July 2009 – Page 2

21 Jul

Ecuador Travelogue (part 4)

By the way, Zazu was the only five-star restaurant we’ve ever been to, and it was stupendous. The sushi, on the other hand, was not as good as it was four years ago. But it gave us enough sustenance to get up relatively early on Saturday morning and take off for Otovalo.

Everyone we talked to said Otovalo was cercita – only an hour and a half away. Eileen thought she remembered it being longer than that; I had no idea. But the bus driver sided with Eileen in asserting that the trip was closer to 2 ½ hours. Throw in a little confusion over where to catch the bus and it really ended up being a 3 ½ or 4-hour saga.

I take solace in the fact that we bargain better than most other gringos, though. Hammocks that were selling for $18 at most places we got for $25 for 2! And Eileen got lots of earrings and scarves for some great prices. But the most memorable part of the trip came before we purchased the hammocks, when a familiar-looking gray-haired gringo walked by and I said to Eileen, “I think I know that guy.” He disappeared quickly, but 15 minutes later I figured out how I knew him. We rounded a corner and there before us, finishing up a purchase with a vendor, stood a former student of mine! That gray-haired gringo was his father, whom I remembered from our one and only meeting at parent-teacher conferences last fall.

On this visit to Ecuador, we allowed ourselves to spend money more like tourists. When we lived here, making a combined salary of $700 a month, we were hesitant to ever drop more than ten dollars in one sitting. (We only went to the Swiss Hotel on Friday nights, when the rolls were two for the price of one.) In fact, I vaguely remember debating whether or not to go to the butterfly museum in Mindo because we thought it was expensive ($6 per person!). But now we were okay with spending $10 for the Canopy Adventure and $8 for the ride up the Teleferico’s cable cars in Quito.

The Teleferico was built while we lived here; it was completed in June of 2005, I think. And while Eileen braved the huge crowds in the opening weeks, waiting in line for something like 3 hours, I never got the chance to go. So on Monday morning, we walked up La Gasca, toward the barrio known as Las Casas, where we could catch a free bus to the Teleferico park. There, we paid the $8 admission fee (for foreigners), and got into a cable car without wait. No line whatsoever. We had gone relatively early (8:30) on the advice of a former student of mine, and it was a pretty good move.

From the cable car looking down

At the top of the lift, there’s a small park with some dirt trails you can hike on. There’s also a church for some reason. The elevation was somewhere around 13500, and it took some effort to walk up steep hills. So I began joking that the church was called Our Lady of I Can’t Breathe. I came up with some good names (Nuestra Senora de la Falta del Oxigeno, Nuestra Dama de la Achachay, La Iglesia de Ayudame), but they were sacrilegious, Ecuadorian Spanish jokes, so I’ll spare you the full list. Trust me, though: they were funny. Really funny.
Nuestra Senora de la Gran Altura

19 Jul

Ecuador Travelogue (part 3)

Back in Quito, we caught the good ol’ 15 de Agosto bus across town and I entertained fantasies of being a bus driver’s ayudante for a day. Those guys are crazy. They spend half their time dangling their bodies outside of the moving bus, shouting out their routes to people on the streets (“Toda La Colon, Plaza Artigas, La Doce, Catolica!”), and the other half of their time, they spend collecting the 25-cent pasaje from the passengers, jumping on and off the bus, weaving through the sometimes-standing-room-only aisles, somehow keeping track of who they’ve already collected from and who just got on two stops ago.

We were headed for the SwissHotel, another famous gringo haunt, and one we had to return to because it was a quasi-tradition of ours four years ago to go to the Japanese restaurant in the basement for sushi. Later in our stay, we went out to an even posher restaurant called Zazu. (It’s been written up in the New York Times!) And in both locales, we felt just a little out of our element. Sophistication is sophistication. And even though in Ecuador we can get away with going to the nicest restaurants in town dressed like the travelers we are (an REI outfit rather than an Armani suit), we still feel completely out-classed.

Luckily, our Spanish isn’t always good enough to know if/when we’re being disapproved of. We slipped into the Hilton Colon to get directions to Zazu and the guy at the desk asked what room we were staying in. We guiltily revealed we weren’t staying there and he said, “no hay problema,” and proceeded to give us the address. When we thanked him, he said, “por nada,” which, translated directly into English, means thanks for nothing. It doesn’t translate directly. And we knew that. Still, it was enough to give us pause: was he being insincere? We know American English’s various euphemisms and hidden messages very well, but when it comes to Ecuadorian Spanish, we’re pretty deaf/blind in the realm of subtle insincerities and hidden meanings even after living there for a year.

In the past, it’s been tempting to say that Ecuador is the land without irony or verbal abuse. I remember how much trouble Eileen had in teaching her class the expression “Do you mean that?” They simply couldn’t understand why you would ask such a question.

And if the email forwards we get from our Ecuadorian friends are any indication, they are sentimental suckers who whole-heartedly believe in inspirational quotes.

But email forwards can never be an indication of anything. And Eileen eventually got through to them by using an example of a woman wearing an unflattering dress.

“You look great.”

“Do you mean that?”

The trick in really posh establishments is to dress well and act like you own the place. When the waitress brings you your five sushi rolls, you shouldn’t take a picture of them with your iPhone. Or when the hostess catches you marveling at the really cool, circular wine closet with glass doors and a ceiling at least 25 feet high and offers to let you look inside, you should turn her down. And when the waiter brings you and your wife a delicious swordfish in a pisco-soy consommé and grilled sea bass medallions in coconut foam, you really shouldn’t go halfsies.

