In Guayaquil, Full of Angst

Written Wednesday Night

Its the first time I've been under an air conditioner in months, and its the very end of December. I'm here in Guayaquil in Stefano's grandmother's house, on a fold out couch bed with my backpack next to me on the floor. There's 71% battery, I have stiff legs and a headache. Yesterday morning my mother and my sister left, cought a taxi to the airport, leaving me to lie in the still-paid-for hotel room watching three consecutive episodes of The Big Bang Theory and eating wafer cookies from christmas that had somehow already gone stale.

Hannah's parents took us all out to lunch and I had a chicken salad sandwhich because all I seem to want to do these days is eat various forms of chicken between types of breads. Usually, mayonase should be involved. Aracely came over and immedietley conked out for a two hour nap on my bed, only waking to ask if she could get under the covers.

I lay with the sweet centimeters below my knees in the sun and read Mary Karr's Lit, one of those books that pricks your consciousness, makes you think the way she does, see things with her crossed eyes. I can't wait for some dialogue to come up soon so that I can leave out quotation marks just as she does.

Its wonderful to have somone so smart and well spoken take up temporary residence in your skull, but it can get awkward when her values start sitting down on your own. Anecdote? Of course, so glad you asked.

Much of Karr's memoirs deal with her own and her family's struggles with alcoholism, and Lit is no exception. In The Lair's Club, pages and chapters are sobbed about her mother's heavy drinking coupled with knife-weilding mental illness, as well as her father's reclusive constant alcoholism. There's also aquaintence rape, bigamy, and cancer people get from oil wells. Not a cheerful set of essay prompts. So I read The Liar's Club and I thought, Well damn, my life is a piece of peach pie. She's bareley got a can of cool whip.

I was so stressed out from The Liar's Club, and just from seeing the cover of Viper Rum, her book of poetry, that I decided to skip her second memoir, Cherry and stick to the backs of cerael boxes for my reading. But for christmas in Baños, sitting on a hammock with my sister, my mom passed me Lit with its accolade-slobbered cover and those neat looking fake cuts down the front. There's a lot going on on the cover of that book, it took me a while to recognize Mary Karr, our lady of Perpetual Suffering/Southern Texas. What the heck, nightmares can make you stronger or hold Feudian clues to what's wrong with you.

It's a great book, once you start reading. Each chapter is as strong as an essay and very presentable or discussable, but the book hangs to gether as a story. Of course it does: Its her life. Her marriage and its failure, her child and his raising, her spiritual life and literary success. And her drinking and how she stopped.

So when a person who does have a drinking problem sneaks into your head, a 20 year old having a beer with dinner, and she starts muttering and throwing down adverbs that you haven't heard in months, due mostly having your main conversation partner being a hispanohablante dentist who prefers to watch TV, its easy to get distracted from outside and fold yourself into your ears ad fall into the anxiety hole. And no matter if you're on vacation, no matter if there's eggplant lasagna coming, no matter if you're with your friend you haven't seen for a while, no matter if you've been taking your medicine more constant than you check your facebook, Mary Karr can talk really, really loud.

You're drunk she says. You're drunk and your making a fool of yourself.

I'm not drunk I say. I'm tired. Did you spent 4 hours today in the Quito airport? I think not. I bet you were eating fondue in Maine or something. Or spelling every word correctly. Or praying. Whatever, something cool.

You are a fool, an Immature fool. She says. You should stick to your own language and begin attending self help groups immedietley.

Could you shut up, Mary? I ask as my lasagna arrives. Stefano is approximately 1/2 through his small beer and i judge myself to be at 5/8. Oh shoot, she's right. Out drinking a boy who'se been at college? This could be a bad sign. Or maybe I just have a bigger mouth-capacity than he does. How would that be calculated? Would it make my face look fatter?

Look at this anxiety Says Mary, her hair perfectly stright, bangs that will never happen for me. Why aren't your working on this? You should be in meetings every night!

But I haven't done anything wrong! I jab my fork into my food, which turns out to be at least two thirds cheese. Should I feel guilty for eating such a large amount of cheese? Should I quit while I'm ahead and just give up all dairy, or should I eat this hulk of mozerella, get gas, feel fat, and then learn my lesson later to never ask for lasagna in Ecuador?

Mary doesn't know, and I don't either. But I know that beer, cheese, and fear are a filling but bad-tasting dinner.

Going to the Baños

Hey, maybe its time to tell you about my trip to Baños! I went to Baños the weekend before last and had a ton of fun. Its about three hours south east of Quito, they call it The Gateway to the Orient. Madre and I woke up really early to get to the bus station in the very south in the city. We both got groped on the bus by this same creepy man and then we gave him such angry looks that he got off. Woman power. Once we got to the station, we promptly waited around for an hour for our friend Jorge. We got on the bus and within minutes the scenery was amazing. I'm normally a watching sort of person and this just made my jaw drop. Green fields with vertical agriculture, tiny stone towns, clean sky and edgy mountains. Sheep! Kids! Old people! Bridges! A very very good bus ride to sit by the window.

