Sabaday!

Saturday was so fun, probably one of the best days I have had in Ecuador. I slept nice and late and by the time I had really roused myself, Madre was back from work at the Consultorio and she had brought Tio Malcolm with her. we were all in a great mood and went to the Centro Historico. Its so nice to take the Trole there, to walk up the streets with narrow sidewalks. We stopped in the Indian store again, and this time I had enough money to buy the green dress I wanted last time. But then I spent my money. as you will see. We stopped at a little electronics store, one of a thousand, and bought a memory card reader for me and a new phone shell for Malcolm (its somehting that sounds like "carcass.") So that means there are now photos for me, for facebook, and for the wide world of blogging! if I had known it would cost 7$ for a card reader and not 35$ for a cable, i would have done this alot sooner.

We ate lunch at this Vegan Hare Krishna place, 1.50$ for a huge bowl of bland soup, brown rice, a celery-sort of vegetable, guacamole with corn, spicy lentils, bizarre juice, and apgar-mora-jello stuff. Vale la pena. My madre has already picked out my future husband among the Hare Krishnas present.

My madre bought me lunch, so she told me I should buy her coffee. We went to this old plaza that the Catholic (obviously) church owns but rents out to business to make money. The coffee shop was called "Cafe Fraile." (Friar). Yes. this place is owned by the church. Malcolm got Chocolate con queso which is very rich hot chocolate with heavy wipped cream and pieces of fresh cheese that you drop in and they melt but keep thier sweekyness and flavor....totally not vegan but insanely good.

We went home and my madre went to "un bebay eshowur" and Malcolm and I made about a cubic meter of popcorn in a pressure cooker and watched MTV for a few hours. We do this periodically, its very theraputic. Madre came back and we ate ravioli (weekend pasta) and we took the bus to Malcolm's and a taxi to Nick's and a Taxi to the Fosh.

I've got to say, I'm getting a little sick of going out to the same place over and over again. I like my friends and all but in alot of ways the thrill is gone. Usually going out for me is a way to find that socialy contact that overwhelms and thrills a part of me that doesn't want to be paid attention to during the week. Pati Smith says "I went to the protest to rub against people." This isn't sexual the way I see it, its desiring the random contact that crowds provide. You can get that at protests, always, and K parties often, and I used to be able to get it here, but I'm too surrounded by people and places I know. I never get asked to dance, I get tired early, the people there to bump against are too flimsy or hit back hard. Its an existential crisis when I dont want one. If I want to freak out about my place in the world, there better be a keyboard at my fingertips or a paper and pen in my pocket, not a beer in my hand.

So we got out of that club pretty fast, took those same taxi's home, those same fumbelings for the keyes, the same glasses of water before the same sleep.

Seems Like Years Since

I wrote a blog entry. It's only been since Friday, that semi-lucid post from the library, but so much has happened. Friday was mostly spent at the physical therapists, which took two and a half hours. Here's how the time was spent:

2 pm. Arrive. Dra is not there, I take a nap on the couch in the waiting room. Receptionist looks at me like I am crazy.

2:45. Dra arrives, puts me in a different room with a wet towel/compress on my back. Says she'll be back in 10 minutes.

3:15. Towel is freezing cold. Dita goes to look for Dra, only to find her working on an other patient. Smooth move, Dra.

3:40. Dra comes in, gives Dita a blanket, tells her to take a nap. Nap time.

4:00. The actual 30 minutes of PT I came there for. Whatever, its cool.

I went home and napped and chilled out, went out with Celly and Alana and my cousin Monica. We ate schwarma and told lies to this guy that was trying to get with us. My name is Franchesca, I am 27, and I have a kid. My friend's names are Doris, Maria, and Something Else (Helga?).

Sabado,

One of the best days so far. My tio Malcolm (fellow K kid) came over, and he and I and Pilar went to this Hare Krishna vegan restaurant in the Centro Historico

whoops! my madre wants to use the internet! I'll finish this later!

A Little Chatty

Hoy es viernes
que feliz estoy
la fin de semana
empieza hoy

That was a little poetry for yall fans of my last album, Rapping Her Way Though Statistics. My rhyme career is still goin strong. Yall know.

But anyway, enough frontin, its friday and I couldn´t be happier. This week and the one before it have been quite a struggle. There was just so much homework, so many bus rides, so many cravings for chocolate, so many vocabulary words attempted and mispronounced. We are resting comfortably in the bottom of the W curve. The probably-genius Stewart described a bus ride as ´ being cradled by the bottom of the W-curve, lulled to sleep by pleasantly bleak lullabies of alienation and homesickness, and there have been some times like that. Both my mother and brother have been out of the house alot, so I{m alone in the evenings, which i´m not used to. I´ve really caught up on my Ugly Betty and Scrubs, thank the lord above us. It was really a huge hole in my life, not watching America Ferrera make odd fashion choices.

