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.
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.
