Monthly Archives: February 2005

I put up some videos of the demonstration. Over there on the right, click on videos.

We were gonna go to Vilcabamba, which is the “Valley of Longevity,” in the south of Ecuador. It’s supposedly a beautiful place. Ecuadorians talk about it like it’s magical. Our WorldTeach friend, Heather, lives in Vilcabamba, and we had talked excitedly with her about going to Vilca for Carnaval, but alas, it was not to be. Last week, we checked the internet every day for times and prices for tickets to Loja, the nearest airport to Vilcabamba. It’s a 16-hour bus ride from Quito to Loja, something Eileen’s knees can’t handle, and something I don’t want to do. I think it was about four or five years ago when I finally burned out on long road trips. In the spring of 2000, I had traveled from Philly to Madison then to Fort Collins, Colorado. Six weeks later, I went from Fort Collins to Philly, then Philly to Fort Collins, then Fort Collins to Madison. A 16-hour ride on a bus made for small people doesn’t sound appealing at all. However, the 45 minute plan ride to Loja sounded pretty ok. In our internet searches, we ascertained that there were suitable flight times and it seemed there were many spaces. We emailed Heather, giving her the all-clear. She booked a room for us at an ecolodge you have to hike to. We were pretty excited. Everyone in Quito says that Carnaval is “feo,” meaning ugly. People here “play Carnaval,” which entails throwing water balloons or buckets of water on random people walking in the street. They do it all over Ecuador with the exception of a town called Ambato, where it’s outlawed. In some places, they also throw flour at each other. Eileen and I have so far managed to avoid most of the water, though yesterday, we did get sprayed with a water pistol in a drive-by shooting.

Vilcabamba is not exempt from the playing of Carnaval, but the ecolodge would be much more tranquilo, as they say. Last Saturday, we went to the Tame office (Tame is the only airline that flies from Quito to Loja). Unfortunately, we arrived at 12:08, eight minutes after they closed for the weekend. No problem, we thought. We’ll just make a reservation on the internet.

Well, as one of Eileen’s fellow teachers at the CEC said, South America and the Internet don’t really get along yet. I went into the Tame office on Monday morning with our passports and enough cash to cover the purchase of two tickets. I said I had made a reservation over the internet. That’s all you can do; you can’t actually purchase a ticket online. The woman at the Tame office looked me up and found nothing. Ok, I said, well are there any flights to Loja on the 5th? Nothing. The 4th, maybe? Nope. The 6th? Yes.

The 6th would be a Sunday; we could leave on Sunday and stay two nights, then come back on Tuesday so that we’d both be back for class on Wednesday, the 9th. But, no. There were no Loja to Quito flights available on Monday or Tuesday. Despite the fact that every internet search we had done the previous we claimed there was space on flights, the woman at Tame told me the flights had been booked for 10 days. There was no way we could get to Vilcabamba unless we took the bus.

So here we are, in a pretty empty Quito. We thought about going to Ambato, which is a mere two and a half hour bus ride away, but Ambato’s really popular, so the crowds will be huge, and there won’t be any hotel space in town, so we’ll have to come back to Quito on the same day.

We apologized profusely to Heather via email; we feel terrible that we may have ruined her plans to do something else. The last we heard, a couple other WorldTeachers were gonna go to Vilcabamba, though, so hopefully, it’s not all bad.

There are pics posted in the coppermine of the protest.

After our Spanish class last Thursday, I turned to Bill and said something like, “Hey, I’m gonna go down to the U to watch the riots. Wanna come?” He was a little reluctant at first since he was dressed in his school clothes, but he said he’d text me at 4:00 or so and maybe he’d come over. We left it there.

I have been going to a copy shop at the bottom of the LaGasca hill; I know the woman there by now She makes small talk with me, always does the copying right away, and never cheats me out of even a penny. It’s a great place, but everytime there’s a student demonstration, its business suffers. It is about 30 or 40 yards from one of the primary demonstration intersections, and it frequently gets tear-gassed. I’ve gone there half a dozen times during riots and I’ve found the copy woman working the machine with a handkerchief over her mouth.

This past week, I was at the copy store two or three times while just 50 yards away, students were throwing rocks at police. I’ve been on the other side, too: the police usually station themselves near the Santa Clara market, and I’ve been walking from Santa Clara a time or two when I’ve seen the police in their urban camoflauge and gas masks, getting ready to launch tear gas into the meager student crowds. One day, while I was standing in the copy shop with its front-row view of the action, I thought, “I should bring the camera down here and take some pictures. This place is safe, and if things got out of hand, I bet the people at the copy shop would allow me to hide behind their metal pull-down door with them.

And so last Thursday, I invited Bill to go see the demonstrations with me. He text messaged us at 4:00 or so and said he was on his way. When he arrived, I was playing some video game, squinting at the little black and white screen. We took a bus down the hill and walked toward the tear gas, deciding on the way that the best route would be near Santa Clara market on the police side of things. Unfortunately, most of the action was at the far end of campus rather than near my copy shop, so we had to walk a little bit further.

When we finally encountered the action, we found ourselves right behind the police. Most stores were closed for business, their metal pull-down doors, um, pulled down. From our vantage point, we couldn’t actually see any students – only a regulat stream of rocks flying through the air and bouncing at the feet of the police. Just minutes later, we tired of the incomplete scene and decided we needed to get to a better spectating point. The police were at a T intersection, and we were in the stem of the T behind them. We witnessed a young man walk behind the police and go to the left; the rocks were coming from the right. We resolved to follow the guy’s lead and walk right behind the police. We hung out right on the corner for a little while, but since we were very close to the police and pretty much directly in the line of fire for the rock-weilding students, we decided to go join the crowd of spectators in the northwest corner of the T.

