So I’ve been trying to stay away from the internet as much as possible- if you read that article about me, you’d know I’m trying to wean myself off of those so called creature comforts and go back to the bare necessities. That being said, I have my kindle, 2 nice cameras, a laptop, and a flip video camera at my disposal and a veces I find myself checking my email on my kindle before I go to bed. I only have one small request, instead of emailing me (or posting on my facebook, as those get sent to my email tambien) about updating my blog, how about updating me on what you’ve been up to. I understand that you are all interested in what I’ve been up to and what my day-to-day life is like, and I promise I will try to be better at updating my blog, but it’s a little disappointing to have half of my emails be requests about updating my blog… let’s all promise to make a change so that what little time I spend on the internet can be a little bit more worthwhile for everyone involved.
Sorry to start my first post on this new blog (you can all thank Sarah for this, apparently the other one wasn’t to her liking) like that, but I figured I should nip this in the butt (bud?) before it started to become a problem and I had to take drastic measures- like erasing the blog or something crazy. Anyway, on to what you’ve all been wondering- what I’ve been up to the past week or so since my last update:
We had a Resiliency conference in Cuenca the other week. Technically we aren’t supposed to leave our sites for the first 3 months, but this was a mandatory conference, so we all got a free trip to Cuenca out of it. Cuenca’s awesome. It’s either the second or third largest city in Ecuador, I forget. Supposedly there is a pretty big underground music and art scene there, but we weren’t really there long enough to get to experience that. Needless to say, I’ll be back plenty of times in the next 2 years- it’s only a 5-6 hour bus ride away. The conference itself was a joke, we had a day of Resiliency training while we were in Cayambe for training and the best part about that day was that it ended early. The conference was for 3 different clusters (Riobamba, Cuenca, and Loja) so there were close to 60 other volunteers there from all of the different Omnibuses currently serving in Ecuador. It was really cool to meet all the different people and hear about their experiences. Some of them are only months away from their C.O.S. (close of service), which means that they’re a little jaded at this point, which is kind of a bummer but not that surprising. I mostly hung out with other people in my same Omnibus who I don’t get to see often- the ones who live near Cuenca and Loja. I felt like I was back at May Convention, only we were allowed to go out on the town at nights and there definitely wasn’t as much praying. We had to do skits about different ways to deal with the language barrier. I wasn’t the lead (just a little old tienda owner) this time, but every line I said definitely got the biggest laughs and people even came up to me afterward and told me how funny it was. I guess I’m good with the Spanish one-liners, who knew? The spiked coke bottles that my friends and I snuck into the conference could’ve had something to do with it also…you never know.
After the conference, we all headed back to our respective sites. I’m pretty sure I brought some amoebas back with me, but I didn’t feel like going through the hassle of sending in stool samples and all that business so I just sucked it up and stayed close to the bathroom for the next few days. Manuela made me some tea with special medicinal herbs in it and they kept telling me that I needed to eat more because I was getting too skinny- first time I’ve ever heard that, I knew I was going to like it here.
This past weekend there was a fiesta for the city of Cebadas. I kept asking what the point of the celebration was, but I was just met with blank stares and a few sentences of rapid fire Spanish about Cebadas, so I’m still not exactly sure. Whatever the reason, there was a huge stage set up right in front of the family’s tienda, in the town square, and on Saturday night around 8 pm a string of 5 or 6 different Ecuadorian “artistas” sang/ lip synced some songs until the wee hours of the morning. At first people didn’t seem that into it, but around 10 or 11, the boxes of wine started flowing and I felt like I was back at that wedding that I had gone to with Manuela and Lucho when I first got here. Luckily, this time I had an excuse not to drink from the communal cups (my alleged amoebas), but even that didn’t deter the most insistent Cebadans. I mostly hung out in the tienda with the rest of the family floating in and out. At least a couple times an hour, I would get the same string of proposals- a group of guys would walk into the tienda and buy either a box of wine or a bottle of really gross flavored vodka, they would see me hanging out with the hermanos (brothers) or some of the primas (cousins) and would come up and offer a sip of whatever they had just purchased. I would decline, graciously, stating my beechos as the excuse. Next, they would offer me a cigarette figuring that a little fumando never hurt anyone. Again, I would decline, graciously of course. Finally, as a last ditch effort, they would offer me some gum (they sell individually wrapped pieces of Trident in most of the tiendas so people usually buy a handful), to which I would finally accept. Needless to say, my jaw was sore for the next day and a half from all the gum I chewed that night. Just like at that wedding, everyone was beyond excited to get the gringa to dance. Now, I’ve never been the biggest dancer in the group, but even I can hang with the campo shuffle (literally side step more or less to the beat, sometimes go in circles, but only if it’s getting crazy). The only problem with the campo shuffle is that the second you try to add some personalization to the process, you end up screwing up your partner’s rhythm and then the whole thing is botched and you just have to suck it up and go back to side stepping until the song is over. Eventually, after pretty much everyone in town was bien burracho (good and drunk), I walked home with Lucho and Jose Luis at 3:30 in the morning and slept in until 8ish the next morning only to walk back to town to do it all over again.
