Ecuadorian Rose

Friobamba

2007-06-18T14:25:00.000-05:00

About a month ago I spent a long weekend with two friends, Diego and Lisset, in Riobamba, also known as ‘Friobamba’ (‘frío’ = ‘cold’).

One of Riobamba's claims to fame, which is a bit more exciting than the typical 'My Aunty once shook hands with Tony Hart', are its stunning views of the volcano Chimborazo. Ol' Chimbo is the highest peak in Ecuador and the furthest point from the centre of the earth due to the equatorial bulge which gives it the right to laugh in the face of the non-bulging Himalayas!

The photo below is of Riobamba's local market where ice is still brought down from the volcano twice a week and used for making juices. Two brothers from an ancient ice-wielding family are the only remaining devotees of the idea that a blackberry and coconut juice is simply inconsiderable without volcanic ice cubes: now there's an oxymoron for you!

diego and liseth somehow didn't find this shop as amusing as I did!

We attended a CU conference over the weekend and undertook the epic 12 hour bus journey a few days earlier to ride the famous ‘Nariz del Diablo’, ‘The Devil’s Nose’ railway, which is the only remaining part of a once extensive and pioneering rail network in Ecuador. Any quick flick through an Ecuador guide book will highly recommend the 2-3 hour journey, which boasts a steam engine, stunning views and the chance to sit on top of the train as it whips along dangerous precipices. We arrived in Riobamba a day early to ensure we got tickets, and arose early on the frío Friday morning to discover that:

1. We were going on a tram, as the train was being repaired
2. We couldn’t travel on top because some tourists had recently been decapitated by newly-erected mobile phone cables along the route
3. The views weren’t as good as the ones on the nearby bus rides!!

Despite all that, we greatly enjoyed our non-mountable non-steam non-train train ride!

with a lovely, crazy Colombian friend we made at the train station

astronomical excellence in Alausí, one of the stop en route

We then spent 2 days at the conference which was really enjoyable, and toddled back to Loja on the Sunday night on a bus for which too many tickets had been sold (the shadow of a man standing up next to me haunted my 12 hours of dreams) after a rather amusing bus-wide fight about some missing apples which had mysteriously vanished from someone’s seat.

Quick Pics...

2007-05-21T11:40:00.001-05:00

buskers in Cuenca

facial improvements in Cuenca

visiting Tatiana, a friend in Cuenca

coming to a garden party near you...

discovering hidden doors with lene

bedtime stories with zaydha's little sister

café days

funky express band

The Roses Descend: Part III

2007-05-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

In the final stretch of our time together we bussed to Baños, a small town covered with the mystery, fear and awe that come from living in the tousled skirts of an active volcano. The effect of the evacuations last August is still felt as the incoming bus weaves through enormous piles of roadside ash.

Baños is a beautiful island town, raised above the rushing jungle-headed waters on high riverside flanks.
We got off the bus among the many sellers of sugar cane; lorries laden with the recently-hacked caña were continually arriving and the tough green stalks were stripped and chopped up, ready to be chewed by sugar-needy travellers.
Chewing sugar cane became rather a theme over the next few days, Jay being enamoured with the small bags of pale sticks which ressembled parsnip, but which emmited deliciously sweet juice when chewed along the grain and finally left you with a mouth full of straw-like plant residue.Baños is a spa town, and the boiling thermal water pouring down from the volcanic springs gave us a good Romanesque experience as we nightly joined half of the town’s residents in a series of freezing, bath-warm and boiling pools under the stars and adjacent to a gushing waterfall bursting out of the dark rocks. It made the Center Parcs spa look a bit lame!

We bumped into Martin, another SIM-er from Loja, who was also travelling with his parents, and happily spent the next few days eating and meeting them intentionally and accidentally. On our first full day we decided to do the famous Ruta de las Cascadas- a downhill bike ride past dozens of waterfalls, miniscule and terrifying, right to the edge of the jungle. We donned our cycle helmets (possibly borrowed from local miners) and began an adventure of large dams, ravine-crossing cable cars, roadside orchids, one long, dark mountain tunnel shared with oncoming traffic, inadvertent mud baths, a puncture (thanks, Dad!) and increasingly jungly fauna and breathtaking views over the valley.

jay took this photo whilst dad fixed my puncture!

Around lunchtime we stopped nearby an enormous waterfall called The Devil’s Cauldron, which we walked about half an hour to reach and were not disappointed. Gallons and gallons of water were forced down from the mountains into a cauldron of rock, swirling angrily and intensely in the enclosed pool before being released through the small outlet which formed a more orthodox waterfall further down. The owners of a nearby restaurant spent 6 months constructing a viewing platform with three descending levels; the last of which cannot be used during the rainy season, and the first of which still gets you wet in the dry. They were 6 months of daily donning abseiling gear for the owner and his workmen, as they set concrete and formed stone staircases above perilous watery depths below. It was stunning, and I would rather the relentless iced-water pumelling and whirling below us remain in your imagination than tamed and warmed by an inadequate photograph.

We cyled to Río Negro, almost the mouth of the jungle at Puyo, and Jay and I had the tired yet firm desire to press on into the beckoning green beyond, but after hours of amazing downhill bursts we decided to throw our bikes in a bus and head back to Baños for the thermal baths and a nice meal with Martin y familia. Whilst waiting for the bus, a lovely old lady with a most impressive beard leant us two stools as we sat in the dusty road with cheap ice cream, smiled at me lots and then gave me an enormous hug as we left.

Now, a summary of our time in Baños would not be complete without a reference to the various climbs out of town up to the top of the hill past the Evacuation Bridge, from where we looked and longed for Tungurahua. If ever you desire poetic inspiration, or to revel in the beauty of incomprehensible yet intoxicating words, look at a map of Ecuador and just read the town and volcano names. Tung-goo-rah-wah, Tung-goo-rah-wah. Never have I so longed for clouds to clear, and as we waited and waited for spectacular views of the bubbling companion tantalisingly close to us, we came to content ourselves with infrequent black cauliflower emissions of smoke and ash pushing their way above the persisent dull clouds. Not a bad thing to have to content oneself with, all things considered.

Tungurahua from a distance- Giovanni our taxi driver took this photo with Dad's camera which he left in the car!

The day after the epic jungle journey we set out in early morning rain along the same road, only this time in a small van loaded with raft and several sleeping Ecuadorians (thankfully not the driver, though that was just an unexpected bonus) and we drove slightly beyond Rio Negro to begin our jaunt down the Río Pastaza, not exactly white water but brown and rough enough for us! We arrived at the sports centre, a hut with a plastic sheet where we changed into our delicious wetsuits (in the rain) and were given instructions for rafting, not drowning etc. Then we mounted our inflatable vessel with other equally clueless foreigners and began an exhilerating super-speed-cruise about 30km into jungle proper. Jay and Dad were at the head of the mighty vessel and Mum soon realised that she wasn’t about to meet a watery end, and we all had a jolly nice time, what?

We descended in Puyo where we had traditional lunch (rice and chicken, rice and chicken… thus goes the rhythm of my digestive process) and saw a bright green parrot sitting outside the window. After Jay had convinced the guides that they would never win her hand nor her father’s blessing, we drove back to Baños via Shell and Mera, where Jim and Elizabeth Elliot lived before ‘moving in’ to the jungle, for those in the know.

And cake! There was lots of cake in Baños, which obviously marks it out as one of the best places to visit in Ecuador, (apart from my kitchen, but Lonely Planet have so far been terribly slow to catch on).

Prepare for unashamed tangent: talking of vessels reminded me of a conversation with a policeman I had in Loja last week. Normally the rule of the law here makes you feel more threatened than safe, as large groups of policeman hiss and made lewd comments on a frequent basis. However, last week whilst waiting for a shop to open in the central square I chanced to sit upon the grass (Cambridge pettiness appearing to be far removed from Loja) and continued my reading of Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’. Presently a policia presented himself to me, greeted me, giggled, and then walked away again. Bemused, I continued reading. A couple of pages later he returned, and, greeting me again, apologetically informed me that it was not the done thing to sit on the grass. Apologising (though not as much as him) I immediately made to move.
“No! Wait, you don’t have to move really, I suppose. I mean, you won’t be here for very long will you?” “No, really, it’s fine.. I can sit on the bench.” “No! Don’t be silly. Where are you from? [Insert normal formalities here…] Can you tell me about the vikings?”

So, for the next twenty minutes we remained on the forbidden grass and I shared my entire viking knowledge (mainly based on a primary school viking production which involved sitting on ‘long boat’ benches and singing ‘Row, Row, We are the vikings…’), discovering to my joy that this policeman has been wondering about the ins and out of los vikingos for a very long time without having anyone to ask! Despite my deficient knowledge he seemed delighted, another service to mankind dispensed….

Quito's colonial centre

Anyway, returning to family exploits… we returned to Quito for our final few days and did the obligatory afternoon trip to ‘Mitad del Mundo’, the predictably cliché tiny town constructed around the equatorial line, which, ironically, they painted according to measurements which have now been shown to be about 240m out. Quite funny really, but I am in no position to mock! So, putting empirical awareness firmly out of mind we straddled the hemisphere, with no particular feeling of grandeur and, disappointingly, no toilets with which to see the Coriolis Force which doesn’t even work on such small quantities of water anyway. All in all, the sum value is in the following photos, to be passed down through Rose family generations:

So, after a wonderful few weeks together we bade farewell at Quito airport one Saturday afternoon, to be reunitied after many more adventures at home and abroad. It was both wonderfully normal and yet rather strange to thus blend such different worlds, but I think that returning home, 2 months today, will be easier knowing that those I will be around have shared Loja with me.

The Roses Descend: Part II

2007-05-10T11:40:00.000-05:00

Early Saturday morning we were reunited with the now legendary Giovanni who drove us 2 hours north of Quito to Otavalo, a town famous worldwide for its enormous Saturday market.

The road to Otavalo

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a wife and daughters will find his fortune wanting when they start to shop.

We spent hours walking around endless stalls of every kind of woven item imaginable, ponchos, paintings, chickens, jewellery, hammocks, plastic fruits… it was a quite unique experience. Dad soon grew tired of mooching and he and Jay caught a taxi to a nearby leather village (i.e. famous for, not made of) and both returned to our hotel that night with new leather jackets. I took lots of pictures at Otavalo but unfortunately had my camera stolen a few days later, so use your imagination to conjure up tired, sun-battered faces learning against impossibly high piles of equally sun-battered woven fabrics, and beautifully-dressed indigenous ladies clothed with resourceful smiles trying to outdo their beadwork rivals.

roast hog and scarves, a classic combination

We stayed in a lovely hotel in Otavalo which gave slight relief from the constant stream of traveling which left a persistent echo of bus engines, bus sellers and bus scent in mind and mouth. We sat outside in a beautiful garden dotted with flitty hummingbirds and enjoyed ‘Horniman’s Tea’, which, despite not tasting as good as Twinings, definitely wins on comedy value. Any comedy value to be found the following day was definitely only in hindsight, as we traveled from Otavalo, past Quito, down to Latacunga, a town somewhat akin to Loja in its fame and tourist appeal (lacking the former and hiding the latter). During the journey as the rain turned the Panamerican into a mud bath (minus the therapeutic qualities) we drove past two buses which had collided to form a perfect T shape and leave many dead, as we saw on the news the following day. Then my camera was stolen by some geezeros dodgerios sitting behind us before we pulled into Latacunga and settled into our hilariously miserable hotel, finding everything in the town shut for Easter Sunday as the rain and thick cloud continued to dismally bathe the town. Thinking about it, it’s pretty hilarious, but I was pretty fed up in the photo below:

We ate lunch and dinner in the only open restaurant in town and then went to bed early after all wrapping up in our new Otavalo woolies and watching ‘Home Alone’ in mine and Jay’s windowless hotel room.

‘I thought it was supposed to be hot at the equator?’

‘Not at 2800m, it would appear.’

We rose early the following morning to fulfill our purpose in coming to Latacunga- the famous ‘Quilotoa Loop’, a remote and adventurous voyage of hiking and catching milk floats and rare buses to travel round extremely isolated communities amongst striking scenery and past Laguna Quilotoa, a volcanic crater filled with alkaline water. As time was limited and we had had our fill of buses, we caught a taxi from Latacunga as far as the lagoon, past three villages and numerous unmapped indigenous settlements.

The drive was truly spectacular; the most striking feature being the cultivated land set right at the top of the patchwork peaks, the harvesting of which would definitely require Mr Motivator and probably lashings of fluorescent lyrcra. The early mist rose as we began our drive and then descended as we rose higher and higher into the moutains. A feeling of utter abandon cloaked the journey, only temporarily punctuated by the sight of fire in tiny hillside huts. Our first stop was at the service station; a large pile of mud behind which we relieved ourselves and, upon having to use our legs, we keenly felt the lack of oxygen at such great heights. The second stop was at the village of Tigua, from where the peaks of Cotopaxi and other volcanoes would have been visible without the thick layer of cloud. Vividly colourful paintings of Andean life which are internationally recognised (whatever that means) were originally painted in Tigua on sheepskin canvases. We stopped off at the local gallery, which was closed, but as we stood by the door the woman who runs it ran down from her house with the keys to let us in. We were faced with ghoulish masks and delicate depictions of village existence covering the walls and we bought a few pictures, giving us the perfect excuse to refuse the oncoming onslaught of ‘Genuine Tigua Pictures’ or ‘Better Than Tigua Pictures’ or ‘Pictures Made With Better-Fed Sheep’ over the next few days. The little girl in the picture below painted all of the pictures we bought.

A few hours later we arrived at the lake, paying $1 entrance to the village which has sprung up purely due to tourism. We climbed the steps to the lookout post and the view waiting below us was incredible. A heady mix of altitude, enormous volcanic flanks dropping down to deadly still, eerily bright water, a near total lack of vegetation and continued silence made for an impressive yet rather terrifying first meeting with Quilotoa. The photographs do it no justice at all.

We decided to hike down to the base of the water, much to Mum’s delight, joy and overall rapture. We began our descent which involved sliding down huge stretches of volcanic sand, trapsing across greenish flats and navegating down bouldered pathways. We had ordered two donkeys at the top of the volcano to bring us back up again, or at least some of us, as we were now at 3854m, and walking up the steps had puffed us enough. We arrived at the base of the water and the awe simply changed angle. There is no inlet for the water and the huge, immovable mass of liquid increased in eeriness as its blueness seeped out to reveal a deep emerald.

There was some slight confusion about whose donkey was whose as a few came trotting down the crater with their guides and several people seemed to have ordered them. Eventually Dad and Jay set off walking and Mum and I began our very bumpy ride to the top of the volcano, with the horseriding in Vilcabamba our only experience to help us cling on to the saddle-less mules.

Dad and I swapped for a brief moment, but I think I failed to get into a rythym and the old story of parents suffering for their children was padded out as Dad was forced to keep walking after I nearly collapses from (perceived) heart failure!

The drive back to Latacunga gave us our first terrestrial glimpse of the volcano Tungurahua, puffing out smoke in the distance as the sun began to set. We returned to a much livelier Latacunga, and I shall end this entry with these extracts from the safety notice in our hotel room, which are indeed ones that should we should all heed with great seriousness:

Hotel Rodelu gives you the normest welcome to Latacunga and reminds you:

The hostage is responsible of all normal use of all fornoture put on your use and to maintain an adequate suffer at ALL MOMENT IN HOTEL

(Spanish reads: The guest is responsible for all furnishings placed at your disposal and asked to behave appropriately at all times in the hotel)

It is forbidden to listen music on hing volume or doing strong noises that disturb the resting of other hostages

It is furbidden to bring animals (wonderful, unintended pun!)

RODELU HOTEL IT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR AND VALVEE. Thing leaved on room there is sewrity box. The water from the faceuh is good for drink, without dinger of haman heaty

(Spanish reads: The tap water is safe to drink without endangering your health)

The restaurant menu was selling Sir Lion Stick and Gordon Blue food, as well as pineapple hard drink (piña colada)... the waitress was somewhat baffled by our unsurpressable giggles!

More to follow...

The Roses Descend: Part One

2007-05-06T15:54:00.000-05:00

It has been far too long since my last entry and this bears no relation whatsoever to a lack of activity or excitement; not, of course, that both are necessary all the time! However, amid the funk gigs, salsa nights, trips to Vilcabamba and late-night flings with dead 16thC writers, the arrival of the Rose consortium at the end of March is by far most in need of exposition.

Now, after months of a worrying mother telling me to be careful when traveling, I was rather surprised (although traumatised is probably a more honest word) to discover, whilst waiting at Quito airport at 11.30pm, that my parents and sister Jay had decided to make an unplanned stop-over in Bogotá, Colombia. They missed their connecting flight to Quito after flying Madrid-Bogotá, and my misplaced optimism and faith in airline punctuality meant that we would miss our morning flights to Loja, although they had already managed to get the earliest flight out to Quito. Further plagued by my optimism and affected both by a latino sense that ‘things will work out somehow’ and the imminent presence of my father who can always, always fix anything, I went to sleep fairly peacefully. I arose at 4.30am and got yet another taxi to the airport (I did that route 6 times in 24 hours, but it was probably a blessing in disguise: taxi acclimatisation) to see if we could change our flights to Loja and travel that afternoon or even in the next few days. Nada. Na-da.

