Week 3/Otavalo

1/20/09

            Happy inauguration day!  In honor of the occasion, Catherine played Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to start out our biology class, and then we were dismissed an hour early so that we could watch the inauguration on a large screen in the theater at USFQ (with all the other gringos).  I’ve never been a very political person, but hearing MLK’s speech and watching the ceremonies on TV were pretty touching, and I’m very excited to see what will happen in the next four (eight?) years.  To celebrate, a bunch of us went to La Mariscal tonight, and one of the best parts of the night was when I learned that a couple people live in the same general direction as me, so I was able to share a cab on the way back.  I was also able to watch part of the Australian Open on TV at an Irish bar.

Mati had four puppies today, and I was particularly surprised because I didn’t even know she was pregnant.  My parents aren’t too happy because the puppies are mutts, and so it will be hard to find homes for them, but hopefully I can take a few home with me.  I seemed to be the only happy person in the house after hearing the news of the newborns.

 

1/21/09

            About 80% of the students on this program are sick right now, and it’s probably only a matter of minutes until I get sick too at this rate.  A group of seven or eight people went to a restaurant two days ago for lunch, and almost immediately after eating they all felt sick.  One girl has had a bad cold for a while, and another developed a rash that she thinks came from a plant at El Pahuma.  Two people got sick after going out last night.  One girl has E. coli because her host parents didn’t purify her water, but I think she’s recovering.  Two students had to leave biology class this morning because they weren’t feeling good, and three left their Spanish class later in the afternoon. Also, three people have been robbed so far.  Either I’m really street-smart (not likely) or really lucky.

For lunch I had a pizza crepe from the university and an entire package of María cookies (about 40).  Best lunch ever.

            Every day, I become extremely tired at 3pm, which is right in the middle of the time I spend at the daycare.  I always want to lay down on the mattress that’s sitting in the corner of the room, but there’s always about six passed out 3-year-olds piled on top of it, so I would feel kind of awkward shoving them aside.  To keep myself awake, I try reading stories to the children who are also awake.  Today one of the girls asked me why I can’t speak Spanish well, and then she handed me a songbook that was in German, so I was able to attempt two things I’m really good at: singing and speaking in German.  I got through one page but the girl (Michelle…a lot of the children don’t have normal Latin American names) didn’t like it and made me start over.  Then we colored stars in a coloring book.

 

1/22/09

            The kids need to learn how to share- a lot of them wanted to use the swingset, but there are only 3 swings and so many had to wait.  I decided that each kid would receive a certain amount of pushes before they had to get off and let the next kid swing, and each time I enforced the switch, the child forced to leave would start bawling…as if he or she didn’t see it coming.  Also, for the third day in a row, someone on a swing hit Isaac (a boy who Melissa and I thought was a girl until we learned his name, very recently) in the head because he was standing too close to the swinger.  I’m hoping he’ll learn sometime soon to not walk close to the swingset while it is in use.

            Some interesting conversations occurred at the dinner table tonight.  After my host parents found out that I am a lifeguard during the summers in Madison, they wanted to employ me to watch over the maid (Francisca) as she does the laundry, because she’s so short that she needs a stool and a scoop in order to grab the clothes out of the laundry machine and dryer and my parents are afraid she might fall in.  Also, somehow we wound up talking about child obesity, and my dad asked me how much I weigh.  When I answered with 160 pounds, he amusedly pointed out to his wife that it was the same as her weight.  I think I was the only one who felt awkward, because she didn’t seem embarrassed or anything; she just nodded in agreement.  Obesity is pretty much non-existent in Quito (and probably most of Latin America)- I can’t recall seeing anyone who looks obese, and only a couple people I’ve seen are slightly overweight.  I remember coming back to the US from Spain, and noticing immediately the conspicuous increase in people’s weights, so I’m sure I’ll experience the same feeling when I return to Madison in May.

            I have so much reading to catch up on, but I’m going to Otavalo (the largest market in South America?) this weekend so I won’t have much time to read.  Every night this week, after I returned home from the university, I’ve tried to do some reading but each time I’ve ended up falling asleep within about ten minutes.  After dinner, I feel even more tired.  Writing is usually more fun than reading, so I’m able to stay awake (usually), but the amount of reading has been steadily accumulating and I can sense that next week, when we have an exam, I won’t be able to get much sleep.