Sundays are usually market days in Cebadas, but this Sunday, there was a special event- bull fighting. Of course, the one day I left my camera back at the house there were finally some photo ops, but as The Format says in their song Inches and Failing, “pictures only prove you can’t convince,” so I’ll do my best to paint the picture for you, sans photos. There was a makeshift bull-fighting ring that everyone crowded around, boys pilled on the perimeter fence, little kids peeking in through the pieces of wood that made up the fence. One side of the ring was the side of a little hill, so a lot of people- myself included- climbed on top and looked down on the fight from above. Inside the ring, there was one angry bull and about 10-15 (I’m pretty sure most of them were drunk) guys standing around waving their ponchos around and then running for dear life as soon as the bull started heading their way. At one point, one of the taunters threw his poncho down, ran over to the fence and dove into his friends’ laps causing a few pieces of wood to fall off the fence and the whole crowd to gasp. After about a half hour and a few bull changes, Jaime, Sara and I had seen enough so we headed back to the tienda to hang out with Manuela and the boys. Eventually, since it was starting to get cold and rainy, Manuela and I walked back to the house, stopping to talk to every single person we encountered along the way. After helping feed the puercos (pigs) and sacar la leche de los vacas (milk the cows), we headed inside to prepare dinner; you guessed it more soup!
I’m all about lists these days, so far I have a Post PC list (a little premature, I know), a Things From Home list, and a To Do June 2010 list. Add to that my list of observations from the last update and now my newest installment: books read so far in Ecuador. Since arriving in Ecuador I’ve read 10 books and am in the middle of about 4 others. Here they are with my rating (scale of 1-5):
Fear and Loathing in L.V.- Hunter S. Thompson (4)
Gonzo: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson- Multiple authors including Jann Wenner, Johnny Depp and Corey Seymour (3.5)
Shantaram- Gregory David Roberts (3.75- could have been so much better if it wasn’t so god damn long and descriptive)
Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger (4)
Franny and Zooey- J.D. Salinger (4.25)
Ender’s Game- Orson Scott Card (4.5)
White Tiger- Aravind Adiga (3)
2BRO2B- Kurt Vonnegut (3.75)
In Cold Blood- Truman Capote (4)
And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks- William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac (4)
I’m in the middle of (I have a little bit of reading ADD, so I like to jump around a bit):
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert Pirsig
Call of the Wild- Jack London
Time Traveler’s Wife- Audrey Niffenegger
It’s not that I don’t do anything during the days; it’s just that there are huge breaks in between chores so I have small windows of free time. With my kindle fully stocked with over 250 books and my external hard drive (which was packed with almost every movie imaginable) broken, I have plenty of time to get my read on.
Well, that’s all for now. Hope this will keep you guys satisfied at least for the next week or so until I venture into Riobamba to use the Internet next. Love and miss you all!!
Oh p.s. thanks to those of you who sent me news articles, it didn’t work out exactly how I was hoping because I couldn’t open the attachments on my kindle and by the time I got to a real computer and could open them, the articles were out of date and I wasn’t as interested. I think I’ll just have to settle for an issue of The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time (and/or Rolling Stone, Filter, Spin, Adbusters, Economist, Entertainment Weekly, etc) or something slipped into a care package every now and then! And maybe shoot me a quick email on anything drastic that is going on in the world that you think I should know about!