Dada! Three very tired looking family members finally appeared at Quito airport the following morning. It was strange and wonderful to see them again; you often spend so long thinking about people or things, reminiscing, imagining what it would feel like to see them, and then suddenly the mystery all falls apart and you are face to face again. We began planning, and it turned out that Dad and Jay had indeed come up with a plan to get us to the other end of the country in order to not entirely mess up our minutely-planned itinerary: get a taxi!

That may sound sensible enough, but suffice it to say that people are still asking: ‘Did you REALLY get a taxi from Quito to Loja?’ It feels glamorous to have passed into the mythological and now form part of Lojano legend, but it felt less exciting as we progressed further and further along our 15 hour zoom straight down the Andes. We had a lovely taxi driver, Giovanni, who was a bit of a trooper and doubled up as a tour guide as we drove the ‘Avenida de los Volcanes’. Unfortunately the clouds prevented much volcano spotting, but our epic voyage took us through unnavegable mist, past a fatal car crash, via a wonderful fruit juice stall selling ‘bounty in a cup’, 6 hours on a road resembling the surface of the moon (on a bad hair day) and past hundreds of indigenous people walking beside the road with llamas, mist, and reams of ruddy-red-cheeked children in tiny ponchos. We arrived at about 2am in Loja after momentary panic at the question ‘you can find your house, can’t you?’ and impressively only 100m down the wrong side of the dual carriage way.

"Service Station"

The next few days were spent catching up, emptying suitcases of things brought for me (Photos of Oliver! Soreen! M&S knickers! Shoes! English Tea!) and getting to know Loja. We spent 2 nights at the café and Mum, Dad and Jay were introduced to lots of friends- Dad’s Spanish skills in no way impeded communication, and Mum got to put her recent lessons to use! We did lots of normal things which through new eyes had restored wonder- the Sunday market, pottering in the streets among ‘proper shops’ selling only one kind of produce, shoe shining in the squares, going to my church, street sellers…

Hugo, one of the street kids at the café, was fascinated with my Dad’s height and keeps talking about it- ‘When are you parents coming back? You Dad was hu-u-u-u-ge!’ (¡grandote!)- I think that even I will be scared of my 6ft+ brother in law after a year of Ecuadorian heights! On Sunday afternoon we headed off to Vilcabamba for a few days to relax amongst the hills, and for Mum’s first ‘Thing I Don’t Really Want To Do But Will Later Be Glad I Did’- horseriding through rivers and up gentle slopes for a few hours with the friend of a friend.

We ate well at Izhcayluma and were all massaged (and some of us waxed) and Dad and Jay took very well to the hammocks. We returned for one more night at the café on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning caught the bus to Cuenca. 13 Panama hats, the world’s largest steaks,

a few museum visits and general admiration of colonial architecture later, we flew to Quito on Friday morning in time for the famous Good Friday parades through the historical centre.

We joined the thousands of quiteños and gringos throbbing through the cobbled streets awaiting the huge procession of ‘Jesus del Gran Poder’. The purple-hooded marchers, los cucuruchos, simultaneously resembled medieval princesses and plague doctors. Their penitent air as they followed the many men dressed as Christ dragging enormous wooden crosses through the streets was only somewhat dampened by the rather intimate drunk next to Jay and I who aromatised the air and was one of the few people evidently wanting a hug whom I refused to indulge.

In the afternoon we went up the enormous cable car which hulks your bulk up Volcan Pichincha to a dizzying 4100m. After a long time queuing we arrived at the top for views which were breathtaking in every sense, just before the clouds folded in, covering the valley below and beckoning driving rain and spectacular lightning. We sheltered in a conveniently-located wood cabin which served us mulled-wine in polysytrene cups and rather tasteless corn on the cob- a new Christmas combination, perhaps? Our attempt to get back down the volcano was a good lesson in latin queuing culture, or absence thereof. As the rain slammed down, the cable cars were stopping and starting spasmodically leaving a huge backlog of wet, chilly punters rather keen to get back to the more sensible altitude of 2850m. Endless new families were formed as everyone behind us claimed to belong to parents or children further on in the queue. As people slipped by us and the growing numbers threatened to remove the already miniscule amount of oxygen, it was clear that these people would soon be shot were they ever to visit Wimbledon. I cast my mind back to the previous summer where we were given ‘The Guide to Queuing at Wimbledon’- a whole book, dedicated to the etiquette of waiting! Here is my own version for the Quito cable car:

The Guide to Queuing at the TeleferiQo We are so glad that you have chosen to travel up to the top of this volcano in our cable cars, here are a few tips to make you trip more enjoyable:

1. You will notice that there are two separate queues- an express queue and freight queue, make your choice based on whether you have a few extra dollars to hand and no desire to wait at least 3 hours.

2. Whilst you wait your turn, why not make the most of our wonderful amenities? This volcano boasts a fun fair, fast food outlets and an arcade- whoever said natural beauty couldn’t blend with the modern world?

3. Should your bladder request your temporary exit from the queue, we recommend that you take a large handbag with which to bash the endless stream of rather impertinent ladies in the Ladies who, unless you are aggressive, will rob you of the bodily peace which you set out to restore.

4. Once on the top of Volcan Pichincha, you will be pleased that together with the stunning views of Quito you will be met by our very own busker- gaze in awe at the valley below whilst enjoying ‘Eternal Flame’ on the panpipes. Should you wish to purchase a CD, it is unlikely that queuing will be necessary.

5. Should a large storm begin whilst you are up top, forget that you are an unmarried, only child whose parents emigrated to Spain- all of the people just far along enough in the queue to be out of earshot are now your relatives! Think of it as a kind of benevolent mass adoption, and remember that if God hadn’t wanted you to shove your way to the front of the queue, he wouldn’t have created elbows!

[More to follow…]

Singing and Shooting

2007-03-19T15:34:00.000-05:00

(written on Saturday night)

When was the last time that anyone learnt a genuinely interesting piece of information from a glossy magazine? Well, this week in ‘Vanidades’ I learnt that Chauvin was a general under Napoleon Bonaparte, and was renowned for his dogmatism and stubborn characteristics, hence the birth of the male chauvinist (with optional pig). Last night I had the privilege of meeting my biggest one ever! My new-found knowledge allowed me to view the experience of dancing with someone who insisted on calling me ‘woman’ in every sentence with slight amusement, although eventually I was forced to run out of the club out of sheer terror that I would soon be stripped of any non-generic name and chained to an oven… which, ironically wouldn’t even be necessary. I have been having frequent baking urges of late and have made mango upside-down cake (which remained right-side up, probably due to being on the other side of the equator), mango sorbet, butterfly cakes, flapjacks, coconut macaroons, white chocolate muffins… all low fat alternatives to oppressive males!

This week we had the privilege of all of the Miss Ecuador candidates coming to San Sebastian, and so for once being vaguely blonde and walking through the square did not attract much attention as all hisses were averted… perhaps beauty contests aren’t such a bad idea after all…

Another exciting event in the square today was a drunk man crashing into the back of our taxi, and then proceeding to deny that it was his fault in the most passive way possible. Not exactly the material for a good fight scene in a film:

Drunk man with half-closed eyes in brand new 4 x 4 (number plates pending) bumps into stationary taxi

Girls inside yelp momentarily

Taxi driver exits taxi

Drunk driver stares forward nonplussed as taxi driver approaches

Taxi driver sticks head through drunk’s window and points animatedly to back of his source of income

Drunk driver inclines head towards taxista with as much haste as a legless rabbit, rolls his eyes, lifts up his hands feigning innocence

Taxi man examines back of his taxi, returns to window and tries to ask for contact details, drunk raises hands again and slurs that it most definitely wasn’t his fault (taxi driver tells us later)

Taxi driver is affected by the gesture of the moment, raises his hands, rolls his eyes and in resignation returns to the taxi to take us home

Drunk leers at us as we depart paths

This afternoon we had a BBQ for people who come to the Saturday night Bible Study at the café and one of the activities (see below) was good practice for any repetition of the two encounters above, I’m sure that shooting arrows at least at the drunk’s tyres would have been a valid response!
The past few weeks have really zoomed past since my uneventful séjour in Peru. By uneventful I mean not being woken up when our bus arrived at the border and almost not getting my passport stamped which was the whole purpose of the trip, and then arriving in Peru too early for any banks or money-changers to be open so going with my taxi driver to his friend’s house. The friend came out in PJs and then brought out a huge plastic bag full of Peruvian sucres, which I trustingly changed for dollars not having any other options… one of those times where you think you could get kidnapped but probably won’t, and besides, you know it will make a good story afterwards. I stayed a few days in Mancora, a small fishing village on the northern coast of Peru, famous for its good surf and replete with gringo-friendly restaurants. I was glad to finally get back to Loja and settle back into seeing friends, working and having some form of routine after being in the Galapagos and then having to leave the country!

The past week has been full of rehearsals for two gigs on Thursday and Friday night. On Thursday Maria and I played at my favourite club in Loja ‘Casa Tinku’ and managed to attract a large crowd despite general perplexity as to what a ‘Noche de Feeling’ (‘Night of, erm, feeling’) entailed, as the posters that were stuck all over town thus described our mix of jazz, blues, pop and ballads injected with good musicianship!

Last night I sang in a Beatle’s Tribute Concert headed up by Maria’s Uncle Rafael, who is a wonderful guitarist, and accompanied by Kenny, a British ex-pat. It’s been great to be singing again, and this week I have two more gigs on Thursday and Friday so rehearsals continue to be the theme of most free time!

On Thursday I’m singing in a charity concert to raise money for a local bar owner who has cancer, and on Friday the ‘invitada especial’ of ‘Funky Express Band’ who are one of my favourite local bands, and have just come back from Cuba where they recorded a video for their latest single… one soon finds that every musician in Loja is in at least 3 bands, so singing with one band means links to about 15 others!

My parents and sister Jay arrive in less than 2 weeks and it will be wonderful to show them round. During the BBQ this afternoon I stood looking over the valley and felt a great freshness and joy at being in the mountains and having the amazing chance to be intertwined with the life of such a lovely little town.

Galápagos: Underwater

2007-03-09T12:19:00.000-05:00

These photos were taking during our snorkelling by Rolf, a Canadian guy on the boat.

white-tipped shark

Galápagoodnessgraciousmeit’samazing!

2007-03-01T11:47:00.000-05:00

The daunting task of putting the past 10 days into words feels a bit like I’ve been asked to paint a royal portrait and given a box of stubby wax crayons- nothing short of a poetic masterpiece could convey anything vaguely approximating to the experience of being in the Galápagos Islands.. and whilst wax crayons are definitely yet to be as appreciated as they deserve, I shall let the following small selection of the myriad photos taken during my time away speak for themselves, almost…

Iguanas...

2007-03-01T11:45:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most iconic of the Galapagos dwellers, my initial amazement at the iguanas scattered across the road less travelled on our first day on Santa Cruz island rapidly had to adjust from ‘Wow!’ to ‘Oh, another iguana’, or I think my lifetime supply of adrenaline would have been used up in eight days [dubious biological possibility].

We saw marine, land and hybrid igauanas in an array of colours on nearly all of the 10 islands we visited, some of which looked like recent army recruits in their shedding camoflage skin, others which were bordering on obese having over indulged on cactuses [‘Iguana Obesity – Volcanic Parents Accused of Nutritional Irresponsibility’], and others which were suffering from the non-favourable vegetation conditions on their island due its being made of solified lava.

Life on the Boat

2007-03-01T11:35:00.000-05:00

The boat I lived on for the week was the lovely, miniscule ‘Yolita’, bearer of many wonderful young travelers and raised toilets from which one easily fell into the waiting shower with an unexpected jolt of the boat. I shared a tiny bunk room with a French girl Karine for the first part of the week and with a Brit, Sarah, from Thursday until Sunday. As Yolita nightly wove her way through Pacific wetness we wove our way into the bathroom and into bed with great contortionist fun as our two rucksacks took up more than all of the floor space, and I learnt the hard way that I could not sit up in bed!

The 8-day survivors

Everyone looks more beautiful in the Galápagos..

A cook, guide, captain and 4 sailors made up the crew of the boat who stay on board for 12 weeks at a time. As one of the few in the group who spoke Spanish I got to know them quite well as they knew that they couldn’t make fun of me in front of me as they could with other passengers! My idyllic idea of their life sailing around the ocean was shattered as I got to know a group of fairly lonely, tired guys whose only change of scenery is really the fresh batch of tourists who arrive every week, and whilst there is possibly no greater place to have monotonous scenery, change is change and for them there is very little of it. I had to put up with many anti-Loja jokes as all of them were from the coast and the Sierra/Costa rivalry is equivalent to the North/South divide in the UK… ‘they eat dogs in Loja’ - the highest insult for a lojano- formed the basis of a wonderfully imaginative array of jokes and insults!

mapping our route and planning pirate expeditions

Dinner time

Being thrust together with 15 other travelers in a small space for a week meant that we all got to know each well which was great, and led to some rather monumental decisions.. one couple who got engaged during the week and the formation of a wonderful business plan for me and Eric, a lovely Swedish guy: ‘GALAPAGOS- The Musical!’, coming soon to a volcanic island near you. My French and now-less-non-existent-than-before Swedish both got an airing which was good, although I realised how comfortable I have become in Spanish and little words I have known for years in French kept coming out hispanified as I chatted with Karine which was all a bit terrifying!

Our amazing cook- the kitchen is what you see!

We often sailed to different islands overnight, which meant noisy intrusion into dreams and a very fine line between the feeling of ‘Oooh, I’m being rocked to sleep’ and ‘I WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN!’ One morning I was very sea sick and removed all introduced food items to the bottom of the ocean until I became so hungry that I ate a huge bowl of rice lying down and didn’t get up for a few hours until I knew it was safely beyond reach of the persistent waves. On the nights that we sailed a few of us slept on the top deck and found that falling to sleep whilst watching the stars provided a very effective fixed point which distracted from any wayward tummy movements!

The Group from the first half of the week on Isla Floreana

Life in the Air

2007-03-01T11:31:00.000-05:00

A host of friggate birds regularly caught a ride on the upthrust of our air as we sailed. Each day we would walk along different trails which are rigorously set out by the National Park, and the islands with high cliffs provided the largest nesting spots for masked and blue-footed boobies, hawks, gulls, doves, friggates, owls, pelicans…

Tortugas

2007-03-01T11:25:00.000-05:00

With its world-famous endemic giant turtles, a trip to the Galapagos would certainly not be complete without several encounters.. one morning we visited the Charles Darwin Research Centre which does lots of tortoise and turtle conservation [that’s a super power that the world of heroes is lacking] and breeding. This was my first encounter with turtle breeding, which was unexpectedly hilarious! (see below)

On our last full day we took the smaller boat through some salt water lagunas and watched beneath the murky green as enormous shadows floated past us and occasionally poked up their heads to breathe. Both the tortoises and turtles can live for up to 200 years which makes their lack of haste very understandable, although the little fellow below was most speedy in eating passion fruit which makes me wonder if that was the real secret of the turtle beating the hare…

A fascinating fact… the creator of E.T. spent time in the Galapagos and was inspired to make the little wrinkly alien in the syle of the turtles he saw!

in a very old shell we found in a café- sumbitted for the front cover of 'Turtle Weekly'

Passion fruit breakfast

No such thing as privacy...

El Esnorkeling

2007-03-01T11:21:00.000-05:00

Each day it seemed that we found a more amazing place to snorkel. Being within the 5% of the Galapagos visitors not yet retired, our guide seemed to greatly enjoy taking us on watery jaunts lasting up to two hours, which was exhausting, but one of the most indescribably amazing experiences of my life. Which I shall, of course, now describe! We snorkelled hugging the coastline of different islands and it felt a bit like swimming in lasagna- everything had its own layer and I’m sure that the invisible pasta protection was the basis for the lack of worry about being less than a metre away from sharks on a fairly regular basis! Many a moment was spent floating and gawking as sea lions, tortoises, white-tipped sharks, huge schools of fish, sting rays, eagle rays and all of their friends flipped and rolled along below. It all sounds rather dreamlike now, but I’m pretty sure that it happened! On the last day as I swam past a protruding rock, three Galapagos penguins dove in succession from the rock in straight past my face, and their identical elegance within a soup of bubbles was breathtaking. Galapagos penguins are the smallest in the world!

Many a moment was spent floating and gawking as sea lions, tortoises, white-tipped sharks, huge schools of fish, sting rays, eagle rays and all of their friends flipped and rolled along below. It all sounds rather dreamlike now, but I’m pretty sure that it happened! On the last day as I swam past a protruding rock, three Galapagos penguins dove in succession from the rock in straight past my face, and their identical elegance within a soup of bubbles was breathtaking. Galapagos penguins are the smallest in the world!

Luís and the Lobos

2007-03-01T11:18:00.000-05:00

The number of sea lions was incredible, if I remember correctly there are about 30,000 of them in the islands. They are waiting on the benches when you leave the airport and hiding in rocky coves in the most isolated spots. Perhaps most people know what sound a sea lion makes, but as they began their chorus of the most amazing belches I was very surprised! The babies emit a finely-tuned blend of belch, splutter and desperation whilst the adults sound like drunk, beer-bellied burpers.

