Un mescle de cosas from the past few days!

So... last weekend Rachel, her friend Juliet, and I took a bus ride to Papallacta to relax a bit in the thermal hot springs. Papallacta is a really tiny town a bit southeast of Quito on the same road we´ll have to take to the jungle. It´s absolutely gorgeous. The bus ride there and back, however, was not so nice. At the bus station before we left, we were asked by a random old man in a business suit on the street corner if we wanted to step on his scale and be weighed. Then we got on the wrong bus and realized just a minute before it left the station that we had to quickly jump off. Our actual bus was then 45 minutes late so we left a bit later than we wanted to. Once on the bus, the driver decided he wanted to drive about 10 mph the entire way to Papallacta, which was great for our safety but he took forever to get us there!

The views on the way to Papallacta were really great, though. I think that area of Ecuador is definitely my favorite so far. It´s almost in the cloud forest, so there are always clouds lying low over the green hills. The town itself is tiny and probably only has a few hundred people. The thermal baths there are supposedly some of the best in Ecuador. Anyway, we got some lunch once we arrived and were served by a completely incompetent waitress. She came to take our order the second we sat down and we said we weren´t ready and asked if she could come back in a minute. But she didn´t come back for 10 minutes even though we stared her down with pleading eyes. Juliet finally went up to her and reminded her we needed to order and she said she´d be right over. She didn´t come. Juliet went up to her again and asked if we could order and the waitress then said, ¨But I already came and asked you if you wanted to order and you said you weren´t ready!¨... as if she had completely forgotten her conversation with Juliet a few minutes earlier. We finally got to order, only to discover that they were out of the tamales I wanted. Juliet and Rachel had ordered trout a few minutes earlier, but I had to re-order and decided on chicken. The trout came right away and I watched as they ate the entire thing. My chicken still hadn´t arrived. I was starving. Rachel and Juliet were done eating. The waitress seemed to have forgotten my meal entirely. Juliet went up to ask her what happened and she made up an excuse that there were 3 chicken orders in front of my order and that´s why it was taking so long. I watched the 3 chicken orders come out to the other tables and the people finished their chicken and I still didn´t get mine! At this point it had been about 30 minutes. Juliet went up to the waitress again and asked if maybe she´d forgotten to put in the order since she didn´t write it down initially. The waitress assured her there was no problem. Finally another waitress came and asked us if we wanted the bill and we pointed out that I still hadn´t actually eaten yet. She gave a little shout in surprise and ran to the kitchen... and came back with my chicken. It had been sitting there the whole time and nobody brought it out to me. I have to say, it was definitely good chicken, but I didn´t want to pay for it... so when a different waitress came to give us our bill I asked her if I could get my chicken for free. She looked at me like I was an idiot, but once we explained what had happened she said she´d go ask. She never returned. We looked around the restaurant and realized that the entire restaurant staff was having a meeting about my chicken and whose fault it was... at that point we realized we´d never get an answer so we just left... and didn´t pay for the chicken.

Other than that, Papallacta was great. We took a hike through the town and the hills with Juliet before she had to bus back to Quito that afternoon. We passed by a soccer field, a giant pipe carrying water up the hills (to Quito area?), a lot of pigs, and a whole lot more stray dogs. And again, there were a lot of people carrying around puppies like dolls. Still don´t get it.

We stayed the night at El Viajero, a small family run hostel on the ¨main¨dirt road through town. You can walk the length of the town in about 10 minutes. Our first view of the hostel included a view of the neighbor TORCHING A PIG WITH A BLOW TORCH... I am not quite sure why he was torching it, perhaps he likes the taste of crunchy, charred pig skin. I took a picture because I couldn´t believe what I was seeing. Later on that day after we came back from our hike, we discovered a pig head hanging from a giant hook on the porch and another pig with, er, half it´s body left, hanging from another hook. A little boy was skipping down the road carrying a bloody pastic bag filled with the pig´s feet. Other than the bloody and charred pig carcasses... the old man and woman running our hostel were so, so cute. They were probably in their 60s and had been running the place for at least 30 years. The woman was about half my size! We were the only guests so we got the chance to talk to them a lot and practice our Spanish. They cooked us some really delicious trout for dinner (trout was a theme dish that weekend) and asked us what type of animals people had in California. I think they thought that we lived in a place similar to their little farm town They had a chicken coop across the street and some cows on the hill that they tended to.

We went to the thermal baths that night and had to take a camioneta (small truck) up the hill to the nice hotel where they were located. He charged us $5 for the mile drive and we thought he was ripping us off since it was supposed tobe $2. We told him to come back to pick us up at 10:15pm but later realized we didn´t want to pay $10 to get to and from the baths so when we went home later we ended up getting a free ride from the hotel workers (¨as long as you say thank you, it is free!¨they said). Three of them piled into the truck with us, bombarding us with questions about ourselves and why we were in Ecuador on the way home. Somehow they misunderstood us or we misunderstood them because suddenly they were yelling out their windows at a bus bound for Quito, thinking that we needed to catch the bus and go home that night. We got home, watched some of the Miss Ecuador pageant (even cheesier than our pagents in the US), and fell asleep to the sound of large trucks, tractors, and buses with bad breaks passing through town all night on their way to the jungle.

