Ecuador

I´ve been sick during the past few days with a 102 degree fever so I haven´t done as much lately before and after Spanish classes. I was pretty upset the other day because I´d been sick, but since our house is ice cold at night, I wasn´t getting any better. Plus my host mom just told me to go to bed and I´d get better and didn´t really give me anything to help my temperature or body aches. Then I developed a crazy dry cough, which I still have, and Cecilia finally gave me something to help... a mysterious, sour green herbal drink. I´m not coughing now, so I guess it worked?

Our Spanish classes are going well. We´re learning a lot, but 4 hours a day is a really long time! I can tell even our teacher gets a bit tired at times. She´s our age, about 25, and is really sweet and intelligent. She works 8 hours a day here AND somehow goes to university. We were talking about life in Ecuador and she told us that basically she only makes $2 and hour for her work. She doesn´t have any extra money left over to travel or buy nice things, so Rachel and I feel especially bad when she asks us about our upcoming travels to make conversation... here we are, these two ¨rich¨American girls who get to go gallavanting around Ecuador and even go to the Galapagos. And Betty, our teacher, hasn´t even been to some of the nearby cities we´re hoping to go to. It´s really frustrating to know that everyone here works just as hard and as long as we do in the United States but they make so much less money. Betty told us that 60% of Ecuadorians make less than $2 per day and do not even have enough money to cover their basic needs for one month. On average, a ¨well off¨person makes $400 or more per month.... and here´s a shocker, the president himself only makes $4,000 a month. That´s considered ridiculously rich.

Jonna (the Dutch girl who lives with us) and I wanted to go shopping the other day to buy some warmer clothes since we both wear every article of clothing we own to bed as well as to class... we ended up walking around for hours in La Mariscal area going into various stores and local markets but didn´t find any warm clothes! We found a ridiculously expensive bookstore (the books cost more than the US price!) and then walked a bit around El Parque Elijido where a bunch of sketchy men of all ages stared at us, and then found ourselves in a very odd mall called Espiral. It´s named Espiral because it´s actually a spiral about 10 stories high... you walk around and around in circles until you get dizzy, or at least that´s what happened to us. The mall was filled with tiny gaming centers where boys in their bright blue school uniform sweats were playing video games with their friends, and there were also a ton of phone stores. But still, no warm clothes to be found! We finally gave up looking because we´d become dizzy and were falling asleep. We then looked around for a good place to eat lunch and almost fell asleep in our bowl of vegetables (I guess we stumbled upon a vegetarian restaurant). I´ve never seen beans that big in my life!

The other night a Norweigan guy arrived at our house. He´s very tall, has dreadlocks down to his waist, wears beachy clothes since he just arrived from the coast, and his name is Knut. I don´t really want to write much about him because during his first dinner with us, he put me on the spot and then made fun of the way I spoke Spanish. Nobody could believe he did that because 1) I had just told him I had only been learning Spanish for a few days and 2) he´s not even a native Spanish speaker anyway. He also called our host mom ¨tu¨instead of ¨usted¨when he first met her, so all in all he´s just an inconsiderate and rude guy. Really arrogant. Glad he´s only at our house for a week! Speaking of which, now that he´s at our house, we have a grand total of 8 people to one bathroom. Knut takes long showers and I noticed he placed a book in the bathroom to read on the toilet. Haha. This really is not a good sign, because there are 7 other people who need to use that bathroom, too! Oh, Knut... I don´t really like you. I hope other Norweigans are nicer than you.

Last night was really fun... Rachel and I met up with her friend Juliet after class and took two buses to a nearby town called Cumbaya (Cumbayaaaa my lord, Cumbaya... yes, like that). It took us forever to get there, going down a ton of windy roads, but we finally arrived and discovered that the town was MUCH warmer than Quito. If only we could live there right now, we wouldn´t be human icicles. Juliet´s other Fulbright friend Sarah lives there in a huge, nice, beautiful apartment complex that´s (get this) right next door to the amassador of Bolivia´s house (which, by the way, is an enormous 4 or 5 story mansion surrounded by a high electric fence. Too bad, because we wanted to knock on his door and bring him some of Juliet´s homemade chocolate cake and become friends with him. Well, at least that´s what Juliet and her friends are planning on doing so they can get invited to his parties). There were a bunch of other Fulbrighters there and we all had a delicious potluck for dinner and listened to cumbias music (the Ecuadorian equivalent of bad country music). The Fulbright people are all going to make up a silly ¨boy band¨dance to a cumbias song, inspired after a night in Cuenca when they saw an Ecuadorian boy band group perform in the streets... they seem like a fun, silly group of people They´re also friends with some Ecuadorians so I got to speak with them about life here... it´s good to meet actual locals instead of just travelers all the time!