And the vendors. It's almost like in Harry Potter on the Hogwarts Express, there's this endless stream of people hopping on the bus selling things. Sometimes they are gross/unwanted (warm coconut milk in a plastic bag, thise mysterious inflatable donut-shaped pillows) but often its tempting and cheap. Madre says she likes supporting la gente but I know she really just wants a snack. The highlights: tiny butterly cookies in that come in plastic re-used from other food products. It's not noodles, its shortbread. More exciting: Ice cream from saucedo, made in a dixie cup with three layers: majority coconut, then thin stripes of mora, naranjilla and taxo. Pale pastel, bumps of seed and flakes, almost unmelting after days in a freezer.

We made it to Baños by 11 or so. We went to the friend we knew, who works at an ice cream parlor. This was a good friend to have, one because she is extremley nice and two because she gave us free ice cream. Welcome to down, Dita, Jorge and Pilar. We decided on our hotel, named unsurprisingly "BACKPACKER HOSTEL." It was about a 15 minute walk through town. The main building was paja (sort of grass/straw) roof, really really dark inside with about five or six stoned hippies lying on the floor and hammocks. Ok, cool. My madre asked for a lighter for her cigarette, and the owner pulled out an onze bag of "Mary Jane" (If you get my drift) and dug a lighter out of the middle of some nugs. Ok, so it's that kinda hotel.

Climbing into my top bunk to look at the slanted ceiling painted with an acid-trip storm at sea, I scraped my leg on this screw. I got this weird three pointed cut and probably an advanced case of tetnus. Luckily, there was no time to enferm because Jorge had a bike ride in mind. We rented bikes, he and I at five dollars a day. Pilar stayed behind because she is afriad of being hit by a car. So we started on these bikes with poor breaks, no helmets, the regular. We go about 10 kilometers downhill. Its gorgeous and plesent, theres mountains all around, we are crossing bridges and the sun is shining and without the helmet the wind is in my hair.

But its straight down hill and Jorge doesn't stop. Not when I plead scared, tired, lost, a girl, weak, young, a pulmonary disease, dehyrdation. Jorge is like "nah nah its cool, lets just keep going."

Finally, after we go through these industrial-revolution era tunnels and end up in front of a powerpoint, I put my foot down. I'm going back. he can follow me. I start walking my bike up this mountain. Jorge seems really happy in first gear. he shows his happiness by constantly lapping me. I see other happy tourists with thier bikes in the back of pickup-truck taxis, on buses. I ask Jorge if we can do that. "That" he say "is bad. It is weak. We went down, we can do up." I cry a little bit. I buy some water. People stare at the sweating gringa. Two hours later, we make it back to town. Pilar is irate at the lack of pick up truck use (perhaps because we were not supporting the local economy enough? She has bought several bags of local taffy, some men's shorts, and a pair of sandals). We search for a restaurant with salad to make me happy. Pilar understands that salads can sooth me at my worst. We go to a restaurant and I order asparagus salas. They are out of asparagus. We got to another restaurant with no vegetable dishes on the menu. She and I spilit a lunch because we don't have enough money and I eat aproximately 2/3 of a chicken. I also eat all of Jorges rice because we though we each got a dish and it turns out we had to share. Tooooooo bad.

A while later, we go to the waterfall that is fed by the springs that Baños is named after. Its very pretty, very slippery, very trecherous. Pilar and I huddle in the only dry spot which also happens to be occupied by a couple deep in making out. We all politely ignore each other.

At 5, we get in line for the baths. The baths close between 4 and 6 and its apparently very important to be the first ones in. Ecuadorians are almost always late, except when a line is to be formed. And line behavior is very orderly. there is no butting. While waiting in line, we meet the other people who have come to Baños for this birthday party. Three of them are Pfizer employees, mostly accountant. This sounds lame but they are funny and awesome. One is a metal head with two tattoos and a shirt containing the word "Dismemberment." It's cool to be an accountant and live with your mother in Ecuador.

Six comes and we get in the baths themselves, which are eyebrow-raising hot and apparently clean. There are alot of obese people and old people that move very slowly down the stairs. Jorge insists I stand for 30 seconds in the ice-cold pool. Sure thing Jorge, you never led me wrong before. We paddle around in the pools, melting slowly. We jump in the cold pool and yell and writhe. At nine we leave, go back to the hotel and shower and go eat pizza at a local chain called "Garfield The Cat." Guess what their logo is! We are joined by another person, N, who's 20 like me, studying art, and extremley stupid. She didn;t understand how antibiotics work, what natural selection was, or what a relay race was. She also didn't know the differnece between automatic and manual cars. Not transmission. Cars. So we eat pizza, and we go back to the ice cream shop to start the party. We are supposed to get in a chiva, which I've already described, at around 10. At 11:30, after a lot of dorito eating, the Chiva shows up.

For the rest of the story, you will have to stay tuned until I write it! But I gaurentee that it's going to involve trecherous roads, public urination, more things that that dumb girl doesn't know, lots of potatoes, and a city called Ambato. This sounds like book 14 of A Series of Unfortunate Events