Category Archives: Ecuador

  O woe! O woful, woful, woful day!
    Most lamentable day, most woful day,
    That ever, ever, I did yet behold!
    O day! O day! O day! O hateful day!
    Never was seen so black a day as this:
    O woful day, O woful day!

So last Friday night, my English class decided to take Eileen and I out to dinner. We were invited, which means that the students paid for everything, including our taxi ride home. As I said in a previous post, I’m really enjoying my night class. There’s a good dynamic, great personalities; they really want to learn English; and they’re smart (we’re about three days ahead of my police class). Although they had told me we were going out for some traditional Ecuadorian food, we went to a Chinese restaurant. It was cheap and it was pretty much all the food we could eat. At some point early in the evening, Tatiana, a maid from Guayaquil, proclaimed that we wouldn’t be speaking English at all. Tatiana is hilarious. She’s this very gregarious little woman who laughs a lot and calls me “profe.” She’s probably about 25 years old or so (I’ll try to get some pictures posted later). Anyhow, she told us a story about how she was cleaning a room in the hotel and she noticed this little doll and thought, in passing, “how cute.” But then a minute later, the doll turned toward her and spoke. She screamed and ran out of the room. It was apparently some sort of new doll from Europe that has a sensor on its forehead. She called it Chucky, pronounced chooky.

At the dinner table, we talked about President Bush, music (one of my students is really into heavy metal), and bad words in Spanish. Eileen thinks I caused a scene by saying one of the bad words too loudly. But it’s funny: without years’ worth of social context, words like “verga” mean nothing. I may have caused a scene, I don’t know, but after my spiel on Bush, I had a couple students saying “Tim for president.” So it wasn’t all bad.

As we left the restaurant, Tatiana accidentally went into the kitchen thinking it was a bathroom. Good times. Once outside, we had two offers for post-dinner activities: karaoke or a pipe bar (one of those Arabic communal pipe places – what are they called?). We opted for karaoke.

I have three students in my class who are siblings: Manuel, Jessica, and Amparito. They’re all really good-looking; Eileen and I have taken to calling them “the good-looking siblings.” Anyhow, Jessica and Amparito latched right on to Eileen all night. They were great. At one point, Jessica asked Eileen how old she was. Eileen said “I’m 22,” to which Jessica replied, “oh, joven!” (young). Eileen asked her how old she was and she said 23. We laughed and then Eileen pointed out that she would be 23 in a few weeks, “so we’re the same age.” “No,” said Jessica, “soy mayor” (I’m older).

Once at the karaoke bar, we all sat at a table and browsed the catalogs of songs. There was naturally a lot of pressure for me to sing a song in English. “No one will know if you screw up,” they all explained. But I kinda held off till the opportunity was passed. Some other dude in the bar ended up singing a couple of songs in English, one of which (Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise”) he dedicated to us. His rendition of “Dust in the Wind” was much better.

In keeping with the rest of the American public, I feel strongly about this upcoming election. I didn’t used to be so politically interested. For much of my life, I was cynical towards politics. I felt it was a game played by rich liars, who perpetuated their richness by lying. But to tell the truth, I don’t know if I was even interested enough to be as cynical as that previous sentence. I think I used to see politics as detached from what really matters (Town hall voted to allocate x amount of dollars to the construction of a new pool – ok, so what?).

I don’t know where or when, but gradually, things started to change for me. You read a few essays here and there about American atrocities. You begin to investigate more publicly-owned news media. You begin to understand the effects of “corporate interests.” And slowly, you realize that CNN and the Today Show and even the New York Times are not doing a great job. Most newspapers are written at a fifth-grade level. Local TV news is a joke in that it gives very little information (I think the average is 12 minutes of “news” per half hour). And overall, there’s so much we don’t hear or see. The US has sunk three fishing boats off the coast of Ecuador because they thought they were drug boats. They weren’t. They didn’t apologize. On TV here, you actually see footage of the war in Iraq. You see bodies.

I am still pretty cynical about politics and politicians, but since I’ve realized we’re not getting the whole story through mainstream sources, I’m more interested. There is lot to be angry about. There is a lot to be sad about. There’s a scene in the New Testament in which Jesus enters the temple and finds people using it as a marketplace. He gets angry. He overturns tables. Apparently, there are times when anger is the godliest reaction.