 

1/25/09

            A LOT happened this weekend- I’ll try to describe it chronologically, but I may switch to thematically.  On Friday, the plan was to meet a group of four or five other students at a bus stop and then walk over to a bus station in order to go to Otavalo, but unsurprisingly I ended up arriving almost twenty minutes late to the bus stop, and no one else was there.  It had begun to pour (this was only the second time that a downpour has occurred since I’ve been in Quito…usually it’s just cloudy and pretends to rain a little bit) so I decided to hurry to the bus station alone, hoping that everyone else would be there.  As I was hustling down the river-like street (whenever cars or buses would pass, a tsunami would pound into my legs), I felt a slight tug on my backpack.  I turned around, but no one was there- instead, a woman (who [whom?] I would later find out was wearing Otavaleña clothing) was a few feet to my right, jogging down the street at a slow pace, with some other women in similar garb jogging a few yards behind us.  At first I thought they were just running because the weather resembled a monsoon, and they were trying to find shelter (the entire crowded street seemed to be in panic), so I kept walking briskly.  The thing that made me most suspicious was that none of the women ever passed me, even though they were jogging.  At that moment I wished I had taken karate lessons as a child so that I could practice my moves on these women, but instead I took the more passive way out and stopped on the side of the sidewalk while I waited for the women to (finally) pass me.  Upon inspection of my backpack, I found that one of the smaller zippers was wide open, but luckily the only items inside that pocket were a blue dry erase marker, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, and earplugs that I bought in Spain 1.5 years ago.  And a band-aid.  Apparently the woman didn’t find anything of value, so I can’t say that I was officially robbed (although I haven’t been able to find a package of Kleenex that I think used to be in my backpack).  However, if my hand sanitizer had been taken, I would have been furious.  I’m pretty confident that if something valuable WAS stolen, I could have easily chased the women down and tackled them, although I’m not sure how socially acceptable that kind of behavior would be.  They weren’t that fast.

            When I finally arrived at the bus station, not only was I Kleenex-less, but I was also soaked and still couldn’t find my friends, so after assuming they left without me, I hopped on the next bus to Otavalo (if I had waited about ten more minutes, I probably would have seen them).  I met an old Ecuadorian man who had lived in St. Paul for five years, so he could speak English decently.  I wanted to practice my Spanish, but every time I tried asking a question, he would answer in English.  Apparently he is the head of some important environmental/economic agency, and right now he’s working on a project to improve the irrigation system somewhere in northern Ecuador.  It seemed like an interesting internship possibility, but I’m pretty sure I will do my internship in the rainforest.  And northern Ecuador (near the border with Colombia) is supposed to be extremely dangerous (even more dangerous than that street by the bus stop).

            The most unforgettable event of the three-hour bus ride was when we were approaching Otavalo, and the bus began slowing to a halt.  It was dark outside, so I couldn’t see much, but I could hear shouting, and hordes of people were gathered in a semicircle around the street.  As the bus approached the scene, I glanced down and saw that a man’s body was lying in the middle of the opposite lane, face-down and motionless, with blood trickling down his arms.  Although I didn’t see it happen, I was shocked and felt like the wind was knocked out of me for a few seconds.  Except for a few funerals, I had never seen a dead body before and even as I’m writing this two days after it happened, the image is still vividly engraved in my mind.  As the bus left the scene, we passed ambulances heading towards the victim.

            When we arrived in Otavalo, I was surprised with how easy it was to find the hostel where we made our reservations.  The town is so small that I only had to walk about five blocks (and more importantly, I only had to stop once to ask for directions).  It was called Valle de Amanecer, and definitely ranks within the top two hostels I’ve ever patronized (I really liked the hostel in Granada, Spain…and the one in Barcelona was cool too except for the drunk Kiwi who stayed in our room and almost urinated on my brother, but caught himself and proceeded to go on the wall outside our room instead).  Valle de Amanecer was a hippie-themed hostel, with incredibly nice employees, an open courtyard in the center, hammocks tied underneath shady trees, and no showers—actually there were showers, but no one used them because we didn’t bring towels.  Most importantly, breakfast was complimentary, and each morning I ordered pancakes with fruit (banana, papaya, and pineapple).  Another benefit of the hostel was its two-block proximity to the street market.  But anyways, after arriving, I checked in and the man behind the desk told me that a few other gringos had just left to go eat dinner, but they weren’t the ones I was supposed to meet at the bus stop in Quito.  Unwilling to go out alone to find them, I went into my room and began feasting on Maria cookies (clearly a better choice than going out), but about ten minutes (and 7/8 of a package of cookies) later, I breathed a sigh of relief because from my window I could see my friends checking in at the desk.

