so this is chau…for now?

i decided to switch my flight to thurs morn, (less than 24 horas!), so that i’ll have a bit more time to spend with the family before heading back to atx on 1/4. i feel as if things have been happening so quickly lately that i have had little time to digest this experience, so as for reflections, i have few.

academically speaking, i’ve learned a ton...politics, economics, anthropology…and i’ve made connections to come back and do research some more. and this experience has only made me more hungry to see other parts of the world. i can’t wait til the next opportunity finds its way to me and i can see india, russia, the middle east, africa...wherever life wants to take me.
but i think perhaps more importantly, i’ve learned a bit more about myself and about human nature. i’ve learned that i’m certainly not a “dueña de la verdad”, that there is more than one way to see the world, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be as rational. i’ve been saturated with beautiful scenery and generous people. i’ve learned a bit more about being patient when things don’t go as planned, about the importance of community, about being still, and about enjoying simple things...like the nights after dinner, when my ecua-mamá would make us sit with the grandson quietly and name all the sounds we could hear.

and in this season of advent, the time of hopeful waiting, of preparation, and also of action, its an appropriate time for a return to the u.s. although i’ve often had to sit back quietly while watching injustice here, which has been so frustrating, i can take all that i’ve learned here as a guide to be a more effective advocate in a place where i feel its more appropriate for me to act.

and now, as i sit in the university computer lab, traditional quito songs played by the university band stream through the windows accompanied by the mountain breeze. these songs and their joy, these mountains and their majesty i will carry close to me until i return here again.

hasta junio, el ecuador mío...

my tour of south ecuador

i ended my tour of the south EC today, a few days earlier than originally planned, but it was great. thurs after my test, i left quito and at 9 pm got to portoviejo, a town with nothing of interest but is a portal to the coast. i figured that since it was already dark it would be best to get a hostal near the bus terminal, but i ended up a really creepy place...$5, a pillow that looked like it had never been washed, what appeared to be blood on the wall, a barely locking door, really noisy and creepy neighborhood, two creepy guys working there...need i go on? i barely slept. when i got up at 5 am, i thought that maybe i wasn’t as cut out for this traveling by myself thing as i thought. there was a bus leaving for guayaquil in front of my hostal at that moment, so i thought maybe it was a sign to skip the beach part of my trip and go straight to guayaquil.

when i got to guayaquil, i decided to get some good pancakes in a nice hotel since i hadn’t eaten dinner the night before. i went to the grand hotel guayaquil and ended up being seated next to the owners of the hotel. i asked if they knew of a cheap, safe hostal in the area, and told them a little about my previous night’s experience. they said they didn’t know about hostals but that i could stay at their hotel for free, and paid for both my breakfasts there too! this is a place that costs $100 a night...i had my first consistently hot shower in four months, swam in a pool with a waterfall, and watched cnn en español on cable. it was such an amazing surprise! on friday i did touristy guayaquil, the malecón 2000 which is an urban renewal project along the bay with statues, botanical gardens, markets, museums, etc. at night i went to a symphonic concert on the bay and had a drink in a bar in las peñas, an restored cute old neighborhood. although all the quiteños say that guayaquil is dangerous, its definitely possible to walk around the malecón and las peñas alone at night, which is not really the case for quito’s mariscal...

the plaza in front of guayaquil's cathedral is filled with iguanas!

the next day i went to cuenca and met two environmentalists from colorado who were planning on seeing every national park and other nature parts of ecuador in three weeks...pretty sweet. cuenca is a quaint little city, with a cute river running through it, cobblestone streets, and tons of gorgeous architecture and parks. cuenca is also famous for panama hats (they’re not from panama!). i stayed in a hip little backpackers hostal with lots of europeans. saturday night began the novena of the baby Jesus, so the churches in cuenca were having mass with a procession afterwards with all the kids in the church dressed up as part of the nativity scene. they really went all out on the costumes, even matching shoes and painted faces. besides the usual shepherds and angels, there were every kind of animal imaginable, including rabbits and elephants, and i’m almost certain i saw a pirate!

one of cuencas many beautiful churches

sunday i missed the direct bus to ingapirca, the biggest incan ruins in ecuador. the bus left 10 mins early! who has ever heard of that happening in latin america? but it actually ended up being cool because a group of siblings my age from the ecuadorian coast were in the same situation, so we took the two-bus route to ingapirca together. ingapirca was beautiful and makes me even more excited to see machu picchu someday in the near future.



hanging out with ecuadorians is always an interesting experience, and this one was no exception. carol, the only sister, was constantly asking me funny questions like “have you met hilary duff? do they sell colgate toothpaste in the u.s.? how many pairs of shoes do you own?”
the ecuadorians weren’t that impressed by ingapirca, and when we got back to cuenca, they insisted upon going to a shopping mall. they invited me, so im ashamed to say that i ate kfc for dinner...then they played video games til their bus left. haha. carlos, the oldest of the group, consistently switched from ‘usted,’ ‘tu,’ and ‘vos’ while talking to me. that’s one thing i still haven’t figured out here yet. but i really do like the use of ‘vos’ here, as well as the use of the intimate ‘usted,’ like raul’s family all uses with each other. other talking observation: i had a more difficult time understanding my new mono friends (mono means monkey, but its what the people from the mountains call the people from the coast) because monos mush all their words together, but i really love the way they talk. sometimes i wish that i would’ve studied in guayaquil rather than quito, so i’d leave with a tiny bit of that accent...

