This weekend, I went to the mountain-hippie-hotsprings town called Baños. By myself. I had a great time. Some pikturz:

this is what was in my backpack

delicious breakfast, a mess of eggs.

bike ride! get ready for lots of scenery photos

I stopped at a tarabita which is a tourist trap combined with a janky cable car-arrangement.

 

that bag is full of fried pork skins cut into sheets. YUMMMno

wadafal

l

hahah ORAL. Nah this is actually for if there was a volcanic eruption and people needed to take shelter. 

see how the vegetation is changing? I was riding downhill into the jungle. I didn't make it or anything, but it was changing as I went down in altitude. 

self timer to show my joy. 

Cable cars, one thing you should not DIY

sitting by a beautiful river

with ice cream

took a truck ride back up the mountain:

and I did some other stuff that day, too, but there was a lot of this.

 

Love from the Andes,

Dana

Today in 1533, Atahualpa was killed. 

Thanks, fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory

Its a little beautiful here

ok so I just had a nice choclo(giant corn on the cob) chat with my host ma. She's not that bad a person. I hadn't realized how much constant talking was part of my upbringing and not other people's. That it might not even be part of this culture, to talk things to death.

but I won't take back that bit about the smile. that's true

Daily Lifes

p>Some people (my grandparents) might be confused about what my daily life is like here in EcuadorSIPWorld. Here's how it happens most days. 

5:40am. Alarm goes off. Snooze

5:50. Alarm goes again. Hate life, worry about how I always end up sleeping on my belly, that can't be good for neck.

6am. actually get up this time. Put on one of two pairs of jeans and one of three shirts. Same shoes every day.

6:15. make breakfast. I boil water for tea, make myself some kind of banana-based smoothie, and some kind of carbohydrate. My host dad drinks oatmeal and eats saltines and watches me in silence. We listen to the Christian radio. 

6:30. get ready for work: fill up my 2 liter bottle with filtered water, get my two little-snack packs of crackers, get my notebook, pens, voice recorder, and money for the bus and lunch

7. leave the house and walk half an hour down the giant hill I live on.

7:30. get to the bottom, wait for the bus.

7:30-7:45. Approximately 17 buses pass and none of them are going to Puembo. Some of them have cool signs on them like this one:

that shows all the laborious tasks the people of Tumbaco can do. but it also makes me think of those images that are actually people having sex. No judgement, plz.

7:45. Get on the Puembo bus. I used to just look the scenery but I just got some headphones so I mostly listen to the Mountain Goats ( Heretic Pride is my Mountain Goats album of the year) and sleep. 

8:15. Get to Puembo. Theres a line out to the corner, about 50 people, mostly Mas and Babies waiting for appoitnment. I battle through and make it to the door on the basis of my scrubs, admire how clean it is in there.

8:45. after I stand around for 30 minutes or so watching stuff that is way too complicated to take fieldnotes on, I go into one of the Drs offices to watch them do their family planning appointments. 

9:40. Those appointments are done, I leave the office to find the nurse swamped in preparing people. Each day, there are like 30 people that come to get the appointment you need to attend school. People do lots of things wrong like not bring the exams we need for the certificate, not bring the 1$ needed for the certificate, not bring the children the certificate is for, or have children that are out of the Puembo district. I spend a lot of time being like "you need an exam of urine AND feces AND blood. Yes. Blood. it's possible to get an exam of blood, its very safe." and "if your child is not going to school, you do not need to get the exams or the certificate." I can say this stuff on the phone too. 

We weigh and measure and take the temparature and blood pressure of so many people. Each day a baby pees on the scale when we take thier daipers off. 

10:30. I watch more appointments with the other Dr. 

11:30. I wait until now or 10 to eat my crackers. It's an obsession. It's a lifestyle. 

here's me and my double chin that has nothing to do with eating crackers.

1pm. Lunchtime with Doña Marcy. We eat chicken, rice, potatoes, and onion salad and gossip. 

1:20. Back to work. I look for files in the hideously disorganized archive room, prepare patients and watch more appointments. 