Sorry to start my first post on this new blog (you can all thank Sarah for this, apparently the other one wasn’t to her liking) like that, but I figured I should nip this in the butt (bud?) before it started to become a problem and I had to take drastic measures- like erasing the blog or something crazy. Anyway, on to what you’ve all been wondering- what I’ve been up to the past week or so since my last update:
We had a Resiliency conference in Cuenca the other week. Technically we aren’t supposed to leave our sites for the first 3 months, but this was a mandatory conference, so we all got a free trip to Cuenca out of it. Cuenca’s awesome. It’s either the second or third largest city in Ecuador, I forget. Supposedly there is a pretty big underground music and art scene there, but we weren’t really there long enough to get to experience that. Needless to say, I’ll be back plenty of times in the next 2 years- it’s only a 5-6 hour bus ride away. The conference itself was a joke, we had a day of Resiliency training while we were in Cayambe for training and the best part about that day was that it ended early. The conference was for 3 different clusters (Riobamba, Cuenca, and Loja) so there were close to 60 other volunteers there from all of the different Omnibuses currently serving in Ecuador. It was really cool to meet all the different people and hear about their experiences. Some of them are only months away from their C.O.S. (close of service), which means that they’re a little jaded at this point, which is kind of a bummer but not that surprising. I mostly hung out with other people in my same Omnibus who I don’t get to see often- the ones who live near Cuenca and Loja. I felt like I was back at May Convention, only we were allowed to go out on the town at nights and there definitely wasn’t as much praying. We had to do skits about different ways to deal with the language barrier. I wasn’t the lead (just a little old tienda owner) this time, but every line I said definitely got the biggest laughs and people even came up to me afterward and told me how funny it was. I guess I’m good with the Spanish one-liners, who knew? The spiked coke bottles that my friends and I snuck into the conference could’ve had something to do with it also…you never know.
After the conference, we all headed back to our respective sites. I’m pretty sure I brought some amoebas back with me, but I didn’t feel like going through the hassle of sending in stool samples and all that business so I just sucked it up and stayed close to the bathroom for the next few days. Manuela made me some tea with special medicinal herbs in it and they kept telling me that I needed to eat more because I was getting too skinny- first time I’ve ever heard that, I knew I was going to like it here.
This past weekend there was a fiesta for the city of Cebadas. I kept asking what the point of the celebration was, but I was just met with blank stares and a few sentences of rapid fire Spanish about Cebadas, so I’m still not exactly sure. Whatever the reason, there was a huge stage set up right in front of the family’s tienda, in the town square, and on Saturday night around 8 pm a string of 5 or 6 different Ecuadorian “artistas” sang/ lip synced some songs until the wee hours of the morning. At first people didn’t seem that into it, but around 10 or 11, the boxes of wine started flowing and I felt like I was back at that wedding that I had gone to with Manuela and Lucho when I first got here. Luckily, this time I had an excuse not to drink from the communal cups (my alleged amoebas), but even that didn’t deter the most insistent Cebadans. I mostly hung out in the tienda with the rest of the family floating in and out. At least a couple times an hour, I would get the same string of proposals- a group of guys would walk into the tienda and buy either a box of wine or a bottle of really gross flavored vodka, they would see me hanging out with the hermanos (brothers) or some of the primas (cousins) and would come up and offer a sip of whatever they had just purchased. I would decline, graciously, stating my beechos as the excuse. Next, they would offer me a cigarette figuring that a little fumando never hurt anyone. Again, I would decline, graciously of course. Finally, as a last ditch effort, they would offer me some gum (they sell individually wrapped pieces of Trident in most of the tiendas so people usually buy a handful), to which I would finally accept. Needless to say, my jaw was sore for the next day and a half from all the gum I chewed that night. Just like at that wedding, everyone was beyond excited to get the gringa to dance. Now, I’ve never been the biggest dancer in the group, but even I can hang with the campo shuffle (literally side step more or less to the beat, sometimes go in circles, but only if it’s getting crazy). The only problem with the campo shuffle is that the second you try to add some personalization to the process, you end up screwing up your partner’s rhythm and then the whole thing is botched and you just have to suck it up and go back to side stepping until the song is over. Eventually, after pretty much everyone in town was bien burracho (good and drunk), I walked home with Lucho and Jose Luis at 3:30 in the morning and slept in until 8ish the next morning only to walk back to town to do it all over again.
