More Touristy Tales

Let’s see…where was I, even? Having days that are packed with stuff to do both gives one lots to write about and keeps them from actually writing about it. And then last night I finally had a night with nothing to do and ended up crashing at 9:30. Sleep is nice. I’ve nearly forgotten how to use an American keyboard (that’s what happens when your laptop is only used for watching Sailor Moon and playing mundane card games). Bueno, let’s see…

Last Saturday we went to Otavalo, where there’s a high indigenous population and a huge artisan market that we spent a day at. I got gifts for a few people and a hammock-chair-thing for myself, which I’m very excited to put up in my apartment (though I might need to devise a clever hanging maneuver). They sell all kinds of things there—jewelry, little trinket keychain things, American brand clothes (likely counterfeit equals fodder for my project), spices, backpacks, T-shirts, meat (luckily I didn’t happen upon any cuy (that’s guinea pig)), what have you. It's pretty cool, but once you realize how similar each vendor's merch is, it starts to seem just like a flea market in the US (which, don't get me wrong, I love). And I'm sure all the tourists that go there (myself included) buy things in hopes that they were made by small family-owned artesanal companies, but some of the things could have very well been mass produced in factories. And we talked in class about how a lot of the indigenous people still wear traditional clothing, but others who work in the tourist industry wear it because it's what travelers are expecting when they look for an authentic experience. We talked a lot about the tourism industry in class today, and how some people (mainly in Peru) charge tourists for spiritual cleansings/training to be a shaman and do the workshops while leaving certain things out (like the indigenous belief that white and mestizo people come and steal the body fat of natives and sell it to Western makeup companies) and don't tell a lot of the history, just what the tourists want to hear about. And certain rituals are supposed to only be done once a year since, according to traditional belief, they extract a lot of spiritual energy from the earth, but they do them a few times a day for tourists. I mean we haven't done anything like that, but it makes me really uncomfortable being a tourist anywhere, knowing that the activities I partake in might have huge rammifications for someone.

Anyhow, after that we went to visit a family that makes and sells instruments and plays music. A woman showed us how to make a pan flute and a few family members played music for us. Also that weekend, we went to a place where they collect reeds and make baskets and got to try basket-weaving. I thought we'd be able to each make something, but instead some of us just got to weave one row of something. I was bummed, but even a small basket would've taken forever, I realize. What else? I need to make it a point to write things down right after the fact cause I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff.

Anyways, I'll write again if I remember stuff. There was a waterfall, too, for example. And I'm going back to Otavalo, which should trigger my memory.

Anyways, and then there was a big volcano.

Let me introduce you to my friend Cotopaxi. It's a few hours from Quito and one of the highest active volcanoes in the world, and the second highest summit in Ecuador. It's on the Equator and yet it's freezing and there's a shitton of snow on it, if that's any indication. And the wind. Yeah, so we've all been advised on altitude sickness and cold and potential snow/sleet ish and stuff like that. And they might've mentioned that it could get windy. But when we got there even our instructor said that the wind was the worst he's ever seen it. December/January's the leasy windy time, see, and we were at the opposite of that (might be total troll physics?)

Anyways, so we're trying to make it to this refugio hut where you can buy tea (Coca leaves are illegal in Ecuador, but processed as tea leaves it's sold to help treat altitude sickness) that's like not even a third up the mountain. And we're walking on sandy gravely stuff so when you take a step you slide back two. Oh, remember the wind? It knocked me over maybe three or ten times. And sunglasses were necessary. Not for the sun (there was, in fact, zero visibility at times so sun wasn't an issue), but for the sandy gravely stuff. It likes to be picked up by the wind so it can lovingly hit you in the face. Anyways, I was holding onto the trip organizer with all my life as we went up, and he decided it wasn't safe and that we were going back. I never would've given up on my own, but it was definitely for the best. He tried to beckon everyone else down, but they were determined. So I went down holding onto our Andean culture professor's friend as he went to retrieve another student. Getting down was pretty awful, too. I nearly fell on my face. A big rock hit me in the ankle and I again tumbl(e)d over. It probably wasn't that big, I didn't see it. But it hurt like hell. Was not a happy camper. I felt kind of like a failure when I got back to the bus, but I was glad to be back and in retrospect probably would've keeled over and died somewhere on that mountain. The only reason I really wanted to do it was to redeem myself after chickening out of the cascades in Mindo. But, you know, keeling over on an active volcano isn't quite worth it. And I introduced the professors to Sporcle back on the bus. And the altitude gave me an excuse to eat an entire package of lemon wafers, since sweets are supposed to help (I didn't feel that sick, but they were yum). I won't get too much into when I tried to pee outside the bus, but remember the wind?