Tomorrow we´re off to Otavalo, a town north of Quito, with a few other people from our Spanish school. It´s only $40 and we have all our transport covered, most of our meals, and a homestay with a local indigenous family in Otavalo (Otavalans are one of the largest idigenous groups in Ecuador). Apparently (attention Dad! just for you), we get to try cuy, aka guinea pig. I will be sad, but ´tis only a small bite. We´ll visit the nearby lakes and go canoeing, go on a short hike in the mountains, and visit the Saturday market in Otavalo, which is one of the largest in Ecuador.

I´ll write more about Otavalo once we get back next week. Until then!

Oh no.... damn it, it just started to POUR rain after a day full of sun. Bah!!! No umbrella today

So the canary who was nameless died yesterday. Boohoo. At least we still have Mozart and his friends to serenade us as we dine.

Rachel and I planned to go visit the old town, el centro historico, the other day, but somehow we ended up spending 2 hours on the internet trying to upload pictures unsuccessfully (it took about 5 minutes per picture, which is why I only posted a few ), then I got ripped off on the price and paid $3 extra for someones phone bill. We were starving by the time we left and thought, hey, lets go eat at that wonderfully cheap and delicious El Maple restaurant that Juliet took us to the other day! Good idea in theory, except that we got lost for about 40 minutes walking in circles trying to find it. Everyone we asked either said, ¨EL Maple?!!¨, as if it were entirely crazy that it started with ¨el¨, or they told us it was ¨very, very far away¨. We later found out from Juliet that we had walked right past it. Oops.

We wandered into a tour company office after our adventure getting lost and got some information on a cheap 8 day tour of the Galapagos from April 2 -9. When we walked in, it seemed that we were interrupting a party and about 6 people got up and left to go next door when we came in. I think they all then proceeded to get drunk and started to sing karaoke at the top of their lungs in really terrible off key voices, and we could hardly hear the travel agent over their singing.

Dinner that night was even more silent than before, if that is possible. Those who did speak a sentence or two did so in a whisper because it was so awkward to be the one to break the silence. We finished our food and then there was at least 2 full minutes of silence. Our plates didnt have a speck of food left on them and we{d drank all of our tea. We sat staring at our empty plates and I finally decided the silence was so unbearable I just had to say something to Rachel. I turned towards her to speak, and the second our eyes met we burst out laughing. I hope we didnt offend Cecilia too much, but really, I feel that she should be initiating conversation with us since we dont really know what is going on! (Sorry for the lack of apostrophes but I cant figure out how to type them on this keyboard.)

We went to another dance performance celebrating the day of women at the Casa de la Cultura that night with Juliet and her Fulbright and Ecuadorian friends. It was the opening gala celebration, which we didnt realize meant that we would have to sit through an entire hour of speeches in Spanish before we actually saw any dancing. I just about fell asleep because to me, all I could comprehend was that I was in a dark theatre, there were some women and men taking turns giving speeches, and everyone clapped every now and then. At one point they helped a man (who I think was some sort of ambassador from Colombia) onto the stage as if he couldnt walk, but then suddenly he was able to walk fine. Solidarity perhaps? Then everyone stood and sang the national anthem, they raised a big white sheet from the floor to the ceiling (apparently it was symbolizing peace?), and yes!... finally the dancing was about to begin! But no! it didnt. Instead a projector turned on and we watched a power point presentation with all the advertisers on it. Oddly enough, one of them was Applebees. By this time Rachel and I couldnt keep a straight face because our night had been so ridiculous so far beginning with our uncomfortable (but delicious) dinner. The dance group performing that night was from Israel and they were pretty good... once we finally got to see them. Their dancing was a mix of modern and ballet.