Our guide, Luis, specialised more in bad jokes, tales of death on the islands and animal imitations than breathtaking biological insights. However, he did do an impressive sea lion impression which always confused the babies into belching away merrily as they looked for their mother who was, in fact, a bored tour guide looking for a bit of a giggle. Watching the sea lions play in the waves was like watching animated sausages wriggling around a cobalt frying pan; letting their fat bodies roll over each other as they caught the incoming waves. At times I suspected they were being paid for being so camera friendly, but as Luis embarked on another tale of death I realised it’s not all sweet and salty for the lobos de mar: ‘These baby, you tourist, touch baby, maybe have a cream on you hand and baby mother know he by smell, you your smell on baby and mother no want! Abandon baby and die, die, die….’ Let that be a lesson to us all.

Playas y Vistas...

2007-03-01T11:06:00.000-05:00

The famous pinnacle on Isla Bartolomé, formed by a wayward US bomb during their WWII training in Galápagos

white coral on Isla Rábida

As the week went on the animals began to vary less, but the landscape changes in the different islands made looking out of the bedroom porthole every morning a complete revelation. Some islands looked positively lunar, and indeed apparently NASA have flimed there (send all conspiracy theories on a postcard), whereas others had the most beautiful flat, white, brillliantly blue beaches I have ever seen.

Sombrero Chino- The Chinese Hat

The weather was glorious every day which made the endless tones of turquoise even deeper and more vivid. My favourite beach was ‘Tortuga Bay’ which Eric and I walked to with an Italian couple, Alex and Manuela, on the day we were moored in Santa Cruz to pick up new passengers. We trapsed in the relentless sun along a 2.5km paved path (which felt like The Wizard of Oz meets the Wild West) which finally dropped us sweaty and exhausted onto an endless stretch of the finest white sand littered with marine iguanas.

There are red, green, black and white beaches on the islands and our many wet landings ashore meant that there was intimate contact with all of them!

Tortuga Bay, Santa Cruz

La Playa Roja, Isla Floreana, with Karine

Isla Española with Eric

Finishing Off...

2007-03-01T10:58:00.000-05:00

There are far too many more things to mention, and I’m sure I’ve written more than enough for the average lunchtime read, so when I return for those who wish I shall show the rest of my 600 photos and tell you more stories! I am so amazed that I was able to go, and back in the Loja rain which welcomed me when I arrived back on Tuesday I can hardly believe that I am really the person in all of these photos! However, the comments on my tan prove it, as well as providing interesting cultural insight:

Non-Ecuadorian: ‘Your tan is amazing, I’m so jealous!’
Ecuadorian: ‘Gosh, you’re really burnt, don’t worry, I’m sure it will go away soon.’

Good times! I also spent time in Guayaquil with Carolina on my way back to Loja which was lovely (had breakfast at ‘Planet Ice Cream’ so things couldn’t really get much more magical). I’m off to Peru (exact destination unknown) this weekend to get my VISA renewed and revel in the unecessary bureacracy sending me on another overnight bus journey replete with loud kung fu movies followed by 3am salsa sessions!

Enjoy the photos!

Sights...

2007-02-16T11:18:00.000-05:00

A few pictures from the past week...

A mural depicting the defeat of the Spanish, taken from the Puerta de la Ciudad

Loja´s City Gate, La Puerta de La Ciudad. Hanna and I visited yesterday and climbed to the top of the tower, only to find upon descending that the doors had been locked for lunch and we were trapped! After fits of giggles and plans to jump, we shouted to a guard below who kindly told the clean to unlock us, which provided great amusement for all!

Banana, anyone?

The discovery of a new juice! The one on the left is 'Alfalfa', made from plant extract (with carrot and orange added, presumably to add some orange to the taste of green)

Singing with Maria de los Angeles on Wednesday night for Valentine´s day in a lovely little old bar. Preceding days involved much frantic learning of lyrics in Spanish!

A view of Loja from t'other side of the valley

Meal with the girlies.. the discovery of Thai Curry Paste in a kitchen drawer was cause for a giant prawn-filled feast on Monday night. From that we learned that Ecudorians should never, ever visit India without wanting to lose a lot of weight!

Chifles... (fried plátano), or 'The eighth wonder of the world'

Water, water everywhere...

2007-02-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

The afternoon light is bouncing violently off the newly painted facades of the banana buildings opposite the café as I stand at the cash desk and await the arrival of the band who are to play tonight: ‘Las manos del poder’, ‘The Hands of Power’. When they came in last week to ask if they could play I asked them their name, and they looked embarrassed and asked if they could tell me the following week when they had thought of one. Last night when they delivered more vibes implying that they had never played anywhere before, their wonderful name made me pray that Hands would most certainly be present tonight, but in order to switch off the power and save us all!!

Carnaval is now in even fuller swing and this morning a huge water bomb mercifully skidded off the top of my head. Having spent the past 20 minutes trying to keep my hair dry from the rain whilst walking to the Post Office it would have been a bit ironic had I been drenched at the last turn to my flat! People often walk into the café totally drenched, egged or foamed, and I´m becoming increasingly glad that I’ll be in a little boat in the middle of the Pacific when it reaches its climax next week. Not to say that we haven’t been making full use of our roof and the opportunities of wetting of Very Important Businessmen it virtually thrusts upon us!

This week has been a monumental and a calm one; my sister Amy had her first baby, Oliver. I thought that I would find it really difficult to be away and it has been strange to be so far removed from home at such an important family time, but I’m feeling a lot more peaceful and content in Loja than I have for a while which helps. I´ve been here for 5 months now, and this week I booked my flights home- I´ll be back on the 23^rd of July, which seems like a long away, but what with going to the Galápagos, a family visit, two trips to Peru to renew my VISA and then a bit of traveling before I leave, I think the second half of my time will bring me to my nephew before I know it!

I leave for Guayaquil on the Friday night bus [note to self- learn to love 1am horror movies] and then leave from the airport on Sunday morning for a one and a half hour flight to the islands, where I’ll begin my one week floating jaunt in a little boat called ‘Yolita’. Today I started reading a collection of stories and memories by Galápagos residents which I hope (naïvely) will relieve something of the feeling of being just another tourist taking lots and lots of photos (although of course I will!), and being in the most unspoilt place in the world without really having a grasp of the lives and immense poverty which have co-existed with such wonderful wildlife. The first is the story of a woman from Loja who was forced to move to the islands by her husband during a long drought in the province. He could give no reason for his compulsion to move to the islands, but was so persuaded that he said to her:

´Well, the only thing I´ll say to you is that given how young we both are, if our marriage falls apart it will be your fault, not mine, because I’m not staying to live here, I want to give you and my children a better lot in life, so I’m going, if you follow me, great, but if you insist on staying with your parents then it’s not my fault.’

After taking the tri-annual 8-day boat ride from Guayaquil, they found themselves working on Isabela, the largest island of the archipelago, as guardians of Ecuador’s Australia- a penal colony. The subsequent accounts of her depression, extreme loneliness and desire to die in childbirth provide a stark contrast to the thousands of people who visit precisely because they have been able to eke out an existence on their islands, whereas the Galápagos were the very epitomy of hopelessness for Blanca Castillo de Vargas.

Other exciting news is that the hotel next to the Loja Fire Station burned down last night without the firemen noticing until it was completely destroyed. My diet has recently consisted almost entirely of leaf-encased raisin sweet bread, called quimbolito. On Sunday afternoon Veronica, Joanna, Susana and I began reading the Gospel of John together. Bob and Millie are going to Chile next week so I am in charge at the café, which will mostly mean trying to enforce a ‘no water bombs in the kitchen’ rule. Perhaps I shall just encourage those with wetting intentions to sign up for the Fire Brigade.

Market Sights...

2007-02-05T11:11:00.000-05:00

Carnaval

2007-02-01T10:26:00.000-05:00

It´s February. The dark, cold month when trousers never seem to fully dry out after inadvertent bathings in the rain and constant wetness hanging in the air.

Or, alternatively, the fresh, bright month when trousers never seem to fully dry out after deliberate soakings from water bomb-wielding little boys.

Carnaval has arrived in Ecuador! Preceding Lent, technically it falls in the last few weeks of the month, yet for the past few weeks Loja has witnessed an ever-growing number of city-wide water fight protagonists. I´m yet to work out the link between Lent and the daily attacks with water balloons from roofs, balconies, doorways, church steps, but if this is the Ecuadorian version of pancake day- ridding oneself of the constant urge to soak strangers in the street- then it´s definitely a bit more exciting than ridding oneself of eggs and butter. In any case, the eggs are just part of the fun here- here´s to scrambled hair! So, we have stocked up on water bombs ready to defend ourself from the especially purposeful kids on the roof opposite ours, whose aim seems to be improving. Last night I was chased down the street by two kids who thankfully had very bad throwing skills. I looked one of them in the eye and told him he threw like a girl, at which he proceded to prove my point!

Last weekend I went to the baptism of one of Irma`s grandaughters and then spent the night at a huge family party which was brilliant. We had a huge meal at midnight and the rest of the night muched on cough sweets and local brew, dancing the night away to music pumped from speakers large enough permanently damage the hearing of all present.

Viviana, looks like a princess, screams like a queen!

After a first photo, Erica said- ´Boring! Let´s stick our tongues out and then my Mum will get annoyed!

Paulina and Irma

At the weekend the GAP girls and I went to Vilcabamba for a night and have all been rather ill since. A huge debate on whether diarrhoea or constipation is more desirable last night pretty much illustrates the symptoms! Too much detail? When it´s commoner than the common cold, you become pretty hardened to using such words! In our team meeting yesterday we all practised using a special needle pen to inject if we are about die from an allergic reaction.. but only if totally convinced death is imminent, for which there was no training. Happy days!

Cairo meets Vilcabamba: the inexplicable pyramid in the hostería we stayed in!

Yesterday I hosted an English speech competition in the town hall and Bob was one of the judges. 12 students spoke for 4 minutes on Pablo Palacio, one of the most important Ecuadorian writers of the 20th century. Whilst some contestants passed without incident, my favourite was a definite candidate for South American Dictator, crumpling up his face and moving his hands in such an angry manner that his body language was hard to relate to his words: ´we should be proud of Pablo Palacio, a wonderful example of Loja´s cultural contribution to Ecuadorian and world literature.´ Bob was on the panel of judges and told me that the girl who won, who was by no stretch of the imagination worthy of her prize, was awarded the gold medal because she was the oldest of all candidates, and another of the judges said that it would therefore be unfair if she didn´t win. I proposed that next year it be called: English Speech Competition, or ´Give in your date of birth to win a prize´, but I´m not sure it will catch on.

El concurso: I´m at the lectern at the left, Bob´s at the table, and the English grammar skills were unsure whether or not to enter the room

Things have been really busy of late, but we´ve got a lot more hands at the cafe which makes doing the groups and Bible studies a lot easier in terms of workload. I´ve just booked my holiday for when the cafe closes for Carnaval proper in 2 weeks- off to the Galápagos islands for a week, which is more exciting than the recent discovery that potatoes and icing are a world class combination. More information to follow!

Sunset from our roof

Befriending a llama

2007-01-24T12:59:00.000-05:00

Step 1: Know your target. He is fluffy, white and in desperate need of some dental floss.

Step 2: Gradually intrude into his personal space, always maintaining an air of disinterest, and never showing fear.

Step 3: Introduce the idea that you too are a simple llama, just needing companionship. This is most effectively achieved by baring your teeth and looking as white and fluffy as possible.

Step 4: Take the plunge. Try not to make jerky movements when llama´s bad dental hygiene makes you worry more about your safety than your olfactory pleasure.

Step 5: Enjoy your new friend!

Saturday Rain

2007-01-21T14:23:00.000-05:00

The only thing missing on this photo is the fragile and beautiful second rainbow hanging just above the first

Giant Rats, Tiny People

2007-01-20T12:52:00.000-05:00

It’s late on a Friday night and I am probably only still awake because I bought some amazingly mad stripy blue (bleen) trousers, and falling asleep would tragically rob me of such a vision of vertical wonder. So, spurred on by my new apparel, I shall fill in the blanks from the past few weeks. Having the power to both create and fill the blanks, I remind you that many blanks remain unblanked to be filled, which seems to be an inevitable and beautiful part of the daily attrition of those Small Things You Don’t Notice At The Time But Will Surely Come To Miss.

I would really love to eat a good green olive and some blue cheese. This am currently wondering how viable it is for my visitng family members to pop some Saint Agur in their hand luggage.

On to more likely things, such as the new President popping up just outside the café, 10 of the 13 members of a visiting team being bed-ridden and one hospitalised, being interviewed on radio, TV and appearing in local taxis as a token foreigner on a laminated tourist brochure and the public incineration of a large, stuffed rat.

So numerous have been the protests, parades and general public manifestations of noise and colour since I arrived that I barely even flinched today on seeing about 50 horses wandering past our balcony, and huge procession headed up by a floating image of a local saint.

Two girls on a GAP year programme arrived from the UK at the beginning of January and they experienced their first night of fireworks last night, which reminded me of my first week here when the combination of enough erratic explosives to provide a lifetime’s work for the world’s Health and Safety Departments and nearby, waiting eyes still shocked me. I am now surprised when people ask me if I’m getting used to life in Loja; I walked down a certain street today for the first time in a few weeks and it felt like the urbanised version of Friends Reunited.

with hanna, becky and sebastian

hugo, one of the homeless kids who comes to the cafe

Last week, Rafael Correa, our new President, (‘what lovely eyes!) came to the Plaza de Independencia. The whole event could have easily been confused with a teenager-heavy pop concert as screams and various outward gestures of devotion to the blue-eyed leader rose up to our balcony. Correa was mobbed (‘he’s so pretty’) and soon disappeared from sight, and his rousing speech (‘apparently he’s one of the best looking national leaders in the world!’) arrived in the form of passionate yet highly muffled pleas for revolution, so he may as well have been advocating his favourite brand of toilet paper given the political upheaval he failed to wreak in my fertile mind. Watching the middle-aged mothers go a bit dizzy at the sight of President Pin-up provided rather more audiovisual entertainment than El Hombre himself.

Last night a local TV show came to make a short programme about the café and the things we do, so El Sendero was temporarily turned into a studio with the added surreal experience (surreality?!) of a group of Peruvian Madrigals arriving to work wonders with tambourines and accordions. I had my first guitar lesson today (4 months later than planned!) and soon hope to run away and join the merry band of travelling musicians, as long as they give me a pair of their furry furry trousers.

an old photograph of lojana guitar players, possibly wielding their instrumensts as secret weapons

My guitar teacher is one of Veronica’s friends who studies music in Buenos Aires (and gets there on the bus, 4 days’ travelling with a daily toilet stop) and also a teatro aficionado, and is running an improvisation workshop in February which will be a rare injection of good theatrical discipline in Loja. Not sure whether we will reach the subtleties of my fellow year-abroader Will, who is being thespian in Paris, and who reportedly had to be a tea bag dissolving a biscuit. If only I could imagine myself into a good cup of British Tea perhaps I could learn to be content and not dream of pre-heated tea pots and digestives.

A week ago a short-term team from Australia came to Loja, primarily to help out with the English activities we run, but also to see the work being done here and bring man power, although ‘17-year old incoherent boy power’ might be a more accurate description! We went out to one of the villages in the province, Gonzanamá, and painted some classrooms in the poorest school in the village and spent the day with the kids there who were wonderful but exhausting, highly malnourished yet bright.
Later in the week we went out to an extremely poor area of the town and ran a children’s programme, gave out food, painted lots of faces and somehow agreed it was a good idea to let kids bash each other with pillows on gladiator-tyle podiums (perhaps I’m missing a latin plural there).
Having spent most of my time with students so far it was lovely to be with tiny people, although really challenging to see the hopelessness of so many kids trapped in poverty.

Not that hopelessness stops there; 4 of my good friends are currently looking for work and things are distinctly murky in the Loja job markets. The feeling that nothing will every really change seeps like transparent liquid into politics as well as into all levels of education in such a small town, where the greatest aspiration of a class of 7-year olds is often to move to the United States to clean houses.

Starting next week for a month I’m going to be teaching for an hour a day in one of the local English language schools, a favour for the friend of a friend (the Ecuadorian version of the ‘Old Boys’ Club’ is the ‘Cousin of my Sister’s Friend’s Grandmother’ club, and generally involves fewer blazers). However, having become either distinctly Ecuadorian in my commitment-keeping or too obsessed with good dessert, I forgot the meeting I was supposed to attend tonight as I was eating cheesecake with Veronica. Ooops!

On that sweet, no-bake note, I shall end and commit some of the many un-unblanked blanks to future recollections.

Merry Christmas and a Pyrotechnical New Year!

2007-01-01T17:40:00.000-05:00

I am now back in Loja after a lovely Christmas and a really enjoyable week of traveling, although 6 grim hours home on a bus yesterday was the longest I actually spent in transit, during which my growing feeling that lengthy bus journeys have been made even harder after a life of free first class rail travel was confirmed. That’s without even taking into account the goats, chickens and drunks trying to sit on my lap, although that lot would certainly somewhat enliven Midland Mainline.

