Galapagos Jan 31

I woke up very early that day to help Jacob with his project which is counting sea lions on a particular beach. Only problem: Jacob kept sleeping, leaving me sitting on the steps waiting for him. It was fine, though, because I had a nice conversation with the owner of the hotel about things you need to do to own a tourist operation successfully.

Once the day officially started, we did a lot of touring and seeing sights. We went to the highlands to a crater lake called Lago Junco. It was very misty and foggy and we could barely see anything until all of a sudden the fog cleared and there was this giant round hole that looked like something out of middle earth. Actually, most things in the Galapagos look like things from fantasy novels, expect many references in the coming entries.

After that, we went to a turtle breeding station. Turtles are so slow and cute when they walk! Their bodies are just not designed for fast movement. We learned about the different verities of turtle on each island and how they developed.

We took a long, hot hike through desert like craggy trees to this gorgeous beach. It looked like some sort of Caribbean fantasy, flour sand, clear sky, turquoise waves. We ate horrible, huge quantities of fried rice that was what was for lunch every day. Now I understand the bio kids complaints. We swam and played and lay in the sun in that beautiful locale. And then walked the hot walk back. Some unmentioned friends did not want to put on their shoes and tried to run 3k back on volcanic rock barefoot. There was a lot of screaming.

On the way back, we passed a hill with wind turbines. It’s a good idea because there is a lot of wind there. Back in town, we had hours to kill. Stew, Iggy, Jamie and I hung around for a while eating ice cream and looking at the sea lions. It's sort of ridiculous how the sea lions act there. There is this playground by the beach and they just lie around on the benches and in patches of shade. They barely notice if you get close, until you get too close and then they snap and bark at you. Beyond the playground there's a beach where endless sea lions lie and cuddle like bums. There is a constant low-level of movement, adjusting and twitching and snuggling closer. It’s adorable and alien.

We found Natalie and she bought us milkshakes and we talked about if English is better than Spanish. No conclusion was reached. We ate dinner, walked around the sleepy beach town, sat on the roof of our hotel and talked about the stars and space and constellations. We also had a discussion about breast milk which would become a prominent theme in the coming days.

Highlight: sea lion viewing, beach appreciation.

"""""""""""

"After months of placing it accidentally," she said, "I have finally realized the location of the quotation mark on the Ecuadorian keyboard."

"Oh, yes indeed. Instead of using the ümlat sign placed ¨awkwardly¨around phrases and sometime ïnterfearing¨when words start with vowels, I can instead press ´Shift´and then ´2,´" she crowed.

"And how did you encounter this epiphany?" asked the lady waxing the floors.

"As all brilliant scientists do, by accident! Looking to form the ´at´symbol, I pressed simple Shift instead of the mysterious ´Alt G.´Of course, when I pressed 2, no @ came out, rather the glorious and long saught-after "! What glory! Praises be!"

She muttered herself to sleep.

And Just One More

To celebrate the end of school, its time for one more session of precious spanish class memories.

Sample sentances showing our brilliance in Spanish

I fell in love with that girl because she has a car

You look grated

We had some heavy use of a word meaning "dead body":

You look like a dead person because you are skinny

I got happy because I don't have to see a dead person

It's going to be great when the dead person in my mom

To sleep means to shut your eyes and dream of someone sexy

I became poor after I hunted my life

Michael Jackson turned himself into a ghost

When I arrived in Ecuador, I turned into a drunken woman (said by a man)

While in the forest, they stumbled upon, accidentally, some people from the FARC

Finally, I found a naked bar!

And my personal favorite:

The situation turned serious after the pregnancy test turned red

Funny and Vulgar

I love this! Its totally not PG-13, but it fully describes how messy languages are.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable

Spañol Class

Here are some more gems from our Advanced Conversation class.