Later we went out with Juliets friends to a bar named after the musical Cats, though it was decorated with posters of ACDC and Fiona Apple. Makes perfect sense. We played foosball for the rest of the evening. From what I have seen it seems to be a really popular game here.

Hilarious story time... yesterday morning, Rachel and I did something very authentic. No, we did not eat guinea pig, nor did we take a salsa dancing lesson... no, instead we went to a step aerobics class in the park. There were a couple hundred people of all ages flapping their arms and jumping side to side to the beat of the loud techno music... grandpas, grandmas, little 3 year old girls, a puppy, even teenagers... all following the directions of the older male teacher who was wearing tight, bright blue spandex shorts and bouncing around on stage with the two other aerobics leaders who were wearing matching blue outfits. We took video, don´t worry.

After we were thoroughly worn out from exercising in the high altitude, we went back to Juliet´s apartment and made the most delicious tacos I´ve ever had the pleasure of eating, then a teeny tiny little car pulled up out front driven by Juliet´s Ecuadorian friend Fernando, we all piled in, and he drove us to the hills overlooking old town to visit the incredibly popular water museum. The museum itself was pretty cool, from what I could understand of our tour... we got to make bubbles in the bubble room, slide down some slides representing condensation, and then learn about water crystal formation in response to positive and negative sounds, phrases, and music. I was really surprised they included that in their museum. But the really wonderful part about the museum is that it has the most amazing view of all of Quito, plus all the other valleys and volcanoes around it. I took about 40 pictures of the same view. We all crammed back in the car again to go down the mountain into old town, where we ate an early pre-dinner (since Cecilia´s are kind of small) at a cute cafe and tried some interesting food and chocolate drinks that had some weird grains that you were supposed to pour into it. Then we wandered around old town in the rain... it´s really an entirely different world than new town. The buildings are so old and cute, the roads are all cobblestone and quite narrow. We peeked into a few of the churches but couldn´t go into the oldest one because it was Sunday and mass was going on. The guy who was driving us around that day acted as our unofficial guide and was really excited to tell us all about the history of his hometown.

As soon as we crammed into the car again, the clouds opened up and it just POURED rain... we had to take a taxi back home since it was raining so hard even our umbrellas wouldn´t protect us on our walk home. Good thing taxi rides are only about $1.50-3 here!

Last night all 8 of us at the house gathered as a ¨family¨ after dinner (which actually involved some talking this time) and watched.... wait for it... Sound of Music. Dubbed in Spanish. Cecilia knitted some socks for her daughter while we watched and made us some popcorn while the rain poured outside.

Random fun fact... people keep their dogs on the roof because they often don´t have yards. This becomes scary when you are walking down the street and think you see a giant dog statue, only to realize it´s actually a huge, living doberman pinscher when it starts barking at you like it wants to kill you.

Also, I told you how cold it was last time I wrote. Well, it somehow got colder. Rachel wore two pairs of socks, gloves, a beanie, 3 shirts, and her sweat pants to bed last night. And she was covered by five blankets. And she was still cold. How is that possible?

Besos,
Kerri

We arrived in Quito safe and sound but haven´t been able to use the internet much because our homestay doesn´t have internet. Our flight was perfect, no turbulence or anything, yay. We met an old couple in the Miami airport at our layover who wanted to have lunch with us, and they actually couldn´t land at Miami because of bad weather and had to circle around and around until their plane was almost out of fuel before the pilot finally decided to land in a nearby airport. At least we didn´t have that problem! And I´d heard so many terrible things about landing at the Quito airport, but we had a nice landing. Everyone clapped and congratulated the pilot and said they were amazed at his perfect landing.