*All this talk of Maria cookies initiated a craving, so I just ate the last eighth of the package.  I’ll need to go shopping for more tomorrow.

            After eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant, we tried looking for a bar but Otavalo was surprisingly quiet even on a Friday night.  We heard music coming from down a desolate street, so we followed our ears and although no one was in the bar, we stayed there the rest of the night (later, however, a few people trickled in and out). 

            The next morning, we experienced the Otavalo market in all its glory.  The main plaza was just two blocks away from our hostel, but Saturdays are the big days, so tents and other craft stands were spilling into streets many blocks away from the plaza.  The artisans and their crafts lined both sides of the streets, and wide streets contained three rows of tents.  Some streets, however, were so narrow that there was only room for a two-person wide aisle in between the rows of tents, and there were so many people filling every square inch of street that body-surfing would have been a more practical mode of transportation.  The colors amazed me the most- the majority of the merchants were selling clothing, blankets, or hammocks, and each tent was filled with a plethora of color, like a deliciously tempting bowl of Trix.  The food tents were equally as amazing.  Fruits of every color were arranged in intricate pyramids, whole pigs were roasting over grills on the street, and I must have seen thousands of bananas.  Meanwhile, the Otavaleños were shouting how much we as customers needed their products, or how happy our parents or siblings or girlfriends would be to receive a gift.  A split second of eye contact with an artisan could kindle a fifteen-minute conversation about their product (and perhaps fifteen more minutes of bargaining) involving taking down or unfolding every single blanket in their table-high stack and forcing the customer to feel each one, and they would not accept no for an answer.  If I could describe the market in three words, they would be bustling, exhausting, colorful, jackhammer…alpha male.

            What better way to end our Saturday than with a cock fight?  We were told that every Saturday at 7pm, cock fights were held in a nearby arena.  I’ve always been opposed to most types of animal cruelty (I love eating meat, and I think bull fights are fine…unless you watch amateur bullfighters trying tirelessly to kill an exhausted bull who slowly gets weaker and weaker until it just gives up and falls over), and Saturday night reconfirmed my beliefs.  After waiting about three hours, the fights finally began around 10:00 (I guess Ecuadorian time is amplified in Otavalo).  We only stayed around for three fights, none of which lasted over 6 or 7 minutes, but the worst one was the third.  One of the roosters was clearly losing and it knew it didn’t stand a chance against the other, so whenever its owner would set it back on the ground, it always tried to jump back into the safety of the owner’s arms.  Since that didn’t work, a good half of the fight was the weaker rooster trying to run away from the other one.  Top three gruesomest parts of the last fight:  the losing rooster accidentally stabbed its own eyeball with his hind talon; the owner would place the entire rooster’s head inside his mouth to suck off any blood; all fights end when one of the cocks can’t stand anymore, but for the last one the rooster clearly couldn’t stand and yet the fight continued for about thirty more seconds.  Olé!

The next morning we woke up early again and went to Laguna Cuicocha, a lagoon situated in a volcanic crater.  We had to take a bus and a pick-up truck (my third time this month riding in the back of a pick-up truck- they’re becoming my preferred method of transportation).  Unfortunately, it was a bit cloudy and we couldn’t see past the mountainous edge of the volcano, and so we couldn’t see the snow-capped Cotopaxi in the distance, but what we could see was beautiful.  The lagoon was dark blue and clear, and two dome-shaped islands sat in the middle (they reminded me of Lost).  Beyond the volcanic mountains lay miles of rolling pastures, which now seem more of a nuisance to me (deforestation sucks).  We hiked part of the way around the lagoon (the entire hike would have taken five to six hours), but turned back early in order to return to Quito before nightfall