Afterwards we went to and Incan tambo (a resting point for Incan messengers and warriors) turned into an hacienda, turned into a hotel and restaurant. It was gorgeous and they brougt llamas out for us and we got canelazo (a hot alcoholic drink) without the alcohol (so apple cider essentially) and there were ducks. It was really gorgeous, but afterwards our professor pointed out how they've tried to erase the place's history as an Incan site conquested and more or less turned into a slave plantation. So many place here try to make money off of the site's indigenous history, but once met with a darker side of history it's just completely ignored.  Now in retrospect it does just seem like a place owned by a wealthy white family where workers of indigenous descent served us, a bunch of privileged foreigners. And they apparently charged us a lot a lot for some soup and salad (which was delicious, but not filling at all).

I'm sure stuff happened during the week, but I'm blanking. We've been trying to walk more to counterract the fact that this place is carb city. I think we're hiking this weekend near Otavalo when we're not celebrating the Incan sun god. Umm, yeah, I'll get back to you on that.

This weekend...let's see...Saturday we went to Papallacta, which houses lots of hot springs and is on the frontier of the Andean region of the country and the eastern jungle area. So we were thinking jungle=not as cold, right? Nope. Try hopping into a steaming hot pool when you're acclimated to cold mountain temperatures. Try getting out of a steaming hot pool in the cold mountains. Unpleasant much? But it was still fun, and much more pleasant than the hummingbird garden before then. Just like nobody told us about the climate there, nobody told us this garden constituted of a muddy trail we'd be walking on through a cloud forest instead of a closed in area like the butterfly garden. Nobody told us we were going into a cloud forest where it would rain. Maybe we could've looked it up, but all the other trips have had a packing list, so we thought the lack of one just meant all we needed was a swimsuit. Muy bien.

Sunday we went to a football game and rooted for Liga. Which means nothing to any of you, but we got pretty into it. So it sucked when they tied the other team (Olmedo, I think). 1:1. But it was cool watching the obsessed fans in one section of the stadium, with their banners and fireworks (we weren't allowed to bring water bottle caps into the stadium since they could be thrown at the players, but fireworks are totally cool. And people have died at Ecuadorian soccer games because of fireworks, but you know, they're prettier than plastic caps.) Afterwards we went to the mall and ate sushi and ice cream before seeing Piratas del Caribe in 3-D for only like 7 dollars. Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz. Happy Happy. Which reminds me, I have a copy of Blow to watch. Anyhow, our other option was the Hangover 2. Spanish title? Que paso ayer (What Happened Last Night?) (I've finally nearly gotten the hang of Spanish-language titles only having the first word and formal names capitalized). I'm disappointed that the Ecuadorian title for Hangover isn't El chuchaqui, the term here for hangover/hungover (which stems from Quechua).

Monday we ate lunch at a restaurant at Mariscal Foch (where there are bars and a few clubs that apparently aren't the safest at night, but it's quite nice during the day) and went on a wild goose chase looking for medicinal herbs to bring in for class (though we had no intention of using them, it's what the profa wanted), wound up in a place that wasn't La Marin but looked exactly like it, and immediately gave up. I also picked up someone's thesis on recent intellectual property issues in Ecuador. A law thesis written in Spanish. My brain's going to hurt for quite some time during and after writing this paper. But I'm actually getting really into intellectual property issues and interviewed an IP law professor at school today, who was really friendly and helpful...and she went to WashU for law school! So that was way exciting. And meant that whenever I tripped up on Spanish we could talk in English. But we didn't need to revert to English much, so go me!

I'm sure there's plenty more to write about, I'll try to write fairly often the next two weeks. Gah, only two more weeks left. One more weekend essentially. Le crazy.

All she wants to do is dance! (And write entries that´ll scare her family)

So, this one time I had to do this activity where we had to think about instances in which we took advantage of being the gender that we were. I blanked and stammered out something like “I get out of doing a lot of heavy lifting at work”. Other people came up with things that were hellsa insightful and my response was way mundane in comparison.

