has Levels 1 & 2 of over 20 languages on it, three bucks. Halo 2 for PC was also three bucks. You can get them most updated version of PhotoShop here for thirty dollars. It's more expensive because it takes 5 cds to pirate PhotoShop. You can get a pirated copy of anything down here, and the Ecuadorian government strongly approves of the pirating practice. Something about how everybody has the right to a job.
4) There will be more as I think of them.

Sick Day

2009-10-30T07:16:00.002-05:00

So I wasn't able to go to work today; I have some sort of stomach bug and my head is spinning. Honestly, I think it's just that not getting enough sleep has caught up with me. I fell asleep last night before I got under the covers as well, so I woke up at like 5am really cold and needing the bathroom and I never fell back to sleep after that. Hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep today, especially because I'd hate to miss another dance class, but when I'm not able to sleep I'll be trying to post on my blog. I've decided that instead of waiting to post again until I've finished the prior posts, I'm going to go ahead and keep posting now about the things currently going on in our life here in Ecuador. Some things I should be writing about are: our new weekly routine, all of the things that have surprised me about life here, the Deportivo Cuenca game, Colada Morada and baby bread, and maybe some other things.

Oh, and I would like to mention that I made it over two weeks longer than any other international teach at the school before I had to call in sick. I feel really bad not going in to school today, but everything I'd have to teach today can be easily covered by student teachers who were probably already planning on leading my classes anyways.

Camping in Cajas

2009-10-19T15:54:00.012-05:00

Look, I have a lot going on in my life here in Cuenca, Ecuador. I'm sorry that I can't post words as fast as I can post pictures to my blog. In fact, I have to take special time to be able to post pictures, and then as soon as I have time at home to spend hours working on writing blog posts I do it. SO I'm sorry that there are so many posts on my blog that have pictures but not words or explanations, but this is going to last for as long as my life is interesting in Ecuador. Don't get me wrong; I do take time to write on my blog, but I don't have enough time right now to keep track with all the things happening in my life. This weekend I think Leslie and I are going to just hang out in Cuenca and not do much so hopefully I can get caught up on my blog. Until then, I'm sorry it's taking me so long to post on my blog and I hope you're enjoying what I'm posting while I have the time.

What is the Greatest Sport in the World?

2009-10-14T16:06:00.005-05:00

Not until this afternoon was I willing to say that soccer is the greatest sport in the world. And it's not because it's the most liked or the most followed or the only sport the whole world cares about. First, I'm going to explain my arguments for College Football and for Rugby, then my reasoning for calling soccer the greatest sport in the world.

Yes, I know I should be posting about Dia de la Raza and the weekend and the game in Quito but this is more important.

First, College Football. A college football game is the only game in the world at which everyone in the stadium is always standing. I have a very strong preference for standing in the stadium during the game; you feel more engaged and involved in what's going on on the field or the court. It's also an incredibly dramatic game; there are tons of tense moments that test the wills of both players and fans alike. Also, a college ballgame is a full-day event. If you're going to the game, and you're doing it right, you get to the stadium in the morning to tailgate and party and drink beer and eat grilled food all day until it's time to go find your seats in the stadium. Then, after the home team wins, the entire city celebrates until it passes out just before sunrise. Also, college football is a very momentum-driven game. And when two equally talented teams take the field together the one with more passion for the game and a greater desire to win will conquer. Even when the teams aren't evenly matched, a David can have the "want to" to take down any Goliath. For example: The USC Trojans against any other Pac-10 team. Sorry, had to be said.

Rugby. Rugby is my favorite sport to play. And momentum in rugby trumps momentum in any other sport. I also love games that require discipline and teamwork and passion and you get all three in incredible abundance with rugby. If any one of the fifteen people on the field for either team can't hold their weight, or is feeling lazy or hung over from the night before, the better disciplined team will take advantage. We say in American Football that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, talking about defense. That is so much more the case in rugby. I also love the physical nature of rugby. Granted, my favorite position is tight-head prop. I also love how raw rugby is. But unfortunately, rugby isn't for everybody. It's not any boy or girl, man or woman who can survive a rugby match. In fact, I will say this: Rugby is the greatest game in the world for the elite and for those who can take and give a hit and get up and do it even harder the next time. But that's not everybody. In fact, that's a small minority of the people of the world.

And now for soccer, and the reason why I've finally given in that soccer is the greatest game in the world. It's not because soccer is "The World's Sport" and that it's the only sport played on every corner of the earth. And yes, I went to a World Cup qualifying match in South America (last weekend) and the ambiance is incredible. I loved the experience of sitting in the stadium drinking beers and shouting songs with the Ecuadorians around me. But they sit during the game when their team isn't about to have a chance to score. And they're not the most sports-intelligent fans either. They shout and scream and sing and chant for their team at moments when Ecuador needs complete focus, to score on a corner kick or a free shot just outside the box. I also hate that there's so much chance involved in winning a soccer match, and that one team can play better and be better the entire game but make one small slip-up and lose (...Ecuador...). There are times when I hate soccer for being all about which team got lucky instead of which team got good. But still, there's one last argument for football that I didn't realize until today.
Everyone plays it. EVERYONE. Today, last period of the day I had the 2nd-graders for gym class and I was waiting for them to come down to the cancha to play, so I invited so guys sitting around not doing anything to come practice and goof off and take shots against me. The caretaker of the school and general handyman, a random construction worker and the company accountant all came down to play. And they were all better than me despite the fact that I play for at least an hour every day. Anywhere you go in Ecuador you'll find people who either actively play or used to play and still have most of their moves.
I was joking with somebody the other day that if you throw a soccer ball into any crowd of people, if they're nice they'll kick it right back to you and if they're mean they just juggle it and pass it amongst themselves until you go take it back from them. If you throw a frisbee into a crowd of Ecuadorians they just look at it as if it fell from Mars. They aren't even willing to touch it because they're not sure what it'll do.
But back to the story. The caretaker, random construction worker, accountant and I ended up playing soccer against the entire 20-kid 2nd-grade class. And all three of the other guys just danced around with the ball and made brilliant passes to each other while I watched.
How many American Football fans, percentage-wise, still go out and play football with their buddies? How many rugby fans actually play rugby? I'm finally willing to say that Soccer is the world's greatest sport, but not because it's the world's most popular sport. Soccer is the world's greatest sport because everywhere else in the world everyone PLAYS soccer. EVERYONE.

Vamos Ecuatorianos 3

2009-10-12T16:37:00.003-05:00

Words are coming later. Right now I'm at the CEDEI International Programs building and I'm just trying to get all my pictures and maybe a video loaded onto my blog while I have a good internet connection.

Vamos Ecuatorianos 2

2009-10-12T16:27:00.006-05:00

Vamos Ecuatorianos 1

2009-10-12T16:20:00.005-05:00

So the story of our trip to Quito really begins with the ending of the Dia de la Raza presentation in Parque Calderon (Central Park). Leslie and I decided to go to lunch with some of the national staff and we ended up at a place all Cuencanos call “Café Francés” and Leslie of course got coffee because the people who make it are French and they make it in the French style. Well, it turns out they use coffee beans from an Ecuadorian company called “El Cubanito” who toasts their beans with sugar and toasts them too long to make the sugar turn brown. It turns out this process puts cancerous properties into the beans and almost every time you drink El Cubanito coffee, if you're not already accustomed to it (and getting cancer) you get really sick with terrible stomach pains that make you not want to eat even when you're hungry, which makes you really fatigued. This is the same place we went to right before we got sick the first time, when we first arrived to Cuenca. Fortunately, I didn't get sick this time because I didn't have any coffee. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for Leslie. She was crazy sick until we woke up Sunday morning to come home and then she was just crazy fatigued. So I spent the rest of Thursday and most of Friday taking care of her, which included making chicken noodle soup from scratch (you can't buy soup in the store because it's just assumed that since you're Ecuadorian you already make incredible soups at home), several trips down the hill to the grocery store and other things I don't feel like listing because this is the story of our experience of Ecuadorian culture and not of Leslie getting sick. But either way I did almost all of the buying things and almost all of the packing and almost all of the getting ready for the trip. We had plenty of food and water to last the weekend and I had plenty of alcohol for the occasions when I needed it.
So we were told to be at the park where the buses were picking us up at 9:30pm so that the buses could leave town at 10. Well apparently everyone else was told it was leaving at 9 because when we showed up at 9:15 (gringos that we are) everyone was not only there but getting mad that they were still there. But once we got on the bus and Leslie could start falling asleep everything was incredible for the rest of the weekend. If you want a story about being sick and hot and tired and miserable in Quito at a soccer game you're not getting it on my blog I had an awesome weekend. Before I comment on some peculiar and unexpected differences between Latin American culture and US culture I would like to say that we got lucky in that on the bus into Quito everybody sitting around us spoke good English. They of course preferred that we speak Spanish, but it was very welcoming that they were willing to speak English with us. Very, very welcoming.
Okay, so differences between Latin American culture and US culture. The big one I want to comment on is that everybody in Cuenca drinks. Apparently, in 2003 they were named the drunkest city in South America, second in all of Latin America only to Guadalajara, Mexico. But the best part was that as soon as the guys around us realized that we weren't just tourists, and that we were in Ecuador to experience and live the culture and we were on the bus to go cheer and shout and cry with Ecuador and her soccer team, we officially had enough in common that everyone was willing to share their drinks with us. And everybody had drinks. If I ever get to do something like this again, I'm taking at least 6 liters of cuba libre with me for anybody on the bus that wants some.
N.B. Cuba Libre is what the hispanic world calls rum and coke, because the rum comes from Cuba and the Coke comes from the free world.
I ended up drinking a couple canelasos, gin and tonic, whiskey and sparkling water, and something else I don't remember (but not because I was too drunk to remember) and I said no to the “traditional mixing” of wine, beer, rum and aguardiente that somebody had. That was a crazy chuchaqui just waiting to happen.
So eventually we finally left the city, and I stayed alert for a while just to listen to the trash talking and general drunkenness going on on the bus and laugh until people started quieting down a couple hours into the bus ride. Eventually, I started listening to music to try to fall asleep myself. But the ride was too bumpy and it turns out that a “bus de lujo” means a shitty bus on United States terms so it would have been difficult to fall asleep for me even if it weren't so bumpy and turn-y. After a couple hours of listening to music o try to fall asleep, and realizing by ancient i-pod's battery was fading for no reason, I changed strategies. I had bought three big flask size bottles of zhumir, in the sweet less-alcoholic flavors so that they could be taken without a mixer (21% abv), so I downed one in about three minutes (you should know that first I wrote ten, then erased it, then wrote five, then erased it too because I realize now it was that I downed that zhumir way faster than I thought I did). Within thirty minutes I was asleep. Which was incredible, especially considering that my strategy had no side-effects.
And I only woke up once before sunrise (at like 5:30 as always here in Ecuador), and that was because we had changed altitude so much that I was soaking wet with sweat by the time I woke up while when we were leaving Cuenca I had to put on my hoodie to stay in my comfort zone, which is considerably colder than that of most people. No, that doesn't do it justice I love the cold I love playing sports in weather cold enough that you can feel your bones every time you get hit and I can't sleep unless it's cold and love eating cold food so for me it's pretty damn serious if I need a hoodie to stay comfortable. It was an incredibly drastic change in temperature, enough to wake a drunken sleeping traveler from the middle of his deep slumber. It was an incredibly intense change in temperature and air pressure but as soon as we started climbing into the mountains again I was OUT.
I woke up at 5:30 Saturday morning when the sun came up and we were almost in Quito. The view of the landscape and the mountains was incredible but nothing like the bus ride on the way home so you'll get plenty of photos in Vamos 3. As we rolled down the mountain leading into the valley that is Quito I tried waking Leslie up to let her catch a glimpse of the city but it was happening. And there's a picture of Quito from the moutains on the bus in Vamos 3 as well.
At some point, after entering the city, the bus randomly stopped on the side of a main road and nobody had any idea what was going on. Until a film crew goton the bus and explained to us that they had chosen our group to be filmed for a tv special about the people who rode in buses all night to come see their national team play in a World Cup Qualifying match. All of a sudden everybody was awake and crazy excited (except the sick one of course) and there was a great atmosphere on the bus and people were singing their Ecuador fight songs which I thought was cool until we got on the bus after stopping at the hotel when people really got into it and that was where it's at but we're not there yet in our story. So we ended up getting to the hotel some time around 7:45 in the morning, after leaving Cuenca at 10pm, and as soon as we had a key Leslie went straight to the room to sleep and I scoped out the breakfast that was included in our package. It turned out to take too long, though I appreciated the juice, coffee and rolls while I waited for the eggs that never came. I went and got Leslie, who fortunately got a little more sleep though her stomach still wouldn't let her eat. We waited for a few minutes outside the hotel waiting for everybody to get outside so that we could have a mini pep-rally for the cameras before we got back on the bus to go to the stadium. That's when the singing really started.

The mini pep-rally outside the hotel

The reason why these blog posts are called “Vamos Ecuatorianos” is because that's to only song we both learned that was appropriate for putting on a blog. It goes like this: “Vamos Ecuatorianos. Esta tarde, tenemos que ganar.” It's a lot more fun than it looks, especially when everybody you can see, including yourself, is shouting it as loud as they possibly can. On the way to the stadium, there was a camera man on our bus and also one riding around on the back of a pickup following our bus around the city so people were going nuts on the bus the whole way to the game, partying in the aisle and sticking their flags out the windows and getting all the people on the sidewalks and in the cars and buses around us to sing along with us. We had to get out of the bus several blocks away from the stadium, but the camera man stayed with us and did things like have us run to them and sing and shout as loud as we could and everybody else was just eating it all up trying to get on tv. Leslie and I found a guy named Nelson who ended up being way nicer than we ever expected. While everybody else was going ga-ga over the video cameras, we cut over to our side of the stadium with he and his son Nelson (strong tradition here, giving you first-born son your name) to get in line to get better seats than the 5-minutes-of-fame people (they only say 5 here instead of 15).

Nelson (dad) took a picture with us just before the mini pep-rally.

We were firmly positioned in line outside the stadium at 10:00am, waiting for a game that would start at 5:00pm to make sure we got at least half-decent seats.

The lines waiting to get into the stadium, 7 hours before the game started.

