MORE ADVENTURES

Here's Elsa, part of the El Cisne family. She has some sort of mental illness or disorder so she is pretty reclusive and impaired, but she is cleaning yuca for lunch.
After lunch we went to a river and played on the rocks

Rocks! river! tree! cows! boys who were flirting with me aggressively despite being 15 years old!
If you look close, the leaves look like pot leaves. OF COURSE pilar took a picture to show what a good time I was having in ecuador "Soy la virgen del la hierba!"

Little cousins playing video games in the house....

Which I realized was a little more natural than I had thought, storing the head of the pig we ate last night in a bedroom. YUM!

Pili and Dita's Excellent Adventure PART II

More Photo-a-day! Here, we have the first part of me and Pilar's trip to El Cisne towards the west of Quito. This was my first or second weekend in Quito after orientation so I had no idea what was going on, ever. I just nodded and followed Pilar, who sometimes dragged me down a road literally. The first picture is the beginning of our trip. We were looking for the Laquisha (ghetto girl name) bus but only the Mitad del Mundo bus would come by. Like 35 of them in a row. Pilar was getting mad so I took a picture of it.

Next photo is of the treasured drink of Ecuador, Avena. Avena is made my soaking oats in water or milk or either of those with fruit and sugar in them for a few days. After that, you put it in a blender until it is a thick grey paste. After that, you add more sugar. It is great for kids! Also, for the first month or so, I was confused when people would call avena "quacker." After seeing it written down, I now understand: Quaker oats. Anyway, here is an avena cart sold by the polish nurse-bear, perhaps named Avena. Let's all get a cup from the disabled guy selling it outside the bus window?

After arriving to El Cisne, we actually settled down the the ceremony celebrating 60 years of marriage of a couple that were presumably more than 60 years old. The ceremony was pretty sweet, except one of the daughters gave a speech about how proud she was of her parents but also some how connecting this to gay marriage being wrong. But my gay-dar was honking Sra. Olivia. I gotta tell you.

After that, we ate huge quantities of meat and drank heavily. Remember that time when I semi-passed out on a balcony? Yeah, that happened. This is Pilar and my cousin Bolo drinking shots of cane liquor at about 5 pm. Bolo was extremely nice and friendly and I felt enormous pressure from my family to sleep with and possibly marry him. I did not bend to thier expectations but it was still eye-openingly awkward.

Oh next up is the little cousin Diego who is totally strange. He made me promise to put this picture up on the internet and I told him I would and put that off for 6 months. disculpame Diego!

The next morning, unbelievably hung over, Pilar and I decided to take a walk in the jungle for a while. because nothing clears up chucaqui like dense vegetation. Here's Pilar in her natural environment

houses are often built off the ground so that there's less humidity and bugs and animals getting in. Example A:

Back at the house, here's Tia Laura making lunch outside in the open fire.
And here's me outbehind the house at the beginning of the forest.
I'm going to start a new entry because my formatting is messed up

Writer Writer Write Write

I am Dr. Writer McLiterary and this is my famous essay. Please bown in front of my genuis, and yes we may use that as a noun. This is a phallic symbol and you wish your mother had bigger boobs. Adjectives are meant to dangle and dingle ends in "el." Puncuation fits neatly inside quotes which begin with commas and end with "he said." Indugle my metaphor and hyphenate my hyperbole. Both will end up brilliant by the time your eyes notice the footnote explaining my brilliance.

So, I'm not so into writing these days. I'm obviously doing less, and the thing's I'm doing I've done and written about before, but I don't even feel like putting my fingers on the keyboard. When I enter URLs, its with a single finger, filled in automatically on my seearch bar, or I just look through history. I bookmark everything and comb farther and farther back in blogs and archives. Every article published on the priests abusing deaf boys? Sure! The blog the lady who made Juno kept when she was a stripper? All pages, please. Every photo Kelly O has taken of drunk people? BRING ME THE RICHES. I've been following Charlie Sheen and have culled through every page of Sarah Silverman's twitter. I hate them both less.

So I'm learning, even if I don't take note of it, and if its mundane pop cultures stuff I'll only make references to. I will make me more obscure-sounding and erudite and less approachable. That's what I'm going for.