But, k, I have a good one now:

This weekend I was able to cling to a tour guide begging him to hold me tight as I nearly cried, and I wasn’t ostracized by a culture replete with machismo for it. We were a bajjillion feet up in the air and zooming by ginormous trees at who knows how many miles per hour.

Yup, I did another zip line. 

I’m pretty sure after I panicked throughout the 5 lines or whatever we did in Alaska I said “never again” (save a few shaky glides through my high school’s tiny ropes course). But this weekend we were in the lindo town of Mindo (lindo means beautiful if you didn’t take middle school Spanish) in the cloud forest, about 2 hours away from Quito. And the trees were so pretty and I so wanted to feel what it was like to soar high above them like a pájaro bonito (pretty bird). Actually, I had just already proved myself to be a total chicken earlier that day and wanted to redeem myself. Needless to say, I failed. Let that be a teaser for you while I ramble about other stuff.

Woooah, we’re halfway there…

So we got in on Saturday night and the next day we took a tour of Quito and the surrounding area. Lots of gorgeous churches and the presidential palace where guards stand outside stone-faced in uniforms whose style dates back to when Ecuador was part of Gran Colombia. And a lookout nearby where you could see these gorgeous mountains and farmlands in the distance (I forgot to stick the battery in my camera so no pictures now, but I’ll steal them from someone else later)

We also went to La Mitad Del Mundo, where there was a museum about Ecuadorian cultures that housed part of the Equator. After learning about various indigenous groups and Ecuadorian plants, our tour guide took us to the equatorial line so we could do various activities. One involved closing our eyes and trying to walk the line; era difícil. Another was meant to exemplify that we have less strength on the Equator (but I’m a weakling anywhere so I didn’t really prove the point). Some people got to balance an egg straight­-up on a nail, since it’s possible there. And we examined the Coriolis Effect by pouring water down a drain on either side of the Equator and right on the line. On the equator it doesn’t spiral at all, it just rushes out the drain. Gjreggit 33uu4igjrijg so cool! I had a video, but it´s not working, so it´ll have to wait.

 Like, it’s crazy how everything works differently if you move an inch in either direction. One unfortunate consequence of being on the equator? The sun sets about the same time year round, which is at around 6:30, just when at home I’d be getting excited for longer days. Limits the amount of time I can spend goofing off at the internet café since I need to be home before dark. Probably a good thing (especially when I have to pay for internet if I’m not at the university), but when I get back I’m going to spend like a week Tumbling nonstop. So don’t make any 4^th of July plans with me (I get back July 2, have I mentioned that yet? In case you were wondering. And don’t actually leave me Tumbling alone on the 4^th, please. Though I’m sure I’d have plenty of company on the internets. )

Summer School (Fall/Winter School? A little after Rainy Season School? I don’t know what to call this season)

We’re taking two classes at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (I’ll throw in here that the name’s fitting because with the fog and scary-steep roads, Quito reminds me of what I imagine San Francisco, CA is like): one in conversational Spanish (where we compare Ecuadorian and U.S. Cultures) and one on Andean culture (where we have to write a 15 page paper in the end. En Español. Most of the group, including me, has never written anything that long in English). In that class we’ve been talking about pre-Incan cultures and we’re moving on to the Inca and then Spanish conquests. I’ve learned about those topics a bajillion times and they’ve never really interested me, but once we get into the modern social problems unit it’ll be really cool. The campus is located in Cumbayá, a little ways away from Quito and the school grounds are gorgeous. I can use internet there (it’s not that expensive at the internet cafes, but still) and once all the other eating places on campus open in June, I can eat things other than caprese sandwiches (update: yesterday I found a place that takes our campus cards with seitan…carne de gluten! It’s called Wok n Roll and when we went the first time, Aerosmith played throughout our meal. Also they have a really good strawberry fountain soda in Ecuador that I always get.) Speaking of food, because of scheduling confusion we rushed out the door on the first day and I didn’t know we were leaving that early and didn’t have time to eat breakfast. So I sat through a few hours of lectures of all the ways we’ll get mugged and killed on this trip with a as my stomach screamed in agony, only to then take a tour of all the food places on campus. It was still an hour before I got any of the food, and even then they forgot to make the vegetarian dish so I picked at a plate of rice until they brought the soy chicken out. They eat a lot of starch here. Like, bread, rice, and potatoes at every meal. I’m not complaining.