other cool thing about cuenca: the cañari, an indigenous group in this area, have such beautiful clothing. the women’s skirts are shorter (to the knee) and they wear really tall colorful socks, and all their clothing (shawls, belts, hair wraps, etc) is different colors...bright pinks and blues, lime greens and orange! it totally clashes but somehow looks wonderful. and all their clothes is embroidered with tie-die thread. they also wear flat hats with tie-die feathers and fuzzy balls on them. its awesome!

by sunday night, though i’d had a great time seeing the south, decided i’d been traveling long enough, and took a night bus back to quito. this way i’ll have more time this week to say bye to everyone and pack my stuff. home in 5 days, craziness!

p.s. all my latest photos are here.

goodbyes, babies, bribes, and guinea pig

its been awhile! a long catchup entry...
two weekends ago was my last weekend teaching in cotacachi, they threw us a cute little going away party with gifts, i will never cease to be humbled by the generosity of these people! it was really sad to leave, but its so awesome to think ill coming back to do research there.
that sat i traveled all around northern ecuador near colombia. we went to the valle de chota, one of the areas with a lot of afroecuadorians.

interesting grain harvesting tecnique

we roamed some towns and lakes and hiked the “the angel’s paramo” which was filled with one of the most interesting plants ive ever seen.
the guy i went with later tried to take me to a hostal without telling me his plans (unless he was talking to me in secret ecuadorian sex code...) but thankfully i made it clear i wasn't interested. yet another example of the absolute ridiculousness of the guys here...machismo and everything associated with it is something i’ll never get used to.

the next week was the fiestas of quito, but i was more interested in getting all my final papers written (40 pages en español!) than celebrating the conquering of indigenous people with bullfights and too much alcohol. 12/6, the founder’s day, my fam took me to a typical foods festival, where there was no room to sit or even walk around, tons of greasy, smoky but delish typical foods, including my beloved llapingachos and buñuelos!


there have been lots of protests recently at the university down the street from my house (its public, bigger than u.t., and the most politically active) in which traffic has been diverted due to violence. the interesting (and sad) thing is that no one ever seems to know what they’re protesting until after the fact, and even then it gets little news coverage.

my ecuadorian sister had her second baby! he’s so adorable, and its funny how we visit and not really spend much time actually looking at/holding the baby, but somehow its just peaceful being in his presence. he still doesn’t have a name, after five days, which is interesting. also interesting...as relatives came to visit the baby, every single one kept saying “¡que blanco! ¡que hermoso!” (how white he is! how beautiful!) and to me, the baby didn’t look particularly white, mostly reddish and pruney like newborns often look. but how sad that white = beautiful! (another manifestation of the self-hatred demonstrated by mestizos, along with their anti-indigenous racism, etc).

i finally went to the mitad del mundo, the tourist trap outside quito where you can stand with a foot in each hemisphere.
i also finally ate guinea pig! (a favorite food of the indigenous people). it was...interesting. on the way there, i saw a pretty high concentration of fascinating street people, including flame eaters and a man selling live chickens in his arms in the streets. he later came on our bus and i was entertained by clucking the whole way home.


speaking of chickens, the other day my mom bought some wild chickens to eat, and asked me to help her prepare them. we sat around de-feathering, cutting off heads and fingernails, and pulling out hearts and livers (i felt like i was in 9th grade biology again!)

classes are ending, final presentations are being given and tests being taken. i’m pretty sure my absolutely awful human rights professor tried to bribe us yesterday by giving us pretty bookmarks just before handing out the class evaluations. i’m not so easily wooed, and circled “malo” (bad) on several questions, which she promptly looked at as i handed her back this “anonymous” eval. oh, ecuador.

yesterday i went to the guayasamín museum, a world-famous ½ indigenous quiteño artist, who almost always painted in social protest. he was friends with tons of famous people, especially radicals like fidel and a famous latin american social protest singer whose name escapes me. his most famous paintings have hands as the focus, because he believed that hands are very powerful and could express any emotion.
my favorite painting of his was of a church building. the whole atmosphere of the painting was very gray, except for the light in the doorway of the church (which was not escaping to the outside). outside the church were laying the marginalized…sick, old, unemployed. so powerful and well done. and such a good slap in the face and challenge for the church of today.

ill leave you with a cool quote in the video about guayasamín’s life, and try to do my best at remembering and translating: “some things pass from the skin in, and some things pass from the skin out. when these things coincide, painting happens.” i love it.

p.s. tomo when class is over, i’m headed to the hippie beach, guayaquil, cuenca, (two big cities in the south of ecuador), incan ruins at ingapirca, riobamba (town with highest concentration of poor indigenous people and the center for the theology of liberation movement in ecuador) and a scary roller-coaster-like train ride called “the devil’s nose”. ill get back two days before i go back to the states (the morn of 12/23), and i hope that ill write again, but if not, its been a pleasure! thanks for reading!