Meeting the CEDEI School Int'l Staff

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.