Monthly Archives: October 2004

Well, last week I told you all about how my brief vomiting session invoked self-pity within me. I recovered, went to Banos and had a lot of fun, and then this past weekend came down with a 17-hour fever. It was a “fun” sandwich with two moldy pieces of bread. (Good grief, am I for real?)

Anyhow, on Saturday night, I was caught in this never-ending, abstract, fevered dream in four dimensions. Quito is truly a three dimensional city in that it’s not flat. When I’m lost on busses, I think “I need to get up there” or “I need to get down there” as often as I think, “I need to get over there.” In my dream, I think I extended this then-subconsciously observed detail about Quito; thus, my dream presented me with this 3D grid of all of Ecuador — really just a plain old grid that I understood to be Ecuador. The dimension of time was thrown in there somewhere too, though not really visually accounted for. And here’s how things functioned: if you wanted to meet someone, or maybe catch a bus, or do anything that involved you being in a specific place at a specific time, you did it and you were a little dot — or a sphere, rather– within one of the little cubes within the larger cubic grid. Get it? But the problem was that other people and events were other spheres in other cubes, and so you could never meet them.

The whole thing kinda turned into this existential nightmare-literally- cuz it turned out you could never actually meet anyone, or arrive at a store when it was open. People were always in some other cube, making interaction impossible and all appointments and goals futile. What was the point of even trying?

Anyhow, sorry about this; I find it pretty funny now.

Here’s a better story:

I went to the doctor on Monday and he looked me up and down and was worried that because I was jaundiced and my right side hurt more than the left, I might have hepatitis. I had to go to a lab to get my blood drawn and provide urine and fecal samples. (Eileen wrote a hilarious little journal entry while I was working on obtaining the fecal sample, but she won’t let me post it.) Anyhow, it turns out I just had parasites, and yeah, this isn’t a better story at all. But I’m happy I don’t have hepatitis.

Please send Dove Dark Chocolates and/or Chocolate Peanut Butter Clif Bars to us at:
Tim Storm
c/o WorldTeach
Casilla 17-17-1960
Quito
Ecuador

(I figured that I might as well put all the shamelessness into one entry.)

Ok, that’s enough.

I just thought I´d let you guys know that Tim is healthy again. The Doc put him on some medication to get rid of his parasites and he´s back to normal.

Yesterday was our first full day cooking ALL of our meals. We were thrilled to discover a market called Santa Clara close to our apartment and so we stocked up on lots of fruits and veggies. We had pancakes for breakfast, pita sandwhiches for lunch, and pesto pizza for dinner (Chifles, which are fried plantains for desert). Considering our past cooking failures here (I made some unbelievably bad pasta, I don´t know why the pasta here is so bad but it just isn´t the same) we were pretty happy with ourseleves.

We’re officially moved in to our new place, we’ve posted pictures on the coppermine. There are pics from Banos and of the new place. Tim’s sick again, we’ll find out today if he has consumption. He probably just has some new parasite friends (all of you considering making the trip, no worries, you have to be here at least 3 weeks before the buggers get to ya). Tim started teaching on Monday; he has two classes of beginners. The police showed up at one of his classes. But don’t worry, the tourist-sector police are his students. Sorry for the cheesy joke. It was bad, I know.

Since we had a few days free and we were both healthy, we decided to get out of the city for a bit. So Tuesday morning we got up early, stopped at a restaurant in La Mariscal for pancakes and hopped on a bus to the Trebo. The Trebo is basically a big traffic loop, but it is also the last pick-up for buses leaving Quito. After a two-minute wait a bus passed which was headed towards Baños (our final destination) we boarded and about 4 hours later we arrived. Baños is a tourist town, but is by no means garish. It is nestled in a valley between volcanoes and on one end of town there is a waterfall and hot-spring baths. Tuesday we walked around the town, ate lunch and checked out the possible activities for Wednesday (we decided on a biking/rafting tour). That night we headed to the pools and soaked for awhile, enjoying the view and hot water. The next morning we got up early and ate breakfast in the gorgeous terrace at our hostel (eggs, fresh rolls with pineapple jam, tea, and fresh passion fruit juice). We met a nice Swiss guy at breakfast and discovered that he and a friend were signed up for the same tour as us. So we walked down the street to a “Rainforest Tours” where our guide, Enrique, handed over our bikes. Enrique is an Ecuadorian with the look of a Californian. He did an excellent job yucking it up with the clients. The bike-ride was almost completely down-hill and he liked to take both hands off the handlebars and sing “Vamos a la playa, la, la, la” which translates to “We’re going to the beach, la, la, la.” We stopped a few times on the bike ride to learn the names of waterfalls or national parks we passed (we were assured there would be a test later). At one waterfall you could pay a buck to ride on the longest and highest cable-car ride in Ecuador which passed directly over the cascade. It was flippin awesome. At the end of the bike ride we hiked in the forest a bit, saw another spectacular waterfall, a suspension bridge, and some rainforest foliage. Then we rode in a van to the launching place for the rafting. Enrique passed out wetsuits, lifejackets, paddles, and helmets and took us through a saftey demonstration where we also learned the commands he used (forward, backpaddle, get in there´s a big rock, and gimme five). He was an excellent coxswain “faster, faster, paddle faster!” He also liked to pull on the back of our lifejackets and dunk us in the river during the slow parts. We throughly enjoyed ourselves. The only problem was that Tim´s sunscreen washed off with all the splashing and his shoulders got fried. Hopefully we´ll get a chance to post some pics of the trip soon.

Sadly, we´re back in the city now and we both start work on Monday. But we´re excited to be moving this weekend – the cleaner air and proximity to work will be great! Plus our host family has been harder to convince that tim really can´t ever eat anything with milk in it (even if it has just a little) and that I not only don´t eat meat, but I also don´t eat chicken. So we´re looking forward to having a little more space and being able to control what we eat.