But if there’s no disapproval from anyone, why not?

18 Jul

Ecuador Travelogue (part 2)

Mindo’s a funny place. It’s pure Ecuatoriano – full of little tiendas on every block with free-roaming dogs that expertly dodge trucks that carry fruta or pescado or dangerously-packed construction equipment. And though not untouched by the corporate world, it’s still free of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and peanut butter. But as with all pueblos turisticos in Ecuador, there’s a rise in Internet cafes and adventure tourism. And it’s in those places that you see the most gringo influence. The most fluent English speakers and the most Americanized young men – emulating the X-Games and Jackass ethos we export abroad – run these establishments. And they look to be doing well. It’s ironic that gringo tourists flock to the gringo-ized Ecuador. But alas. It’s true.

Even we were drawn to the canopy zip lines advertised all over town. On Thursday, we rode/walked our piece of crap rented bicicletas up the mountainside to the original canopy adventure, called simply Canopy Adventure. We were the only customers. Two guias went with us.

What you do is you get onto a raised platform, where they strap you onto a steel cable and give you some quick safety instructions. Then they tell you to sit on your harness, cross your legs at the ankles, and hold on to the straps that are attached to the cable. And away you go, zipping above the cloud forest valley. My guide was kind of a grumpy jerk; Eileen’s was much more gregarious and nice. But it was fun either way.

The course consists of 13 cables, some freaky high up and others mas tranquilo. On some of them, you can opt to do the superman or the mariposa, both of which require a tandem trip with el guia. For the superman, you hook the backside of your harness onto the cable with a safety running to your guide. Then you basically fly horizontally through the air, face first toward the next platform. For the mariposa, you sit on your harness facing your guide and once you take off, he flips you upside down and holds onto your legs. I liked the mariposa a lot, but it was definitely freaky to see the sky below you and the canopy above.

Our return to Quito was in the standard bus, which travels through so many switchbacks that I had to put my head between my legs – or at least get close to doing so. There wasn’t actually enough leg room to bend over all the way. But I survived anyway.

17 Jul

Ecuador Travelogue (part 1)

Eileen got sick in record time. Her stomach started rumbling on Monday night, not even 48 hours after our plane had landed. By Tuesday morning, she was even more uncomfortable and though the bichos remained tolerable for the ride to Mindo, by Tuesday night, there was no denying that the bichos were indeed bichos and not – as we had hoped – just a delicate stomach adjusting to new food.

We traveled to Mindo not by bus or taxi but by camioneta. At the bus stop, as we were waiting for the coche to Mindo, some guy appeared saying, “Mindo, Mindo. Van a mindo?” I said si because yes, we were going to Mindo, but then I saw that he was driving a white truck with an oversized flatbed bien cubrido so that you couldn’t see what he had in the back unless you put an eye up to the thin slats and peered through. “That’s not a bus,” I said to Eileen. “Are you sure you want to take it?” And she said sure, so I said okay to the guy and he opened the passenger side door for us and we piled in.

Angel was his name, and not only was he harmless, he was, by the end of the trip, asking if we’d have any interest in gaining a god-daughter. “Bueno,” he said just before letting us off, “el primer paso en la amistad es compartir numeros telefonicos.” So we punched our US phone number into his cell phone and shook his hand and after several un gustos, we caught our second camioneta into Mindo.

We stayed at El Descanso, which mean “The Resting Spot,” mas o menos. And boy did we rest. Eileen’s bichos were getting angry. So while she slept, or at least tried, I read a lot. I also took a few trips into the main drag (six blocks away) and got some sanduches de jamon, which were just about he only thing I ate all day, what with Eileen’s loss of appetite and all.

But even with Eileen’s ailing stomach, we remembered immediately why Mindo was one of our favorite places when we lived here four years ago. The air is, for lack of a better term, well-oxygenated. It’s about 4000 feet lower in elevation than Quito, and it’s not full of pollution. My glands were starting to get swollen in Quito because your immune system mistakes the pollution for disease. But in Mindo, we both gravitated toward the hammocks overlooking the hummingbird-populated selva that is El Descanso’s back yard. Last time we were here, we heard someone say that there are 19 species of hummingbirds in this jardin alone. We were in the off season, so we only counted six. But apparently the entire continental US only has nine species. They move through the air impossibly fast, fluttering their wings ten times a second, and they buzz like bees when they fly (not when they hover unless they’re really small). It’s a sound that, minus the Doppler effect, would be soothing. But because I’m apiphobic it puts me on edge.

Still, on the first night, as Eileen and I lay in bed, a light rain was falling, and some exotic bird species were singing, and I said to Eileen, “This sound we’re hearing right now? People put this on CDs and sell it.”

15 Jul

Things We Knew about Quito But Forgot until Just Now

(From day one of Quito — June 28th)

Cab drivers routinely run red lights at night.
Sinks come equipped with a separate hot and cold tap even though the hot tap never works.
The occasional 5:00 am dog barking session can last more than 30 minutes.
The beds are too short.
On Sundays, the only places populated by people are the malls, the churches, and the parks.
We speak Spanish with strong accents.
The pollution turns your boogers black.
If you’re not walking with your husband, you will get cat calls.
There’s a home remedy for everything.

It’s strange to be back, but not as strange as I thought it would be. The strong midday sun, the smell of the pollution, the uneven sidewalks, the dirty dogs that know how to cross the street, the bus routes, the disregard for pedestrians, the traditional food, the kick-ass fruit – all of these things were pretty familiar to us, and though we got far fewer compliments on our Spanish this time around, we still felt like we were medio-Ecuatoriano.

More to come. . . .