One thing that´s kept me going, though, is the misery of others. Best example: yesterday, I had about an hour of free time before horrible art class began at 4. I was sort of hungry, craving salt and fat, so I went to this little restaurant near school and ordered some french fries. I ate them alone. Not all of them, but a lot of them. I was swimming slow in the lagoon of Thursday self pity. When I got back on campus, I saw some friends from K. I told them that I had just eaten an entire plate of french fries alone. All three of them said they had the urge to do that today. Got home, talking to a home-friend in Virginia. He had also eaten french fries alone. Ok, maybe its just part of being 20.

And 20 I am. 20, between the fury of adolescence and the sluggishness of adulthood and the struggle of responsibility. The center of this marvelous trifecta of needing sleep but waking up naturally at 7 am because there´s things to get done.

like eating lunch. talk to you later! Dear Kitty!

(not normally this weird)

Strawberry Fields Forever -OR- Dana Gets Angry

El Oriente!

From Saturday to Tuesday we went to the eastern part of the country, el oriente. At first, this sounds like I went to Laos and Thailand, and actually the climate was pretty similar: tropical, low-lying, humid rainforest. It was an amazing experience and I’m completely glad I went.

We started our trip early, meeting at the mall at 7 am. My cab driver did not drink a beer this time. We mostly slept on the bus until we got to the hot springs of Papallacta. I’d been there before, but it was just as nice to relax in the pools, trying to emerse yourself in the really hot ones and jumping in the ice pool and feeling your heart race. We played the name game, too, and it was nice and awkward, the way getting to know people usually is.

We got back on the bus and kept going, watching the paramo turn into wetter vegetation. Speaking of vegetation, my first cultural incident I want to analyze is about plants, specifically strawberries. I was sitting in the back of the bus when I overheard some people in the front of the bus talking about picking fruit with their families, going to an orchard in the summer. Someone commented that picking strawberries was very hard and labor intensive. Another person responded, “when you pick strawberries you are basically doing Mexican’s work for them.” I believe my jaw dropped when I heard this. There’s a lot going on in this quote, and my inner anthropologist just might have to wait in line behind my inner furious person.

There are a bunch of ways you could analyze what this person said. You can look at it from a racial standpoint, assigning a cultural group with perceived biological characteristics to a set of skills and social caracteristics. Following that logic, people with brown skin who can’t say their Hs are good at picking berries.

There’s the economic perspective, that the United States’ economy should depend on labor by foreigners, picking plants their parents would never have been able to grow, living in rented spaces in a country that rejects them as human beings but desparately needs their never-tiring hands

There’s a lot of classism in here too, the idea that picking strawberries is a leisure activity for those wealthy enough to go to college, with enough capital to afford a trip to a place remarkably similar in social landscape to where those very Mexicans were born. However, it's the god given gift of Mexicans (who are very clearly pictured as poor, frumpy, and diabetically overweight) to pick these strawberries. Strawberry fields forever are probably the highest thing a Mexican could aspire to. A Mexican would certainly never dream of relaxing in a hot spring or riding on an air conditioned bus with his friends.

So this analysis is clearly scathing. I haven’t really given fair space to the person who said this. However, there is so much assumed in this quote, that I’ve got to interpret this as an idea what was given to her, not self made. When you think something up yourself, you want to explain the details, you don’t just drop the thesis sentence out there and then keep quiet. So I interpret this as a statement by someone who doesn’t quite understand the economic implications of the high levels of Mexican immigration to the United States, has probably had little contact with said immigrants or large scale agriculture, and is unaware of her own economic privalage. And she probably likes the taste of strawberries.

HOW ON EARTH

can I have so many commitments, journals, drawings and papers to get done? How can I have so many classes to attend? How can I have so many things to copy and turn in? How am I going to do this and manage to keep everyone happy?

Hello Dear Kitty,
(guess who just bought The Diary of Anne Frank in Español? This guy)

My neck is feeling way better so I thought I’d update you guys on my fascinating life. Actually, its been pretty lively. I’ve still managed to sleep like fourteen hours a day, but get a lot done in the small time I’m awake.

Last Wednesday, we had the English Improv workshop. I actually have to write three pages in Spanish about this experience, but I’ll spare you the minutea that I’m going to get into, and just do an overview. The first part, where we did warm-up like games in the middle of the quad-like-place on campus went really well. People were watching and staring, we really caught the attention of the kids just laying around. It was also really good to work with my partner, Maria Jose. She looks like a typical USFQ student, with a blackberry that never leaves her hand, designer clothes and a perfect body. But she was actually really proactive and responsible in planning. She was a little embarrassed to play the games, but she totally got into it, and didn't seem to mind that her partner for all of this was a gawky gringa with bad hair.