We passed the next forty-five minutes watching an oddly amusing back and forth between the police and the students. Rocks were thrown, the occasional tear gas was launched. There was a fortified tank-like vehicle parked pretty close to the students; they were throwing rocks at it and every once in a while, one of them would comically tiptoe up to the tank and start kicking it. Eventually, the tank left. Then the student crowd grew and they began to drive the police back. Some of them seemed completely unaffected by the tear gas; others would grab the smoking can of gas and throw it back at the police. As the students came closer to the stem of the T, they decided that we spectators were in a bad place, so they started throwing a few rocks at us. The crowd of lookers-on turned and ran; a few women were screaming, but most of us were laughing. It was surreal. For the crowd of watchers, this was entertainment, and our occasional transformation into targets only made it more fun.

In my class that night I asked one of my students about the demonstrations. Most of my night class are college-aged kids, and many of them are students at the Universidad Central. My student, Lenin, explained that two years ago, the president promised a discounted bus fair for all students. All you have to do is show your “carneta,” your student id, and the bus drivers are supposed to charge you 12 cents instead of 25. But the busses don’t honor this deal and the president has done nothing to enforce his promise. So every time there is a demonstration elsewhere in the city, the students come out to the Avenida America, a main street that runs right through campus, and they shut it down. They don’t allow any cars or busses to pass; they burn things, and they throw rocks at the police. The idea is to put continual pressure on the government to follow through with their promise.

And then two gringos go and join the crowd of amused spectators.

Ok. So first off, I need to make public the somewhat embarrassing fact that I brought the xbox back here to Ecuador after our Christmas break return home. When we moved in, our landlords had told us that they would provide us with a TV if we wanted one. We never really pursued it. We weren’t all that interested. But then, of course, before Christmas, with the prospect of going home and coming back with the xbox, I asked Luis if, when we got back in January, we could borrow a TV. “Claro!” he said. I whispered “sweet!” as I walked away and I made the fist of victory.

We returned in early January and I mustered up the courage to ask about the TV the day after we got back. Our landlords have six TVs. There is a 30-some incher in the parents’ bedroom. In the hallway-esque area between the parents’ room and the daughter’s room, there is another 27 incher. It is literally four feet from the one in the parents’ room; the two are separated by a wall. Then there’s a fourteen inch TV in the kitchen, a slightly smaller but black and white one in the study room, a 20-some inch one in the living room, and a puny little 5-inch black and white one in the daughter’s room. Indeed, the only room in the house without a TV is the son’s bedroom. Guess what TV I got. Yep. The 5 inch black and white one.

For the past month, we’ve been squinting as we watched the occasional Simpson’s episode and Napoleon Dynamite on the little guy. I limited my video game playing to only those games that were visible enough, and even then I sometimes had to be about 12 inches from the screen to see it. The scheming began. Despite Eileen’s very rational objections to spending over $100 on a 14 inch color TV, I started investigating. Plan one: find out if there were any TVs in Quito for a discounted price. They may exist, but they’re not very easy to find. I enlisted the help of some of my students in my research; one day, I even got a ride to some so-called discount stores in the southern end of Quito. Nothing. Plan two: buy a new one and sell it for 70 – 80% of its original price this summer. Multiple Ecua-sources indicated such an endeavor would be possible. So I resolved to carry it out soon.

First, though, I figured it would be smart to mention the plan to the landlord in the hopes that at the very least he could give me a ride to the store. Well, instead, he suggested I have someone buy a TV for me in the states and then ship it. It’s expensive to ship such things, I explained. No, he said, ship it through American Airlines. It’s cheap. A friend of mine did it once for 20 bucks. In fact, get us a little 9-inch color TV and have it shipped and we’ll pay you back. We’ll lend you our 20-some inch color TV if you get us a TV.

Ok. Let’s pause and review. The offer from my landlord was this: we’ll pay the cost of the TV and the shipping and we’ll lend you one of our color TVs if you find the new TV and arrange for its delivery. I accepted the offer.

Unfortunately, in my internet investigation, I found out there is not much of a market for 9-inch color TVs unless they’re flat screen and they fold down from, say, under the kitchen counters. I made note of a few smaller color TVs, including some TV/DVD combos which I hoped might be enticing, but I grew a little despondent knowing that a) the cheapest TV I had made note of was $120 and b) the American Airlines thing was a bust; to ship something weighing 1-11 kgs costs $75. Ouch.

I presented my findings to Luis et al, and they decided upon the $160 9-inch, flat screen TV/DVD combo from Wal-Mart. I said I’d look into a friend or family member bringing it to us when they came to visit. He said ok. I said bueno. He gave me the 14 inch color TV from their kitchen.

Eileen and I watched Mulan in full color (and in Spanish); then we surfed the channels (there were only about 7 or so on the little black and white, but this one has about 15), eventually landing on some music-video station. Next, we watched half of Napoleon Dynamite in color, the whole time marveling at the fact that the van was orange and not brown or tan.

And so ends the TV saga. The only remaining question is, who will bring us the landlords’ Wal-Mart TV?