Going through cutoms was a breeze. The passport officer asked me a bunch of questions about my life and we had a conversation like we were old friends... in Spanish. Funny thing, I didn´t think I knew Spanish. We were really excited at how easy everything was and how friendly people were. Our good luck ended, though, when we went to pick up our luggage and discovered that Rachel´s bag had been lost! And she realized that she didn´t even put a name tag on it. We registered it as lost, though (and it was delivered to our homestay at 1am that night thankfully!) and then finally went outside to meet the guy who´d take us to our homestay. It was around 8 or 8:30pm at that point. He was really friendly and the whole ride home we again spoke only in Spanish. I was so surprised that I could form sentences and understand him. He thought Rachel´s first name was Lipton.... hehe. ¨So which one of you is Lipton and which is Kerri?¨

Our homestay is amazing. We live in La Floresta, which is a really nice residential part of town on the western side of Quito. Our apartment complex is on a hill that overlooks a beautiful green valley and some other moutains and it´s soooo gorgeous.

We´re on the 3rd story of the complex in a pretty big apartment with 5 bedrooms. Rachel and I are sharing a bedroom that has a view of the Volcano Pinchinca and some of the city.

The house is filled with about 100 paintings that our host mother´s son painted and there´s an altar to Jesus with a candle that´s always burning in the living room.

Our host mother is a retired pediatrician named Cecilia and she´s so sweet... she´s always making sure we have enough layers on when we go out because Quito is freezing and rainy right now, and she´s a really good cook! She has 2 daughters who also live with us (aged 18 and I think 22) and then there are 3 other students learning Spanish like us, all girls from Canada, Holland, France. We also live with 4 canaries named (Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, and apparently the other one is nameless) and the sweetest, most affectionate laborador in the world named Camila. She thinks she´s a cat and if you start to pet her she just puts all her weight into you and kind of slides to the floor and then lays on her back with her feet up. Oddly enough, she has a really loud, ferocious bark and so she makes a great guard dog for the apartment complex. Rachel and I already decided we are going to take her home with us We get breakfast each morning (including fresh squeezed juices of fruits I´ve never heard of, like ono and a tree tomato), and the canaries serendade us as we eat. Dinner so far has been mainly chicken in some delicious sauces with her ¨secret ingredients¨ and rice or potatoes and a side of veggies. We have tea with every meal, even dinner. Milk comes in a bag, which I find really funny. So far dinner has been really awkwardly quiet and Rachel and I almost burst out laughing the first night. We all eat together at 6pm as a ¨family¨ and serve ourselves, then Cecilia says grace, and then it´s complete silence for the entire time we´re eating. You can hear knives and forks clanking on the plate... and me sniffling because it´s so cold out and I´m drinking tea. Sometimes there will be 30 seconds of lively conversation but if no one has anything else to say it´s another 5 minutes of silence. Haha.

The first day we were here Juliet met us at our house and took us around the new town. She´s here on a Fulbright scholarship and knows Quito pretty well already. We discovered a cool, alternative film cinema a few blocks from our house called Ocho y Medio and had some hot chocolate there. I kind of fell asleep on Rachel and Juliet at that point, maybe it was altitude sickness or jet lag. Each month the films change... this month its German films by Fassbinder That night we went with our whole house to see a free dance show at the big cultural center in town... I think it was a kick off performance for the Day of Women which is one day this weekend I think. They seem to be really big on celebrating that day because there are weeks of celebrations and dances planned before and after the holiday all over the city! The performance we saw was really great, especially considering it was free. It was about 2 hours of modern, ballet, and traditional Ecuadorian dance pieces.

The next day we ran some errands, got memberships at South American Explorers Club (discounts for everything, plus they also have a cute guard dog named Yali), managed to order some food in Spanish for lunch without the help of Juliet (giant sandwiches!), and then we had our first Spanish lesson at Yanapuma from 2-4pm. Rachel and I are taking classes together and our teacher is Betty (make sure you pronounce the t´s very clearly). She´s our age or a little bit older and is a great teacher! After speaking only Spanish with our host mother for the past 2 days and then taking our first lesson with Betty, Rachel and I are already having full on conversations in Spanish... although very basic, but still, it´s pretty cool that we already know so much We walked to the internet cafe today trying to speak only in Spanish to each other and somehow it worked. I didn´t realize I already knew so much from living in San Diego but random Spanish words just randomly pop out of my mouth and make sense. Yanapuma itself is a great organization and we´re really happy we chose them as our Spanish school. There are a lot of European students (mainly Belgian, Dutch, and French) and everyone is very friendly. They´ve got a lot of fun classes organized, too, like salsa dancing and cooking classes so we can´t wait to take some of those. Next week we´ll try making shrimp ceviche.