The second part of the program, well, it wasn;t a failure. We were expecting some sort of audience, but no one sat down to watch and all my gringo friends left after five minutes to go eat lunch. So our audience was Sharon, our program coordinator, two professors, Maria Jose’s cousin and my friend Danny. Only Danny speaks English. Whoops. Additionally, we had The Drumming Guy join us. The Drumming Guy exists on every college campus, but seems particularly out of place at USFQ with his dreadlocks, tie-died linen pants, giant djembe drum, and belief that he, personally, was brought from Mars. So The Drumming Guy decided he wanted to be part of the games, which we totally supported, but he only wanted to participate through drumming. Which is not very helpful in non-musical games, or in musical games where The Drumming Guy does not know the song and keeps playing the same stoned rhythm over and over. So yeah, that was The Drumming Guy.

The English didn’t really stick, and that was fine. It was pretty comical, actually, to see people start sentances in English and then burst out in Spanish, “I want to…viajar el mundo contigo en un moto solo los dos de nostoros, amantes pro siempre.” Lord knows I wish I could use English when I get excited, so I was just happy to see people get excited.

Thursday was pirate day. In some sort of spirit week/homecoming/Halloween conglomeration, USFQ decided that Oct 24 to 26 was Pirate week. This didn’t seem to include anything except a film festival called “Non Pirated Movies about Pirates” (A pretty clever name, I’ll give them that) and some posters about the upcoming census. But Thursday was pirate day, and all the girls wore too large blouses and stripes. There was a fake ship mast in the lake at school (yes, there is a lake at school) and a hunt for treasure in the afternoon. Teachers were either irate at the festivities or joined in and cancelled class. Students were either apathetic, enthusiastic, or just used the day as an excuse to drink rum out of water bottles.

Thursday night, the school had a Halloween party. R Kelly (my pseudonym, not her’s) and I dressed up like 80’s babes and went down town, where we found fourty of our classmates drinking in an alley. After a while we got on a chiva, which is like a flatbed truck with a roof and railings but no walls. Its decorated and has a bar and a stereo system and its incredibly dangerous and the coolest way to party in Quito, apparently. We were divided into two chivas and drove around downtown at ten miles an hour for fourty five minutes, singing along to US pop songs, smashing into each other at stop lights, waving at people on the sidewalk, and being offered canelazo (think apple cider with moonshine) out of waterbottles by a guy in a bear suit. It was pretty fun and completely ridiculous. It was fun to ride around Quito at night, but I felt totally ashamed to be part of this drunken mass being driven around the streets and throwing their cigarette butts in the gutter.

On the chiva, the most ridiculous thing happened. I’m going to talk about it even though its embarrassing because I want to get it out there. So, you know at parties, how you sort of just meet random people and introduce yourself and start dancing and stuff like that? Well that was the case on the chiva. There was a guy who joined our little circle of dancing, a guy from Jaimito’s class, and we started dancing and that was fun. While we were dancing, he was like “oh yeah, you want this, you want me,” stuff like that. I figure other people like to talk as much as I do, so I just sort of let that slide. But then! I asked him what his name was, and he told me that he would tell me after we had sex. Smooth move, Sinatra. That’s really going to get me to leap into bed with you. I feel like names are personal but they are also completely public, you have a right to know the name of everyone you interact with. Especially people “con quien tienes relaciones.” Ehem. I’m embarrassed I didn't slap him and walk away then and there, but staying gave me the second best quote of the night, “Wait here, I’ll come back for you, my goal is to make out with five people tonight.” From my observations, and its hard not to keep tabs on someone when you are both on the same flatbed truck, he got to at least three.

I hope he was unsuccessful. I hope someone finally pushed him away. I hope she learned his name.

Ouch

Hi Everybody,

I really want to update the blog with a really lush entry about the weekend, but I´m sort of in some pain right now.

Reasons for pain:
1. While swinging on a vine in the jungle, hit a tree with my chest. bruised ribs
2. While climbing in a cave in the jungle, hit my head on a rock. way messed up back.
3. went to physical therapy for above problems. Was put into traction by a machine that looked like it was invented by the nazi´s/ in the nazi era, and got my head pulled on for half an hour.
4. My stomach is, as we say, flujo.
5. Deep wells of self pity. Malcolm and Nick have started referring to me as ¨Sad.¨
6. For some reason needing to sleep for like 13 hours a day
7. oh yeah, I´m wearing a foam orthopaedic collar and thats making me sweat alot and leaving red marks on my chest.
8. did i mention my high levels of self pity?
9. did I mention the painkillers the PT gave me?

so not doing so good right now. but I´ll get better and then i´ll update. And sleep on my side and be able to nod. stuff like that.

PS. Here´s me looking fly. My hair is not actually the shape of the computer behind me, they are just the same color