Fortunately, my full-size fake Ecuadorian flag was keeping my neck and arms from the crazy hot and bright sun that forced Leslie to make me buy her sunglasses, because she had just recentley lost her (second) pair at school and Nelson and the others laughed at me for paying too much but I said very surely that if Leslie needed sunglasses, she was getting sunglasses and the difference between eleven dollars and eight dollars was worth her feeling better. Then another guy our age in our cuencano group immediately said (in Spanish) “Yeah my girlfriend doesn't want sunglasses” then his girlfriend hit him and laughed with the rest of us. About fifteen minutes into waiting for the stadium to open its doors we got the great news that the doors were going to open at eleven instead of noon. That's great news because Nelson (dad Nelson not son Nelson) had already explained to me that beer and water and food inside Ecuadorian stadiums isn't as ridiculously priced as it is in US stadiums. In fact, the beer and water and food is reasonably pricedinside the staiums; it's cheaper than oustide the stadiums where people walk from line to line trying to rip anybody off that is desperate enough to buy something outside like we were with the sunglasses. At one point, Leslie left the line to go sit in the shade of a building next to the stadium, which ended up being alright because we didn't have a problem geting her back in front of me in line when the doors opened. And entering the stadium will be the beginning of the next blog post, which I will hopefully write in the next couple days.

El Dia de la Raza

2009-10-12T15:14:00.006-05:00

Dia de la Raza doesn't really translate well into English. And really, it's a pretty terrible holiday. It translates literally to "Race Day" so the CEDEI School took it as an opportunity to march in Central Park in the name of racial equality. What el Dia de la Raza actually celebrates is the day Christopher Colombus "discovered" the Americas, beginning a still unending racism, discrimination and general bias based on skin color for all the hispanic people of the world. It celebrates the day that began the eventual enslavement of entire peoples of whom almost all of South and Central Americans still consider themselves. So they call it Race Day and celebrate it. They used to get the day off from work, because it's a national holiday, but the indigenous peoples of Ecuador protested and now you still have to work even though it's still a national holiday. But either way, the kids dressed up and we had a march and presentations on the central square and in a building just off the square. Here are some cute pictures.

This Past Weekend

2009-10-06T16:26:00.003-05:00

Leslie and I had a lot of fun this past weekend. It really started on Thursday night, even though we had to teach on Friday. Thursday night we went out with the other international teachers and some of the national teachers to a bar/club called “Once” downtown. It's definitely not the nicest of the clubs here, but the drinks are good (the mojitos had lots of real mint in them) and resonably priced and they play good music. I didn't drink enough to ever feel the effects of the alcohol, and neither did Leslie really, but that can't be said for a few of the people who were with us. After chatting with everybody for around an hour-and-a-half or two and trying a cheeseburger (first time I had let myself try a burger down here. From what I hear, it was a pretty good burger for Ecuador. I'd put it somewhere between Applebees and Dairy Queen, Applebees being the better of the two.) we ended up dancing. I wasn't really feeling it, especially because all the music was latina so all the nationals knew what to do and I didn't. That and I just really wasn't feeling it for some reason. Leslie and I left early at around 10:30, “early” considering that we normally go to bed at 10 to get up at 6 in the morning for work.

Friday we didn't really do much of anything. We had gone out the night before, even though we cut the night short because we had to work the next day. We just lounged around at home, I think Leslie might have made something for dinner and I just wasted time on my computer, might have played poker or something.

Saturday the Razorbacks hogwolloped the Texas A&M Aggies in Dallas at the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium. The best part of it all was that we won by playing great DEFENSE. Yes, the Aggies hadn't really been tested yet this year so their statistics were a little on the higher-than-real side but we still did a great job of, well, gimme a minute to think of the right word, I don't like “bottling up” or “bewildering” because they don't really describe how pysically we dominated their offense. “Dominated” is too generic. “Jackhammered” would be good except that normally refers to a great rushing offense. I'm not really a big fan of the word “decimated,” especially after learning what it really means in Latin class in high school. “Rampaged” is a good word, but it also sounds more like offense than defense. How about this: Our defense built a concrete wall and when they tried to break it down, we beat them back like a pack of powerful and handsome sheepdogs herd sheep. Except they were a pack of powerful handsome Razorbacks.
On the Ecuadorian-side of things, we went out with Pepe Luna, the music teacher at our school and his friend Juan who is a tour guide here in Cuenca. They're both great guys, especially considering that they're willing to hang out around town with a couple of gringos. We eat at a nice vegetarian restaurant on the east (far) side of town and had some really good conversation, mostly in English. Juan is completely fluent and Pepe is trying to get better. We also spoke a little bit in Spanish, giving Leslie and me a chance to get some practice in as well. Then we went up to Turi, Juan practicing his tour-guideiness on us as we went through the city to the south-end of the valley. Cuenca calls Turi its balcony. Turi is a church up the side of a mountain on the south side of town, which has developed into an observation area both for tourists and for cuencanos (some cuencano took his girlfriend up there to be romantic, and Juan and Pepe both love showing off their city). It's really more of a cuencano spot than a tourist spot, even though any good city tour will take you up there at some point. Juan, Pepe, Leslie and I had a beer up there, looked over the city and talked about the bad words in both English and Spanish. When Juan asked me what happens when you say “nigger” in the United States I told him he'd get shot. And depending on where you are, that's pretty much what happens. He thought that was a bit much, but Leslie and I explained that most people won't even say that word in conversation among friends or when discussing racism because of how powerful it is here; we all just say the N-word. Most people probably wouldn't write it in their blogs, either, but I refuse to let any word hold ground over any human being and everyone who reads this blog knows that I would never use it in reference to a person. Like I said, Saturday was an incredible day. Did I mention the Razorbacks beat the Aggies 47-19? That's a thromping. Even moreso because we started out terribly, going down 10-0, then resurging and scoring 30 unscored points before halftime. I'm glad Caldwell DVRed it at home from his Ipod Touch, because when I get home I'm gonna want to watch it.

Sunday, two very blogworthy things happened. First, Angel took Leslie and me up to Cajas to try trucha. Cajas is the national park just beside Cuenca and is considered the most important and most beautiful national park in Ecuador The drive up was marvelous. The road goes up a ravine in between two stretches of mountains that are simply gorgeous. And on the way back down, you can see Cuenca in her valley and the peaks of several mountain ranges behind her. Gorgeous. The trip itself is worth the trip. And the trucha was amazing as well. Trucha is either the Spanish or Quechua word for trout. Quechua was the language of the Incas before the Spaniards showed up. Almost all Ecuadorians (and Peruvians and other South-Americans, I would think) blend some quechua words into their Spanish, and most of the time don't realize the difference. The restaurant we went to is called “Restaurante Guevara” because a man named Guevara used to catch all of the trout serrved at the restaurant. He was a simbol of “the old ways” in Cuenca; he only used the most traditional methods for catching his fish. The trucha is served whole, with a few slits cut into each side to make sure it cooks thoroughly. I'm not going to upload the picture of her trucha that Leslie took, because I think the eyes of the fish may be looking up at the camera. But the meat came right off the bone and was delicious. We also tried horchata and canelaso, which I'm going to put on the “Strange New Fruits” list when I'm done with this post. Unless you can't handle your food looking back up at you, I'd definitely recommend going to this restaurant. There are several trucha restaurants along the road that leads into Cajas, and they're all aesthetically more pleasing than Guevara's, but any Cuencano will tell you that Guevara's has the best-tasting trucha. However, if your Spanish isn't all that good and you ever want to order trucha anywhere, I strongly recommend that you let an hispanohablante order it for you because "chucha" means "pussy" and that's a mixup you definitely want to avoid.

There's more to come, including our trip to WalMart and the dinner Leslie made and a couple of things from Monday, but Leslie and I need to go shopping right now so I'll post about them when I get back. I hope she's not mad that I let her nap for an extra 30 minutes.

Sorry I didn't end up finishing this post yesterday evening; I was too tired when I got home from running errands. I ended up letting Leslie stay home and just did it all myself. Which is for the better considering how much walking I had to do, and how much Leslie hates how fast I walk when I have to get somewhere.

We ended up doing some shopping when we got back into town, the usual grocery stuff and then we head over to WalMart. Technically, it's called an hipermercado (hyper-market) and it's the Avda. Las Americas version of the Coral in the Mall del Rio. It was packed. I mean, it was a Sunday afternoon, but I think we had to wait 30 minutes in the checkout line. Another interesting thing is that if you want something expensive, they put it in an airtight bag and bring it to you when you're checking out. You just tell the person at the register your name and your item comes up and they send for it. I guess it cuts down on theft.
But two important things happened. The first, and quite possibly most important, is that I saw an all-glass chess set that cost fourteen dollars, and all the pieces were shot glasses. When I buy it I'm going to call it "Gentleman's Chess," but that won't be until I'm in the mood for an impulse purchase (another impulse purchase will be the Simpsons poster where all the characters are drunk and wearing Real Madrid jerseys, I need that poster). The second most important thing that happened was that we bought a scale for weighing ourselves to see our progress. First, and this sucks, we had to buy the expensive one because my weight doesn't gauge on the cheap ones. Second, I've lost over 10 kilos since I've been here. I was around, probably a little under, 315 when we arrived in Ecuador and now I'm just under 285. My current goal is to get under 120 kilos, which would mean weighing less than 265.

Monday the mother of one of Leslie's and my students brought us home from school, which was really nice of her. A couple of our co-workers think we should try to get a ride with her every afternoon, but I'm not going to press her for more favors. At least not yet. Also, I was supposed to have my first saxophone lesson, but the guy (Gregorio Romero) canceled on me. I had that lesson today, and it was good I think. Though I'm not sure this guy is actually a saxophone teacher, just a really good saxophone player. But I'm gonna be able to learn from him, and at two lessons a week for $40 a month I'm certainly not going to complain.

We also got paid on Monday, cashed our checks on Tuesday. That's pretty exciting in itself: no real need to explain. It was kind of interesting though, to get an entire paycheck cashed in ten dollar bills.

Highlights From The Past Couple Weeks

2009-09-30T19:18:00.005-05:00

First, I want to apologize for not posting in for so long. I've been really angry at my internet connection for resetting every time I try to upload photos and losing whatever I was trying to upload. Leslie finally got her pictures uploaded to Facebook, so when she's done uploading stuff I'm going to try it for myself. My laptop is better than hers, so it should work.

Second, here is a list of notes, comments and highlights from these past couple weeks. I'm sure I'm leaving out plenty, but this is what I've remembered to write to to remind myself to write about:

-I've started taking basketball shorts to work on Tuesdays and Fridays, because those are my heaviest gym-class days and nothing is going to stop me from playing soccer with the kids. It's great practice for me, I'm losing weight at a fairly rapid pace and I turn recess into an opportunity to teach teamwork and sportsmanship. And no matter what the weather is like, be it cold and raining, I'm sweating enough at work on Tuesdays and Fridays that the shorts valen la pena.

-We finally have our tickets for the Ecuador-Uruguay World Cup Qualifier Match on Saturday, October 10th in Quito, Ecuador. First I'll explain the importance of the game, second the travel agency package we were able to purchase. Currently, Ecuador is in 4th place in South America for World Cup Qualifying. The top 4 teams in South America after the qualifying is over automatically qualify for the World Cup. The 5th-place team plays the 4th-place team fro North/Central America and the winner of that game also goes to the World Cup. Right now, after Ecuador beats Urugay on Oct0ber 10th (it's a home game and Uruguay SUCKS), they have to go to Chile who has been playing really well and has already accumulated enough points in qualifier matches to qualify for the WC. After beating Uruguay, the WORST Ecuador can do is place 5th in South America and play in the play-in game and the best is clearly qualifying straight-up for South Africa 2010.
So, our package. We have round-trip bus fare with luxury buses owned and operated by Boom Travel. Luxury means the seats are actually comfy and recline far enough that you can sleep during night rides. We leave from Cuenca on Friday the 9th at around 10pm and hopefully sleep during the 10-hour drive through the mountains to get to Quito. When we arrive, a breakfast is provided for us and we go directly to the stadium in Quito where we will get in line to enter the stadium around 8 hours before the start of the game at 4pm Saturday afternoon. We could only find general admission tickets, which means we can end up anywhere in over 70% of the stadium and no seats are reserved. So it's very good that we'll be able to wait so long to get decent seats. Our tickets are included in the package along with a sack lunch while we wait in line. Hopefully the atmosphere at the stadium will be exciting while we wait eight hours for the game to begin; I know hundreds if not thousands of people will have been sleeping in line at the stadium for a few days before the game so they should be pretty pumped by the time we get there. The package includes our bus trip to the hotel after the game and the hotel reservation. Though after the win I don't plan on doing much sleeping because the town will be going crazy. Breakfast the next morning in included as well, along with the bus ride back to Cuenca leaving at around 9am. Leaving then means two things. 1) We get back in time for a late dinner Sunday night and whatever lesson planning we have to do for Monday at school. 2) We spend almost the entire ride in the daylight, and the view of the mountains from the road between Quito and Cuenca is spectacular, so I've heard. But I may be doing a lot of sleeping on the bus, depending on how much fun I had the night before. And if Leslie gets tired early, this is one time I am definitely leaving her behind to party. so long as I get her to the hotel and into bed safely so she can get some sleep. The entire package was $100 per person, so $200 for the two of us. This game is my thing, so I paid for both of us.

-I don't want to talk about the Razorbacks. All my fears about this season and our coaching staff have already been confirmed.

-So we finally tried El Asador, the Saturday before we played frisbee and walked along the Riobamba. It's Ecuador's version of fast food. We had heard the chicken is good there, so we ordered a couple chicken dishes to try. It's more expensive than almuerzos, but tastes better and is prepared equally as fast. It's also not sketchy, and you can order full or half chickens with tons of side dishes and feed up to 8 people for around 2-3 dollars each.

-We learned a while back that going out and buying almuerzos (menu-of-the-day lunches at hole-in-the wall restaurants, $1.25-$1.50) are actually cheaper than buying food and bringing it home to cook. We've started getting almuerzos for lunch every day, every once-in-a-while going someplace a little nicer and a little more expensive.

-We bought Leslie a nice fake Ecuador jersey for five bucks.