Last night we went out with Juliet and her Fulbright buddies to La Mariscal, also known as ¨Gringolandia¨... even though all the young Ecuadorians go out there, too! It´s where all the bars, clubs, hostals, and really good restaurants are. We got a ¨to go´ drink that is called ¨Cane lassi¨. It´s pretty odd because it´s actually a hot alcoholic drink that you sip through a straw. We walked around a bit more (in the rain with our really attractive rain coats on) until we found a small bar that was playing some salsa dance music. We stayed there and danced for a few hours with all the Ecuadorians. Wherever we go, we get these really obvious and awkward stares because we stand out so much, and it was no different at the bar. But I think after they realized we could dance salsa, or at least look like we were dancing salsa, they stopped staring at us like we were martians. The whole time everyone was dancing, there was a giant movie screen with an Asian car movie playing behind us. It didn´t make sense, but oh well. After we left the bar, we were given cough drops as a present by the doorman. Apparently it´s considered candy here.

So Quito in general is a pretty interesting city. It´s really colorful and loud, but there are some quieter neighborhoods like ours in La Floresta. So far we´ve only been to the New Town and the neighborhoods within it, but today we´re hoping to take the Trole (also 25 cents) go straight to the Old Town where all the cobblestone streets, cathedrals, and musuems are. The buses here are giant, blue smog machines that hurtle around corners at lightening speed and don´t exactly stop completely for anyone to get on or off. The good thing about them is they are only 25 cents for a ride to anywhere in town! One of Juliet´s Fulbright friends offered to show us how to get on and off and pay on our way home the other day because she lives right by us.... someday we´ll master getting on and off ourselves. Pedestrians have no rights here, and often there aren´t even any crosswalk signs anyway so you just have to go when it looks clear. Our Spanish teacher told us that the main cause of death in all of Ecuador is actually car accidents, above even cancer and other health problems. It´s really rainy in Quito at the moment, apparently it´s noramlly 1 week of sun and 1 week of rain but lately it´s been 2 weeks of rain or so we´ve been told. The rain is so bad that 4 or 5 entire provinces are in states of emergency because they´ve been flooded. It´s mainly the coastal areas to the west of us. Everywhere we go people are collecting donations and supplies for the people in those areas. We heard that we might not even be able to bus out of Quito to certain towns we wanted to visit because some of the roads are washed out... hopefully in the next 3 weeks thing will clear up.

Hm.... what else.
-Grey´s Anatomy is on at 6pm so we always get to watch about half of it before we´re called to dinner.
To get into our apartment it´s necessary to use 4 keys, but you really use the keys 8 times because in order to get OUT of each door you need a key to unlock it, and then you have to turn around and lock it again.
-There are little kids selling things at all times of day... in La Mariscal last night there were little kids selling packs of cigarettes to everyone in the rain, and just now as I was writing all of this two little boys came up to me and begged me to let them shine my shoes. It´s really sad. But it doesn´t seem like ít´s as common as in Southeast Asia though at least.
-Juliet said that oftentimes people here will do things just to feel productive, but really they aren´t doing much at all to fix anything... she pointed out the street directions as an example... one day, the street we were on was a 2 way street, and then the next day someone had changed the directions of the arrows and the street was now one way.
-Food here is cheeeeeeeeap! We had a FEAST for lunch the other day at a really delicious restaurant called El Maple. We had 3 courses... eggplant delicious something, vegetable soup, a main course of quinoa, veggies, and other delicious mystery things, and then a strawberry crepe for dessert. All for $2.50. I was actually pretty stuffed by the time I had finished the soup!
-It´s cooooold here! Especially in our house because there is no insulation or heat. I wear sweats to bed AND I have 5 blankets on top of me and I´m still somehow cold. I feel like I´m camping.

Picture of the street below ours, down the hill a bit:

Okay, I think that´s all for now. I´ll try to figure out how to put pictures in these journal entries soon! Hopefully when I come home I´ll be pretty good in espanol I´m thinking after all that I´ve learned in 3 days that it´s a real possibility.

Kerri