2:45. The patients are done, Dr. V slaps the giant pile of the clinic histories of the patients she's seen that day, Dr. J pulls out her phone to text in celebration

2:50. Four people come in: one want birth control but is actually already pregnant, one is a screaming child who needs stitches, and one is an over protective mom who wants to vaccinate her 7 year child with vaccines we do not carry and is mad about it. The other is a 27 year old man with some kind of vague ache ("my knee hurts." "I have a rash." "I was just wondering if this bleeding from my ear is normal." "Can you guys remove warts? Because I have a ton of warts and I'd like them removed today if you can.") We help all four of them in the three-quarters way that everyone seems satisfied with. There are a lot of recommendations to just go to the hospital

4:30. We pile into Dr. J's car and drive to Quito. We listen to radio disney very loud, even during the commercials. The Drs talk to very quietly to each or in English to the Georgetown medical student while the Nurse and I sit in back and ask each other simple, repetetive questions like "What is your favorite food? "What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?" "Have you seen The Green Lantern?" "What size shoe do you wear?" 

4:50. The Doc drops me off at the same spot every day and almost forgets every day. I walk up the hill being afraid of getting mugged even though nothing is scary on that walk, ever.

5:15. Make it home, remove horribly sweaty clothes. Eat more crackers. Waste my life on the internet.

8. host parents come home, give me weird foods for dinner. We do not speak but every 45 seconds or so my "mom" catches my eye and gives me a look like  tthat might symbolize love or something.

830pm. I start feeling really bad about not being able to type up the 25 hand scrawled pages into perfect fieldnotes each night. Instead of dealing with this productively, I mostly complain about it to people on Skype. Luckily, my excellent mother was just like "do those in maryland dummy and get enough sleep and don't beat yourself up over it." So I'm going to do that from now on.

This might also be because my desk is so durn messy:

contents include: external hard drive, Ipod, camera, voice recorder and all thier respective cords, two types of candy, my unused planner, notecards, "South America on a Shoe String" "The Dharma Bums in Spanish," a note entitled "Thing to Look Forward to in the US", Spanish-English Dictionary, a lone earring made of dried glue, broken headphones, reciepts, academic articles, my computer case, and a needle and thread. 

10: there is no context of fieldnotes now, I'm just really sitting around and reading and eating candy that I should have given to other people as gifts or candy that I just bought for myself

11: i go to sleep. Blah. 

Isn't like life in a foreign country fascinating and exotic?!?!?

 

Get Ready for some Writing

Instead of appreciating the creations of other people (movies, tumblr, the newspaper, books, food made by the maid), I think I'll do some of my own. That's what blogging's all about, right? pointing the camera towards yourself? 

19th Nervous Breakdown

In direct opposition to the crappy job of blogging I've been doing, here's what happened this weekend. 

Friday Night

• did nothing.


• Called a couple people, they didn't anser


• watched Almost Famous and thought about that for a while


• Host mamita was like "hey do you want to go to the jungle with my son ok cool"


• Made the moral decision not to go to my work thing on Saturday


• Packed furiously


• Finished Almost Famous. 

Saturday 

• Woke up around 5, packed and ate breakfast furiously


• said goodbye to host 'rents who are going to the beach and bringing 6 packages of ham, 3 boxes of tea, and 4 of canneloni. I do not wonder anymore. 


• Found out Diego wasn't coming till around 8, so I slept for a while. 


• Woke up to find Diego in my room ruffling around in his CD collection. He's like come on and Im not wearing pants. 


• We go out to the car and meet the other people with whom we are going to Tena. His ma told me that "Diego, his girlfriend and some other friends" were going. Most of the times I've hung with Diego, we were drinking moonshine on a street corner and listening to punk music, so I was expecting some pretty cool friends. I mean, I'd even shaved my legs for this. At the car, I find his girlfriend, Lora, and a 45 year old man with atheletic socks up to his knee caps. They are listening to Fiona Apple. Originally, I thought he was a bachelor looking for a foreign bride to deflower (uh hem) in some kind of feux indigenous ceremony preformed by bored Schwar teenagers in coconut bras, but it turned out he was just Lora's dad. 


• We drove for many (4) hours and through many (like 5.5) climate zones. 


• Around f10 30 we stopped in Baeza and got trout. I really really love trout around here. It's all either fished by people, like with a pole and worms, that old school , or grown by industrious people in square ponds near rivers. I like both those things, and I like trout. Fried trout, french fried, onion salad, and strawberry juice.


• Oh, also, this is when Pablo began his spree of paying for things. He just got up in the middle of lunch with his mouth full of bread and went to the counter to pay for all of our lunches. I hadn't figured out that he was Lore's dad yet, so this made the sugar-daddy possibility higher. 