-Santiago, the 2nd-grader with Downs Syndrome, has started playing soccer with us during recess. Most of the time it's a pain because he doesn't understand that the game has rules. He only understands that scoring a goal is good. One time, before the older kids were released to recess after eating lunch, Santi and some other young kids and I were playing soccer, Slocomb and Santi vs. everyone. I spent the entire time trying to get Santi opportunities to score goals. It was hard, because he just followed me around and said "Paseme paseme." Every once in a while whenever I saw an opportunity for him to score, I'd yell "Santi! Over there over there!" and point several times until he understood he was supposed to stop following me around and I'd pass him the ball and he'd get a good open shot. He scored twice. In a live, real game with a bunch of kids his age where nobody took it easy on him for being different. He was so happy each time that he had to cover his face. I don't know if that's a Santi thing or what; all I know is that I've never been so happy I had to cover my face. They talk a lot about integration and incorporation of kids with special needs into the classrooms with the other students. There is nothing more normal in Ecuador than scoring a goal in a soccer game playing with the kids from your class. That's a feeling he'll never be able to get in any classroom anywhere.

-I taught the 5th graders how to play 4-Square and they loved it. They're really the only class with enough patience to learn new weird games from the US. They had a lot of fun, especially after they had the courage to change the rules when they reached the King/Queen square. I'm going to try kickball in the next couple weeks, with all of the classes.

-I also taught Daniel, the 5-year-old son of the empleada who does the Coloma's cooking and cleaning, how to have thumb wars. He loves it.

-We're working on setting up a relationship with an elementary school in the United States so that our 3rd-5th graders and have pen pals. I have a friend, Jaime Kent, who teaches at a school in Washington DC in a Salvadorean neighborhood where all the kids grow up learning English at school and Spanish at home. I'm hoping we can get hooked up with them, so that our kids can write and receive letters in both English and Spanish.

I think that's it for now. If i realize that I've missed anything, I can always edit the post. Again, I'm sorry it's been so long in between posts.

Our Trip To Baños

2009-09-30T19:07:00.013-05:00

I recommend that you visit Leslie's Facebook page for pictures of the spa we visited. I wasn't ever planning on going into too much detail about the spa, but I will give you the url for its website: http://www.piedradeagua.com.ec/ There's an English option on the webpage that opens.

These pictures are more about the view we got from a hill I climbed up and the last two are from the church in Baños. The inside is incredibly beautifully decorated, but I'm not taking pictures inside an active church. Museum/Tourist trap churches in Europe are another thing entirely.

I also want to say that we went to an incredible restaurant with lots of great grilled food. Their mayonnaise was phenomenal as well. A lot of places have homemade mayonnaise (made daily of course) with spices and oils and other tasty stuff and ketchup here is a lot sweeter that in the US. Whenever we go back to Baños for the spa we'll always go back to this place too.

This is Leslie in one of the fuentes termales.

This is me on top of a ledge I climbed (from the side you can't see.) I'm not sure if you can tell, but that's my Procter t-shirt. The Procter flag flies in the Andes.

This is another picture of me sitting on top of the ledge. I'm not sure why my eyes are closed; I was taking in the view.

The view was the reason I climbed up there. This is a part of it.

Eventually, Leslie climbed up there with me.

We sat up there for a few minutes being cute and wondering how we ever ended up living in the Andes Mountains.

This is a picture of the church at the top of the hill the town of Baños is on and the little market set up in front of it. I realized on the way there why they put their church where they did. Not only because it is most visible and most iconic at the top of the hill, but once you climb all the way up there you don't want to leave until the end of the day.

This is the view of Cuenca, down in the valley, from the top of Baños.

Saturday this Past Weekend

2009-09-22T20:01:00.015-05:00

Nothing really important or interesting happened this past Saturday, except that Leslie and I tried out this chain restaurant "Restaurante El Asador," which is a bit on the expensive side but their chicken and fries are both good. It's the closest thing that Cuenca has to fast food in the US, and it's a fairly popular chain here we figured we'd check it out. The one we went to is very close both to our house and to the river Tomebamba: the river that cuts through the center of the valley in which Cuenca sits. So we took a frisbee with us to play in the grassy fields next to the river, and ended up walking up and down as much of the river as has grassy fields on the west side of town. I haven't posted pictures in a while; this post is really just an opportunity to share some photos. Nothing really important happened this past Thursday and Friday. Also, we finally got our passports back from the government and got our Ecuadorian identification cards today. I'm also finally confident that I'm better at soccer than all the elementary school kids that I teach. But most importantly, I think Leslie and I found out how we're getting tickets to the Ecuador-Uruguay game on October 10th. Tomorrow afternoon we'll go buy them. Hopefully I'll post again soon about our tickets. Okay, finally, here are some pictures from el Rio Tomebamba.

"Enjoy Coca-Cola"

This is a picture of an interesting juxtaposition of cultural phenomena: chulas cuencanas doing their laundry in the Rio Tomebamba right in front of a busy street and the grocery store where Leslie and I buy our vegetables and rice and sometimes our humitas.

There were a couple rock-chair formations like this, so I stopped at one to take a rest and Leslie took a picture.

This is Leslie, with some buildings and the mountains in the background.

Wednesday Was Supposed To Be An Easy Day...

2009-09-16T18:05:00.003-05:00

...but I didn't know I wouldn't be teaching any classes. I was scheduled to do nothing until after breakfast the first recess, so I spent the hour nursing my sunburns (the skin on the back of my neck was peeling, you get sun burns WAY more easily up in the mountains), eating peanuts and helping Jen get her art class cleaned up after painting and glittering. I was scheduled to teach Language (English) to the 3rd-grade class after that, but we ended up having all the kids from 1st through 5th clean out the flower gardens of all the weeds and dead plants and water whatever was left. So I ended up going all the way to lunch and the second recess without teaching a class. Today is the day I was supposed to go with one of the directors to get sports stuff for Corporal Expression class, so after I ate my lunch during recess I went over to the offices to see whether or not we were going. I was told to get ready to go right then and there and to tell the national teachers that I wouldn't be taking their kids to CE class that afternoon because I would be gone with one of the directors. So I went and told them. Turns out, the two teachers who thought I would be teaching their kids weren't the two teachers whose classes were on my schedule, but we got it all worked out and now everybody knows where Slocomb will and will not be on Wednesdays.

So Braulio, the "I'm not sure what his official job title is because I'm still not quite sure what he does though I am sure that it's important," and Ramiro, the really cool really physically-fit caretaker of the school who lives and works full-time on-site (one time he climbed up the wall of a classroom and swung across the rafters cutting strings off on the ceiling, he's also from the Amazonian region of Ecuador so a lot of people call him "mono"), and I all went to the mall together to buy sports stuff and later to a ferrotiera (hardware store) get Rami (Ramiro) some stuff he needed to make repairs. We went to an expensive sports store called "Marathon," where Mark Odenwelder tells me I may be able to find a legitimate Ecuador jersey in my size because that's where he goes to get his (he's not my size, but he's not your average Ecuadorian either; we and another guy from the US joke that we three are of "un-rob-able" size), and we bought one nice basketball and one really nice soccer ball. The soccer ball is a Mikasa size 5, which is important because it is the official ball of ecuavoley. Ecuavoley is exactly what is sounds like: Ecuadorian volleyball. They play three-on-three and they use a soccer ball, probably because before volleyball became a big deal in Ecuador (which it is now, but only in its Ecuadorian form) that's all anybody had. Later we went to Carol, a "hipermercado" (Ecuadorian for WalMart), and bought a couple cheap basketballs, a couple cheap soccer balls, a cheap small soccer ball for the younger kids, a cheap volleyball, some tennis balls and some pong balls. I also saw that you can get a brand new guitar there for under thirty bucks. Of course, it's not a nice guitar, but for twenty-seven dollars I'll ask the music teacher and the school if he'll spend a bit of our free time together teaching me how to play guitar. Leslie could also teach me a bit I'm sure. My saxophone-learning process was delayed because the conservatory (which here means the place to learn elementary music, not the place for masters of music) was completely closed until all the kids went back to school, which of course when I started work so I haven't yet had a chance to go back and figure out what the deal is with learning the saxophone here in Cuenca. But it will happen. After the mall, which is pretty much just like any mall in the states, we headed back to school and stopped at a ferrotienda on the way to get screws and rope (for jump-rope because a normal jump-rope costs 4 bucks here and a hundred meters of rope costs a couple dollars) and a few other things. This stop took forever, because every couple minutes the lady running the store would remember where she had put a certain size screw Rami needed and every few minutes Braulio would remember another thing he needed Rami to fix and the lady would have to find that too. Then the lady had to run through all 20ish different things we ended up with and calculate the price for everything with a calculator. We got back to school just after all the kids had left, just in time for Braulio to stop in with the other directors and say a word and take Liv, Jen, Leslie and me to a restaurant near the Coloma's house.

The restaurant is called "Good Affinity" and it's owned by the parents of two of the students at our school who are both adorable, smart and speak very good English for their ages. It's a chinese vegetarian restaurant owned and operated by a Taiwanese couple and the food there is very reasonably priced and very tasty as well. We learned today (we plan to go there once a week, both because it's owned by the parents of a couple of our kids and they like to give us free desserts every once-in-a-while and because the food is good and fairly priced and Jen is a vegetarian and can order anything on the menu) that the "menu del dia," also known as the "almuerzo," is never as good as the other things on the menu and even though it's cheaper and we're all very money-conscious because we make sixteen dollars a day at work we're probably only going to order from the regular menu from now on.
Lunch was good. It started raining pretty hard when we first got there (we were sitting outside at first) and it kept raining for a long while after we were done eating, so we stayed until it stopped which wasn't a problem because it wasn't too busy and the people who run the place like us. Leslie and I walked home, which is only around ten minutes from this restaurant, depending on the traffic on the streets we have to cross.

When we got home, Nellie and Angel were here (Angel had been in out of town on business) and one of their friends was here as well. Angel and the friend and I (though we did the cordial introduction thing we never learned each others' names) spent a few minutes chatting about random Ecuadorian things like the game against Uruguay, traveling around the country and other topics. After Angel left the kitchen, leaving me alone to converse with his friend for a good ten minutes, he came back and asked me how I felt speaking with a coastal Ecuadorian because their accents and dialects sound so different. It was tough, but I was able to follow almost all of what he was saying because on the coast they cut up their Spanish the way we in the United States cut up our English. If they spoke English, the mountain Ecuadorians would say: "I'm going to the supermarket to buy some ice cream, don't you want to come with me?" Coastal Ecuadorians would say: "I'ma go to the store to buy ice cream, dontcha wanna come?" In casual settings, I definitely speak English like a costeño (This isn't me explaining what that words means {coastal person}, this is me explaining why I use parentheses so much. It's also the only time I'll ever use inappropriate parentheses grammar. I don't think in a linear pattern, and I definitely don't live life in a linear pattern either. I don't feel that my writing should follow the one-topic-at-a-time policy most people keep - especially now that my future doesn't depend on how it's graded - and I want this blog, MY blog, to reflect my life as much as it possibly can. Our mother used to always take us to the grocery store with her when Caldwell and I were young. When I was small enough to fit in the seat of a grocery cart - before Caldie came around - mom always had trouble with me pulling random foods off of the shelves and putting them in the cart. She'd end up at the checkout line with food she'd never wanted to buy or maybe even never seen before; eventually she had to pick her grocery stores according to how wide the aisles were. In my eyes, life isn't about taking the cart through the aisle. Life is about grabbing whatever you can and putting it in your cart.).

First Two Days of Teaching

2009-09-15T17:59:00.003-05:00

Monday and Tuesday were the first two days that we international teachers had a schedule and supposed lesson plans. I say "supposed" lesson plans for two reasons. The first is that I teach gym class. For me, lesson planning a gym class just means keeping a record of all the games we've already played so that I can be sure to keep our activities diverse. It also means that I prepare ability-appropriate activities for students with special needs. I planned September last Sunday, in about ten minutes. Lesson planning for the Language classes I teach is different, however. First, we were told that the students would all have English Language books from which we would get our lesson planning (apparently here the lesson plan is "follow the book," so I'm going with the flow). So I lesson-planned September Language classes as "Follow the book." I also have a battery of wordy games and songs to do with the students when we reach the point in our 70-minute sessions of speaking in a foreign language (for the kids) when they just break down and the boys start fighting and the girls start coloring and doing their hair. Turns out, they won't be getting their books until October and we're supposed to be reviewing what the kids learned last year. Okay, I can handle that. But it would be helpful to know what the kids learned last year. So for right now all I'm doing is playing wordy games and singing wordy songs and with the younger kids I'm doing lots of repeat-after-me games and sing-along lots-of-motions songs.

Monday was a disaster. That's why I decided to wait until today to post on my blog because I don't like posting after a bad day; I'd much rather wait until after something good has happened so I won't sound angry. I didn't know I wouldn't have a book to work from until I arrived in the 3rd-grade classroom to teach English and the teacher told me what I just told you. And didn't tell me what I just told you that I still don't know. So I tried several games with the kids but it was still too early in the morning for them to be able to pay any attention to me. Failure. After that class, I was on duty to watch recess, which was fine. Then I had the middle of the day to myself so I made a gigantic Scrabble set out of letter tiles we have in the staff lounge to take with me to the 4th-grade class that afternoon. I had some trouble getting the 4th-graders to focus, mainly because they had just come inside from the second recess, so after a few minutes I just sat down and waited for everyone to get quiet. I'm still surprised that worked. My favorite bribe thus far for getting kids to do whatever educational (aka boring) is to tell them that whoever wins (because it's always a contest if I can make it into one, it helps make them want to do well) the current activity gets to pick the next one. That also worked with the 4th-graders, but after a 75-minute session with them and playing soccer with the kids a recess I was pooped and still had to teach Corporal Expression to the 5th graders. In my lesson plan, for the first day of CE and for all kids who are physically able (aka everyone that can both see and walk), I had tire relay races. Now, it is understandable for you to be questioning: "Tires? Why tires?" The answer is simple. They're my only resource for now until I can go shopping with one of the school directors to buy soccer balls and basketballs. I brought frisbees, but it's too early in the year for that. I pumped up two kickballs at the beginning of the year, but one has already exploded and the other is the only ball I have. There's also the basketball I found, but it's too old to be useful and the fact that the kids only want to kick it doesn't help the fact that I already have to pump air into it twice a day. The the basketball is in hiding until further notice. Yesterday was just a really stressful and tiring day. We also spent all afternoon shopping downtown and at the Cooperativa (I just call it the coop now) for food and other things for this week. We found a place where hopefully I can buy an Ecuador jersey that fits me, Leslie bought flowers, we bought a MoviStar sim card for our phone so that calling our friends will be 8-times cheaper, we bought food and we did something else I can't remember right now. And after all this and the Ecuadorian chocolate liqueur we bought to try I still couldn't sleep well last night.