Tuesday, December 26th

We left Loja heavily bathed in cloud juice and began the 430 metre upward journey on a road whose twists and turns meant that half of our journey was actually spent heading back towards Loja! During the elections one of the most talked-of political promises was road improvement, and as our suspension was almost entirely suspended by the deceptively deep holes (which, full of water, could have functioned as wells for entire communities) I understood why. The landscape began to shift dramatically and Loja’s unfeasibly pointy peaks eased out into a wide shock of beautifully smooth green crumples which looked like carelessly dropped mounds of silk flopping off the mountainside. We had a belated white Christmas in the form of the huge boulders dislodged by the recent downpours which winked in the middle of the road, forming a petrified barrier bettered only by the indigenous groups huddled along the roadside with washing lines suspended over our paths; a protest against something which was probably unrelated to their traffic warden underwear which flipped and danced in the wind.

We arrived at the cabins we stayed in for two nights, and I hardly need to say how lovely it was to stay in the top room with its stone walls, straw-matted floor and sloping bamboo ceiling and wonderfully comforting smell of cauliflower cheese, which most likely explains the vivid dreams I had there! Bob and Millie returned there yesterday on their way back from Quito and met a French man who is walking across South America with his llama, which I found almost too wonderful to believe and just hope that our paths cross in Loja, although I’m not sure llamas are allowed on the main roads, unlike quad bikes.

Cuenca cathedral, with its famous blue domes

Being philosophical over ice cream with Lyndsay

Wednesday

Having read an advert for a local collection of over 400 orchids, we naively set out on Wednesday morning and finally arrived at the closed orquideario after an hour and a half of enquiries at Cuenca University, advice from local taxi drivers, men in a tool shop, a woman in a mobile phone shop, a complete lack of any helpful signs which was in no way improved by my navigational ability and the fact that I asked for all of the directions, endless wrong turnings and incredulity that an orchid garden could actually be inside a place which was advertised as a school. This frustration was slightly echoed throughout my time in Cuenca as countless museums and lugares de interés were firmly padlocked shut, to the surprise of those who assured me that it would be business as normal. Perhaps the ‘normal’ is what caught us out! Anyway, we went into the centre of Cuenca to a hat workshop, which was really interesting.

The famous Panama hat has, in fact, always been made in Ecuador, but before being directly exported, entrepreneurial Panamanians shipped them to the United States and to Europe, giving them their erroneous nomenclature (that would be a good name for a band, my copyright!) This also followed their being worn by workers on the Panama canal and being wrongly identified by travelers. The industry remains far from tourist-intended in Ecuador, in Cuenca they form an integral part of indigenous dress (and there is a much higher concentration of indigenous people in Cuenca than in Loja) and the ceilings of the many workshops we passed were covered in bespoke bonnets for the local bonce. The hats are made from a palm fiber grown in the humid regions of the central coast, where the shoots are beaten, boiled and dried for three days, before normally being transported to Cuenca for weaving, although the finest quality hats (superfinos) which can take up to a month to weave and cost around $200 have to be woven at the coast as the shoots are so fine that they snap in less humid conditions. The tightness of the weave determines the quality of a hat, and we were shown the moulding process which involves hydraulic bashing using metal and stone moulds.

Hats in various states of unweave

Thursday

Bob, Millie and Lynsday left for Quito on Thursday morning and I caught the bus to a spa-pueblo of Cuenca where I spent a day reading, sitting in a huge swimming pool as hot as any bearable bath and finally bathing in the moonlight when the many noisy children had left. I walked up to the bright blue church at the top of the village and saw the beginnings of a Christmas parade in which dogs were given an equally important rôle as the children. I followed the pipes from the hot pools up to a point where you could see the water surfacing at its natural temperature and I understood why they had to add lots of cold water to the pool as only a pot was missing to make the perfect cup of Earl Grey.

Decorated canines- essential for any parade

Friday and Saturday

On Friday morning I checked into a hostal in the centre of Cuenca full of young, international travelers and spent a lovely few days speaking with foreigners in an interesting, almost creole form of Spanish! Due to high industry levels the greater wealth in Cuenca is immediately palpable and the sight of Pizza Hut and other wonderful emissories of Western cultures made Loja feel nice and protected from the onslaught of the worldwide domination of a 12 inch Pepperoni and Coke. Having said that, it was nice to be in a place more visited by tourists for the purpose of buying a few presents and having many more closed museums to be disappointed by! I did manage to find one open, full of Inca carvings which confirmed that Sylvanian families are a mere continuation of a much longer tradition stemming from the apparently innate desire to replicate oneself in teeny tiny form. Many of the jugs, cooking pots, axes and statuettes were labelled either in French, Spanish or English, which led to one particularly special moment when next to the ‘zoomorphic whistles’ I saw rows of ominously sharp, flat stones labelled as ‘hachas cemoniales’ (‘ceremonial axes) in Spanish and ‘instruments de musique’ in French! This seemingly incongruous juxtaposition is tempered only by my many karaoke experiences here which definitely approximate to torture.

Evenings were spent in the candle-lit hostel bar playing cards and me being systematically thrashed at every single game. Dancing until 4.30am on Saturday night was possibly not the wisest move before New Year’s Eve, but I met some lovely people and got some good recommendations for jaunts further afield.

Sunday

So, with three and half hour’s sleep under my proverbial belt (possiby rucksack support strap) I returned to Loja yesterday afternoon, ready for my first party at 5pm. Most of Loja’s 20s and 30s assemble yearly in one street, hanging out in their cars, drinking and dancing and generally knowing everyone there! Another great New Year’s tradition here is for men to dress in drag, and I was greatly disturbed to see one of my friends riding on the top of a truck in a miniskirt. I bumped into lots of people I knew and discovered that they somehow knew, or were related to, all of the people I was with, which had a mushroom cloud effect on our streetside gathering and was generally very jolly! My friend Veronica is moving to Quito on Wednesday to try and get work there, which I’m really sad about as I’ll miss her a lot, but it was lovely to spend time with her and her friends. After that I went to the house of one of the couples on the team- Colin and Jill- for fireworks and my first experience of the lifeblood of an Ecuadorian New Year- burning dolls and fire jumping.

During the week Guy Fawkes-esque dolls and models popped up all over Cuenca, and if anything there were even more of them in Loja when I arrived, as well as a huge volcano, helicopter and a small village contructed out of papier-mâché which I saw in one neighbourhood. Models of politicians and basically anyone famous (thankfull not local TV presenters, as my Dad pointed out to me on the phone this morning!) are burnt with great relish at midnight every year, beaten with belts and then the ensuing erratic flames must be jumped over three times to ensure the forthcoming year be a successful and merry one. Stalls with masks and homemade fireworks have been everywhere, and the dolls lie in shop doorways or are carried by underwear-clad men dubbed as ‘widows’ who jump on any cars foolish enough to venture into the streets past 8pm on the 31st.

Colin and Jill have young children, so together with lots of other families we began the burning at about 9pm in the middle of the street, with our orange-faced doll soon melting to an impressive set of burning clumps, with the occasional firecracker and rocket spurting out from a surrendered limb. From there, Amanda, Colin and I went to a family party at our friend Miriam’s house, with dancing already in full swing when we arrived. We spent a lovely evening swirling with family members, small children and total strangers who beamed and made me glad that I had taken a few dancing classes! There were about 60 people there, all family, and at midnight we went out onto the road to burn their three dolls and begin the second jumping session of the night, which began a bit badly when Miriam’s Dad fell over into the fire whilst leaping, causing his trousers to catch fire temporarily but his smile and delight only to increase. A police car slowed down as it passed us and an officer leaned out to shout something- bad sign?- ‘Feliz Año Nuevo’ he cried and they zoomed past. I think that if high jump teaching were conducted under such circumstances then any pupil’s lack of enthusiasm to hulk their bulk over the little painless pole would soon melt away under the heat of a roaring flame beneath them. One of Miriam’s cousins set off some rockets from a plastic bottle which he held in the air which made me laugh inwardly at my very fleeting thought that the children with sparklers really should be wearing gloves. When the flames died down we went back inside to begin the midnight meal which was beautiful, and fuelled a few more hours’ dancing before we finally gave in and left, clearly hours before the party would end.

Definitely one of the best New Year’s Eve experiences I’ve ever had, and henceforth shall all celebrations I attend involve such wonderful antics, so get saving those plastic bottles…

Parental Advisory: Explicit Soup

2006-12-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

Two little friends: The Jenga Architects of the Future

Trying to look happy and carefree

But I'm a real Ecuadorian!

The world's scariest Santa

Vero and Susana

Yo, Fabricio and Maria

Christmas cooking

I am sitting up on my roof listening to ‘Silent Night’ on the first Christmas Eve ever to afford me sunning possibilities. Given that I’ve not written for a while and that I’m leaving Loja for a week or so on Tuesday morning, I think it’s time to share some choice ‘morsels’ (see below) of the past few weeks.

Perhaps the title of this entry requires a prompt (and preferably swift) treatment of the subject so that insatiable curiosity does not force you to rush all the way through more mundane accounts of television shows and photo shoots. I should begin by informing you that incredibly I have not been ill since Tuesday, finally proving that there is no explicit link between food consumed and level of stomach discontent, however the explicitness resides in the fact that this week I went with 4 girls to eat Ox Penis soup for one of my friend’s birthdays. There, I’ve said it! For those of a more delicate constitution, look away now…

‘Caldo de Nervio’ is a famous hangover cure and ‘full of nutrients’, and from the distinct lack of other females in the Loja-renowned café we visited for Tuesday breakfast, more of a male ritual than a traditional way to celebrate another year of life with a group of giggling females. Memories of supressed laughter in primary school sex education classes returned with the guffaws and squeaks of grown women anticipating what was to befall us that fateful day, which has forever changed my gastronomical record and most probably established eternal enmity between me and my digestive system, The soup arrived with a worrying large unidentifiable piece of meat in its centre, and even if Lojanos were concerned about food presentation, there would be little one could do to disguise or make appealing the 15 or so slices floating in the turmeric-coloured broth. Thinking longingly of my usual morning feast of mango and cammomile and honey tea, I managed to eat one piece of the unmentionable and upon nearly returning it back into the bowl decided that that was sufficient to be able to tell this story and also retain some self-respect! My only worry now is that I will not be able to top this new height in culinary grossness and shall have to leave you all bored and unimpressed with anything else an Ecuadorian kithcen can rustle up for the next 6 months!

It’s nearly Christmas! Even though it is very strange to not be at home and yesterday Christmas was potentially going to be cancelled due to a widespread outbreak of disgruntled colons among those I am to spend it with, I am really looking forward to tomorrow and the past few weeks have been lovely. Last Sunday we had an Australian bush dance for English Night which involved the joy of seeing Ecudoarians not being able to dance for the first time ever! It’s very like a barn dance or a ceilidh, and with the added hilarity of a compartively small space, instructions in English, and
comparatively smaller English comprehension skills, the night was a beautiful medley of fleeing limbs, harmonised collisions and only a minor threat of an outbreak of civil war.

Yesterday I had a Christmas lunch with Veronica, Susana and Joanna (a new volunteer) which was great fun; we cooked and I made mulled wine and shared presents (I now have a 2D wooden doll with woolen hair that I can plait, amazing!).. I put on some carols and lovely choral music which was thoroughly voted down in favour of more latino-friendly beats. It was Veronica’s birthday last week and we spent the night dancing and karaokeing in her lounge, during which her little sister taught us some dance moves for ‘Regetón’, which is a blend of hip hop, R&B, bad rap and sheer nastiness which is really popular here, and I can only bear listening to about 2% of the time. I knew all of the songs from the TV show as lots of the dance groups use them, so I felt very hip and trendy, which isn’t a very frequent occurrence! Indeed, dancing has become an increasingly important part of life here; last night I went with a few friends to ‘Casa Tinku’ which is a lovely candle-lit live music venue. Whilst talking to a friend I missed the comments of the singer on stage and was reliably informed that he had said that if anyone dared to simply walk up to him on the stage then they would be given a free bottle of wine. Encouraged by those around me who decided that I would be a good candidate, I started walking towards the stage and then heard shouts ‘Que bailes! Que bailes!’, ‘Dance, Dance!’ and suddenly realised that the grins of my chums meant that one was, in fact, required to strut one’s stuff on stage to get said vino. This one has never returned to hear seat so quickly!

This Tuesday was the grand finale of the TV show, when all the finalists came to show their stuff. I arrived and was told I had a new co-host, a guy from California, and that we had to present the show entirely in Spanish and were given a huge script full of pretentious quotes and ecstatic praises of the organisers and participants. I wondered why they got foreigners to do it (‘gringos’, as we’re called, which can either refer to all non-latinos or just to people from the US, and comes from the Mexican/US border when US soldiers in their green uniforms were given a predictably warm welcome: ‘Green, go!’) but have learnt to shop asking most cultural questions that begin with ‘why’!

So, with the TV show over until March and something of an acquired nonchalance towards the audiovisual media, I decided to branch out last week and together with two English girls who were travelling through Loja, Bob and Millie’s daughter Lindsay (who’s here for Christmas) and a token Ecuadorian male, went for my first photo shoot! One of my friend’s husbands works for the Tourist Board and they’ve been making some new publicity and wanted some foreign faces to stick on some postcards in the hope that others would see our unharmed bodies here in Loja and feel safe enough to venture further south than Cuenca, rather like using blue tack to take off old adhesve from a wall.
Sort of. Anyway, we went to the oldest church in Loja and spent a few hours of disastrously cheesy posing, dancing, climbing on random obects and all in all having obligatory fun, which has always been my favourite kind. The photos are to be used for some postcards and some laminated publicity which will go in all of the taxis in Loja which tourists can leaf through or locals (and anyone who knows us) can laugh at.

Tonight my church is having a candle-lit carol service and then I am going to Amanda and Helene’s house (two girls from the team) to stay over, to be joined by 4 or 5 more people tomorrow for our celebrations. They went away for 2 nights this week so I house-sat for them, and spent a happy 2 hours on Friday morning locked between their front door and the fortress-esque yard door, the key for which I had cleverly left on the kitchen table. More of that obligatory fun ensued! Three people were baptised this morning and church has been really lovely recently, especially now that I feel settled and have a sarcasm/banter relationship with enough people to feel truly at home there. On Tuesday morning I am going with Bob, Millie and Lyndsay to Cuenca, a city about 6 hours north. We’re staying there for 2 days and hopefully visiting Cajas, the national park, and then they fly up to Quito and I’m planning on heading to a little town called Baños (which, brilliantly, could be translated as ‘Loos’) which has lots of natural thermal baths and springs, and then back to Cuenca for a few days of museums and exploring before coming back to Loja on the 31st ready for the great New Year Incineration Festival!

Hope that you all have a wonderful Christmas and remember, ‘A blog is for life, not just for Christmas.’ Ahem.

Vilcafotitos

2006-12-12T23:22:00.000-05:00

Look closely to spot the Christmas tree; wonder at the fact that the mist covers at least 6 deeper layers of silhouetted mountains on the horizon.

Calm in the middle of the storm.

What a wonderful invention! Definitely not intended to make anyone jealous...

The second best shower in the world. This Flinstone-esque delight of abathroom is, in my opinion, beaten only by the open-roofed bathroom we had in India last summer which had a bountiful banana tree growing into it.

The path from my cabin to the restaurant- what else do you need, after all?!

Days Between Two Hills

2006-12-12T23:10:00.000-05:00

An impending sense of doom hangs over me like an overfull rubbish bag as I contemplate the task of ‘filling in’ the past few weeks when pictures have possibly painted a thousand words, but my entries have been so long until now that a thousand has probably been too short! Amazed to get an email from Katy D saying she’d read the whole of my blog so far in her break from work… whoever said nurses worked too hard?!

A dizzying rush of dancing, wonderful live music, lunch with friends, teaching, Bible studies, talks and the general wear and tear which can either inspire or crush, depending one one’s mood, became all a bit much this weekend and I ran away to the Valley of Eternal Youth, keenly feeling the pressure of my 21 years. On Sunday afternoon after church I caught the bus to Vilcabamba (and met a very nice guy called Fabiano who grows avocados, which made me think of the ‘Avocado Baby’ book and whether a Vilcabamba avocado had ever fuelled the shopping trolley-lifting exploits of the young hero) and returned today feeling very rested. I stayed in a lovely place called ‘Izhcayluma’, which means ‘between two hills’ in Quicha, and had a little wooden hut with a balcony overlooking endless folds of green and the hugest hammock in the world! I spent a lot of time swimming (the water of Vilcabamba is said to be curative, hence themselling it at inflated prices to gullible tourists), slept in quiet for the first time in about 3 months (I don’t count the amazing insects that lulled me to sleep and the rather rude-sounding birds that greeted me in the morning!), met some travelers, ate good food and had an amazing back massage. I also read ‘The Water is Wide’ by Pat Conroy which charts his personal attempts to combat segregation in the South of North America in ’69 as he taught a forgotten island of black children who struggled against an education system that gave lip service to their right to knowledge but could not fathom the weight of its crime against so many individual lives. It was a strangely pertinent comparison to my continuing reading on Ecuadorian history, and tales of the Spanish conquest which actually led to a debate in Spain between two eminent scholars as to whether the conquerors should consider the indigenous people as animals or ‘real humans’. Incredible. I felt echoes of this inhumanity as I tried to teach Hugo, a homeless boy of nine, to spell his name tonight. Forgotten, ignored life was a feature of 16th South America, the Deep South in the ‘60s and is equally a feature of today’s world.

