Notes on Our Daily Life in Cuenca

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.