Today has been a blast. I started the day with a doubleshot of second-graders (my 70ish-minute Language classes are two time blocks put together) for Language and I showed up mentally prepared to just play silly games and do silly songs. We started with head, shoulders knees and toes because when the kids sing along they're learning several parts of the human body. We also did a walkthrough of a regular morning with lots word reciting and of motions. Did you know how many things you have to do to be able to take a shower in the morning? Assuming you're already awake and out of bed, you have to take off whatever clothes you're wearing, open the door or curtain, make the big step into the stall, close the door or curtain, get the water started, get wet, put the shampoo on your hands, use the shampoo, get your soap ready however you prefer to use it, clean your body paying particular attention to your bottom because it's funny, wash all the soap and shampoo off of your body, turn off the water, open the door or curtain, take the big step out of the stall, close the door or curtain, grab your towel, dry off your body paying particular attention to your bottom because it's funny (you can also dry off inside the stall of course but we didn't), put your clothes on and leave the bathroom. And that's just taking a shower; what going through an entire morning routine would be like and imagine all the important words you can learn! Yes, today was a much better day than yesterday. The second-graders were too young to play with the big scrabble letters because they couldn't pay attention long enough to realize that you're supposed to use letters to make words, instead of using letters to build castles and tall stacks of nothing. What got them on the right track was that I offered to take them outside for our last several minutes together if each kid in the class made a word out of the letters on his or her table. The girls all spelled their names, which was no small feat considering their names are Arianna, Trinity and Lizbeth (my guess is that's the new trendy way to name your child Elizabeth in Ecuador). The other two girls needed considerable help from the national teacher and the therapist to be able to make words, but that's not because they aren't bright, only because they have physical limitations that make seeing and lining up tiles very difficult. A couple of the boys who really wanted to go play outside pondered and peddled their letters until they could come up with words like "cat" and "moon" and as soon as they had their words I let them go help the other several boys. Of course, that means that every other boy in the class ended up with the word "moon," but I thought that was clever enough to pass once and we went outside to play. Outside, I learned that these 2nd-graders are physically incapapble of lining up on a line and standing still for longer than it takes to say "Okay, what we're going to-." But it's all good, learning experience for me and nobody got killed or maimed. My next class today was these same kids for CE. Those who were able enjoyed rolling the tires around the concrete basketball/soccer area and I don't remember what we played after that but they enjoyed that as well. Actually I don't think they played anything after that because they arrived to my class around fifteen minutes late and the tires kept the entertained for the other twenty. The two girls Tati and Maria Josue, who both have trouble walking and Maria is mostly blind (I'm not sure what "mostly" means, that's just what I was told), sat down in the shade with Caro their national teacher and played pass by rolling the ball to each other with the basketball. I consider getting those two girls active in a CE class to be a special enough occasion for the basketball to appear.
My next class was CE with the first-graders. When they heard me say "Okay, everybody line up behind a tire" immediately their faces lit up and they didn't wait for me to tell them what to do. Those tires were rolling all over the place and they never would have stopped if some of them hadn't gotten tired and started to sit out. I wanted to play tag with them, but they'd never heard of it! What first grader hasn't ever played tag! Aside from the ones in the US right now, of course, because tag is obviously too violent an activity for children to be playing at school. Somebody might have an uh-oh and get a boo-boo and that's definitely not allowed at school in the US. The stranger part is that all the kids at the CEDEI school have heard of Sharks and Minnows and play in on the basketball court. I immediately changed the name of "Tag" to "Shark" and all of a sudden all the kids knew how to play. That was a lot of fun.
My last class of the day - I have more classes on Tuesday and Friday than any other day - I had CE with the 4th-graders. They were excited to play with the tires only because I told them the winner of the last race would get to choose what we played next. And they chose Red Rover. I had heard that the kids at this school love playing Red Rover (if you don't know what it is, wikipedia probably has a good page for it) So we played Red Rover which was interesting because the kids aren't old enough yet to be able to break each others' grips.
All-told, the day was much better because the kids enjoyed my classes more which made me enjoy my classes more and though I was equally exhausted going home from work I was in a much better mood.

Also, we're much closer to finding tickets to the Ecuador-Uruguay game. We're on a waiting list for a package deal which include a private bus roundtrip, one night in a hotel with breakfast, the game ticket and a sack lunch for eating at the stadium. We also think we've found people in Quito who can buy tickets for us (because they're only being sold at the stadium) and get them to us for a little more than the price of the tickets, which all things considered is incredibly cheap.

I'm excited for tomorrow; I only have three class periods and they should all go fairly well. Wednesday is my easy day. I may post again tomorrow evening, but after that I'll probably have to wait for the weekend :-P

The First Week of School

2009-09-13T19:30:00.002-05:00

Sorry this post is so late; I told some people I'd post on Saturday and others on Friday afternoon. Well here it finally is.
I want to write about the first "real" days of school, Tuesday through Friday, and I'm gong to do it first by talking about the week in general, then by explaining some of the highlights of the week. Here it goes.
I should probably write something about this weekend too; that'll probably happen.

We were supposed to spend the week observing. What we ended up doing was running from classroom to classroom doing activities with the kids to give the national teachers a break, all while the other international teachers were trying to decorate their classrooms (painting, pictures, etc.) and I (not having a classroom to decorate) had to scrounge around for things I can use in gym class. My current list of resources includes: the basketball court with soccer goals, a basketball I found that had been in a ditch for a couple years and needs to be re-pumped full of air twice a day, three kickballs (one of the four I brought has already popped), and nine tires. I'm actually really excited about the tires; there's a lot that can be done with them relay-race- and spontaneous-activity-wise. I spent the week realizing that these kids are almost all younger than the campers at Procter, and so different games and activities spark and maintain their interest. I also learned that on the whole nothing at this school is ever going to be very organized. Except the international (aka USA) part of the team. Some of my activities worked well and some of them were "learning opportunities" for me. The two oldest classes of kids both love me and a lot more of the games to which I am accustomed work with them. I also learned a lot about how I can incorporate children with special learning/visual/physical needs into gym class. I'll write more about them in the highlights section. Which I guess is going to happen right now.

This isn't a very well-thought-out blog post, if you can't tell. I'm really just winging it. Unfortunately, that means I'm going to miss a few things from the week that I really wanted to mention. I'm sorry I waited so long to post.

First things first. The Razorback football team is 1-0 and is coming off of a bye week to play Georgia at home this coming Saturday. It'll be a sellout crowd, it's always a sellout crowd, and even though Georgia will be in the top-25 we'll be the favorites and we ought to beat them. I'm really excited.

My fantasy baseball team is gasping for air in the first round of the playoffs (though I must say, I'm impressed that in the first year I've ever cared about professional baseball, I made the 4-of-14-team playoff and had the second-best regular season record). However, my pitching is turning around and if I can pull out a few offensive categories by next Sunday I should be able to make the championship round.

My fantasy football team looks ready to win this first week. I'm the defending champion in this league, so it better win this week. My drafting strategy seems to have worked very nicely and I'm already scouring the free agents for good pickups and getting ready to offer some trades. I'm not going to give away my "in-season team improvement" strategy yet, because at least one other person in the league reads this blog occasionally. And if you're reading this, and I do offer you a trade, it'll still probably improve your team. It's just that I have a plan to use a combination of waiver-wire players and trades to make my team better.

I still don't care about any professional US sport enough to call myself a fan of any professional team. I still just follow the Razorbacks wherever they make it into the pros.

And regardless of whether or not you're reading my blog for sports updates, they're a very important part of my life - even here in Cuenca - and in my opinion definitely worthy of making a weekly highlight post.

Also, Leslie and I are looking into opportunities to go to the Ecuador-Uruguay World Cup Qualifier in Quito on Saturday, October 10th. We're going to the game, it's just a question of how and how much we want to pay for our seats.

Back to school. I'm not sure where to start. Okay, got it. There's a girl in the 2nd-grade class who has a crush on me. Her name is Tatiana but everyone calls her Tati. She has very little control of her body - she has a lot of trouble walking and using stairs and really only has one steady arm - and I think she has a crush on me because on Monday during recess I saw that she was sitting alone on a bench so I went and introduced myself and sat with her and chatted until she had to go back to class. She's incredibly bright, but incredibly shy when it comes to people who only speak to her in English. She understands us, but doesn't want to interact with any of the other international teachers. Whenever she needs to go somewhere and the national teachers don't have the time to walk her, generally I'm the one who helps her down or up the stairs. She's fiercely independent, but she wants you to sit and slide with her and she scuttles down the several staircases at the school. The school is definitely not handicap-safe on US standards. But we'll manage.

Another boy named Josue (Joshua) made my day one day when we were playing Simon Says in his 3rd-grade class and he was Simon. He's blind and his English isn't very good, but he's very eager to learn and to do everything everybody else does. And the class is willing and eager to help him. He'd been playing the game with us very well because each Simon said very clearly what they were doing and he could hear them and follow along with the actions. When it was his turn to lead, he would think for a second, yell out "SSSSSSimon says!" then he would think for a second, and he'd shake his body and flail his arms and jump up and down and everybody else would follow suit and laugh about how funny what they were doing was.

In the second grade class, a boy named Santi (Santiago) led the ABCs song for the class. He has Down Syndrome and is very socially awkward though all the kids in his class like him. He's really funny and clever. The best part was that after the song everybody clapped and shouted so loud that the national teacher came running back to the room to see what had gone wrong. Santi's face lit up in a way that adult's faces just can't. He was happier than anybody over the age of 15 ever will or can be. I'm almost in tears now just thinking about how happy it made him to sing the song and have everybody sing along with him and clap and shout for him. He was so happy that when Leslie and I had to leave the room he said "no vayan" repeatedly and tried to pull us back into the classroom and keep us there so that he could sing again. I wish we could have let him sing again.

I learned not to play soccer with the kids because they are better than me. Well, mostly I learned that I'm now a terrible goalkeeper even though that's almost all I ever did when I played on soccer teams as a young kid. I can play defense and handle the ball well enough to be better than these 4th and 5th grade kids, but not better enough to maintain that "I'm the teacher, you're the student" power relationship. Give me a couple weeks and I'll be able to work these kids like I'm drinking water. Every once in a while I can take the ball all the way down the court (we have to play on a cement basketball court), swerving around a couple or three kids and making the cross right in front of the goal to one of my teammates. I do it just to remind them that I'm still the teacher and they're still the kids. But I lose that power any time I try to be the goalie.

The kindergarten class (of 20 kids, which is WAY too many 4- and 5-year-olds for one class) will copy any motions I make, which makes entertaining them on the short term very easy. I got to read "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman (they have it in the school library!) to them, and I just scrapped the words and went around showing the kids the pictures and saying "Is this the little bird's mother?" and they'd all yell "Noooooo!" and sometimes they'd giggle when I pointed at some piece of heavy machinery. And they were all excited when the bird finally found its mother. That was awesome. "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman was by far Caldwell's and my favorite children's book growing up.

I read "Los Tres Cerditos" to the 2- and 3-year-old class. Which means I flipped through the pictures and said "Oh no! The big bad wolf is going to blow the house down!" and other things like that. The kids just stared pensively at the pictures, with their mouths hanging down and theirs eyes wide open. Every once in a while one would say "Lobo!" or "Casa!" It was cute.

The fourth-grade class loves me, and we think it's because they're just simply more responsive to guys and I'm the only male teacher at the school. They also had a male international teacher last year. As of now they're the only class that calls me "Tio Loco," just them and Tati.

The 5th grade class loves me too. With them, I use activities that inspire inter-student competition because they are mature enough to handle winning and losing. They're also capable of enough patience to play games like Hangman and Wax Museum.

Finding the basketball was a highlight. Teaching the kids not to kick it will also be a highlight.

Seeing Ecuador beat Bolivia 3-1 was also a highlight, because it put Ecuador back into position to qualify for the World Cup in South Africa this coming summer. Now the game at home against Uruguay is incredibly important because Uruguay sucks and the only other match left is at Chile and Chile is awesome. Ecuador needs to beat Uruguay in convincing fashion to have a chance to make the World Cup, and Uruguay has nothing left to play for, so the atmosphere in Quito should be electric in a way that no other continent can handle and the timing is just right for Ecuador to put a whooping on Uruguay. That's why we're going. Right now we know of a cheap way to go and get "General Admission" aka bad seats, but that's where the real (rowdy crazy noisy flag-waving drum-playing chanting screaming) fans will be which makes it where I want to be. The lower-level seating has a roof in case of rain and your ticket actually has an assigned seat so you know how good your seat will be when you buy the ticket. We'd have a better view of the game, but the atmosphere won't be nearly as powerful and exciting as sitting with the real fans. Mom always hated sitting next to me at important Wittenberg men's basketball games, because I was loud and rowdy and sometimes taunted the refs and the other team. She just wants to sit quietly and spectate a sporting event. That's one of the reasons why she likes the Witt women's team better.

That may be it for highlights from the week for now. Saturday, every football team I was rooting for lost. At least that means Georgia will still be in the top-25 when we beat them this Saturday. That'll look better for us. Today (Sunday) Leslie and I made our lesson plans for September and went to Mark Odenwelder's (director of CEDEI) for the CEDEI staff party and to watch football. He has NFL Sunday Ticket so I spent most of my time watching football and some of my time watching the nationals and a few foreign staff play Ecuadorian drinking games that don't seem nearly as fun as what we do in the US. All the teams I was rooting for lost, just like Saturday (but Arkansas didn't play, which is probably better considering my luck this weekend), but my fantasy players played well enough that I ought to win this week. We won't know until after Monday Night Football.