It was very strange to be thrust into the traveling community for a brief spell and realise that a lot of people here to ‘do’ the country know nothing more about Ecuador and its people than their Lonely Planet Guide tells them… I felt suspicious of one British guy’s claims to be trying to ‘find himself’ when he’d never even heard of Loughborough! Yesterday afternoon we had a huge tropical storm which was heralded in with black clouds as thick as tar and mid-way gave rise to a sweeping rainbow which brightened from its base upwards as bolt lightning gave the eye the dilemma of which fairly rare natural phenomenon to look at, both being framed within the same small shot of God’s amazing creation.

On the bus journey back today I smelt tarmac and then realised that we, as well as the many other vehicles around us, were driving through the freshly-laid black stuff intended to fill in the many holes which pepper the terrible roads and licking it over our tyres and basically anywhere there was not a hole to be filled. Clearly shutting off one side of the road would be too complicated, although perhaps that’s in the pipeline as we later drove past two men sitting in the middle of the road with a large tape measure extended between two apparently randomly-selected points. A few chickens on the bus, stopping off half way for the driver to pick up some things from his house and it all felt perfectly, wonderfully normal.

It was refreshing to be vaguely ‘on the road’ and have time to write, think and pray, and after a break I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks as the sunshine tries to retrieve its dominion of our little valley from the proliferation of terrible plastic Santa Clauses…

Fundación Fireworks

2006-12-07T23:47:00.000-05:00

I can't work out whether I've seen more fireworks or stray dogs in Loja- tomorrow is a holiday to celebrate the founding of Loja and we've just had another amazing mad pyrotechnical fest!

Otavalan Dancers

2006-12-06T11:23:00.000-05:00

I had the pleasure of interviewing these Otavalan dancers for the TV show yesterday, who were more worried about having to speak English than the fact that they were about to wield potentially fatal flags around the stage!

Snapshots I

2006-12-04T22:37:00.000-05:00

The Disney bakery at the corner of my road ('Donald's bread') , tragically shut down for a week for tax fraud
Tungurahua volcano from the air, still leaving thousands of people homeless and the tourist industry paralysed

A lazy afternoon with Yesenia, Veronica and a distant, deformed relative of Ronald McDonald

The man in the white shirt asked me to take this picture, voila his chosen pose!
Stocking up on drinking water in the Plaza Mayor
My future retirement home- donkey a necessity to haul groceries up ridiculous gradients

Good Inca Names

2006-12-04T22:24:00.000-05:00

Why don't you find these in a baby names book?

Calicuchima, Rumiñahui, Huayna-Cápac, Quizquiz, Chalco-Maita...

I am currently reading a poetic history of Ecuador by Benjamin Carrion, one of Loja's most famous writers, based on legends and myths of the Quitus, Incas, Indians, the Spanish and the many wild and wonderful stories that have sprung up from their vivid and tangled tapestry. Carrion describes Ecuador as 'the belly button of the world', and having been a bit exhausted this week I'm looking forward to finding some fluff inside the belly button and settling down for a nice long snooze.

I went with two friends to a wonderful folkloric dance show on Saturday night, with Lojanos exhibiting traditional dances from all over the continent. In order to force myself to do some work on my project this afternoon I went to check out a new cafe and put every Starbucks trip to shame by ordering half a pineapple topped with ice cream, whipped cream, grapes, peach, apple and bananas and some tea made with fresh pink flowers. A good work incentive, I found!

Yesterday afternoon was spent with Veronica and Joanna, one of her friends, making my now famous dark/white chocolate cookies with them (at least 10 people have asked me whether the white chocolate is, in fact, cheese!) which we cooked in the lovely old bread oven she has on her roof. Her Dad works in printing and she showed me his enormous old printing press which he has told her to keep for at least 2 generations, which will require storage space which is equivalent to about 25% of the average house size! Tomorrow I'm helping out a friend with her thesis proposal and then watching as the week flies by. Christmas decorations are everywhere, although there is a lovely lack of canned Christmas music and a good number of live turkeys stuck under people's arms and sold on street corners. Watch this space for an upcoming culinary experience which outdoes all forerunners...

New Photos II

2006-11-30T11:40:00.000-05:00

Peeling peas

Mountains dreams are made of

Casa dulce casa

My chamber
A vaca loca in a more placid phase of its existence
Interviewing a dancer for the TV show
Loja's version of Strictly Ballroom
A concert we did a few weeks ago in a local park

Liset and Gabriel on El Sendero balcony

New photos I

2006-11-30T11:14:00.001-05:00

Working hard at El Sendero with Liset

Loja meets the chocolate game (and my cag in a bag)

Paul and Alberto

Maria de los Angeles

With Veronica

With Camilita, Lourdes and one of two new fluffy cats

Birthday flowers and the rat-rabbit balloon

Singing songs for me and Correa

2006-11-30T11:14:00.000-05:00

Political Adulthood, or, ‘The Entry of the Tenuous Links’

2006-11-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

Two rather significant events have occurred in the past few days, changing the face of Loja, Ecuador, and possibly the entire world. One was my 21st birthday, the other was the final round of Presidential elections in Ecuador. I suspect that the former is more likely to have made it onto BBC news, yet it appears that there are a surprising number of similarities between the two events. I thus propose to compare the two and thence conclude which hold greater significance for the world at large.

Frequency

I have had a birthday each year since I was born, and this year was no exception. Given the established rules of when a birth is to be remembered- governed namely by the Roman calendar- it appears I am nothing particularly special in this regard. However, given the established rules of 4 year terms for Presidents, I feel that the fact that Ecuador has had 7 of them in the past 10 years is worthy of special mention. Especially as one of said Presidents was the only female ruler of the country who held her lofty position of power for all of one hour, being the Vice President to a man who’d just been ousted by the army, and was then swiftly replaced by someone with a beard and trousers. She is still referred to as ‘former President’ which I find rather amusing.

Supporters

I had a lovely birthday party on Sunday night with about 15 friends, who for the purpose of comparison I shall call my supporters. We ate, drank, played the chocolate game (wondering whether this was as dangerous to introduce to a foreign country as new types of fauna), sang songs, I was serenaded, and then we danced the night away and I was very grateful for my newly-acquired footwork skills.

Ecuador’s new President, the socialist Rafael Correa, beat his millionaire opponent Alvaro Noboa by about 15% of the votes. This sounds impressive, and 15% of the nation rather than the 15 Ecuadorians who boogied in my flat on Sunday night seems to swing the title of ‘more important event’ in the favour of the elections. However, Correa’s political party decided to not put forward any MPs in the elections, which means that when he begins his term in January, he will find himself surrounded entirely by MPs who voted for someone else. This sounded a bit daft to me until I was informed that Correa’s plan is simply to stage a revolt, chuck out all of the current MPs who were voted in in October, and set up an entirely new parliamentary system with his buddies. Now, I am far from being any form of competent political commentator, nor do I claim great understanding of the current situation, however I do feel that this means I had greater stability with my friends in my flat on Sunday night than Correa will have in terms of supporters for a good few months.

Bits of paper

I got some lovely birthday cards on Sunday, which meant a lot to me, although ultimately won’t give me any great powers. However, everyone who voted was given a small piece of paper as proof of their attendance on the happy day, without which no bank transactions, house or car purchasing is possible. Anyone who does not vote is fined, and the power wielded by such a tiny momentum of the day is incredible, given that I still have not been given my local ID card as they have run out of the special paper required to make it in the whole country.

Shouts of joy

I have never before had to compete with a politician on my birthday, but as the election results trickled in shouts of ‘Long live the birthday girl’ were coupled with ‘AND LONG LIVE CORREA!’ It has to be said that people have great expectations for the new President, who is an Economist and seems to at least be slightly more realistic in his plans for housing and education that Noboa. Last week graffiti sprang up all over town and ‘NO BOA NO’ was scrawled across the wall opposite my building. It has since been painted over in a pleasingly different colour of paint, leaving a subtle reminder to the initiated of what it is attempting to hide. Rather like a sign that says ‘Don’t look at me.’ I came across some great anti-Noboa propoganda last week in the form of a sheet of questions which the Ecuadorian people demanded that he answer, including: ‘Tell us why you declared your Father to be mentally insane so that you could change his will?’ Correa’s campaigners did a good job of spreading rumours with the efficacy of an embittered teenage girl.

Celebration

I had the great joy of seeing my first ‘vaca loca’- ‘crazy cow’- in action last week during one of Correa’s support campaigns. You may remember that I came across one of these whilst buying fireworks, and it was a truly wonderful sight to see hundreds of rockets shooting off from the wooden frame of a cow strapped onto a suicidal volunteer who ran merrily into the nearby crowds, sending them running faster than a housewife from the beef aisle during the BSE crisis. I definitely prefer mad cows in Ecuador! I was given a rather freaky balloon for my birthday, which you can see in one of the pictures above, but I think that Correa wins this category!

Future

All in all, Loja feels pretty much the same now that I am officially all growned up, and now that we wait for all administrative processes to be changed and see what twists and turns the future holds for Ecuador. I suppose one must concede that the Presidential elections were of greater national significance than my birthday, however when I asked some pupils what they thought about their new President one girl enthusiastically replied ‘Oooh, he’s got lovely eyes’, and another ‘He’s so much more handsome than Noboa.’ Who can hope to compete against such virtues?

Quickly touching on other things, salsa lessons have now begun (exhausting!), Christmas lights have gone up (but it’s so sunny, argh!), work has been done on my project for Cambridge (minimal!), teaching continues (hilarious!), TV recording continues (even more so!) and an excess of parentheses and exclamation marks brings this entry to a close.

Culinary Update III

2006-11-25T14:20:00.000-05:00

Looks like I'm paying the price for recent gastronomical exploits, having spent the past 36 hours either in bed, being sick, or on the loo. A bit more glamorous than my fly symptoms a while ago, but for the moment I'm sticking to herbal tea and fruit!

Rapidito

2006-11-22T23:10:00.000-05:00

This will be a nice, short entry.

Two monumental things happened today:

1. I ate cow intestines for lunch (mise en abîme of the digestive process, you might say)

2. I finally worked out how to make myself look like the Ecuadorians dancing merengue when it was suggested to me that I dance as if I really, really needed the loo. Genius! So glad that method-dancing wasn't part of the class.

¡Nada más!

Can you guess what it is yet?!

2006-11-20T14:59:00.000-05:00

Firewall

2006-11-20T14:36:00.000-05:00

A close look at these photos will reveal a small child running through the wall of fire and the cut-off point for the new yellow paint on the church!

Parade-a-rama

2006-11-20T14:21:00.000-05:00

La Plaza de Independencia

2006-11-20T14:17:00.000-05:00

Independence Days

2006-11-20T14:15:00.000-05:00

Three parades, two dance classes and a firework display. A brief resumé of my week sounds a bit like the title of a really bad novel, although it is definitely surpassed by this choice extract from the ‘Worst First Sentences of a Novel’ book which I found on at 2.30am on Saturday morning during an impromptu rearranging of the living room:

‘She jiggled like a tea bag as he metaphorically poured cold milk into the boiling mess of her life.’

What a disappointment to realise that the book was the result of a competition which tragically did not compel Isobel Whooley, Plimmerton, to complete her promising memoirs.

Anyhoo, I digress, which is now something with which my English Club members are now familiar, having been introduced to ‘Just a Minute’!

Yesterday was the 186th anniversary of Loja’s Independence from the Spanish crown, which we have been celebrating all week with much gusto, many flags and a huge amount of yellow paint. El Sendero is in ‘La Plaza de la Independencia’, the square where the treaty of independence was signed in 1820 which has been the focal point of most of the festivitites this week. The current mayor sent all of the residents and businesses in the square a letter a week ago ordering that any building which was not yellow, brown or cream, be repainted, as the current rainbow of knowingly clashing colours was, apparently, ‘too colonial in appearance.’ It is a law that every house be repainted at least once a year in the historical centre of the city anyway, but given that there seems to be only one small business who specialise in painting things yellow, the mayor’s request was highly ambitious, yet violation of it carried a $300 fine. The big blue church on the conrner of the square has been swathed in scaffolding all week, and as the first parade began on Thursday its front was still a refreshing bluellow cocktail as the painters rested in one of the trees to watch the passing dancers. The church face was finished by Friday night, which saw most of Loja descend on the square (and those who weren’t in the square were in the café), but our building remained a defiant bright pink and the side of the church which cannot be seen from the sqaure remains blue, and if I were a gambling girl I would bet anyone that it will never be brought into bananary yellow harmony with its other half.

This week has been really interesting, and El Sendero has provided great view of the three huge parades on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, showcasing everything from folk dancing, marching bands, thousands of flag bearers and small children dressed up as trees. On Friday every single high school in Loja paraded, all with immaculate uniforms and costumes and the produce of weeks of putting up with school kids banging drums hung over their shoulders like bags of dirty sports kit. Upon expressing excitement that I would not be woken up again by passing drummers at 6am, Sebastian (our youngest volunteer, aged 9, heartthrob) laughed and told me that we still have to wait for the celebration of the Foundation of Loja in December, when, needless to say, drums will out and about again raging a vicious campaign against anyone hoping to stay asleep. Woooo!

This week I have felt something more of the fierce national pride which is always present here, unsurprising in a nation which has goverened itself for such a short time, relative to so many European countries. There is still a lot of resentment towards Spain, la madre tierra, but greater is the joy at the recollection of Loja’s ‘Independation’, as a friend called it! A extract from a supplement in yesterday’s newspaper:

‘We must always assert the value of a country being free to shape its own development… the sons of Loja have written a brilliant story, with many pages resplendent with glory, of which the greatest is that which speaks of Loja’s independence, as this historical decision was taken by the people themselves, in face of the opposition of the ruling classes at the time. A people with no history is a people without identity, without identity they are weak, being weak, they are easily overcome by dark forces which the sons of power wield. Yet we still live in a state of permanent crisis, poverty and corruption. Until when?’

On Monday this week, one of the Marias and I went to our first dance class together, and had our second on Thursday. We’re currently learning ‘merengue’ which is a combination of knee, hip and waist movement which I am convinced is only possible for an Ecuadorian-shaped pelvis. The lessons are great fun and I was taken under the wing of an amazing Ecuadorian dancer at our Thursday class, which convinced me that any girl can dance if she’s guided by a guy who knows what he’s doing. We went to an amazing gig afterwards at a lovely club with rustic candlelit tables and saw a flamenco-gypsy group, and it turned into a bit of a sing along when they played some Gypsy Kings songs, and I was proud to be able to join in! Many a spin and hip wiggle later, Maria and I went to a birthday party at the same club last night (of another Maria, my singing friend) and ended up dancing the night away and putting our new skills into good practise, although the swift change between house, cheesy pop, hard dance music and merengue was a little confusing for my limbs! A band played during the first part of the night and I noticed that three of the members had been in the flamenco group a few days before! A guy I danced with thought I was Argentinian until the end of night, which was either flattering or means he has only met Argentinians who have somehow been deprived of the dancing gene and speak a bit funny.

I returned home at 2.30am to find an even bigger party outside my bedroom window than last week; a huge stage had been mounted at the end of the road and I swam through dancers and empty bottles to my front door, deciding that the number of people unconscious on the street floor (can streets have floors?) rendered my new phrase ‘if you can’t shut them up, join them’ rather obselete. I am hoping to sleep in my own bed for the first time in 3 days tonight having sought refuge in the apartment at the back of the building in previous nights!

On Friday night the huge clock in the Independence Square was set alight with a wall of catherine wheels and ropes laden with fireworks were strung from the top down to each corner of the square and a firefall cascaded over the delighted punters waiting beneath, with small children running through the dripping flames with the same excitement that I recall when I first dared to quickly slide a finger through the flame of a candle. They sure don’t make wimpy kids like that here! The fireworks were amazing and the view from the café balcony made the busiest night we’ve had since I arrived all worth while.

It’s Sunday night and we’ve just had English night which was really good fun, and produced the memorable phrase: ‘Don’t be so interested, in Scotland it’s normal to have three girlfriends’.Didn’t make much more sense in context either! I’m constantly overjoyed at how open people here are, and I’ve already got two invitations to lunch this week with the families of two different girls who came for the first time tonight. There is a wonderful amount of friendly country-bashing among the SIM team members which keeps things nice and patriotic, and I often to have to reassure the Ecuadorians that now I’ve arrived they’ll get to learn English proper like. Was tempted to teach them the word ‘mardy’ tonight, but I guess that a Leicestershireism won’t be that useful for English speakers in Loja!