I’m leaning more and more towards doing my research paper on intellectual property (driving back from Mindo I saw a pet store that used Blue from Blue’s Clues in their logo and a restaurant that used Sylvester the cat). I’ll probably include research on agricultural knowledge since that’s the kind of intellectual property I’ve been studying for the past semester. But it would be really cool to study the people that juggle in the streets here; when the light turns red they all run out into the crosswalk, and tonight I saw that when it gets dark they juggle fire. They usually accept tips, but I can’t imagine they make enough to sustain themselves doing it.

Let’s see…what else…oh, last night I either got robbed by a taxi driver or he was just incompetent at his job; I can’t tell which. Five of us were coming back from Cumbayá after dark last night and we called a cab, since that’s what you’re supposed to do so you don’t die on the bus. The thing never showed up. So after waiting eons for a taxi with a legit company/number/license plate to pass by we finally hailed one and got in. At first he was all, “Oh, we have to go a round about way since the tunnel’s closed”, which made sense, so he dropped the first four off and chatted with us about his time in Spain and blah blah. Then I told him my address and he was all “What sector of the city is that?” And I didn’t know, but it was like 2 minutes away from the last girl’s house. So he starts driving and I realize we’re going the wrong way and he’s like, “No, no, we’ll find it.” So then later he’s all “okay, where’s your house?” And I give him a map that he can’t read and at first when I offer to call my host mom for directions he’s all “No, that’s fine” (if it weren’t for that detail, I’d be leaning towards a mere fail of a cab driver, but as is…sketchball). Eventually he agreed to get directions from mi madre and we made it to my neighborhood…and then hit my one-way street in the wrong direction. So we circled around and he missed the turn so we ended up going down the street the wrong way anyway, at my insistence. I wanted to argue with him over the two dollars extra that the trip cost since we got lost, but my desire to get home and get the eff away from him won over. And getting that lost would’ve cost like 10 bucks in the US so I couldn’t complain too too much. And I’m not sure how convincing I would’ve been in Spanish anyway. But, yeah, transport here is just generally nutso.

Speaking of taxis, let’s talk about the ones in…

¡Lindo Mindo!

So the first step to going adventuring in Mindo is hopping onto the back of a pickup truck, where you stand while holding on to a metal bar as you’re transported to whatever bonkers (MS Word doesn’t like my use of the word “bonkers”. “Consider revising”, it says. If Word came with a paperclip still it’d be crying. Sorry, Word. Word up.) activity you’re attempting to do in the forest. At one point I ducked down to avoid being smacked in the face by a tree but instead hit my head against this bar. Read on for another head injury. But it was a fun bonding experience keeping our balance as these “cabs” coasted down bumpy mucky country roads, if nothing else.

So our first stop was a series of waterfalls we were to rappel down. When the truck dropped us off, we still had a 30 minute uphill hike, and by the end I was panting and dizzy and ready to pass out, even though I’d had plenty of (store-bought, bottled, microorganism free) water. Not good conditions for climbing backwards down a bunch of slippery rocks when you already hate heights. So I opted to go last, and before I even got over the first fall I started slipping and sliding and freaking out, so I eventually opted to go not at all. So back down the hill, and travelling downhill isn’t necessarily easy if the trail is way-steep and muddy. When I got to my resting point I met an American who had retired to Cuenca (the third biggest city in Ecuador) and was waiting for his wife to finish rappelling. He was just learning Spanish; apparently there’s a pretty big community of English-speakers who retire to Ecuador since it’s inexpensive for them, though. I took some pictures of the rest of my group as they climbed down the final waterfall and plopped into a big pool of water, and off we went for lunch at our new hotel.

The night before we’d stayed in a hotel that looked great (very trendy eco-lodge-esque, with hammocks and a swimming pool) on the website, but once we got there we decided we weren’t staying a second night. Chintzy tin roofs, grody bathrooms, pillows with sketchy stains and the like. Some political rally was going on outside.  And a baby next door that wailed all night. None of us got much sleep. Great for adventuring the next day!

So our next hotel only cost a dollar more per person and was gorgeous in comparison (or just gorgeous in general…hummingbirds and orchids and stuff). It’s owned by an American who’s been in Ecuador since 1987 and is currently working to build a clinic in Mindo. She was really friendly and helpful. And had 2 dogs, one of which had really soft ears. The dogs are allowed free roaming throughout the hotel and pretty much throughout Mindo and know their way around. And this hotel had delicious food, and all of their fruits and vegetables were sterilized so I was able to get a strawberry smoothie without any worries (they use the word “frutilla” for strawberry instead of “fresa” here). There was another restaurant that we went to for dinner both nights to get fajitas…they even had vegetarian ones om nom.