Our First Day with the Kids

2009-09-07T18:23:00.003-05:00

Well the day began an hour earlier than initially expected; Prisi called us last night to let us know she had to go in early to finish setting up the room and we decided it'd be better to ride with her early than have to catch a bus. We got there, helped out a bit, then I went downstairs to meet and greet with the early parents and their kids. The kids are all adorable and the parents were all either very grateful or very shy. We're only allowed to speak in English when there are kids around, and most of the parents don't speak English so they were a little intimidated by being greeted in a language they don't speak. One lady spoke very good English, though.
We were originally going to spend 30 minutes in each classroom helping out and showing our faces and I started in the kindergarten room. When I introduced myself, a very dignified-ly dressed mother would translate what I said for the parents and the kids were off in space anyway. Her English was fairly good, too, but sometimes she said things that came out awkward. I was distributing finger paint for the kids and their parents to put their hand prints on construction paper and I came to the table where this lady, her daughter and her husband were playing with the paint and the paper. The father was joking around like he was going to green hand-print my $65 dress shirt and I pretended to joke around with him when in honesty I was ready to kick his hand. Then after I explained (in English) that I understand Spanish, I just can't speak it because the kids need to hear me speaking in English the father immediately said he wanted to teach me all the "malas palabras" in Spanish, that I should hang out with him and learn what Spanish is really like. I did the jokingly "Well, thank you, yeah," and laughed and the mother, the very dignified-looking lady, came up to me and said "He wants to teach you all the 'fuck yous'." My first reaction was did anybody else hear that? Turns out nobody did because if anybody heard it, especially a four-year-old kid, it wouldn't have been funny but nobody heard so I just said "Okay," and walked away so I could laugh. I had to laugh. I told all the other teachers after all the students and parents left and we all had a good laugh about it.
There's a new kid, Carlos, who's in first grade and he can already read and write in both Spanish and English. He grew up in Texas and has Ecuadorian parents and already knows his multiplication tables. We had a good conversation about his favorite games and sports and colors.
After the kids left, we had our little meeting where I told my story about the very dignified lady and then we had to move all the books from the library to a new room that is going to be the new library. All the books are categorized into several subsets so I decided to just carry the bookshelves and let the girls manage the transfer of the books, keeping them in the same order they were originally. After that we Leslie and I ended up downtown where we ate lunch at a $1.25 almuerzo place, which all things considered wasn't too bad. The tomato juice was more like a fruit juice than the tomato juice we're used to. It was sweet and not so tomato-y.
We then went on a mission to find Harry Potter in Spanish so that Leslie can use it to help her learn the language in a way she'll enjoy. When we finally found a libreria that wasn't just a school books store the guy was closing up to go home for lunch; he had just pulled down the metal shield that kept anybody from vandalizing his shop. When we told him we were looking for a Harry Potter book he was more than excited to open his store back up and find it for us. We weren't just muddling around not wanting to buy anything; the man was going to make a sale so he was overjoyed to let us into his store and get home late for lunch. The only one he had was Harry Potter 7, ten bucks. We also ended up in a DVD store where we bought a collection of the first five Harry Potter movies for a dollar fifty. That's a dollar fifty for all five movies, thirty cents each. Bootleg stuff is fairly common down here because the government doesn't care about copyright laws. We then headed to the central park to get some ice cream. We ended up in a good expensive ice cream place where Leslie got Nutella and I got Nata. When I say that she got Nutella, I mean that this place turned Nutella into an ice cream, and they did it very well. It tastes exactly like Nutella, except it's ice cream. The nata was no good. At least, it wasn't anything like nata in Salamanca. I think it doesn't ever get appropriately hot in Cuenca to really appreciate nata ice cream. In Salamanca, after having played several hours of ultimate frisbee down by the river and making the 40-minute trek uphill to the Plaza Mayor in 90-degree weather, the moment nata hits your tongue you are instantly refreshed. Your body doesn't realize that it's not sitting in an air conditioned room. Nata in Salamanca is that good. The stuff here just tastes like cream.
We then tried to catch a bus back home, and intentionally went the wrong way just to see where it would end up. Way out in the boonies past the airport and the military base and civilization. That was a mistake. We finally got home late this afternoon, exhausted and hungry. And that's pretty much everything important that happened today.

Orientation Week at the CEDEI School

2009-09-06T11:28:00.010-05:00

In case you were wondering, I haven't been holding out on you. I decided after our training session on Monday that I was going to wait until training was done on Saturday and post about the whole week all at once. So now that it's Sunday I'll go through each training day's events, or at least the appropriate highlights.
Note: I revised this once, and when I went to publish there were problems with the internet connection. So if you find errors, it's because I don't feel like going back over the whole thing again.

Monday - Nothing. We didn't start until Tuesday.

Tuesday - Sucked.

Wednesday - I'm kidding. No, Tuesday really did suck, but I'm going to explain why. It didn't help, for starters, that Leslie and I saw our bus leaving from the Feria Libre as we arrived to get on it, having just made the 20-minute walk to the station. So we had to wait for the next #27 bus and we were worried we were going to show up late. We were supposed to get to the CEDEI School at 8:30, but when we walked up to the gate at around 8:33 we were among the first 5 of the 24 people to arrive. We didn't really get started until around 9:15, which was the beginning of the end for the Type-A personalities on staff (aka Leslie). We're still adjusting to third-world timing and organization; the only reason I would say something like this is that Ecuadorians say it of themselves. We covered very little pertinent information and whenever the person leading the meetings wasn't saying anything that concerned the international staff, she just went on in Spanish and never explained what she was saying for those of us on the inter team who don't understand Spanish yet. I can say "she" because no "hes" ever led anything; the only two guys teaching at the school are me and Jonatan, the new cuencano psychologist who works with the special needs students. We had been told the week before that there would be a break for a morning snack and also that we would have time in the afternoon to eat lunch. Bullshit. We went straight on from 9ish to 2ish and then we were told to go home, with no food nor time to eat the food Leslie and I (really just Leslie) prepared the night before. We came home totally frustrated and confided our complaining in each other. We decided to wait before we let our frustration be known, thinking that maybe the people in charge didn't have enough time to prepare and/or that it would get better as the week went on.

Wednesday, really - And it did get better and more organized, though those of us on the inter team with teaching credentials are still feeling like the whole school just flies by the seat of its pants. Wednesday officially could not be a bad day starting on the way to the Feria Libre when we saw a random cuencano wearing an Emory sweatshirt. I got his attention and asked him where he got the sweatshirt (in Spanish, of course) and he just said "un amigo." Either he was just shocked and scared because the biggest man he'd ever seen had just been yelling at him to get his attention or he really did get it from a friend, who would have had to been Paul Coloma, the son of the family we're staying with and the reason we're in Cuenca. He was my boss senior year at Emory; I was an RA and he was the building coordinator and we became good friends. When I told him that I / Leslie and I was / were looking for teaching jobs in Spanish-speaking America he told us that if we could find a job in his hometown we could live with his parents. But I digress. Not only did we see a cuencano in an Emory sweatshirt, we also saw some guys pitching dimes. Dad used to tell me stories of his childhood, in which he and his friends pitched pennies. I don't remember exactly how the numbers work out, but I know he left for school every day with either one or two pennies for milk money and if he won a couple more pennies he could get a doughnut with his milk that morning on the way to school. To play, everyone stands an equal distance from a walk and whoever can "pitch" their penny and land it nearest to the corner where the wall meets the ground wins all the pennies. These guys by the Feria Libre were itching dimes, seeing who could land them in or nearest to a crack in the sidewalk. I guess the comparison is that for two dimes a cuencano can get an humita at the market. For gringos they cost $.25-$.30 depending on how good your Spanish is and how fearsome you can look. I can look pretty fearsome.
Honestly, nothing that happened in the training sessions at school on Wednesday mattered as much as the two things we witnessed on the way, though we did learn some important stuff about how the school works and how they plan programs. I inflated one of my dodgeballs at school, and none of the nationals had every seen anything like it before. Everyone who wanted to see it dribbled it like a basketball or juggled it like a soccer ball and asked what it was for. The answer was of course a bunch of games they'd never heard of before because you can't play any of them without a dodgeball. I'm especially excited to get to teach the kids games like dodgeball and foursquare because I now know that they've never even heard of them. Unless they saw that stupid Ben Stiller movie.

Thursday - Leslie wanted to try walking up the big hill to school from an earlier bus stop in order to walk on a paved road instead of walking along the even part of the hill on bumpy dirt roads at the later stop. It didn't take long to realize this was a mistake. We spent most of the day at school talking about how to incorporate special needs kids into our classes. Simone, a Swiss national who now teaches at Wisconsin-Whitewater (thank you for finally beating Mount Union, btw) caught it before I did, but Ecuador is 25 years behind the rest of the Western world when it comes to working with people with special needs. The main thing about it that bothered me was that all of the strategies bottled up all the kids into the "special needs" group and treated them the same, claiming that the same activities and interventions will work with all of them. That's just stupid. I can't think of a swear word that would appropriately emphasize how stupid that is, so I'm just going to call it plain stupid. One thing that surprised me, though, was that the teachers who were at the school the past year all said that all the kids get along well regardless of whether or not they have developmental differences. That made me very happy, especially after working at the MRDD Center in Springfield where I constantly had to keep kids from getting into conflicts with each other.

There's something I would like to explain here; I'll get back to this past Thursday afterward. This is my explanation for why people with special needs deserve different treatment according to their particular individual abilities (I can't stress enough that every person should be considered an individual before anything else, particularly within the context of their own culture and society). It starts with an explanation of the general idea of rights. There are two kinds of rights: negative and positive. I really don't like using these words to classify them, because negative sounds bad when negative rights are actually easier to respect and more feasible to protect. Rights are classified as either Negative or Positive according to whether or not one's society is required to act in order to respect one's right. Negative rights do not require society to do anything in order for them to be respected. In fact, most of them require that society do nothing. Any right that fits this model: "Leave me alone so I can ______," is a negative right. Some examples are the right to free speech, the right the bear arms and the right to marry the person of your choice (though this one is tricky because that person also has to want to marry you). Positive rights are rights that require one's society to do something for him or her (peoples and societies can have rights too, but I'm not talking about those right now; I'm only clarifying all these things because I know at least a few of the people who read this blog enjoy studying Philosophy). Some examples are the rights to nourishment and education. Somebody's gotta provide that food and that schooling for you in order that your rights are respected.
The reason I want to explain this is to say that people with special needs have rights equal to those of any other person. The difference in treatment comes from the fact that people with certain special needs require more from society in order that their Positive rights can be appropriately respected. This is a major issue in the way the American (USA) public thinks about people with special needs. We call them people with special needs because they require special attention from society in order to have their rights respected to the same degree as everyone else's.

Thursday, again - I'm sorry for the digressions. I hate divisions between peoples, like "special needs" people and everybody else, but sometimes it's necessary, at least until we can find a better way to do things. So the important thing that came out of the day's discussions of incorporating special needs students into our teaching that concerned me was that I learned that I will be conducting gym class for blind kids. From what I've heard, each class will have a group of kids who want to compete and play contact sports and a group of kids who would rather pick flowers. My plan is to have two activities going at all times and let the kids pick which one they want to do. One will be a competitive activity and one will be more oriented towards kids who just want to goof off and play, and maybe also can't see.
Though in my opinion, the most important thing that came out of Thursday was an incredible discussion that happened by accident. The national staff went through an inventory of questions concerning how they felt in comparison to each other and the school in general. We all would have done it together, but they were the only ones who had any experience teaching at the school so they were the only ones who went through the questions. Afterwards their answers were explained to us in English. All us internationals were all thinking to ourselves that it was very interesting that they never felt that they were any different from each other when it came to their relations with the school. I dunno, maybe they were rushing through to go home or maybe they really thought of themselves as equals. When it was explained to us that none of them thought their skill sets for working with children and in groups were any different, Simone called bullshit. Not in so many words, of course, but I guarantee you they were equally blunt. What came next was incredibly revealing of the sentiments of the national staff and of cuencanos in general. Whenever cuencanos - and in my experience hispanic people of any kind from any place - express that something is different from something else, it is always implied that one thing is better than the other. In their minds, two things can't be "different" without being qualified as better or worse than each other. So of course none of them felt like their skills were different, because they were all good friends and they didn't feel like any of them were any worse or any better than any others. This evolved into a discussion of the closed-offishness of cuencanos - reflective in my experience of the closed-offishness of hispanic people of any kind from any place though I have heard otherwise of Caribbeans. Cuencanos never branch out of their own social groups. They all marry their high school sweethearts and think down upon people from other high schools. In my experience, and I feel this very strongly about Spain and think I'm sensing it here, this leads to materialsim. You can mark yourself as a member of your social group by wearing lots of jewelry and nice clothes inasmuch as you can afford them. We played a game earlier in the week where any time you "lost" you had to put a piece of jewelry in the middle of the circle we were all sitting in. There were rings and earrings and hair clips coming out of everywhere. Except from the internationals. One girl put in her shoe, another was lucky enough to have her sunglasses nearby, and I was lucky enough to be wearing my pen over my ear. Another unfortunate observation I've made that leads me to think about materialism is that there are other things that give away the financial status of the national teacher's families. They're mostly all our age, by the way, and still living with their parents. They're not all from the same financial bracket, but unless you got to know them you wouldn't be able to tell. I don't like saying things like this about people, but these observations were a part of my experiencing the discussion that the national teachers had about how closed-offish cuencanos are and how in the past ten years Cuenca has slowly become more other-friendly. I want you to be able to experience things as closely to how I did as is made possible by a blog and my writing skills. Still, if I didn't have Leslie and I'm grateful every day that I do, I don't think any of these girls would date me even if we were interested in each other.
The last thing that came out of Thursday was that Prisila, one of the national teachers who lives close to us, gave us a ride home and offered to give us rides to school. That cut our morning prep time by thirty minutes which we really appreciate.

Friday - We spent almost all day setting up the monthly plans for the year. We "visit" a country every month and "re-acquaint" ourselves with a region of Ecuador every month, as well as having nature-friendly themes and activities. My only particular responsibility is to provide visuals of Mongolia in June. I hope I can find a good video of the stuff some of the Mongolian tribes can do on horseback; they can stand on top of a running horse and hit a fox-size target with a bow and arrow. It's crazy. We spent a little time in the afternoon getting the classrooms ready for next year, and made plans to come in Saturday morning to finish the job. This was something we'd already planned on and was already in the "itinerary." Like we had an itinerary, but we were told the week before we'd be coming in on Saturday.

Pictures from Yunguilla

2009-08-31T21:59:00.003-05:00

This is a picture of Livia, Jennifer and Leslie drinking mapanagua.

This is a picture of me. I hadn't posted any yet, so I figured I'd start with this one.

This is the view of the vacation house and the mountains behind from the patio above the guest house.

This is the lame version of the main course at the place where we got almuerzo for $2. It came with fresh juice and shrimp and potato soup. We didn't get any pictures of guatita, otherwise I would have posted that.