Things are due to get back to ‘normal’ this week I think, and now that my newly-purchased hammock has been installed in front of the mountains on our roof I look forward to catching up on sleep after a week of Cambridge-style 4-6 hours per night sleep quantities. I saw myself on TV for the first time last night which was strange but hilarious, especially seeing the English language mini sitcoms they had inserted between the acts of the show, with their inspiring use of many words which were all English but together formed an impressive mass of non-meaning. We are filming until the end of December when hopefully my status as a local celebrity will be firmly established!! I finally gave in and bought some high heels yesterday as my flip flops, I’ve been told, are a bit informal for being a TV presenter, and much as I hate to conform at least it made me a new friend in the shop keeper just around the corner who assured me that it’s not often that he sees feet as large as mine, size 6! One thing I will not miss about living here is the fact that I don’t think I’ve once been able to get my feet completely clean in 2 and a half months!

I realise that an event of great significance in my adaptation to Ecuadorian culture has somehow managed to slip through these entries, which are fragmentary and incomplete at the best of times, but should doubtless document my first -and last- encounter with a guinea pig- cuy- on a plate, rather than in a hutch on the back garden lawn. When a team was here a few weeks ago our lunch option was either a half or a whole guinea pig. ‘If you’re going to do something, do it properly’ would pass through the cultural translating machine as ‘If you’re going to eat any part of a guinea pig, you may as well eat its head and organs while you’re at it.’ At $13, guinea pig is a delicacy equivalent to fresh salmon or cheap caviar. Before we started lunch the woman who owns the restaurant showed us the hutches where they keep all the little guinea pigs, which looked fairly merry and at least a far cry from the cramped, dark conditions of many animals reared in Britain. As my Mum often says about organically-raised animals, ‘it looks like it was a happy pig’, but I’m not sure that happiness was the primary emotion that registered on the furry face of my guinea pig when it was put in front of me! The meat tasted a bit like chicken, but was more elastic, and the battle to find edible parts among ribs, tendons, skin, a full set of organs and five o’clock guinea pig shadow led to me soon abandoning all hope of respectably finishing my meal. (I really can’t remember whether shadow comes at 5 o’clock or 12 o’clock, but I guess that what with the time difference it will equal out across the ocean). Memories of manipulating frog’s legs in Belgium were replaced in the ‘things to do with food I would like to forget’ part of my brain (the fact that they are there to be replaced shows something of the futility of any such desire!) as my crazy Russian neighbour stripped the head of his guinea pig and opened its little mouth to speak to me and the bottom part of its jaw fell off! I kindly donated ‘the best part’ of my furry friend, its head, to a willing native recipient.

¡Viva Loja!

La vida difícil

2006-11-13T18:30:00.000-05:00

Dancing in the street

2006-11-11T22:30:00.000-05:00

We decided to close the café early tonight as we had completely run out of food and we were all pretty exhausted. ‘Great!’, thought I, ‘I shall read for a bit and then enjoy going to bed a very sociable, early hour.’ ‘Haha, fool!’ replied Loja.

What joy it is to live on the same street as a local radio station (not the one we own!) which is tonight celebrating its 50th anniversary. Clearly the best way to celebrate is a huge street party of the kind that goes on until 5 or 6am, (so I’m warned!), using speakers large enough to require a temporary structure to be raised and attached to the school oppostite my bedroom window. Given that the noise on the road often wakes me up early anyway, and the fact that my windows are about as soundproof as a piece of paper, and that tonight I have the pleasure of the speakers pumping out enormous quantities of bass being pointed directly towards my pillow, I am sure that my dreams will be sweet. Perhaps I’ll just give up and go out and dance with them, but the party at the moment looks like an embarrassing primary school disco with lines of males and females standing aside temporary kebab stalls, and the rain is hardly calling me to leave my echoing lounge.

I awoke two days ago to the school children all staging a sit-in in the road, blocking all traffic and shouting ‘Injusticia’ and having great fun bashing any cars that dared to come through and marching up and down the road. Olmedo (my road name) is clearly the place to be! I took some photos of the kids from off my balcony and they were delighted, it was the merriest outcry against the injustice that none of us could discern that I have ever seen. Hehe, my table is now actually vibrating with the music outside, although a ‘gtrupo folklórico’ has just started and is actually really good, panpipes and 4-part harmony aplenty!

Lots of busyness has swept by since I last wrote and I’m loving Loja more every day. The refurbishment of the square where the café is has just been finished and it looks lovely, there’s a big fountain with lots of coloured lights on its base which looked really magical as I walked home tonight. This morning I went to a Japanese Festival in the main square with Veronica and Yesenia and we had a good giggle! We did some origami and bought some rather optimistic origami books which promise to teach you how to build a cathedral with 3 sets of protruding windows from one square of paper. The most amusing part of the morning was queuing to buy food; one queue to buy a ticket which you then took to queue somewhere else. We bought 3 ‘pinchos’ which were 10 cents each, and spent a total of about 45 minuntes waiting! Queue culture is interesting anywhere though, and the blend of Japanese efficiency and the inevitable Ecuadorian madness did not disappoint. The woman behind me almost knocked a young soldier over the head for pushing in front of her, and was less than impressed when told that the food had run out when we arrived at the front of the queue!

I have still not seen myself on television, mostly because I’m too nervous or am busy when the programmes go out, but having now appeared 4 times quite a few people have told me that they’ve seen me which just makes me laugh!

Bonfire night last week was amazing. The fireworks did not disappoint and one shot over to the car park down the street and started to burn just outside the night watchman’s office, which brought out a crowd of shouting people. The big paper balloon unsurprisingly went up in flames and shone brightly on a neighbouring roof, doomed to never reach the lofty heights it had been promised. People seemed to get the hang of the Guy Fawkes thing pretty well, and I felt slightly like a British Ambassador although without the patriotic health and safety restrictions. We ended the night singing beautiful traditional Ecuadorian songs around the fire with the guitar and the city lights over the valley deepened the already strong hold they have on me.

My new housemate, Martin, a guy from Switzerland, arrived today. He has sensibly gone elsewhere to sleep! The band have now started to play a song that I remember from my first night in Loja during the fireworks in the central square. It’s amazing how a piece of music can arrive at two such different points in your view and experience of a place. I remember wondering how Loja would feel after I’d settled in, and I now know that it definitely feels like a home.

We had another team here with us this week, and things in the café have been really busy. I’ve been making lots of cookies to sell in the café, made about 100 this week I think. Worrying, people automatically assume that the white chocolate is cheese (see last entry!). I went to Vilcabamba again on Wednesday which was lovely, we drove through the rain out of Loja and arrived in the wonderful little valley where it always seems to be sunny. Today we started a new group for University students, basically a mix of Bible study and discussion about apologetic issues and issues that are especially pertinent to students here. 14 people came which was a really encouraging start.

The countdown to Independence Fireworks on Friday has begun, and I’m promised that they are even better (i.e. more dangerous) than the ones we had in September. Teaching things continue to grow and get busier but are really enjoyable and I’ve made some really lovely friends. This week will see the arrival of the game ‘in the manner of the word’, which anyone acquainted with Dave Hooper will have the joy of remembering- one person leaves the room, those remaining select an adverb and the chosen one then returns and asks them to perform any tasks he or she wishes, in the manner of the word, and has to guess which adverb the group selected in their absence. I’m unsure that the pleasure of seeing Dave being told to dance, when the adverb was ‘continuously’, can be surpassed, but anything can happen here!

Now that a terribly out-of-tune, wailing, ballad-singing guy has struck up his plaintif chant, I bid you all good night whilst hoping for a power cut! It’s not too hard to believe the singer’s claim that his great love has left him, she clearly had functioning auditory canals.

Smiling happy people

2006-11-08T16:00:00.000-05:00

Me and my lovely friend Gabby

Miss Fine-Tuned Guitar

2006-11-08T15:50:00.000-05:00

An image of my second TV appearance: a televised beauty contest, ´Miss Fine-Tuned English sponsored by one of the language institutes, Fine-Tuned English. Imaginativeª

Lights, Camera, Absence...

2006-11-04T23:28:00.000-05:00

It’s nearly a week since I wrote last and after an exhilarating morning mopping, sweeping and generally accepting that I need to start giving my home much more tender love care, especially as Carolynn left for Peru last night and won’t return until February. As Fabrizio, a guy from the café, said: just me and my solitude in the house now!

So, I’m sure you’re all waiting with baited breath to hear about my first TV appearance! Unfortunately it’s not going out until 8pm tonight so I have no idea how it will be, but from the recording I imagine that pretty hilarious will be the general summary!

I, of course, was first to arrive, and as our 4pm ‘start’ time whizzed past like a singing gas truck that has received a call from an empty canister, I soon realised this wasn’t exactly Hollywood, or even East Midlands Today! My co-presenter and I had spent the night before planning our script, which we both then proceeded to lose and had to improvise. However, a more pressing issue was the fact that only one of the acts showed up, which is a slight problem when they are the body of your show. Not that this eventually posed a problem, of course; my co-presenter nipped home to get his guitar and sang a song and my karaoke nightmare continued as I found myself on stage singing ‘Heaven’ by Bryan Adams, having firmly resisted requests to sing a song by Britney. The whole thing was highly amusing, though I’m not sure it was supposed to be, and I shall endeavour to bring back a DVD of my public humiliation, although I have told very few people here that I’m going to be on TV tonight so hopefully it will slip past unnoticed.

The past few days have been national holidays and I was only woken up on one morning this week as the traffic was virtually non-existent, and small boys practicing their drum skills apparently don’t take a break along with the rest of the nation. On Thursday I went hiking with Bob and Maria Carion (I seem to be making good friends with lots of Marias, which I suppose helps economy of expression). We drove just a few miles out of town and set off with our government map (no such thing as OS maps in WH Smith here, you have to go to Quito and get special permission!) looking for a lagoon. Any comments about my geographical competence can be written on a postcard and then put in the bin, because it really wasn’t my fault this time! Following the reliable instructions of a man on a donkey and passing cows, horses, a huge pig, a couple of donkeys and beautiful eucalyptus trees, we walked upmountain for about 2 hours and kept reaching peaks which had previously looked enormous but then cowered in the shadow of freshly-revealed giant mountains, mocking us with their teeny tree-covered summits. When we reached the one we thought would overlook the mythical lagoon, with visions of iron-flat blue water winking in the harsh light, we saw only more mountains. Bob decided to use his GPS, and, to our amusement, we realised that on the map we had actually only traveled 300m eastwards! The view over the valley and half of the city that we could see was amazing, and we contented ourselves with that as we abandoned the idea of hiking in the midday sun for another 4 hours before we could feasibly arrive at our destination!

Over the past few days I’ve spent a fair bit of time with the family of my two best friends here, Yesenia and Veronica. Rice and chicken has been flowing like tap water! It was lovely to be in a house with cousins and aunties falling out of the cracks in the walls, lots of laughter, small children dancing to songs about small rabbits and little old women snoring in comfortable frilly sofas. We ate lots of ‘patacones’, which are platanos which you slice into chunks, fry, then bash with big sticks, then fry a bit more. They are really yummy. I am keen to try and make them myself, but still scared of buying bananas/platanos as there are just so many types that the margin for error is enorme! I’ve been told about the ‘Reina Mundial del Banano’- the World Banana Queen, who is apparently crowned every year but has, for some reason, until now escaped my notice. Now that’s what I call an ambition!

As Sunday happens to be Bonfire Night and English Night, I am combining the two, and ready to introduce Guy Fawkes to Loja! Our roof is perfect for bonfires and fireworks, which I took as a clear signal that both were clearly the way ahead, which has led to some exciting adventures over the past few days. Upon enquiring where one could buy fireworks in Loja, I was given directions to a house whose doors, I was told, were boarded up, told to bang hard on the door, wait for an answer and say ‘I want fireworks’, and not to go alone. Keen for an adventure and glad that my Mum had not been in touch that day to ask what I was going to be doing, I set off with Amanda, a girl from the US, and the taxi driver dropped us outside a half-built house gently spritzed with barbed wire. We knocked and were led in. Inside sat 7 men dressed in black who eyed us suspiciously, took our bags off us and searched us, and led us into a small side room, shutting the door and…

Not really! We were actually led into a large, bright kitchen with a lovely little woman who told us all about the different home-made explosives she could sell us. It brought back happy memories of Tim’s home-made bangers in Cambridge, soaring off into neighbouring car parks and student accommodation. I ordered 16 fireworks and a big ‘globo’- a mini hot air balloon that I first experienced during the Loja Fair fireworks when I arrived. I went to pick them up this morning and immediately regretted not ordering a ‘vaca loca’- a ‘crazy cow’, which is a wooden frame draped with cloth and painted white with black spots and given a cute bovine face, with hundreds of fireworks and explosives strapped to its limbs. They had made it for a big show in Zamora tonight, and I don’t think that the faint-hearted are invited. It wasn’t until I was in the taxi home with two giant bundles of explosives and a huge paper balloon that I realised that both the woman I did business with and two others in the kitchen this morning looked either blind or seriously damaged in at least one eye. I’m pretty sure that there’s no connection there, though.

Karaoke Craze

2006-10-30T15:39:00.000-05:00

Either due to quick adaptation or forgetfulness, on a day like this I can never recall the feel of a rainy day, when I have just been forced inside by the blazing heat after reading with grapes up on the roof. Days of rain in Cambridge when your trousers lap up mud and slimy drops of rain as you drag bags of shopping back to a novelty-sized kitchen seem far away on a day like this, when brightly-coloured woven baskets return home from the Sunday market full of promise and enough vitamins to renourish the British Isles, or at least one of them.

Loja is feeling more and more like home and I’ve not got lost for at least 2 weeks, although I am going to a previously unvisited house this afternoon to watch a football match so I may soon have to comer mis palabras! I have started to write to-do lists which is proof that life has reached that busy state that it has until now only been working up to!

Friday night brought an impromptu salsa session as Carolynn had some friends round, and Euadorians think nothing of moving the furniture, having a hefty karaoke session and then dancing until the wee small hours. I was just about to go to bed when they arrived, and felt mightily twee in my Ecuador t-shirt (with tiny embroidered women with dangly pony tails!) and flip flops but was unwilling to be accused of an unforgivable crime here- not being able to move your hips. Maria (another one!) and I are going to take salsa lessons at the Alliance Francaise next month but until then I must be content to merrily and cluelessly copy people who probably started dancing in the womb.

To continue the refreshing lack of self-consciousness that inhibits our island race, last night El Sendero hoisted up a huge white sheet on one of the walls and prepared itself for the first ever official karaoke night, after bowing to repeated and extensive pressure from los punters! I really don’t know where to begin to try and convey the utter madness and jollity of another night of worrying whether the balcony would collapse with so many people, suffice it to say I had to be Miss Spoilsport at 10.15pm and chuck people out before we all got locked in the building. It would have been a bit like being stuck in one of the magical lands in Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree; a rabble of rowdy children high on home-made lemonade, forever doomed to dwell in a land where all English song lyrics are misspelt and those who hold the microphones rule the swaying mob. Not that it is really impossible to escape the first characteristic of such a land, next to me on the lounge table are ‘bilingual’ Ecuadorian playing cards, ’54 postal for not to forget the Ecuador.’

Wednesday to Friday this week are national holidays, to celebrate the Day of the Dead and the independence of Guayaquil. The Municipio of Loja is well on course for its preparations for November 18th which is the anniversary of Loja’s independence, and every high school in the centre of town has had early morning marching band practises ready for the anuual civil parade. I am thinking about not even bothering with an alarm clock any more! Carolynn and I went to investigate the babies made of bread the other day, and were not disappointed, which perhaps reveals a lot about our concern for the welfare of pastry people. One side of the main sqaure is full of identical stalls selling colada morado (made of babaco, pineapple, blackberry, apple and a magic ingredient that makes it thick and taste like a distant, more exotic cousin of mulled wine) and bread in all shapes and sizes. All attempts to discover the link between these items and any historical events have so far been futile. The local newspaper’s main article on the tradition told us where to go, that each shape of bread cost between 10-50 centavos, where to go if we wanted to complain about anything and how much each stall holder had to pay to sell their wares. Wikipedia is equally unforthcoming.

The political antics continue, with one of the two presidential candidates being forced to whip out his school certificates following an accusation that he never finished his studies. He clearly payed even less attention in Maths lessons than I did, as he is promising to build 833 new houses per day if he gets into office. I read a hilarious quote from him defending this promise against its many incredulous opponents: ‘There is no way that we will not fulfil this promise, and we shall achieve this by letting the Ecuadorian people know who will be doing the building work, and telling them everything.’ Beautiful.

I feel it is important to share the state of the cheese industry in Loja, given that in England it would be a fairly important part of my life. Apart from the hugely overpriced imported cheese in the main supermarket, there is one kind of cheese in Loja, which is often sold in CD shops or pharmacies. It is large, woobly, white, and looks like a part of an albino coral reef. It is soaked in water, crumbles to the touch and tastes of little else but salt. Until today I had not enjoyed any form of appreciation or friendship with said item, however, to my delight, I discovered in the absence of background music that it actually squeaks like a tiny trapped bird when you chew it. Not that you’d want to eat a live bird, but I feel that the cheese’s less positive characteristics are entirely outweighed by this clear display of a desire to communicate, or even serenade, its muncher. Perhaps it could be combined with the baby bread and two superficially superfluous culinary items could finally, together, reach their zenith

New plans are afoot in the SIM world here, and with the past 2 months having sped by, I’m excited about new opportunities on the horizon and carrying on deepening friendships here. Tomorrow morning I have my Bible study with Irma and then go for a meeting about the TV show on Tuesday, and the world of juxtapositions continues!