¨I began the growing of my infant¨

¨She drank a lot of coffee and now she has jackets¨

¨My grandpa got false teeth as of yesterday.¨

¨As I ran from the police, I thought, ´Aye, Carumba.´¨

¨I had to be a good grandson and help my grandfather find his fake arm!¨

¨She was raised by two potatoes.¨

¨We will go to the game so that we can have a good climate.¨

¨The more you speak, the more I hate you.¨

¨In the long run, I will convert myself into a very genteel man.¨

¨Our plan to visit grandpa has failed because she has skills.....I mean dead.¨

¨I have been taxed these papers upon the copy machine.¨

¨I wish I could stop my own personal vices!¨

¨We lack food so we will have to eat these ten brawny athletes¨

¨I didn´t get along with him well because he is a violent attack.¨

¨This weekend I dealt with guinea pigs.¨

¨This Gucci looks great on my muscular body!¨

and just one from my sociology teacher

¨They say that you can´t mix apples and oranges. Well, you can, and you get a delicious fruit salad of statistics.¨ Any K kids want to pass that one on to Dr. Nordmoe for me?

Idiot Grin

here are some nicely stupid things I have said recently.


papanicolau is not the word for "Papa Nicholas," even though they sound the same. It means
pap smear. whoops.

The word for a snobby rich person isn't peluquero, its pelucon. Peluquero means
barber. so I was calling kids at my school hairdressers. What an insult.


And then everyday for class we make up sentences with our vocabulary and verb lists. Some of the funnier results.

"She abused our friendship when she gave my money"

"The closet took advantage of World War II"

"The all fled from the happiness of the restroom"

"When I went to touch the rat I looked for a package that was not dead."

"He really worries about the criminal system while resting at night."

"Your BMW tastes good always"


"facebook was discovered in one thousand, two hundred and four"

As I'm sure you all understand, we do it for the lolz

Talky Talky

Here are two interesting/funny anecdotes relating to linguistics from the last two days.

1. I read one of those comic-book style textbooks about linguistics. It was really interesting, but then I caught myself applying Chomsky´s rules of language acquisation to my life! BF Skinner said that childrne learn language through correction and positive and negative reinforcement through their parents. Chomsky said that this isn´t true, that kids don´t just make random guesses at words, they create rules. Today, I felt myself create a rule. In spanish, coverings for things often have the prefix ¨sobre¨and then the word. I was looking for the word ¨Pillowcase¨ (and a pillowcase itself), and I called it a ¨sobrealmohada.¨ Even though that´s not the word (its almohadón), I felt my logic-brain think of how Spanish views coverings for things and what they call them. I´m learning!

2. This one is funny. We were in improv class, and we had a reading to do in English. the teacher was explaining some words in English that people might not know.
Teacher: (Spanish) Ok, so one word is ¨Joker.¨ Who knows what joker means?
Student 1:(English)Batman´s enemy
Student 2: (English)¨WHY SO SERIOUS¨
Student 3: (English) The late Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his preformance in The Dark Knight
Student 4: (Spanish) Heath Ledger died, you idiot!
Student 3: I know! That´s why I said the late
Student 2: He passed away!
Student 4: So ¨Joker¨means ¨dead¨?
Teacher: (Spanish) Ok, let´s move on. Theater of the Oppressed was founded by a Brazillian, Agusto Boal, who actually died about a year and a half ago.
Student 2: What a joker

Un Ratito

So, my buddy Daedal is studying in Greece, and he wrote

dana, in my ethnography class today we got to talking about ecuador and how they used to have the same sense of time as the greeks in that it is event-based rather than time-based. apparently a few years ago the government decided that they were going to change this and make it so that meetings and other various things always started right when they said they'd start. i'm wondering if this was actually successful and if it's changed or if you find that the culture is still event-based instead of time-based like the US? let me know :-). blockquote>

I wrote back,

its really a mix. I also learned about the event based thing, but not in relation to the greeks. I learned about it as a ¨polychronic¨vs ¨monochronic¨which are such totally greek terms. Anyway, so most of western culture is monochronic, but Ecuador +Latin America + ancient greece were polychronic, so they are really into multitasking and not worring about time things, partially due to the fact that there are no seasons, so there´s no real rush to make it through the hard part of the year like there is when you have a winter.