A Weekend in Yunguilla

2009-08-31T19:21:00.010-05:00

I'd like to start this blog post about last weekend with something Angel Coloma (host dad) told me today while we were running errands this morning. He said to me that a Cuencan man's greatest priorities through life are these:
1) Get a title from a university so that you can get a good-paying job.
2) Get a good-paying job.
3) Get a car so that you can "conquistar" a girlfriend.
4) Get a girlfriend you can marry, and marry her.
5) Get a house in Cuenca with your wife.
6) Get a house in Yunguilla for weekend vacations.
Then he laughed and told me that this is the pinnacle of life for Cuencanos. His family is very much more worldly than the average Cuencan family, being that his wife is from Holland and his two children have lived in Cuenca, Holland and the United States. The aspirations of the Coloma family are not so limited.

The coordinator for the international (inglesparlante) staff at CEDEI School is Maria, who is originally cuencana though she has lived most of her life in Minnesota. She's back in Cuenca now where most of her extended family lives and they have three houses (one in Yunguilla) and several apartments all around Cuenca. She invited the entire international staff as well as all of the staff at CEDEI to come to her family's vacation house in Yunguilla where we and a few of her cousins could pass Saturday and Sunday being social and having fun. Of course Leslie and I accepted; this was going to be our first opportunity to really get to know our co-workers and get to socialize with them as well.

We all met up at one of CEDEI's five (I think, there may be more) buildings in Cuenca, then hopped over to a gas station where a couple more cars were parked and from there we headed out to Yunguilla.* It's about a 45-minute drive to Yunguilla from Cuenca, depending on how many cars and semis you illegally pass on the highway, and you go downhill pretty much the whole way. Yunguilla is consistently 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than Cuenca and generally gets less rain and crummy vacation weather.

Now, let me interject to say that this story DOES NOT have an unhappy ending. I'm going to write a couple of things that probably sound "the beginning of the end"-ish but it was a great weekend and nothing bad happened to anybody. Except that we all got eaten up by bugs but that's no big deal.

On the way to Yunguilla, you're just gonna have to imagine how it's pronounced because I can't explain it phonetically, about two-thirds of the way there the guy driving the car Leslie and I were in stopped at a place that appeared to be called "Mapanagua." Jorge, one of Maria's cousins, like to drive too fast and pass anything going any slower than him. And he'll pass anything anywhere under any circumstances. So we got to Mapanagua like five minutes before everybody else and he told us we were just there to let everybody else catch up. They had a pig roast going, which here means roasting an entire pig over a fire and serving every part of it that's edible, and a couple small food stands where lots of you cuencanos were chatting drinking Pilsener out of liter bottles. Pilsener is a beer from Guayaquil; it's the Budweiser of Ecuador. As our convoy caught up with us they all parked in the little semi-lot and got out. So we went ahead and got out and were told that we were going to drink "mapanagua" here. I'm pretty much down for anything, except passing a semi in the middle of a small town with oncoming traffic and a grassy median with trees about 100 meters ahead of us, so I was going to drink whatever everybody else was drinking.

It turns out that mapanagua is a combination of two liquids: sugar cane juice and sugar cane liquor. The sugar cane liquor is called punta (not to be confused with puta) and it's clear like vodka and tastes like vodka but stronger and sweeter. The juice is like, well, imagine orange juice was a dark brown, sugar cane juice looks like that. It's sweet, clearly, but it doesn't taste very good. And our mapanagua was made too strong so nobody really liked the way it tasted but each pint of mapanagua was only $.40 so we didn't care. I ended up having two before somebody told me that punta is 60% alcohol-by-volume. Needless to say I reached my happy place before we reached the vacation house.

In high altitude, alcohol hits you faster and harder and stays in your system longer. Which means that you're drunk longer but it means the hangovers are worse and last longer as well. So it's easier to get drunk, and drinking is even more popular here, but you have to be more careful.

The vacation house was what a vacation house should be. It had a nice large kitchen, a living room with sitting furniture and a tv and all the other rooms in the house were bedrooms. They also had a guest house with a couple more bedrooms and its second floor was a covered patio with a couple grills built into the wall. There was also a pool, which Leslie and I both thought was too small, but the lot itself was rather small and if the pool were any bigger there probably wouldn't have been enough room to park all the cars.

When we first got there, and we got there first because Jorge was driving, Leslie and I rushed to claim a bigger bed and I immediately went for a hammock. I have no idea what Leslie did for the first while, because there was a hammock. There were actually a few hammocks, and they were all incredibly comfortable. After everybody showed up we started drinking Pilsener and whoever had a bottle would walk around and fill everybody's glasses for them. Not only did I have a hammock, people were bringing me beer. I really didn't care what Leslie was doing.

It turns out Leslie was helping make lunch, and after a while I started feeling guilty so I (stayed in the hammock for a while longer, of course, then) got up to help. For the record, I was the only male in the party of over 20 people who offered to help with meal preparation. They couldn't use me in the kitchen, so I went up to the patio and they were grilling! Of course I had to help out, and I must say even when I've been drinking I'm damn good with a grill. This one was a wood-fire grill, my favorite way to cook is over a wood fire, and the first thing I noticed was that the fire was in the about-to-die-burning-crazy-hot-and-throwing-fire-at-the-meat stage so when I notcied that the other people up there were leaving the meat to catch fire I immediately took over, with permission of course, and salvaged as much of the meat as I could. Leslie showed up, smirked at me and said something about wherever she takes me I end up grilling, and I don't think I even looked at her before there were more important things going on. All told, the meat I got the chance to take care of ended up tasting great.

I didn't spend the whole weekend ignoring Leslie. In fact, she probably wouldn't tell you I ignored her very much at all. It just so happened that there were very important things going on when we first got there. Things like beer and hammocks and grilling.

Amidst all the drinking and eating that went on Saturday afternoon Leslie and I also found ourselves in the pool a little bit. It was pretty cold, and most of the people at the house didn't ever get in, but we still had fun until Leslie got too cold and wimped out.

Later on that evening I ended up in the kitchen again and I saw that Maria was preparing some sort of something so I asked if I could help out and she ended up putting me in charge of the Orange Zhumir. Zhumir is a liqueur that is very popular down here, especially in Yunguilla, and it comes in several fruity flavors. What we had was orange Zhumir, so I mixed it two parts Zhumir to one part orange juice and it turned out to be a little on the soft side but that's okay because it had to be shared among some 20-ish people. So then it was my turn to carry alcoholic beverages around and serve everybody that wanted some. It all balances out in the end.

There was this one guy, Jean Paul from Toronto, who was saucing it up pretty heavily and we ended up spending a good time conversing about sports. He made sure each of our glasses had something in it, either the Zhumir or the Cuba Libre somebody had made (Cuba Libre is rum and coke, and gets its name from the fact that the rum comes from Cuba and the Coke comes from the free world) and at some point during all this Leslie and Gamal and I all ended up in the pool racing each other. Gamal had Maria's job last year; he's a great guy and he's really funny too. All I remember, because Jean-Paul had been keeping my glass full, was me beating Gamal in breast stroke even though I never opened my eyes because I didn't want to get chlorine in them.

Some time after the water races Leslie went to bed and I stayed up chatting and drinking. Not after long, and I don't remember what sparked it, I realized I had probably had too much to drink so I immediately switched to water and rehydrated for the rest of the night. One of Maria's cousins brought a friend; her name was Veronica. I thought she was kind of cute but she was pretty shy and didn't like speaking in English. Most of the conversations last weekend were held in English but some were in Spanish. So I tried speaking Spanish with her, not because I was trying to flirt but because I had been drinking, and I'm sure I came off the wrong way and I'm sure my Spanish was awful because I had past the point of drinking where my Spanish is better because I speak more freely and was probably slurring a bit. She ended up leaving, hopefully not my fault, but whatever everybody was having a good time and at no point in the weekend was anybody mad at me for anything I did or could have done. I ended up going to bed when several people left to go to some party at a race track; I didn't feel up for it since I was trying to wind down my night. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep immediately and didn't wake up for a solid six hours.

When I woke up it was bright and sunny out and I could still feel the affects of the alcohol, the positive ones, so I got up just to get some more water and went back to bed. I was never hung over, which means I was appropriately careful with myself and no part of drinking ever made me feel physically ill or bad in any way. I know I probably talked about drinking a bit too much in this post, but drinking was a major part of the weekend so I want to express that in my post. I also want to express that I was appropriate and mature with my consumption of alcohol and was always fully capable of making correct and appropriate decisions.

We had eggs and rolls for breakfast and lounged around for a while at the vacation house before we decided to go into town for lunch on the way back to Cuenca. We went to a place that had almuerzo for two dollars. Almuerzo is simply the word for lunch, but "el almuerzo" in a restaurant means the soup of the day, the main dish of the day and a fruit juice. And two dollars doesn't mean the place was cheap and bad, it means the place was appropriately priced and we all liked the food we ordered so it was a good lunch. The soup was crazy good. It was a shrimp soup with potatoes and mote and some other delicious things and a couple people ended up ordering a second bowl for $1.25. The juice was sanguracho juice and it wasn't as good as the sanguracho tea in San Bartolome so I only drank about half of it. For our main course we had a choice of beef with rice or guatita with rice, and because Maria was sitting next to me and said guatita was her favorite, I ordered it as well because I'm very interested in trying new foods. After I ordered it, and somebody explained to Leslie what it was, she made a face at me from three chairs over and asked if I was sure that's what I wanted to eat, and of course it was it was the option I'd never tried before. The guatita was served in peanut sauce, as is the customary way of serving guatita, and with plenty of rice and some vegetable-looking things on the side that I didn't tough because I try not to eat green stuff here unless I know who washed it and that they washed it thoroughly. The guatita tasted how it looked and about how I expected it to, tough and chewy and not really slimy because that word has the wrong connotation. So I'll describe it as :-) slimy :-). Gamal and Maria told me the guatita on the coast is much better, and I said softly that it tasted like it could have been prepared better, but I was still then and am still now glad that I chose to try it. All told Leslie got a Sprite and I got a water bottle and we both got el almuerzo though she ordered the lame one and it all came out to under five bucks for the two of us.

The ride back to Cuenca was rough, moreso because Leslie and Jean Paul and I were squished into Jorge's back seat than because Jorge was driving, but Gamal and Jean Paul and I had a good conversation about sports and movies that helped pass the time. Slowly, my stomach began to realize it was eating the stomach of another animal and it got really mad at me. I was still suffering the effects of an angry stomach this morning but I think it was more because of the wide variety of flavors and textures and substances I ate at lunch than soleley the fact that I ate a cow's stomach.

Jorge was nice enough to drop us off at our house because it was raining. He's really a cool and nice guy; he just doesn't drive like one. We went inside - Nellie was out picking Angel up from the airport so we were there alone until dinner - and I went upstairs and rested until my stomach felt like letting me get out of bed. Which didn't take too long and regardless of the stomach ache and having to poop more often than usual I still think it was worth it to try guatita. I'm going to wait until I'm on the coast to try it again, though.

If you want to hear a little about our excursion to the fresh market this afternoon, you can find it on Leslie's blog, which you can find in the Followers section of my blog. The one thing she didn't mention that I'd like to comment on is that I spent the whole time making sure we wouldn't and didn't get robbed and she did all the talking and buying.

*They have thinly sliced fried plantains here which they call chifles and they're incredible. Imagine a chip, any kind of chip, but instead of starting with a potato or a tortilla you start with a plantain and you slice it up and fry it. Leslie and I both think chifles are incredible. They're much more flavorful than regular chips as well. They're incredible. Incredible.

Meeting the CEDEI School Int'l Staff

2009-08-26T21:30:00.005-05:00

So the past couple days Leslie and I have had our first meetings with the CEDEI staff. Yesterday, we got to meet the other people on the international staff for the CEDEI School this coming year: María (our coordinator), Erin, Jennifer, Livia, all girls. But it's all good, that's kind of what I figured going in, especially since the person who interviewed me told me they were desperate for male teachers. We had a nice dinner at what the Director of La Fundación CEDEI (his name is Mark, He's from Jersey) called a "fairly touristy restaurant," El Maiz on Calle Larga. They purified their drinking water and sufficiently cleaned their fruits and vegetables, and they had menus in English with curious mistakes like "a traditional drink of apples and species." It was a good lunch; I had the Hornado, which means "pulled pork," literally. This hornado was too touristy though. I'll explain when I talk about the lunch I had today.

After lunch we got to meet some of María'sfamily, including her adorable 9 year-old daughter. Then we had a meeting about Cuenca, being safe, exploring our opportunities, etc. One interesting thing that Mark said during that meeting that I hadn't thought about yet was that the machismo in hispanic culture makes men (mainly boys, boys and men acting like boys) want to prove themselves by fighting somebody bigger than them. I wonder who that would be.

After the meeting Leslie wanted to take a taxi home because she felt too tired to make the 30-40 minute walk back to our homestay. Probably because that morning I made her take the 30-40 minute walk into the center of town to find the CEDEI offices. Hey, it's all downhill on the way into town, so it wasn't all that bad even though she complained that I was walking too quickly. I've learned that my body runs very much like a coal engine you would find on old trains. It takes a lot of fuel to get it moving, and a lot of time and patience to get it moving fast, but once it's going there's no stopping it until the fuel runs out and then it just quits.

But on to more important exciting social interactions. We have been told several times by several cuencanos that we should pay $1.50 for a taxi between our homestay and the center of town and $2.00 for any ride long than that. When I asked the taxi driver "cuanto para Las Pencas," (the big road near where we live) he gave me the "how much can I get these gringos for" pensive face so I jumped at his silence and said $1.50 like I'd done this before. He caved and gave the gringos the local taxi price. Baller.

Today we had an all-day professionally guided van tour of Cuenca and some of the outlying area and villages. The morning got off to a bad start in that the hot water pump didn't activate itself when the sun came up so I didn't have hot water for my shower until it was almost time to meet the tour guide at the supermarket down the street. That and I decided to wear a sweater, which has long sleeves, and I never know how I'm going to do with long sleeves. We ended up getting the SuperMaxi just as the van got there to pick us up, one minute early, and we went on to collect the other new international staff (everyone but María). We started with an incredibly informative two-and-a-half hour tour of some of the most historic parts of Cuenca. You can read Leslie's blog about this when she posts; she had her notebook out throughout the entire trip writing down everything Wilson (the guide) said. Yes, she's one of those. Wilson did a lot of explaining why Cuenca was award the status of World Heritage Site by UNESCO. My favorite story was the one about how cuencanos became known as morlacos (you'll have to look it up on your own, or read Leslie's blog) and my favorite fact was that Cuenca is the homeplace of the metric system. French geographers used a tower in Cuenca to triangulate the diameter of the earth at the ecuator, and one meter is one ten-millionth of one quarter of the diameter of the earth.