Loja from the air

2006-10-30T14:47:00.000-05:00

This is the view over the valley from the teleférico: my house is the one on the right

The lady's babies

2006-10-30T14:29:00.000-05:00

Market Day

2006-10-30T13:50:00.000-05:00

A roof with a view

2006-10-27T12:45:00.000-05:00

East Midlands Today eat your heart out…

2006-10-27T12:32:00.000-05:00

Friday morning. The clouds are low and clingy and the banging of hammers, marching bands, a few protests and elaborate car alarms have so far serendaded my few waking hours. I’m enjoying having a stretch of a few hours to relax and read for the first time this week. The US team left this morning and the café has been madly busy all week, culminating last night when the band played for hours and we served more chocolate cake than I could eat in a month. Maria de los Angeles, a bit of a local celebrity and a good friend, sang with the band and was amazing, we are planning to do some music together in nearby live music venue. I did some Beatles tracks with the band (‘because you’ve got that cute little accent’) and was then approached by an unknown man with a very strange request. If you recall the lovely theatre I mentioned a few days ago, it is holding an English music festival over the next few months and I was asked if I would host the festival which is recorded for local television! Hilarious, really. So, on Monday I am meeting with the director and we film on Tuesday. As my Mum would expect me to say, how random!

Teaching things have been busy this week with streams of students coming to the café. My lessons with Maria, the deaf girl, have made me finally grateful for having taken Spanish lingusitics classes, and we are starting to learn US sign language together in preparation for her move there.

Yesterday I went to l’Alliance Francaise to watch a film, slightly craving some French input as I now feel totally immersed in Spanish and happy to be thought of as Argentinian for the next 8 months. The film was scheduled for 4pm, and I turned up and was told by a man with a watering can that it was definitely not going to be on, definitely. I had a bit of a ‘Well why does the brochure say it is on, and why was I told it was still on when I phoned 3 hours aho, quite aware of the high probability of last minute changes?!’ rant session. I then went to an office downstairs and found a very nice French man who kindly spoke to the indoor gardener and asked him what had changed, who replied ‘Oh, I didn’t think it was worth it, shall we bother?’

November 2nd is the ‘Day of the Dead’ celebrations here, and all week there are stalls in the main square selling ‘cola morada’, which I think is a kind of fruity soup, and bread in the shape of babies. Not sure what the link is there. I continue to feel like a bemused child here (possibly one made out of bread), merrily and cluelessly being tossed around by the unpredictability of each new day and season in Loja!

Fight electricity with fire

2006-10-25T10:38:00.000-05:00

Rabbit.

This is the synonym for ´wow´ that Bob has been trying to instigate amongst Spanish speakers here (Conejo!), and it sums up the business of the past week or so since I last wrote. The team from the US is here at the moment and some of them have been playing music in the café, and on Sunday we went to the huge recreational park which most of Loja spends the afternoon in, and had 3 hours of drama and 3 bands playing, beautifully offset by the surrounding mountains and mock Chinese-temple which formed the stage that they played on! I was delegated as MC, so Loja was serenaded with my dulcet tones which most people think are from Argentina, which is slightly strange!

This morning we went to an orphanage which had invited the team to work, and then told us today that we didn´t have the necessary documentation. Típico! Saturday night at the café was the busiest I’ve seen it as people filled the balcony where the band where fighting against the determination of the local brass band playing a few meters away on the steps of the church. The brass band looked remarkably disgruntled considering I had seen them play at the bull fight when they purposely played simultaneously with another brass band (playing entirely different music, of course), but perhaps they felt that an amplified electric guitar was unfair competition.

I sang ´Superstition´ with the band after my ears pricked up on hearing the riff, and it was very surreal to be singing the signature tune of the Second Hand Kisses, the band I sang in last year in Cambridge before we were torn apart by the perilous Year Abroad. Carrying on the Stevie Wonder wonder in Loja felt rather soothing though, a strange welding of two very different worlds!

I am feeling much recovered from some grim days in bed during which the Kleenex flowed almost as much as the mango juice. Yesterday Vernoica and Yesenia came with us to give the US team a tour of Loja and I discovered some new places which was very exciting… including a beautiful theatre which is remarkably similar in style to the Comédie Française in Paris where Matt and I saw ´Tartuffe´ and has set me thinking about plays and curtains and teaching Ecuadorians a thing or dos about Golden Age theatre, as the space is available for public use… watch this space!

On Saturday morning Yesenia, Veronica and Susana and I donned our hiking boots and filled plastic bags full of popcorn and climbed up to the ´teleferico´, the cable car summit from and to which there are, of course, no cable cars. The previous mayor started to build it as a race with the mayor of Quito, who now can boast of a highly popular tourist attraction, whereas the change of mayor in Loja means building work has stopped until someone who wants it to go ahead gets into office.

Anyway, we had great fun hiking up the windy paths up to a castle-esque structure from which there were amazing views of the city. The forest is full of pine trees which are often used here to replace trees that have been destroyed in fires (more on that later), and the floor was a dense burnt-orange carpet of pines and prickles which acted rather like sheets of ice as we scrambled along. When we got to the top we were caught up by a group of about 10 kids, who started speaking to me in English and telling me they loved me (which I found only slightly less amusing than being called ´doll face´ by a friend in a non-ironic or Guys and Dolls way) and proceeded to chase us down the mountain side shouting ´rubia peligrosa´ which means ´dangerous blonde´! We managed to lose them and armed ourselves with pine cones ready to attack, and hid in the undergrowth, which all felt very Famous Five, and we even had a flask of homemade lemonade.

Back to the fires. There have been endless columns of smoke rising from distant mountains across the valley and huge areas of forest burnt to the ground in recent days. Apparently it is an indigenous belief that starting fires will encourage rainfall, and as the wet season here was not very, the parched ground is about as flame-proof as a piece of straw. However, perhaps the fires are doing something as there was a huge power cut last night for about and hour and a half, which meant I could finally put the tea lights I went to such trouble to buy to good use!

Illness and Stillness

2006-10-17T17:14:00.000-05:00

In a country where a few days ago I had to buy a CD to get change to pay a taxi driver, it’s rather disappointing that my first bout of illness isn’t a bit more exotic and death defying. Not that buying a CD is inherently exotic, but there’s definitely something dangerous about the FBI warning of a $2500,000 copyright infringement fine which has been photocopied and glued on to the back of the product sold by the only kind of shop in town which seems to have change for $5 note.

Anyway, I awoke yesterday with a very British cold. I have not been bitten, nor has my flesh been munched on by hungry and beautiful foreign insecty friends, and my skin has disappointedly not turned any funny colours, apart from after a long colouring session with a 3 year old boy. All rather disappointing really, especially as a piercing headache, incessantly runny nose and sneezes punctuated with the odd nose bleed have meant that I have only once left the house to buy milk, and I am now feeling a bit as though I am living in a diplomatic compound which is bent on stopping me from fleeing to the inviting mountains which look cool to the touch. However, my grimness and persistence in pyjamas has been greatly alleviated by reading Roger Deakin’s ‘Waterlog’, a journal of his journey around Britain swimming in rivers, seas, tarns, lakes, canals which has left me with a freshness and an incredible feeling of having been ritually doused in icy water and pumelled with his wonderful writing. Many thanks to the world’s best book-giver.

So, election results are in, and although our TV has broken so my information has come through snippets from visitors in the past few days, things look a bit grim. Two presidential candidates have come through to fight it out in the second round: Noboa and Correa. The former has got through to the second round of the past three elections and wins votes by giving out free t-shirts, the latter is a Chavez sympathiser. The funniest thing about Correa is that all of his publicity reads ‘Dale Correa!’ which approximates to ‘Go for it, Correa my son!’ (free translation), which certain non-natives here have misunderstood, thinking that Dale Correa is, in fact, his full name. Speaking of great names, I was able to share some classics with my English club last week as we played scattegories, so hopefully there will soon be a healthy dose of Ecuadorians named Trevor, Arthur, Colin and Vera. Last week I met a 17-year old named Stalin, with brothers named Lenin and Mussolini and a sister named Cleopatra. My Egyptology isn’t great, but I’m wondering whether the link there is immediately clear to anyone else?

I tragically forgot to write of my first sight of the roasted, toasted, fur and face retaining delicacy here that is guinea pig… memories of pushing Ginger up the road in the doll’s pram made me look away and not rush to shell out $12 for the comestible privilege.

I am about to head to English club, wondering whether infecting those wishing to understand my culture is a justifiable means of making them learning new vocab. I am slightly worried about leaving the house and fear that my tissues are scented with agrophobia as well as aloe vera, but the show must go on!

Ecuelections

2006-10-16T11:25:00.000-05:00

Well, election day has finally arrived and for the past three nights the streets have been practically deserted due to the imposed curfew intended to stop people getting too drunk to be able to vote with a clear mind. I’m pretty sure the fact that there are more candidates than there are stray dogs will ensure the relative confusion of many anyway, but the next few days and weeks should be interesting. There are 4 main presidential candidates, one of whom is a woman. I could hardly believe the answer to my question as to whether Ecuador had ever had a female President- ‘Yes, for an hour.’ Administrational elements of daily life have pretty much ground to a halt in the past few weeks as new Presidents always overhaul everything, so rather than have to change things it’s obvioulsy more sensible just to not begin anything new in the few months up to an election.

The week has sped by. I spent Sunday to Thursday in Guayaquil, which was a strange but special time. I spent most of my time with Carolina, the girl in the photo below (made the most of broad band in Guayaquil to upload!) as she went to live with family there. Guayaquil is hot, sticky and huge. It’s the biggest city in Ecuador, even bigger than the capital, Quito. After getting used to little Loja, it was a bit of a shock to the system not to be able to walk anywhere or get a $1 taxi, and the many robbery/hijacking stories were really conducive to a good night’s sleep. We got an 8 hour overnight bus ride, which was pretty grim. We were stopped by the police for an all-bus search at about 3am just as I was nodding off, having endured the blaring midnight movie which my little MP3 player could not drown and my earplugs could not dampen. White noise, anyone?

Guayaquil was rather exciting culinarily. I tried ‘Morocho’ which is like rice pudding, but made with maize, and was fortunate enough to have rice with lentils which was almost just too exciting. We also discovered a foreign confectionary stand and I splashed out and bought a Lindt truffle (my favourite, but that’s not a hint, because it has been discovered that they do not travel well!) for 60cents which then melted over my rucksack. One night we went up to the highest point of the city, through a recently-restored set of lovely old houses, called ‘Las Peñas’. You scale numbered stairs and climb past tiny little balconies and brightly painted houses full of old women or fridge magnets, and each building has a picture outside of its pre-restoration state. The picture below is taken from the lighthouse we reached at the top, and the view over the city was incredible. The sea is actually a few hours away, but there is a big estuary which makes the presence of the lighthouse slightly more justafiable, but the nearest rocks were probably the ice cubes in the lemonade we bought which cost as much as 3 x 3 course meals in Loja! Guayaquil is so much more western than Loja, and generally cities in the Sierra take longer to be affected by Occidental (is that a word in English?!) culture. We saw bookshops which contained more than 80s self-help books, art galleries and shopping malls… can’t say I’d like to live there but it was interesting to see Loja in comparison with other cities in Ecuador.

For those who have heard about me dropping a flip flop into a lake at a nature reserve, (I blame you, Zoe) you will be pleased to hear that I purchased two new pairs in Guayaquil, for the pricely sum of $5. One pair is a cover of a famous label, and the colour has already rubbed off the base making my feet funny colours and leaving a very cool template of the contours of my toes, and the other pair is adorned with the Ecuador flag, which by all accounts is not equivalent to wearing clothing items with St George’s cross.

Since returning, the café has been really busy and we’ve had quite a few new volunteers, and numbers are growing at English-related things. The whole SIM team in the province has just had a huge Chinese banquet which was lovely. My tastebuds are very happy to have been party to prawn crackers (bought in Quito, not to be found normally!)… funny how such a random item can bring brack such strong memories of certain years at home.

Carolynn took me to a new market outside of the city gates yesterday which was really good fun, although I still can’t cope in the meat and fish aisles. There were hundreds of chickens cut open with their legs splayed out and their innards flashing around- if anyone can offer insight as to what the clementine-like organs would have been, that would be interesting! I bought some lovely white lilies and some jasmine which smell beautiful, and thankfully there are no ball dresses near by to cover with lily pollen.

There is a team from the US coming in a week so we are preparing for their arrival and other than that this should be a fairly ‘normal’ week!

Jungle Floor

2006-10-11T13:07:00.000-05:00

I am wearing a seatbelt, honest...

2006-10-11T13:04:00.000-05:00

La Poderosa

2006-10-11T13:00:00.000-05:00

Bridge of Dodge

2006-10-11T12:57:00.000-05:00

Guayacil Lighthouse View

2006-10-11T12:54:00.000-05:00

Pirates of the Carolina

2006-10-11T12:50:00.000-05:00

Jane of the Jungle

2006-10-10T11:31:00.000-05:00

I am writing on Sunday evening, after a few days of unexpected events which have led to me going to Guayacil tonight at 10pm on an overnight bus. Guayacil is abut 8 hours away on the coast and I’ll be staying with an SIMer there until some time later on this week.
Thought I’d just share a few things about our trip to Zamora yesterday, although the amazing rate at which things can change in life have somewhat pushed the details of yesterday’s trip to the back of my mind.

Anyway, five of us left at 8am and it was my first bus trip in South America, something about which many legends seems to have formed among the GAP year/travelling community! It was a really misty morning and the amazing drive I remembered from when I went a few weeks ago was dramatically altered with low clouds clustering around the mountain heads and making the sweeping drops between the valleys even more accentuated. We arrived and caught a ‘taxi’ to the entrance of the national park we were to trek through. This involved sitting in the back of a truck being tossed around and feeling pretty cool as we sped through increasingly dense undergrowth and avoided low-hanging branches. Podacarpus is a huge national park which also has an entrance in Loja (huge!) and we were on top form as we entered. The day before I was prey to a hiss (which is the Latin American version of a wolf whistle, but a lot more creepy!) which made me trip on the unfinished (or unstarted?) pavement and take off about 6 layers of skin from the top of my big toe. My expensive TESCO flip flops (or thongs, as Carolynn calls them, to my amusement) were covered in blood and I spent the night limping as my open flesh bounced against shoes and was trodden twice on by a very cute but unfortunately maladroit little girl. Carolynn had a sore knee bandaged up and Helene had fallen onto a stone the day before and had a swollen leg. So, off to a great start!

The whole walk was a series of extremely acute gradients, the kind which you’d rather walk up than down. We first trekked to an amazing bridge over the river which flows through the park (leading to the Amazon) which was amazing and duly wobbled as we walked over it one at a time, with visions of filmstar bad guys cutting one end of precarious bridges over canyons making me feel like a bit of a trooper! We arrived at an environmental protection centre which had a ‘mirador’- a lookout tower which you could climb up to survey the surrounding area. Having always wanted to have a treehouse, I merrily started climbing the very wet and slippy wooden rungs and it was only as I got about 20ft up that I started to get a leetle bit scared and worried I could fall and break my neck. ‘Don’t worry’, replied the guide waiting below as I expressed the same concern about coming down again, ‘you’d break all of your bones, not just your neck.’

The whole day was pretty amazing. We saw birds of paradise (the flowers), a beautiful green kingfisher, streams of ants carrying ant-sized bits of leaves, an insect that looked worrying like a relative of the scorpion, (especially when Fabrizio picked it up and let it walk all over his hand) and the most beautiful assortment of leaves I have ever seen. Apparently there is a team of German planty-people (insert appropriate scientific name here) who are logging the varieties of plant there and they discover about 4 new kinds every week. A sign near the entrance of the park says: ‘Who knows if the cure for AIDS or a better kind of cocoa is hidden within this forest? Protect it.’ That’s antithetical juxtaposition for you (I think!)

I collected leaves as we wandered up and down through the sun and rain, coming to several ‘swimming areas’ which were incredibly strong currents of very deep water which I doubt any strong swimmer could battle against. Our final destination was ‘La Poderosa’- ‘The Powerful’- an enormous waterfall whose power and immense noise was breathtaking. Although I fell over a fair few times and regretted not wearing my brown trousers, it was a really refreshing and exhausting day. The bus ride home with my leaves (one of them which measures about 45cm) was stunning as the sun was setting and I periodically opened my eyes to see endless expanses of bubbly green mountain sides shot through with flame-orange light. The mountains here are more like cherry cakes than any I ever seen in my life. Think of the narrow and tall cakes topped with a bright red cherry that tend to characterise cartoon impressions of what a cake should be, replace the cream with trees and the cherry with clouds and a wonderful sunset, put lots of them together and that’s one of the reasons I love this country so much!