So after lunch on Saturday (sorry for the non-extant chronology in this entry) we went back out to do my favorite treetop activity. The first few lines went alright, since we took off from the ground instead of a dinky tree platform. But by line four of lucky thirteen I was ready to get down. Nope. The lines got faster and longer and that’s what she said and there was no backing out. On one line I didn’t like the way I was gripping the…whatever you grip on to…so I leaned forward to move my hands. My forehead grazed the wire (they didn’t give us helmets for rapelling, but they proved useless here) and everyone saw and was really concerned. No giant lacerations on my face, though. Sad day. After everyone else got a chance to ride with the guide while flying Superman-style or upside down, I rode the rest of the lines attached to him, rightside-up, still wimpering the whole time. But it was comforting having a treetop cuddle buddy (though afterwards he invited another girl in our group dancing. [sarcasm] You won’t believe how broken up about it I was [\sarcasm]. And it really was beautiful up there, when I was willing to open my eyes. In the end, after hopping in the back of another truck, a much-needed shower, and more fajitas, I was glad I took the leap, as it were. 

Before leaving on Sunday, we went to the Mariposaria (butterfly garden). I remember once when I was little being all excited to go to an indoor butterfly exhibit and then getting there and freaking out upon realizing that I was in a giant room of big flying bugs. Apparently, when it comes to the bigger butterflies, my fears have not subsided. I love the idea of all butterflies and like most types of them in actuality, but whenever one of those came close to me I shivered a bit. So of course they were the friendliest, most clingy butterflies there. I at one point realized there was a butterfly on my back and was all, “Oh, cool! What kind is it?”, to get an unfortunate answer. Seeing that one of these big ones had been latched to one girl’s leg for an hour as she walked around, I asked someone to take it off of me. But a pretty little one landed on my shoulder and looked just like a brooch. The butterflies were generally way friendlier than the ones in Key West; I remember trying really hard to get one to land on me there to no avail. They also had a board where they pinned up chrysalises that were about to hatch, and we got to see multiple butterflies emerge and dry off their wings (a gross brown liquid dripped off of them and out of the cocoons all the while). These young adults (how long does long adulthood last when you only live for a month?) started off wet and droopy but by the end were almost ready to start flying around. It was way cool. Miracle of life and ish.

Eco-tourism has its issues, with environmental degredation due to transport and Western infiltration in indigenous areas and whatnot, but overall the things we did didn’t seem to have too harsh a footprint on the earth, minus some trees cleared for the zip line. It seemed like a pretty substantial number of Ecuadorians travel to Mindo, so it’s not just foreign tourists taking advantage of the attractions there, and shorter distances traveled mean less pollution because of planes and stuff. So yay. Ecotourism’s another thing I’m considering writing about.

Driving back from our mini-vacation, we were met with another reality: little shanty towns on the outskirts of Mindo and Quito where people live year-round in houses looking like the hotel we suffered through for one night. Graffiti scribbled onto highway walls advertising numbers one could call for an abortion. Generally run-down areas. There isn’t as much overt poverty in Quito as I thought there might be, but in rural areas it seems really rampant.

K, so that’s a depressing note to end on, so here’s a nice little privileged-gringa-traveling-in-Latin-America ditty for y’all, to lighten the mood:

 Despite the fact that this place is way cray cray, I actually am having a lot of fun and my possessions and my being are still intact. Happy day.

Sorry that this entry’s way-long. But you know what? They’ll prolly get longer; we have a packed couple of days ahead. We had dinner with one of our professors tonight (he told us about even more crime in Quito, but otherwise it was a really chill dinner in an amazing restaurant with lots of vegetarian options) and dinner with an Ecuadorian friend tomorrow and Casa Blanca (a resort town in Esmeraldas, on the coast) for the weekend. That one hotel’s website was deceiving, but I’m willing to believe from the pictures of this place that it’s gonna be gorgeous. And fun fun fun fun. So, yes, I’m looking forward to the weekend.

I still like comments when people read entries, if you’d like. Even if it’s just “hey, it’s blablabla, I read your blog. Have fun and be safe!” I also like Freecell. A lot. I just played 4 games in a row. I’m getting good at it.

If y´all are super nice, I´ll upload some pictures of Mindo for you. I probably will anyway. But yeah.

Ciao, loves!