Acutal manifestation of this: the word ¨un ratito¨ is super common. it means ¨in a little bit¨and its totally appropriate to say it to anyone, in a business meeting, on the phone, whatever, and just ignore the other person to do something else. So un ratito is still in effect, but classes, meetings, importatnt stuff starts on time, and my teachers get mad if you arrive late. However, dinners, going out, casual stuff is usually late. Usually things start on time, but end up running over so the second parts start late. Like my friend George came over when he said he would, at nine, but we didn´´t actually go bikining until 945. Its just less stress about time.

Socks and school

Hey faithful blog readers,
Sorry I have been a little shoddy about updating this baby. I also haven't showered for like three days, and I keep wearing the same socks. But I'n not smelly or anything. Just conserving. Oh shoot, the reason I keep wearing the socks is that I don't have any clean clothes, and the reason I don't have any clean clothes is because I hung them up to dry on FRIDAY MORNING and it has rained twice since then and been really windy. My clothes may all have blown away.

Despite being possibly damned to one pair of socks for the rest of the trip, i have to say that I'm doing well. Acutally, I was talking with my ma and sister and skype quit on us, so that;s sort of a bummer, but doing well over all.

Making friends at USFQ, all of whom seem to have somewhat messy ponytails, ladies and pimps alike. and someone who knows gus voorhies. One way I'm spending time with friends is in the computer labs, gringos cluster between classes, furiously checking facebook and sending emails all seemingly titled "Life from one degree south." I know this because the computers have huge screens and everyone can see what you are typing. I have seen three breakup emails so far.

Another thing that's been happening is improving my vocabulary. For my spanish class, we spend an hour each class talking about verbs and how they are complicated.
EXAMPLE:

Acabar- to end
Acabar de- to have just done
Acabarse- to run out
Acabar con- to be done with
Acabar en- to end up.

Also you have to conjugate acabar and thats a struggle in itself.
Other verbs I use a lot, without really understanding their full context.

Gastar- I think this means to waste, but I use it whenever I talk about money
Ganar- this means to earn, but you can also throw it infront of any other verb and make it like "I was wanting to," or "I had motivation to." Not so sure
Hacerse- this is like, I want to turn myself into something. Like a job. Or a life of delinquency. Its got to be something that requires work and time, not just suddenly. If you become emotional, its ponerse, if you become ˆsuddenlyˆ emotional its volverse, if you like transform into a lamp, its convertirse. Are you there, God? Its me, Margaret? When will I convertirme into a woman? Also, Spanish is not into commas, especially Oxford commas. This is a shame, as I almost always refrain from self-injury during paper writing because of the existence of commas. Another thing that is really frustrating is that alot of the computers at school have weird punctuation arrangements of their keyboard. for example, I wrote an about seven pages using umlats instead of quotation marks. And there was no "Find and Replace" to be found.

We, the gringos of the computer lab, find it totally acceptable to yell you "hey, how do you make the 'at' symbol?" or "where is the damn exclamation point?" at any point, and the Ecuadorians, who all seem to be using ms. Paint to design menus for Italiam restaurants glare at us. Various gringos offer various key combinations, and usually the concerned party ends up copying-and-pasting from a website. Also, the internet goes out for like 7 minutes ever hour, at which point, the entire room sighs quietly and ejects their flash drives.

I'm going to go wash my hair really intensely and nap and eat some pasta. Pretty normal sunday stuff.

Mosquitos Suck

Haha, do you like my pun? It is successful, because I am fluent in English! In Spanish, mosquitos do not "eat" or "bite," these words refer to oral sex, I think. I'm not sure what mosquitos do, but I do know I look like a junkie with bad aim, because my wrists are covered in blood blisters and scabs. I think I'm going to start taking the mysterious "Complejo B." Its a very high dose of several B vitamins. Benefits: Makes you smell bad to mosquitos, makes your fingernails really strong, gives you crazy lucid dreams. Downsides: sometimes makes your pee smell weird, semi-expensive. I think this is worth it.

A pun I did understand this weekend: the name Delores D. Cabeza. HAHAHAHA!