And as I'm reading, or talking to a friend (hidden neatly in Maryland's hardwood flooring), or driving home from my uncle's listening to Modest Mouse and bone-crushing volume, I'll get these flashes of verbalization, smart things, reaction, phrases that help me understand what's goin on. These are often innapropriatley timed and awkardly said. For example, I was at a potluck attended by very fancy people, McLean (actually, it was somewhere else, but I can't spell that place) families with art collections. My sister was an an excellent production of Rent taking place in their basement. My Hobo Best Friend's Dad who's been a father figure to me for years asked me why I'd gotten my nose pierced. Its hard for me to explain usually beyond "I like it." But here, with a plate of roasted autumnal vegetables and spanish tapas in my hand on a plastic plate, the words came:

"Well, in a lot of way, having this on my face has freed me from how people view me. Before, I was constatnly worried about not looking strong enough, tough enough, brave enough, bad ass enough. But getting the piercing helped me feel proud in a number of ways. Firstly, It makes me proud that I actually followed through on something that I wanted to do. It's not just a dream for the future, I actaully went through with it. Secondly, it lets me not worry so much about how I look. It's a symbol that I don't take my self too seriously, that I'm not afraid of imperfections that I aquire through my life. Also, It's freeeing. For example, before I got the piercing, I would never wear a cardigan like this. I would feel preppy and fake and not true to my inner strong self, even though I actually like the cardigan. But with the piercing, even as I see the cardigan and know that it's preppy, I don't need to worry about that being my only presentation to the world. It's bigger than that, and there are more symbols involved, more data to make a conculsion. I feel like I am presenting part of my self that I am proud of to the world: parts that aren't scared, that follow through, that are strong and face outwards. It's almost a definition of my sexuality...."

at this point, I realized Hobo's Dad had cocked his head upwards and raised his eyebrows. Those are facial symbols I know and love, the "what the helll is she talking about???" face. And the Armenian music prodegy and her diplomat husband were looking, and the Jewish lady with frizzy hair and her 7 foot husband. Important, but not appropriate.

And I'm saying these things because I'm not writing them. I'm not getting out my long sentances and alliterations and observations on gender roles in my damn computer where they belong and instead am burdening my friend's parents with my inner thoughts about my facial structure. Not so classy, sweetheart.

First Photo

Hello Dear Bwog Weadurs,

I have not been writing because I am a critically lazy person who needs to eat cheese and watch The Big Bang Theory. However, I am also attentive to my readers' needz and will post some pictures from my time abroad. Did you guys know that I went to Ecuador? Me neither.

So, the plan is to put up a picture a day in medium-chronological order from my time in Yekuador. I'll tell a little story background for it and then you can see what I saw, hear what I heard, smell the rank odors that I smelt.

Let's begin!

Here's a sideways photo of Pilar on my first day in Quito. She and Jimmy took me on this very long hill up to a church. I had no idea where I was but later realized that I was in like landmark #1 of Quito. She says that this is a picture of the "virgincita" on the steps. Even then, I did not believe her. She has two children, after all. We walked to the bascillica and didn't go inside but admired all the gothic architecture outside. This is the church in Quito that you read about in guide books that has native animals instead of gargoyles guarding the church. It's really adorable, except some of the lizards and other skinny-torsoed animals have sort of started to crumble and the rebar is visable.

After the church, we walked to get ice cream and I was fixated on whether the ice cream had purified water in it. Only later would I know that a. freezing kills germs and b. I will have diarreah for the rest of my life. My wedding night, I will have dirreah. And I will still not know how to spell it.

Also, I ate some kind of purple ice cream called "mora." little did I know that a. that was a really bad example of mora ice cream and b. I would eat approximately 4 servings of mora every day. Also, I got diarreah a lot.

Later that day, I took a two hour nap and woke up gasping. It was embarrassing but sort of thrilling. We ate stir fry for lunch and I was so pleased that I hadn't been asked to eat huge steaks yet. Also, we had mora juice.

Looking back, besides that walk from the church to the store that sold ice cream, its very hazy in my mind. I remember the bright sky, the steep hills, and not being able to understand anything anyone said. I feel like I was reading lips for most of my information, Jimmy and Pilar's bright magenta from the mora.