Sundays are usually market days in Cebadas, but this Sunday, there was a special event- bull fighting. Of course, the one day I left my camera back at the house there were finally some photo ops, but as The Format says in their song Inches and Failing, “pictures only prove you can’t convince,” so I’ll do my best to paint the picture for you, sans photos. There was a makeshift bull-fighting ring that everyone crowded around, boys pilled on the perimeter fence, little kids peeking in through the pieces of wood that made up the fence. One side of the ring was the side of a little hill, so a lot of people- myself included- climbed on top and looked down on the fight from above. Inside the ring, there was one angry bull and about 10-15 (I’m pretty sure most of them were drunk) guys standing around waving their ponchos around and then running for dear life as soon as the bull started heading their way. At one point, one of the taunters threw his poncho down, ran over to the fence and dove into his friends’ laps causing a few pieces of wood to fall off the fence and the whole crowd to gasp. After about a half hour and a few bull changes, Jaime, Sara and I had seen enough so we headed back to the tienda to hang out with Manuela and the boys. Eventually, since it was starting to get cold and rainy, Manuela and I walked back to the house, stopping to talk to every single person we encountered along the way. After helping feed the puercos (pigs) and sacar la leche de los vacas (milk the cows), we headed inside to prepare dinner; you guessed it more soup!
I’m all about lists these days, so far I have a Post PC list (a little premature, I know), a Things From Home list, and a To Do June 2010 list. Add to that my list of observations from the last update and now my newest installment: books read so far in Ecuador. Since arriving in Ecuador I’ve read 10 books and am in the middle of about 4 others. Here they are with my rating (scale of 1-5):
Fear and Loathing in L.V.- Hunter S. Thompson (4)
Gonzo: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson- Multiple authors including Jann Wenner, Johnny Depp and Corey Seymour (3.5)
Shantaram- Gregory David Roberts (3.75- could have been so much better if it wasn’t so god damn long and descriptive)
Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger (4)
Franny and Zooey- J.D. Salinger (4.25)
Ender’s Game- Orson Scott Card (4.5)
White Tiger- Aravind Adiga (3)
2BRO2B- Kurt Vonnegut (3.75)
In Cold Blood- Truman Capote (4)
And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks- William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac (4)
I’m in the middle of (I have a little bit of reading ADD, so I like to jump around a bit):
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert Pirsig
Call of the Wild- Jack London
Time Traveler’s Wife- Audrey Niffenegger
It’s not that I don’t do anything during the days; it’s just that there are huge breaks in between chores so I have small windows of free time. With my kindle fully stocked with over 250 books and my external hard drive (which was packed with almost every movie imaginable) broken, I have plenty of time to get my read on.
Well, that’s all for now. Hope this will keep you guys satisfied at least for the next week or so until I venture into Riobamba to use the Internet next. Love and miss you all!!
Oh p.s. thanks to those of you who sent me news articles, it didn’t work out exactly how I was hoping because I couldn’t open the attachments on my kindle and by the time I got to a real computer and could open them, the articles were out of date and I wasn’t as interested. I think I’ll just have to settle for an issue of The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time (and/or Rolling Stone, Filter, Spin, Adbusters, Economist, Entertainment Weekly, etc) or something slipped into a care package every now and then! And maybe shoot me a quick email on anything drastic that is going on in the world that you think I should know about!
thanks sooooo much for the blogpost...i too am trying to reduce my desire to hear from you more often and so far i am failing...lots of time for me to work on that though! love you!
ReplyDeleteRach! great blog post. thanks for using the new one. so much better. you are funny. and i miss you a lot.
ReplyDeleteYes...Much easier to read. We are doing well....Maddie had her first gymnastic recital today. We got lots of video and pics so we will share. She is talking up a storm. Nathan is smiling and starting to make noises. We miss you!
ReplyDeleteI'm catching up on your blogging! I like everything so far...except for the part about you bringing home some amoebas. That grossed me out as I pictured little leaches clinging to your intestines. Ok, drastic, I know. But remember I live with two little girls who wake up in the night because they think that snails are crawling all over them. What an adventure you are on~ I can't wait to read more!!
ReplyDelete