A lot of interesting things happened on the journey through the mountains. We went up to 3,500 meters, which is about 11,500-12,000 feet above sea level, and the two girls who had just arrived to Ecuador the day before were having problems with a combination of the very thin air and the bumpy hills and the old stick-shift van. I want to highlight a few things that happened on the way around the highlands, but instead of listing them in chronological order I'm going to list them in order of personal intrigue, least to most.

We learned that there are three passion fruits and hundreds of passion plants with passion flowers, for which they receive their name. They are so called not because of sensual/emotional passion, but because of how the flower blossom reflects the Passion of Jesus Christ (it's a deeply religious heavily heavily Roman Catholic region of the world). There are three stemming buds inside the blossom, which represent the Trinity. The three buds are enclosed by five small petals, which represent the stigmata, the five wounds Jesus suffered that lead to his death (that's not a perfect explanation of the stigmata, but it's sufficient). Then the blossom of the flower is the ten brightly colored petals, representing the ten apostles. These petals come in various shapes and sizes, depending on the passion plant. Mom, when you figure out why there are only ten apostles, please leave a comment for everybody else to read. This is a picture of a passion flower of the plant that produces the passion fruit taxo, which we don't have in the US and which I have not yet tasted so I won't yet write about it in the catalog of new fruits & vegetables.

We got to taste a very interesting tea in a town called San Bartolomé. The people of this town and this region drink this tea traditionally before breakfast every day. It is made with a plant called sangorocho, which is neither a fruit nor a vegetable but it's going in the catalog anyways because it's weird and we drank it. The plant, well, you can see it in the picture next to Wilson and it produces a bright glow-y red tea that is sweet and has a very good, very intriguing, very health-food-y taste to it. We drank it with pancitos that tasted kind of like gingerbread and were baked in an adobe wood-fire oven.

In the picture above, Wilson is wearing what is commonly referred to as a Panama Hat. This is because Teddy Roosevelt found one while he was in Panama and all of a sudden they became popular around the world. The only place in the world where Panama Hats are made, the only place in the world where people know how to make Panama Hats, is the highlands surrounding Cuenca, Ecuador. It's unfortunate that they were popularized in Panama, but now you know better. The indigenous and chulota cuencana (I'm sure Leslie will explain that better than I can) women make them and sell them to almacenes to be finished and sold. Wilson told me that if I go to the almacen (which is translated both "warehouse" and "department store" and sometimes "factory") "Homero Ortega" they will surely have at least one that fits me. We'll see.

We ate lunch in the fresh market in a town called Gualaceo (wah-lah-say-oh but say it fast and don't fully pronounce it) where they had humitas I have to stop because WOW humitas are incredible. They are ground grains, corn, egg, cheese and love all wrapped into corn husk and boiled until they turn into solid mesh. We had humitas, tortillas which are the fried version of humitas and look like pancakes, empanadas del viento which means empanadas with a little bit of cheese in them but mainly full of air, and we had real hornado with mote, a grain, and a fried potato thing. Hornando means pulled pork in a very literal sense. They bake a whole pig in an adobe wood-fire oven and then put it on a heater in the market place and pull some off for you when you order it. That and they make sure to give you some of the skin, which is cooked until it tastes like a bacon-it. It was all very good and all told between leslie and me we had 2 humitas, 1 tortilla, 1 empanada, 3 botellas de agua, and 2 hornado plates with mote and fried potato and all told we spent $7.10 in the market for both our lunches.

One of the artesan places we stopped at was a place where they make the shawls that are traditional outer- and cold-weather-wear for chulas cuencanas and indigenas. The shawls are hand-woven, made with threads that come from the agave (tequila) plant and dyed with all natural materials like nuts, grapes and volcanic soil. Leslie bought one for $30 at the place where they were making them; it's one-of-a-kind and beautiful and if it were in a store it would have been upwards of $90. She already wears shawls, so it's a good fit for her. Wilson said that the best shawl crafters can make a shawl in one day, from the pulling of the thread to the tying of the embroidery knots. $30 is not too bad for a day's work if you consider that Leslie and I will be making around $16 a day to teach in an expensive private elementary school.

Now, the highlight of the trip for me, we went to see a man named José Homero Uyaguari -famous all over Ecuador for his profession - who with his eleven sons hand-craft the most beautiful guitars I have ever seen. They are designed with little pieces of marble, painted beads and wool, some of the mandolins have armadillo hides for shells (outside the wood of course), they import their wood so that they can use only the finest quality stuff for their beautiful sounding hand-crafted always unique guitars. They said it takes a week to make one of the most basic ones, which you can buy from them for $50. They come to the Plaza San Francisco in Cuenca every Thursday and sell their guitars and mandolins all day and the man gave me his business card with his cell phone number on it so that I can call and special-order a guitar. Or I can just go to San Francisco Plaza on a Thursday and buy a guitar for $50 or ask them for one specially made and specially designed for more. This is all very exciting. Caldwell, when you come down I want to take you to the Plaza on a Thursday so you can see the guitars and mandolins and possibly buy one for yourself. The mandolins could be an easy carry-on item on a plane but we'd probably have to find a special way to ship a full-size guitar to the US. It'd be worth it either way.

Well, that's my summary of our day-long tour of Cuenca and the Cuencan highlands. If you want to know more about any of this stuff, Leslie took notes and I'm sure this will be reflected in her blog post. But I'm not done talking about the day's experiences. At dinner Nellie offered us guanámana juice, which is white and sweet and tastes like a fruit, but not like any fruit I've ever tasted. Dad, when you come down here, I will guarantee that everything we eat will be 100% natural and organic but you're going to have to choke down some sugar and some sweet fruit juices in order to get the full experience. The guanámana fruit looks like a prickly watermelon, as Leslie says. It looks like a watermelon that has spikes on it. And the insides produce an incredible fruit juice.

Now that's it for today's and yesterday's adventures. Though I did just receive some good news; our fantasy football draft got postponed so Leslie and I are going to be able to go to the Cuenca Microbrewery tomorrow evening with our new CEDEI friends. I'll try not to get into any fights with any little muchachitos.

Strange New Fruits

2009-08-24T22:04:00.011-05:00

I've decided to keep a list of the strange new fruits Leslie and I have had the opportunity to taste. Some of them will have been juices, desserts, some of the will have just been peeled and eaten. I'll keep this blog post constantly updated with all of the new fruits and occasional vegetables and other plants we get to taste. Hopefully, every time I update this list, I can bring it up to the top of the blog for easy access to the readers. If not, I'll let you know in my other posts that the list has been updated. This is making me hungry for babaco pie.

-Aguacate-This is avocado, which is becoming more prominent in American food because of the spreading Mexican influence. These were fresh from the Colomas' tree in their little garden; Magalay made some incredible guacamole with it and slices of aguacate are also put into several traditional Cuencan soups. In Salcedo, which I talk about in Vamos Ecuatorianos 3, they make incredible aguacate ice cream as well.

-Babaco-There is no translation for babaco. It looks like a longer, much wider cucumber or zucchini and is green and yellow. Nellie explained to us that some Cuencans eat it fresh like a cucumber, but that this was way too tart for her and she expected it would be way too tart for us too. She does however have a really good babaco pie recipe. I can't really explain the flavor of the babaco in the pie, because it isn't really like anything I've tasted before and it wasn't a strong enough flavor for me to remember it distinctly five days later, but I remember that the slices in the pie had the same texture as apple slices in an apple pie.

-Caña-This is the Latin American word for sugar cane, not to be confused for the Spanish word for a .25cL glass of be which is spelled "caña." Yeah they're the same word they just mean different things in different places. In Ecuador, sugar cane is used to produce sugar cane juice, which has the appearance and texture of good apple cider but with another difficult-to-describe flavor in place of the apple. I don't really like the flavor, but the juice isn't meant to be taken by itself. Some rural Ecuadorians also make a liquor called "punta" (not "puta") from sugar cane. Punta is around 60% alcohol-by-volume and is considered contraband. That's why only rural Ecuadorians make it. When you put punta into sugar cane juice the mixed drink is called "mapanagua" (mah-pah-NAH-gwah but really fast so that it sounds like it only has 2 or 3 syllables). It's not good, but it'll get you drunk. Punta looks and tastes like vodka, except that the potency doesn't really come out in the flavor and it has the same difficult-to-describe flavor as the sugar cane juice. We tried it at a place called Mapanagua in the highway between Cuenca and Yunguilla. It was $.40 a pint which means for around a dollar you can get really messed up. But make sure whoever is driving doesn't have any; Mapanagua is only found in the middle of nowhere. For a picture of mapanagua, see the post "Pictures from Yunguilla." They also make canelaso, which is a traditional tea served hot and with aguardiente, the official name for (legal) sugar cane juice.

-Coca-This is a plant that is considered sacred in Ecuador. It only grows in warm weather, but is the best natural energizer for transitioning into high-altitude life. Even the Colomas drink it every day when they travel to the mountains in Peru, which are a third again as tall as the ones in Ecuador. It's also very helpful for recovering from flus and other diseases. It totally demolishes any hunger you may think you had before you drank it as well. I've had it as a tea, which is called mate de coca, and I drink it with every breakfast that I can because of how energizing and filling it is. We've also had it in hard candy form. It's kind of like Halls, but instead of cough drops they're altitude drops. You should also know that coca is the base plant for cocaine, but cocaine is over a thousand times more concentrated than any of the ways by which coca is taken for health reasons. It's also a blend of the coca plant with other things that aren't in the candy or the tea. So there's no worry about any drugy things when you eat or drink the coca plant.

-Guanámana-This is a fruit that looks like a green melon with prickly spikes coming out of it. The inside produces a fruit juice which is white and sweet. It has some pulp, but not thick pulp like orange juice pulp. It tastes like a sweet fruit juice but not like any other fruit.

-Guayaba-This is the guava fruit. I have no idea what it looks like, just that the Hotel San Francisco in Quito has jugo de guayaba that is incredible. The juice was pinkish and tasted very sweet. Until the waitress told us what it was, Leslie thought it was another fruit she can't remember right now.

-Horchata-Horchata is the name for any mixture of medicinal herbs that can be combined to make horchata tea. Horchata tea is simply any tea that is a combination of medicinal herbs. Most restaurants that serve traditional Ecuadorian food have an horchata on the menu; you can also buy the herbs to make horchata in grocery stores or at the Cooperativa (our veggies store) in pre-mixed bags.

-Mora-Moras look almost exactly like raspberries but have a different sweet fruity flavor. I've only had it as a juice, but Leslie bought mora jelly thinking it was raspberry jelly and realized when she used it that it tasted different. Good, but different.

-Naranjilla-Naranjilla sounds like it should just be little naranjas but they're a completely different fruit. They look like yellow-orange tomatoes that were green before they ripened. It's still a citrus fruit; I've only had naranjilla as a juice and it was citrusy and sweet but not orange juice.

-Oritos-This is translated "little golden ones." They are little bananas that are about the size of a swollen forefinger at full-size. They're just like bananas except for their size and their sweetness. We just peeled them and ate them. They were more on the ripe end, so we had to cut out little bruises on some.

-Pepino Dulce-This is translated "sweet cucumber." They are pear-shaped and before they ripen, they are green and taste like cucumbers but sweeter. When the are ripe they are yellow and they bruise purple (like bananas) and taste more like melon. We had them when they were ripe; we just peeled of the skin and ate them like apples.

-Piña-This is just pineapple, except here the inside is white instead of yellow and is sweeter. We ate slices of this for dessert.

-Pitajya-this translates "The fruit that looks like Lisa Simpson's head." Not really, but that's what people call it English: the Lisa Simpson fruit. You're gonna have to imagine how it is pronounced, just remember that "Js" in Spanish make a soft "h" sound. It's very sweet and delicious; you cut it in half and eat the fruit out of it's shell with a spoon. It's a clear-ish white-ish fruit on the inside with lots of little black seeds that you don't have to spit out while you're eating. It's also a very powerful natural laxative, so you never eat more than half of the fruit at once. For pictures of a pitajya, follow this link: http://images.google.com.ec/images?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hl=es&source=hp&q=Lisa+Simpson&btnG=Buscar+im%C3%A1genes&gbv=2&aq=f&oq=

-Platano-This is the Spanish word for plantains. Yeah, you can buy plantains anywhere. They're bigger and sweeter than bananas, and any Ecuadorian will tell you that you have to cook them to make them taste good. Leslie and I have both had plantains before, but they're worth mentioning here because Ecuadorians make them into chips called chifles. They cut them up really thin and fry them and eat them like potato or tortilla chips but they're more flavorful (in our opinion) and more awesome. You can get them at the grocery store or from most chulas cuencanas walking in the streets selling food or from most hole-in-the-wall snackfood places. They can be made to be spicy, and sometimes they are left to ripen for an extra day or two before they're fried and this makes them more sweet.

-Sanguracho-This is a plant that is used to make sanguracho tea and juice. They're both a bright shade of red that looks kind of neon-glowy. I thought the tea looked like Kool-Aid or something like that but it tasted like a sweet, herbal, health-foody tea. It was very good and is customarily consumed before breakfast. The juice wasn't so good, but it had the same kind of flavor; you could tel it was made from the same plant as the tea. A picture of the plant is available in the "Meeting the CEDEI Int'l Staff" Post. Or whichever post's title is the most like that.

-Tomates de Arbol-All I can say about tree tomatoes right now is that they are tomatoes that grow on trees. They look like tomatoes but are more turnip-like in shape. The only way I have tried them is in a sauce called "aji," which has a very strong intriguing flavor. If you put aji on anything, whatever you're eating will taste like aji. Nellie puts it in or on almost everything.

-Uvillas-This translates "little grapes." The ones Nellie had for us are actually larger than grapes, more the size of cherry tomatoes. They are yellow and very much like grapes except that they are more sour. Nellie used to eat them as a snack at work, we ate them just like grapes.

There's a Chocolate Factory in the Basement.