I recently read this article by Tim Wise (you should check it out here). A man named Jared Taylor, who’s pretty much a neo-Nazi, wrote an article in which he claims:

WE JOINED A GYM!!! We’ve started working out there this week. They have elliptical machines, treadmills, recumbent bikes, and a stationary bike. It’s in a safe neighborhood in the Plaza de Las Americas so we can also plan and get on the internet on our working-out trips. It’s a little more than we wanted to pay, but it has what we need and won’t completely break the bank like the Swiss Hotel would have. Anyway, the first afternoon we worked out we had to go at different times to fit it into our schedule. When I arrived I saw Tim on a recumbent bike happily spinning away. I changed in the locker room and then the owner introduced me to the personal trainer on duty: Gonzalo. Gonzalo walked me over to the aerobic equipment near Tim and asked, in Spanish “so, have you ever worked out before?” Um. Yeah. I wanted not to be insulted, but I was sorely tempted to retort, “Yes, I have worked out before, in fact, my team won a national championship in the US.” I didn’t though because 1) I am out of shape and that statement would have come off as pretty conceited 2) it isn’t as common for women in Ecuador to workout so the question wasn’t as strange as it would have been in the US and 3) I’m sure he just wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to hurt myself on the equipment which, considering my history with injuries, isn’t a bad idea. So anyway, I took it pretty easy my first day: warming up, stretching, working out, cooling down, and stretching some more. These last few months here I have been doing some yoga and walking tons with a circuit or two thrown in, but I wanted to ease into steady-state workouts.
After working out I deciphered the towel system and showered. The shower was a wonderful surprise. It was phenomenal. The normal showers in Ecuador leave a few things to be desired. As we posted when we first got here, usually the water is heated with electricity. So you control the water temperature basically by adjusting the pressure (hot water = very little pressure, high pressure = cold water). In our apartment you can have a hot shower with a steady stream of water, which is more than adequate. At our gym though, the shower isn’t electric so you can have a piping hot shower with as much pressure as you want. It’s beautiful.

Ecuador is pretty Americanized. In fact, last week, I was talking with the father of our new quasi-host family about America’s 50 states and how Puerto Rico is not a state and how that fact causes some controversy, and he joked that Ecuador is going to be the 51st state because “somos bien Americanizados” (we’re pretty well Americanized). Which is true. They use US dollars here. And there are American movies and music all over the place. Plus there are signs in English everywhere. But they don’t really speak English. Thus, you get signs like “Quito Friend Chicken” or “Smocking Center.” Or the best is a shirt Eileen and I saw on a mannequin in a shop window: in big red lettering, the shirt said, “Trash up your ass.” We almost bought it.

When we were in Banos, we saw a guy wearing a Lawrence Crew jacket. We were so excited because we thought we had actually run into a rower in Ecuador. But no such luck. Apparently, a friend of his had sent him the jacket because it was Gore-Tex. He pointed to the “Gore-Tex” logo on his sleeve and gave us a thumbs-up sign.

Just the other day, I saw a guy wearing a Georgetown Crew T-Shirt. And I found myself faced with a true rower impulse. You see, in rowing, when you win a race, the losing crews give you their shirt. So shirts are pretty much trophies. You shouldn’t be wearing a rowing shirt unless you A) rowed for the school or club in question, or B) beat the crew or club in question. I should qualify this whole explanation by saying that this is the way men’s rowing works, not women’s. Thus, if you wear a Wisconsin Men’s Crew shirt in public, you damn well better have either beat Wisco or rowed there. So when I saw this guy wearing the Georgetown Crew shirt, I actually got annoyed. Assuming he didn’t row at or beat Georgetown, he had no right.

And the whole thing’s made worse by the fact that so much of the English here is displayed just because it’s pretty. Like the other shirt I saw in a window of a clothing store that said “Very Fashion.” Or I saw an ad with a picture of Eminem; it was for a tattoo parlor. And it got me thinking, “there’s no way they can appreciate Eminem on the same level as native English speakers.” When I saw a dude wearing a Green Bay Packers Superbowl T-Shirt (true story), I thought, “That’s Wisconsin! That’s my state!”

I own the Packers.

I own Eminem.

I own Georgetown Crew.

Trash up your ass, buddy!

But alas, I’m like a dog barking at random passers-by. Yes, I’m from Wisconsin, but I’m not really a Green Bay Packers fan. And yes, I know a couple Eminem songs. I even studied the poetic devices in one of them to use in a freshman English class, but I’m not at all an Eminem fan. And I know a coach at Georgetown, but I certainly never rowed there. I don’t think I ever even competed against them.

Still, isn’t it better not to be so divorced from meaning? I mean isn’t that what American adolescence is all about? Finding the real. Labeling those divorced from meaning as fakes or posers or phonies (a la Holden Caulfield). Shouldn’t you know what your shirt means?

Of course, I can see the argument on both sides. Eileen and I almost bought that “trash” shirt, which would have been a sort of postmodern, ironic statement about the ridiculousness of being so divorced from meaning. But look at that! Look at how individual and layered meaning can be. Thus, in keeping with postmodernity, how can we say that something is meaningless?

But again, language is social. Yes, we all have some slightly different associations with various words and whatnot, but we have agreed-upon meanings. This is why we can communicate with each other. Because meaning isn’t individual. “Trash up your ass” means nothing! Or rather, it means “garbage in your butt!”

What’s my point?

I’m not really sure.