We finally got a nice breakfast the next morning that didn´t consist solely of dry bread and jam. Yes! The woman told us that she and her husband had to leave to ¨tend to their cows¨for the morning but that they´d be back by 1pm. Rachel and I decided we´d go on a hike again to explore more of the hills. We started to walk down the main road, only to discover a mean looking bull around one of the bends staring us down. He didn´t seem happy to see us, and we didn´t know if he´d charge us once we got closer, so we changed our hiking route because of the darn cow. We started down the same path we´d taken with Juliet the day before. We suddenly heard some barking and saw a cow pasture in the distance in front of us and realized that the dogs who were guarding the cows had spied us on the trail. The path went right by the pasture, and we weren´t sure if it was a good idea to walk past the dogs... but we hiked on towards them anyway. Bad idea. As soon as we got to their hill, one of the dogs spied us, Rachel screamed, and then 5 large dogs FLEW across the pasture, through the fence, and were suddenly right in front of us, barking like they wanted to kill us. Rachel threw her stick away (that she was going to use to protect us), I yelled ¨NO!¨at the top of my lungs, and the dogs kind of stopped for a second at the sound of my yell. Then they decided they still wanted to eat us and started running towards us again. I screamed at them again, they finally decided I was a big, bad dangerous human not to be messed with, and they trotted back toward their cows. Meanwhile, Rachel and I tried to slowly walk away back up the path we´d come down on, which was a bit hard to do because my legs felt like jelly. So, um, lesson learned... don´t mess with dogs in Ecuador, at least the ones who have cows to guard. They will eat you.

On the way home from Papallacta Rachel and I hailed down a bus in the middle of the road, jumped on, and realized there were no seats available. We had to stand in the ailes for an hour as the bus driver drove like a maniac back to Quito. Just like the bus driver to Otavalo, this guy thought he was driving a race car. We were swerving around corners, I was convinced the bus was going to tip over and we´d all die, we were passing cars going the normal speed, and to us in our magic race car bus it seemed like the cars were driving at a snail´s pace. Rachel and I were bouncing all around the aile of the bus along with another woman who was carrying a newborn baby. I still don´t know why nobody got up for her and offered her their seat. We finally got to sit down after an hour for the rest of the ride back to Quito. Buses here are hit or miss. Too bad we have to take about 20 more bus rides during our trip here.

Ooookay... so back in Quito, we had a ¨ladie´s night¨at our Irish friend´s bar on Monday night... then we spent an hour the next morning trying to find a fax machine for Rachel so she could fax her job contract to her new employer. However, apparently there is only one fax machine in all of Quito. We went into about 20 internet-telephone places that had signs advertising fax machines, only to discover that they actually didn´t have a fax machine or their machine was ¨broken¨. When we finally found one, it cost Rachel $16 to fax her papers! Ridiculous. After she faxed her stuff, we finally had the chance to go up the TeleferiQo on Volcan Pinchincha to get a view of the entire Quito county. The TeleferiQo is a cable car system that takes you up the slopes of Pinchincha to the top. It has a really cheesy themepark at the base called VulQuano Park. Hehehaha. It was a ghost town, but with really terrible rap music filtering through the park. It took about 8 minutes to get to the top, where again it was kind of a ghost town and none of the 10 or so restaurants were open. But the views were amazing! It was really cool to be able to see where we were living in Quito in relation to the rest of the city and all the nearby towns. We could even see Cumbaya, the town in the neighboring valley to Quito. However, we didn´t have much time to spend there since we had to get back to class at 2pm

Last night, Juliet´s African dance instructor invited us to his house because he for some reason wanted to cook dinner for all of us. He is half Benin, half French, and so is fluent in French as well as Spanish. He cooked us a traditional meal from Benin, which was delicious, and then told us that he wanted us to help him become the first singing president of Benin in the 2011 elections. He wanted the help of me and Rachel specifically becuase we majored in political science and he figured we could help him learn political theory. He kissed our hands because he was so excited that we could help. He said in return for our help, he´d cook for us every night. After dinner we watched about 100 music videos from African-French artists, some from Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and Benin. These videos are ones that we probably would have never seen in our lives if he hadn´t shown us! Definitely interesting. But also very confusing since they were all in French... too many languages at once! My brain was hurting. Then Revelejo (that´s really his name) forced me to dance some sort of dance called Zuklove to the music of a Colombian singer and suddenly we were all dancing in his room. I felt very silly because I don´t dance. But it was a fun night overall

Anyway, I doubt anyone has even read this far... this is all for me to remember my trip, too, so I don´t mind if you only skipped down to this last line

Tschuessi!
Kerri