2009-08-24T19:16:00.003-05:00

Before I write about the chocolate factory, I want to update you on the strange Ecuadorian fruits Leslie and I have tried. Nellie told us that every time she goes to the market she is going to buy a fruit she thinks we've never heard of and serve it to us. Today it was pepino dulce, literally translated sweet cucumber. Apparently it's green before it's ripe and tastes more like a cucumber, but when it ripens it turns yellow and stains purple and tastes like a melon. You peel the skin and eat it like an apple.
So I know I've mentioned this at least once on this blog; there's a chocolate factory in the basement. I'm not sure what it's called, but it's about the size of the kitchen and they send 1,500 truffles to Guayaquil every month to be sent to the cruise ships on the Galapagos islands. The truffles are various shapes, mostly ovals with Galapagos animals on the top. Others are hearts, feet, stars and other assorted shapes. The molds were special-ordered and hand-made in Holland by somebody that Nellie knows. All the truffles are cream-filled and every variety of filling is put into every design of shell so unless you are pulling it from a particular case in the basement you have no idea what you're biting into. Some of the flavors are: almond, coconut, mint, orange, strawberry and others that I either can't remember or that are fruits for which we don't have a word in English. All the truffle shells are an incredibly creamy and smooth milk chocolate and all of the flavors are intentionally artificial so that nobody is allergic to any of them. You can never know what you're biting into, so it's better not to be allergic to any of the varieties.
There are two empleadas who work in the chocolate factory; one is Magalay who is only in there part-time and Leslie and I still don't know the other woman's name because she spends all day in the basement. She has braces. I've noticed that in Europe and I guess in Ecuador and possibly all of Latin America it is much more common for middle-aged women to get braces. I don't know if it's because employer all-of-a-sudden have dental, if braces are all-of-a-sudden affordable or what but it's a peculiar phenomenon. Anyways, the empleada that works all day in the factory spends each day doing just one part of the chocolate-making process. I don't remember what all the processes are, but I think they are made five days at a time. But yeah, one-and-a-half people make well over 1,500 chocolate truffles every month.
Now it's not well over 1,500 because I've been eating a bunch of them. Nellie keeps a small tray of 5-8 chocolates in the kitchen for entertaining guests and personal consumption (the leftover truffles of every variety after the flavors are counted off for shipping are put in a pan titled "consumo propio"), and every once in a while each of us eats one or two of them. Personally, I don't like any of the fillings. The chocolate itself is phenomenal, so I think I'm going to have the full-time chocolate empleada set aside some of the chocoalte shavings she cuts off of the molds before she fills the shells with the flavors. Either way, the chocolates are very good but I won't be eating very many of them.
Also, for those of you who read my blog and will have a chance to visit us here (my family, maybe a couple others), you should know that it isn't customary for the Colomas to show their guests the factory, so I most likely won't be allowed to show it to you. I will, however, be able to take flavor requests and bring the truffles into the kitchen to be eaten by us.

Notes on Our Daily Life in Cuenca

2009-08-23T19:21:00.003-05:00

I'd like to write about a few of the everyday things that go on here that wouldn't be so normal were Leslie and I back in the United States. So what I'm going to do is give a run-down of everything we did yesterday and make special note of particular things.

-The sun is going to come up between 6:00 and 6:30 every morning all year round. Eventually we'll have to be getting up at this time, but until then we're been sleeping in until 7 or 8. I get out of bed and go straight to the shower after grabbing some clean underwear out of the closet. The shower is fairly large, big enough to have a ledge for sitting while you shower. The showerhead is a big old bulb in the middle of the shower stall that in its old age just spits water in whatever direction is feels like spitting. For some reason, most of the water falls out back in the direction of the knobs. Also, when you turn the hot water knob, you have to wait for a popping sound which means that you've activated the heating pump, which is only functional during the daytime.
-After showering, Leslie and I come downstairs to make and eat breakfast. The kitchen is a good size, with countertop space on three sides and a four-eye electric stovetop with eyes of all different sizes to match all the different pots and skillets (it's really cool). There's a nice new fridge, and we do all the dishwashing by hand. Now that we're in the kitchen eating breakfast, I want to make note of several things:
-We purify all the drinking water pitcher-by-pitcher using a method called ozonification. There's a big box plugged into the wall in the kitchen with a long rubber tube with some kind of stone at the other end and several buttons indicating different amounts of time. You stick the stone, a rectangular white stone, into the pitcher and push one of the buttons to purify the water. Since the 5- and 10-minute buttons are broken from overuse, we push the 15-minute button but only leave the deal on for around five minutes because that's all you need to purify a gallon of water. The stone emits ozone gas into the water that apparently eradicates any possible presence of evil. Angel Coloma assures us that there is zero pollution in the water after it has been ozonificado, probably because he was involved in the creation of the machine itself. The water doesn't look or taste any different afterward, though I still retain that the ozone gases have a smell that my stomach doesn't appreciate until the process is over.
-Breakfast for Leslie and me in the Coloma household means wheat rolls bought the afternoon before at Punto, good fresh Ecuadorian cheese, eggs if we feel like scrambling them, and whatever fruit the Colomas have left out for us, pineapple or uvillas (sour grapes) or oritos (mini golden bananas, about thumb-size and sweeter than normal ones) or something else. Naturally, I scramble an egg or two and make one or two egg-bread-cheese sandwiches. Anything that can be a sandwich ought to. It is the highest possible form of being for any food.
-I always have water to drink. In the house I carry a half-gallon water bottle with me to make sure I stay sufficiently hydrated. Remember the note I left in a previous post? We don't want any more Andean dehydration happening.
-I also drink a tea called "mate de coca." Coca was an ancient Incan hallucinogen, Leslie says it's also the plant that cocaine comes from. According to the Colomas, mate de coca helps your body get used to the altitude of the Andes Mountains and energizes you particularly well for the thinner air. I drink mate coca at every meal that I can (and no it doesn't have any of the affects of cocaine :-P). In fact, I think Nellie (Angel's wife) is downstairs making dinner right now so I'm going to go have some mate coca and socialize even though I'm not hungry. I'll be back in a few.
...
Leslie and I just had dinner with Nellie, I'll talk more about dinner later.
-We'll be spending the mornings at the CEDEI School; I'll be able to tell you about that later.
-Lunch with the Colomas is made by Magalay, the empleada that works halftime as the maid and halftime in the chocolate factory in the basement. Oh yeah, there's a chocolate factory in the basement. But that should be a separate post. Magalay prepares all the fruits and vegetables fresh every morning, dicing and skinning and peeling and cleaning and all of it. The first course is always soup, which is always different and always wonderful. Then we have salad, which we are guaranteed every day has been cleaned with ozonificated water. Then for the main course we will have any of a wide variety of things. Some dishes are Ecuadorian, some are Dutch, and some are foods like mashed potatoes and sausage, which are pretty much universal. Dessert is usually something Magalay did to a fruit, making it into a pie or cake or something like that. We've had fruits for dessert that I had never heard of before. They weren't chocolate, but they were tasty for being a fruit-dessert.
-Yesterday, however, because Angel was in Peru and Nellie was in Guayaquil (Ecuador's NYC), we went to Punto, the panaderia, pasteleria, and restaurant just down the hill from us. Notes about the menu: Filet Mignon was $7, Chateaubriand was $6, and they had separate sections in the menu for beef, pork, chicken & turkey and seafood. We each ordered a soup; I ordered the one that had meat in it which just ended up to be chicken noodle soup (lame) and Leslie ordered the one with Cuenca in the name (Locho Cuencano, Cuencan chowder), which had eggs, potato, avocado and corn. She won. The waiter explained that every main dish came with french fries, which were actually really good, and a little salad thing that neither of us ended up eating both for flavor and sanitation reasons. On the french fry note, the ketchup was interesting, not like American ketchup, and mayonesa is the same under any name. Leslie ordered a Chicken dish that had bacon and was really good, and I ordered a pork dish (because I didn't want to splurge for the steak :-P) with a mango sauce that was very intriguing. We also tried one of the beers from Guayaquil: Brahma. It tasted like Spanish beer, which means it tasted like flavored water.
-So far as I can remember, all Ecuadorian beer is made in/around Guayaquil, and these are the brands I can remember: Brahma, Conquer, Club & Pilsener.
Appropriate tipping in Ecuador is 10%, so on our bill of $17.44 (2 main courses, 2 soups and 2 beers) we left our waiter a 20.
-If you ask for water/agua in Ecuador, the waiter will bring you a bottle of water and charge you for it. If you want free water, say "agua del grifo," but you don't want faucet water because it could be plagued.
-We wasted most of the afternoon yesterday in the house. Well, Leslie doesn't consider reading all afternoon a waste, but we should have been doing some of the laundry we had to cram in this afternoon. They have a washer and they hang-dry everything in an area of the house that is outdoors but walled in on all four sides, the front and the back leading to rooms. I'll have to get pictures of the house for you. Also, Magalay will iron clothes for us for some tiny fee but so will Leslie for free :-P. Yes, Leslie, I'll do my own ironing that's fine. And thank you for ironing those shirts. Later on, our afternoons will consist of classes for our Spanish and other things, possibly tutoring in English to make extra money or coming home to do chores.
-Dinner is a cold-food meal and happens around 6 or 7, whenever the sun has just gone down. My dinners look strikingly similar to my breakfasts, except without the eggs and maybe a chocolate or two from the basement. But only rarely do I eat the chocolates. Really. All this will be some other blog post some time.
-Nellie's family plays Canasta. So when her niece Katya was here the four of us played a few games after the dinners we ate together. Angel doesn't like playing cards, and nobody is quite sure why. Though he does enjoy chess, Nellie told me, so I'll have to try out playing with him.
-Depending on how much we slept, when we got up, etc. we stay up after dinner until we're sleepy. This is our laptop time and probably will be all year. Blogging, watching the Daily Show or Weeds, checking fantasy sports teams which is way more important than it sounds, or wasting time reading books titled things like "The _____(simple word with a ridiculous spelling) of the ____(ridiculous color) ____(random flower)."
And that's what our days look like right now. When school starts, I'll be able to give you a better description of daily life and I'll have other peculiarities to highlight. Until then, Caldwell please get ESPN360 to recognize that I'm an AT&T user so that I can watch the game on September 5th. Thanks.

Pictures Of & From The CEDEI School

2009-08-21T11:22:00.007-05:00

Here are 3 pictures I just took this morning when the Director of La Fundación CEDEI, Mark Odenwelder, took us to the CEDEI School to show us where we will be teaching this year. I didn't take pictures of individual classrooms or fields or anything like that, just of the building and the view of the city. More about our visit will come later, this is just a picture posting.

This is a picture of the school from just inside the front gate. You can see a part of almost everything: the basketball and soccer area, the classrooms and the offices.

These two pictures are of our view of Cuenca from the school, which is to the northwest. I wish you could see that the mountains nearest to us on the other side of the valley are covered in houses, but Blogspot doesn't allow me to post pictures with good enough resolution for that.

Photos of View of Cuenca

2009-08-20T17:39:00.004-05:00

Here are some photos of the view of Cuenca that we have from the Coloma's balcony.

This picture shows our view of the downtown area. In the center of the valley is a cathedral, one of a few in Cuenca.

We live on the far north side of town, Cuenca's version of the suburbs. The downtown area is to our southeast; this picture is a part of town to our south-southwest. I can't fit our entire view of the city into one picture.

Another view of the southeast with a little bit more layering.

First Eye-Opening Experiences of Ecuador

2009-08-20T13:58:00.007-05:00

Well, there are three key experiences that I would like to share with you all from my first couple days in Ecuador. The first occurred as soon as we got off the plane in Quito, from Atlanta. Seeing ads and signs in Spanish wasn't all that new to me; when I arrived in Madrid last Spring the arrival screens indicated that we had come from Filadelfia, that was my first "out-of-Kansas" experience. What hit me in Quito was the altitude. It may be that I was rushing towards the nearest restroom, but I was winded just by walking quickly. It's going to be a while before I get fully accustomed to la altura here in Cuenca.

My second thoroughly Ecuadorian experience came at breakfast our first morning at the hotel in Quito (Hotel San Francisco, I definitely recommend it). Our breakfast came complementary with our room and was served with a fruit juice neither Leslie nor I had ever tasted before. When I asked the waitress what it was, she said "jugo de guayaba." It was incredible!

The last experience I want to share, well, I'll make it short and sweet and cut out the ugly details. DRINK LOTS OF WATER MORE WATER THAN YOU HAVE EVER DRUNK BEFORE EVERY DAY EVERY MEAL EVERY CHANCE THAT YOU GET AND DO NOT DRINK FROM THE TAP. That should do it.

Every so often I will write something in Spanish and not translate or explain it in English. This is because when I experienced it myself I had to go through a dictionary or something like that to figure out what it was. For translations, you should use www.wordreference.com. That website got me through college.

As soon as I can get my camera and my laptop to talk to each other, I'll start uploading photos of Cuenca onto my blog. I tried uploading a 55-second video of the view of the city that we have from the Coloma's balcony, but I waited for over 5 hours and I think it timed out without telling me.

My life a week before I leave for Ecuador

2009-08-08T19:07:00.002-05:00

I like making bullet-point lists, so that's what I'm going to do with this post.
- I work 30 hours a week with MRDD kids at the YMCA's Camp Journey here in Springfield, Ohio.
- I'm living at home with my parent's this summer, which hasn't been too bad, and my girlfriend is living at home with hers in Knoxville, TN. We're going to Ecuador together; we both got hired to teach at the CEDEI School.
- Even though I've never cared about baseball until this year, I'm in one of my good friend's fantasy baseball league and as of now I spend way too much time following my time. At least I'm enjoying myself and well on my way to making the playoffs.
- I'm becoming a fan on single malt scotch whiskey. My first bottle was a Balvenie 15-year. I hope I didn't set the bar too high.
- I've gotten my visa paperwork back from the Ecuadorian Embassy in D.C., I've gotten a new laptop and all the necessary vaccinations, all I need to do before I leave next Monday (August 17th) is a little clothes shopping and a lot of packing.
- My best friend from high school gave me his saxophone because he's never gonna use it again and I told him I wanted to learn how to play. Hopefully I can take it to Ecuador with me and take saxophone lessons in Cuenca.
That's pretty much my life right now. If you can think of anything else I've been doing lately, please let me know.

Find me on Facebook and Skype

2009-08-08T14:06:00.002-05:00

It's pretty easy to find me on Facebook because I'm the only member with "Slocomb" as a first name. If you search "Slocomb Reed" I'll be pretty high on the list of results.

My Skype name is Big.Sloc.Daddy. It's a nickname from high school.