• We made it to Tena by about noon, and drove around in the pouring rain for about an hour looking for a hotel. We found called the Pumarosa which I highly recommend. I was still in my double-date mindset and was worried that Pablo (the father) and I were going to share a room and he was going to liquor me up or something, but we each got our own rooms. Can I just expound on how wonderful it is to have one's own hotel room? I'm no Virginia Wolfe here, I just love being able to take up the whole closet and not have to ration towels. Also, not being in an arranged marriage to your friend's friend's dad is good. 


• We got back in the car and drove about half an hour to Misagualli (miss-ah-guay-YEE). This place is great. We only walked through the main town part, but it seemed very sleepy and beachy and nice. We walked to the pier and looked at the Napo River, and they all bought tamarindo and coco juice from this very gregarious vendor who took a long time in getting them change and then refilled the cups when he finally got back. I was terrified about getting sick from water, but really thirsty.


•  River playtime! It was a big wide river with a sandy beach and a strong current but not too many rocks. Pablo rented us inner tubes and I went again and again up to the small rapids and bounced down to the beach. There are some things in life that make me endlessly happy, and rivers and inner tubes are two of those things. Some other's include strong walking bass lines, the flavor of Thai curry, public transportation, and mountains.
  
• Anyway, we played in the river for a long time. It was kind of awkward socially because Diego and Lore were holding hands and cuddling, and Pablo and I were not holding hands and not cuddling and he was wearing something between a speedo and jammers that said "No Diving" on the butt and didn't have any hair on his thighs except for this one ring. 


• The inner-tube-renter took his dog on his belly while he rafted down the rapids. Apparantely he's been featured on TV for this stunt.


• There are a lot of monkeys just running free on this beach and they stole someone's deet and this was a huge deal.


• My thirst overtook me and I went to the coco juice guy and he said "oh I knew when you first came here that you were thirsty, I'm glad you came back, I hate the feeling of being dehyrated. I'm glad a single pretty girl like you is enjoying my beautiful beach." That was nice. 


• We went to a hut and ate maita, which is fish (they call it talapia but I don't think its talapia) cooked over a fire in banana leaves. SO GOOD. but I was feeling nervous about that coco so I just had some boiled yuca, also SO GOOD.


• Here's what Pablo ate in the course of about 40 minutes

1. Maito, the whole fish


2. About an arm's lenght of boiled yuca


3. onion salas


4. two glasses of cold guayuca tea


5. a choco con queso (a giant corn on the cob smothered in mayonaisse and shredded cheese


6. An ice cream bar (he was carrying around the choclo and ice cream at the same time and looking like a pig)


7. Three grilled worms on a skewer


8. a quesadilla/pupusa like thing 


9. another jugo de coco.

• During this time we mostly followed Pablo around watching him eat. 


• We got back in the car and drove to this area called Las Sogas which means Rope Swings. It was another bank of the same river filled with people playing including two youth soccer teams who immidieley stripped down to their  little-kid underwear and began fighting in the water, a father and son who shampooed each other's hair, four people with cerebal palsy of varying degrees, and two kids who were throwing rocks at each other until one hit the other in the forehead and he passed out. 


• We jumped off this ledge a lot. 


• Went home, read Los Vagabundos de Dharma (oh man Beat is so good in Spanish) and fell asleep.


• Went to this pizza place called Bella Selva and everyone got kind of freaked out at me for just ordering a pizza with onions and mushrooms and no meat or fruit or corn. It's pretty normal, guys.


• We crossed the bridge to this coctail place and ordered huge caloric beverages. Lore and I had "Ron Coco" which was like a spiked milkshake and could sustain a family of five. Diego had this giant maracuya thing with a lot of fruit. Pablo had a single shot of tequila which they brought with about ten lime slices and a whole ramekin of salt, worrying us that he had accidentally purchased an entire bottle. No, he just enjoyed his condiments, forming a cocaine-neat line of salt on his thumb and slurping it off, gnawing on lime slices before neatly sipping his tequila in four or so minishots as we slurped on our Ron Cocos. 


• Pablo had been paying for everything so far besides the ice cream, so I whispered to Diego and Lore that I would buy us the drinks. WHOOPS i only brought a 5 not a 20. I threw that in but my chivalry was denied.


• Slept. Naked, the benefit of the solo hotel room. 

Sunday. I'm going to cease the bullet points so I don't feel like I have training-wheels on. Woke up, read some more, jittered around, paid for the hotel before Pablo beat me to it. We went to this gringo-oriented place on the malecon for breakfast. I had fried eggs and real coffee and tomate de arbol juice and read The New Yorker which is my idea of best. After breakfast, we went back to the hotel and got suggestions of what to do from the owner.  Pablo searched for his room key for 30 minutes before we found it in his room.

We drove 30 minutes on the highway, than 40 minutes on this dirt road to finally abanon the car in a ditch. We were searching for this hotel Hakuna Matatta and the beauitful beach there about. We made it to Hakuna Matata and found their beach guarded by an Irish man with very poor spanish. Due to Diego and I speaking english, we found out that the beach was 3 k up the path through this community. The community had been "in fiestas" and we had to ask thier permission.

So we continued up this cobbelstone and mud road for a while longer. We hear the community before we see it. It's the Spice Girls, its a techno remix, but I love bass lines and I remember them. As we get closer, it switches to another Kareoke hit of the 90s, that A Little Bit of Monica song that that rapper sang in the Macy's Day Parade.

We see the houses by the time "I'm Blue Daba Dee Daba Die" starts up. They are small board-based houses a little off the ground as they need to be. There are yards with flowers and corn. There are clothelines and chairs and porches. There are people near their houses, and on the other side of the futball field that is the middle of the town, there is the pavillion with the music where people are drinking. 

It's like a Kurt Vonnegut scene: four tourists in water shoes standing on the edge of a beaten field while 10 men and one woman pregnant with hepatitis dance in drizzle and smack empty liquor bottles together. We don't move until they approach us and they do, four of the men and the woman and they all shake hands and don't let Lore and I go for longer than they should. I haven't smelled breath that fermented since I don't want to tell you, I haven't seen eyes that yellow since a client at the homeless services organization was a week from dead. They are celebrating the graduation, they tell us, of the kids from school. They graduated on Friday. The man who won't let go of my hand keeps asking me if I'm a señorita or a señor. I guess it's cool that even drunk people see that I'm queer?

The woman asks us for a dollar to use the river and Pablo pulls out tens and twentys in a mess from his mesh short pocket and I want to dive at him NO! Currency is capitalism and there is nothing more alluring than spending when you're spent yourself. Money might make it better, but it will only turn her yellow eyes green until she finally falls asleep. There are four of us only, so she technically owes us a dollar. We straggle to her house which seems to have some sort of store attached and she offers Lore a dollar of yoghurt as change. Lore and Pablo insist that they don't teach change, for which a young man mouths "gracias" a them. We shoo off the hand-shakers and cross the field to an audience of drunken, hungover, and children's eyes.

Here's the river

Some drunk folks by the giant rock in the river.

We play in the river for a while, I think big thoughts and am glad I know how to swim. It starts to thunder and lightining, so we walk back through the town in the pouring rain. Pablo wants to practice his english so we finally have something to talk about. He tells me the plot of The Fifth Element: "There is a girl, a very pretty girl. I do not know her name living out of the movie. There are aliens and they want this girl because she knows things. It is very full fantasy and I like that. He is still wearing his speedo. 

We drive back to the hotel shivery and soaking. They appeared to have no check-out time and we take advantage of this and the respectably hot water and shower ourselves. On the road, we drive to Archidona to eat more maito, more yuca, more onion salad, and more guayusa. We fill up the car and it only costs 15 dollars and gas is $1.50 a gallon.

On the way home, we get stopped because they are doing construction and the road is only one-way for a while. At the stop, a woman is selling the guayusa leaves for a whole necklace of folded leaves for a dollar. She's also sleeing fresh damp cinnamon bark and some kind of fruit that smells like rotting meat. Further on, we stop to buy mushrooms from one of the many stalls along the highway. We go into the green houses to watch her cut the six pounds. 

We drive home and I am DJ and I choose all dreamy, trippy stuff. We make it to Quito, drop Pablo off at his apartment and get back to Cumbaya. 

So that was pretty fun. 

Also, we listened endlessly to The Rolling Stones on that long dirt road, so that's the title of this post. Also, I introduced them to The Dodos and Fleet Foxes and they were impressed. This is the first time someone has been impressed with my taste in music since tenth grade or Ryan Douglass