Have had few bursts of homesickness this week, mainly on receiving an email from Amy telling me all about her 20 week scan and wishing I could be there to feel the kicks of my nephew/neice-to-be who is totally going to start speaking Spanish when Aunty Lyd gets home, or at least a few months afterwards when its phonological babbling develops into something more tangible…

English night tonight is to be a karaoke feast and I have been assured that Ecuadorians know nothing of that British reserve that would prevent someone from singing in public without first having drunk far too much.

And so to Guayacil, to newness untold.

Newspaper cuttings

2006-10-05T16:01:00.000-05:00

Thinking of what the last few days have held evokes the usual Ecuadorian mixture of routine and surprise, so to inform you all that I have eaten four mangoes since I last wrote is the routine element that links nicely into a surprising part of my day today during which I read through the entirety of a national and local newspaper. I was delighted to find on the second page of the national paper (which I always skip in the Times as the extra details about the political stories are something I can do without) a full-page spread about mangoes, complete with quotes from an interview with Alberto Swett, President of the ‘Fundacion Mango Ecuador.’ Now that would be a dream job, not so sure about the unforunate homophonous surname…

So, I thought I’d inform you some of what I learnt rooting through some articles.

Right then, back to the mangoes. 20% of Ecuadorian mangoes go to Europe, 70% to the US and some to Chile, Mexixo and New Zealand. That doesn’t leave a very large percentage for Ecuador, but I bought 5 for $1 on Sunday so I’m not complaining. Apparently 6,500 of the 7,700 hectares dedicated to mango growing are for those to be exported, so clever maths people can work out how that fits in with the percentages given, which I’m not sure it does…

My next notable discovery was the VISA lottery that takes place in the US- 50,000 VISAS are randomly assigned to potential immigrants who have succesfully filled out a form with a few basic requirements. Has everyone apart from me heard about this?! Perhaps the National Lottery could do with a vision change, and the Home Office could start using more coloured balls in its screening process… ‘Oh, sorry, you’ve got the Rollover, you’ll have to come back next year.’

Artículo intersante número tres revealed that nine journalists have been killed in South America in the last six months, three in Venezuela and Colombia, two in Mexico and one in Guatemala. The first three plus Cuba are the most dangerous places in South America to be a journalist- it’s shocking to realise how comparatively free the media in the UK are, and complaints about Murdoch and homogenisation ring rather hollow comparatively.

Whilst we’re on the subject of Mexican liberty infringement, in Chihuahua (see atlas), it is illegal to give your child a name which is ‘entirely foreign.’ Perhaps if a trend of calling babies ‘Chihuahua’ started in the UK then they’d relent and allow pleading parents to call their bundle of joy ‘Chardonnay’.

The local newspaper told me that I, along with anyone else wanting one to vote in the forthcoming elections, will not be able to get a local identity card for the foreseeable future. Carolynn lost hers a few months ago and is still waiting for a new one as they have run out of the special paper on which they are printed, which makes the British Passport system look vaguely efficient. Fortunately I would not be able to vote anyway, although I am concerned abuot my birthday as the second round of elections are on November 26nd and absolutely no public meetings are aloud which may distract people from voting (non-voters are fined heftily), so I may end up having a party at the polling booths anyway, special paper or no special paper!

The last, and without doubt my favourite article, was on the front cover of the Loja daily ‘La Hora’. On July 10th the second stage of Loja’s campaign to enforce punctuality began. For three years the local governors have been trying to impliment a respect for the ‘official starting time of events’ in every walk of life, which would make anyone who has spent more than a day here laugh for weeks. 3,000 public services are said to have been ‘enabled’, as well as 16 high schools. However, a meeting organized by the Foundation established to enforce good time-keeping yesterday began 10 minutes late, to the delight of the journalists, and me! The cause? ‘The political campaigns have put a stop to the punctuality campaign. At the moment there is a more important cause, but we must never put to one side the policy of being punctual, for it is a way of being responsible.’ The Real Academia of Spain has been asked to adjust its definition of ‘never’.

So, I still have no idea what is going on in England, but I got to ride in a big musical gas truck today so I’m happy in my little world for the moment. Yesterday we went to hand out the October flyers for the café at one of the universities, and are doing the other one tomorrow morning. I almost felt like I was back in Cambridge flyering for Christian Union events, but the presence of colossal mountains thankfully assured me that my little pink bike was not waiting around the corner, much to the gladness of my legs. I also found out the Noam Chomsky is coming to speak in Loja in a few weeks; of the people who I know read this, I think that will only excite fellow linguistics buddy George, but anyone interested can google him and go ‘oooooooh’. I’m hoping his talk will not take away my desire to be able to process thought quite as much as his books do.

The next few days are really busy and a team of ex-drug addicts who have come over from Peru to give talks to young people here are moving in upstairs tomorrow. I am going back to Zamora on Saturday to hike through the jungle. Anyone who is bothering to read this probably knows me pretty well, so let’s just say I’m looking forward to the picnic lunch! It should be fine, although I’m trying to decide between trainers which don’t grip very well and flip flops which served me well whilst trekking down a waterfall in the Troodos Mountains in Cyprus.

It seems appropriate to end an entry with another journalisty theme… I would just like to plug the eminent writing of my wonderful friend and fellow year-abroader Jen, who is working for the Independent in Paris and has already had 3 articles published… one of them can be found here: http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1772324.ece

So keep your eyes open for Jen Wainwright and then you can say to all of your friends ‘Oooooh, friend, that’s my friend’s friend!’

Vilcabaaaaahhhh... in picture form...

2006-10-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

A restaurant with a view

Vilcabaaaaahhhh...

2006-10-02T11:30:00.000-05:00

It’s late on Sunday night and I’ve put the Gypsy Kings to bed to be left with a noisy refrigerator and the nightsong of roaming canines. Loja seems to be sleeping, although on the other side of the valley you can just make out the occasional taxi weaving in and out behind hidden houses and little lights, appearing every now and then only to hurry back into the deceptive darkness; the clouds around the moon are falling away revealing patches of clear sky, whilst unbeknown to the casual observer there are clouds cloaking the whole city making the sky seem darker than it is. All rather beautiful, but possibly not as moving as bumping into a man in a Winnie the Pooh costume whilst buying mangoes at the market.

So, the end of another week, and it’s strange to think of student life resuming in Cambridge. I had a lovely conversation with my parentals today, which unfortunately ended in the already dodgy connection sounding like it was being seized by some form of recalcitrant martian.

A few exciting discoveries of the past few days:

1. B minor, F sharp minor, G minor, D7, G7 and Cm chords (fingers not so excited)
2. ‘Cecina’, a Loja speciality which is a plate-sized portion of thin pork which acts as a lid for the yucca, avocado and yummy salad hidden underneath, rather like tupperware, but probably more appealing to men.
3. The Post Office door is now half open, so if you duck down then you can pick up your mail (it’s like a big garage door)
4. I am losing my Spanish accent- the distincive ‘th’ of Peninsular Spanish now sounds really strange to my confused ears.
5. Having a freezing cold shower because the gas thingamybobby has broken does not make you feel braver or ‘more ready to face the day.’

Well, that was a summary of what would probably have taken me about 500 words of prose, so I’ve saved you all at least 5 minutes of your time. Which is unfortunate for my dear sisters who are probably reading this because they’re bored at work, or Cambridge people who are getting back into the fine-tuned art of internet/Hermes procrastination.

As I had mentioned, this week I went to Vilcambama, ‘La valle de la longevidad’. I am reading ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce at the moment, and arriving in Vilcabamba made me feel a bit like Stephen, the main character:

‘He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel […] roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.’

Being in Vilcambamba was to gently squeeze earlobes and push out the roar of the endless city noise. Again, the drive itself made the trip worthwhile. There is no theatre in Loja, but looking out of the window, or even just over your shoulder, far supercedes that feeling of utter visual contentment that comes from beautiful stagecraft. It feels false to try and describe the awe of being entirely dwarfed by a mountain which seems to rise out of nowhere and end beyond the possible angle of your neck. In the crevices where two valleys meet, dry geography lessons about rock formation and tectonic plates come to life as mountain sides swathed in trees fold imperceptibly into each other, and you feel really teeny weeny. Dark purple lilies, orchids and more of the strange stamenless flowers that are so common here covered the place where we ate lunch, with amazing views over the valley and a silence to give up song for.

Back in Loja, the past few days have been busy with meeting people for lunch, late nights at the café and playing the guitar on the roof, with the wind gently bearing away my plectrum yesterday. I have bought a new bright red one, having tried and failed to make my own out of a credit card remembering Dan’s enterprising skills when he lost his just before a gig we had many a year ago. I hope that my ownership of plectrums will not become as short-lived as my ownership of earrings, which seem to view me as some form of foster Mother. Last night I went to ‘Casa Tincu’, which is a lovely bar with low wooden tables each with a dumpy little candle. I went with a girl who sings quite a lot in the café and lots of her friends, and mad dancing ensued as the ‘Funky Express Band’ took to the stage, and were pretty awesome. Fond memories of covering ‘So Ruff so Tuff’ with the Second Hand Kisses after Tom bought a vocoder and a £400 keyboard on impulse came back, as FEB began using crazy vocoders, highly generous microphone distribution and jaw-stretching distortion. Like truth, funk transcends all national barriers.

I spent time reading the local newspaper this afternoon which was really interesting. I’ve become a bit like my Grandma and started cutting out intersting articles and quotes. I read that Ecuador has the highest rate of child labour in South America, which I was really surprised at, as it’s by no means the poorest country- 1/3 of minors don’t go to school, which equates to 800,000 kids. There were some interesting reflections on reading, and the responsibility of people who can read to do so. Quite pertinent for a society where a DVD costs $1 and you can’t get a book for less than $10.

Tonight was spent eating curry and watching Fawlty Towers, not entirely acultural as I probaby picked up some new words from Manuel. Tomorrow I hope to try out some new recipes I’ve been given for sooper dooper baked goods, Bible study with Irma in the evening and I may pluck up the courage to go for a hair cut, as if the gas doesn’t get fixed soon it would be much easier to have less of it to wash. Hmmm, thinking about it, they’ll probably wash it for me too, so maybe I’ll start going to the hairdressers every day and just get them to take a few centimeters off, and then when I’m well on the road to baldness I’ll take up a collection for a new gas canister.

The fridge had fallen silent without me noticing, and has now perked up again so I think that’s a good sign that time has come around, as it seems to have a habit of doing, and I should again share the days’ events with my bed. Just remembered that I tried to teach Australians the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ tonight, after I was beaten by a victorious 10-year old at Uno who said something about ‘less cards’. Sticks and stones and Uno games may break my bones, but grammatical precision will always protect

Brain-eating speciality worms

2006-09-27T22:17:00.000-05:00

Another day, another open boot with a protuding novelty-sized louspeaker!

Today I found out that one of my friends, Maria, has four sisters. They are all called Maria. So is her Mother. It´s possibly the most efficient thing I´ve come across here- ´Maria, dinner´s ready!´

I went to Yesenia´s Grandma´s for lunch today to have ´fritada´, which is a local speciality a bit similar to spare ribs. Having been warned that it is the favourite dwelling place of the fatal, remedyless (that´s not a word, but it really should be) brain-destroying worm that haunts south Ecuador, I felt remarkably relaxed!

Yesenia had an ‘exam’ today at an agency which sends people as au pairs to the states. I left her at 2pm at the agency, and at 2.10pm she knocked on my door saying that they´d told her she could do the exam wherever she wanted, so she unsurprisingly came to find the English speaker. This was the first, but not the last time today that I have to clearly explain that I will not assist in cheating! Tonight about 10 people came to the café asking for help with a translation about Loja Fair, after their teacher had kindly told them to come and ask us if they got stuck. Which they all did. None of them thought to bring the original text, which made me shiver and convulse slightly. The one girl who brought along the Spanish text to be translated had crossed out about half of the sentences so that they were no longer legible. Intrigued, I asked why, and then wished I hadn´t when she told me that, in her opinion, they weren´t really important enough to translate. As I thought about my tender loving care of Jean de Sponde, author of the 16thC French devotional work I am translating this year, I wanted to weep for such sullying of my art… however, laughing is better for mascara retention.

Yesterday the Post Office was closed because they were painting the door.

Carolynn, the two girls from the US and I went out for ´quimbolitas´ yesterday, which are sweet sponge and raisins covered in cheese and wrapped up in an unidentifiable green leaf. So good! We then went to the main (and pretty much the only) touristy shop in Loja and I bought a lovely brightly-striped cloth which is now happily covering the growing number of books I am hoping to get through this year.

Tomorrow I am going to Vilcabamba, which is a neighbouring valley famed for its long-living residents. So, brain-munching killer worms today, longevity-inducing water tomorrow. All in a day´s work Hope to load more photographs but I´m finding that the people who are paid to wind the computers up just aren´t strong enough! I´ve been here for over 3 weeks now, and feel very much at home, less likely to get lost, and happy to be making deeper friendships and enjoying Loja life feeling normal, as much as that will ever be possible!

We would like to stress out...

2006-09-25T10:50:00.000-05:00

It’s a lovely warm Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting eating a bowl of pineapple, strawberries and red grapes, having just been out for lunch to a pizza restaurant- could be in England! I got in a taxi this afternoon to go across town to see a friend’s new house, I had to get in the front of the car as we had so many boxes and bags in the back to take over. Sitting in the front in a taxi is usually a big no-no for women here.. gives the wrong signal, without wanting to be too explicit! Anyway, as I put on my seatbelt the taxi driver grabbed my arm and loudly warned me to not to. Hardly anyone wears seatbelts here (even though the statistics say you will have an accident for every 750km you drive), but my resolution to wear one has never before attracted such a reaction! He explained that the seatbelt was too dirty, and that I’d ruin my clothes. Indeed, for some inexplicable reason the seatbelt was caked in mud and dust, but I told him I’d rather be dirty than dead (doesn’t have quite such a ring to it in Spanish unfortunately) and that my Mum would be less than impressed. So I now have a trendy customised brown strip across my green (well, bleen, for those in the know) top, and after all that we didn’t even crash.

Yesterday I became a professional teacher trainer. I found out on Friday night that I was to be one of 3 people running a 3 hour workshop for the largest English language school in Loja- ‘Fine-tuned English’. This was unfortunate, as Friday night was spent in a bar with two girls who volunteer at the café screaming for celebrities who had come from Quito to promote their new TV show. I can’t say I came anywhere close to losing my voice! So, on Saturday morning whilst drying my hair I wrote my presentation on ‘How to motivate foreign language learners.’ I’ve bought a new hairdryer as the voltage difference makes my English one work at half the speed, which was amusing at first but annoying with so much hair to de-wet: parents will be glad to know it has been put in the drawer of things for them to take home! Perhaps you think that this last sentence somewhat hinders the flow of my narration, however, this is South America, and structure is one thing that Santa won’t be bringing more of at Christmas. I had breakfast with the two other lucky candidates, Bob and a technical writer who’s come over for the week to do some training, and read the memo that had been sent out to the teachers at the school: ‘The faculty wishes to stress out that attendance is obligatory at this workshop. Professional teacher trainers from the organisation SIM will be sharing invaluable tips on how to keep a class motivated.’ Considering that they had changed the title of the talk Bob had agreed to give, and had also been told that none of us are teachers, I think we were the ones stressing out! However, years of learning foreign languages when one is forced to waffle on about not very much at all served me well, and we managed to wing 2 hours of motivational therapy and even got a free ‘bola verde’ – ‘green ball’, which was much nicer than it sounds, and really not very green.

Whilst on the subject of amusing language errors, I found a compilation CD with ‘Sound on Silence’ by ‘Simon’ the other day. As if that weren’t special enough, the same CD had two tracks by the ‘Richetus Brother.’ There is also a reputable CD outlet store that also specialises in cheese. Nothing else, just CDs and cheese. My favourite shop name in Loja is without doubt the burger establishment inside the sports stadium- ‘Burguer Deportista’- ‘Sporty Burger.’ If only there were more sporty burgers in the world, then the department of health would have a much easier job.

I started to watch a film with my friend Jadira last night, and just as we were getting into it the curse of the pirate DVD industry came upon our viewing experience and we had to stop the film. Apparently there’s one shop in Loja where you can buy legal DVDs, although it seems to be purely legendary and finding it is feels like searching for the black market. Markets. Seamless link. Went to the market today after church and bought lots of exciting things- leeks, potatoes, tomatoes, strawbs, mangoes, pineapple, apple, avacadoes, carrots, onions, beans… all for less than $7! As a great Greek philosopher once said, I’m lovin’ it.

Tonight is the fortnightly English night in the flat upstairs, and then it’s Monday again already!

Runner? Been...

2006-09-21T15:02:00.000-05:00

This entry will be as short as my breath was this morning as I jogged around Loja stadium. I decided this morning that if I didn't exercise today then I would probably never again regain the use of my legs, so I merrily trotted off (the verb 'to jog' is appropriately 'trotar') to the huge stadium two blocks down the road, MP3 player safely stashed between a varety of straps and layers. Feeling rather out of place next to the team of local athletes training for upcoming championships, I began to run.. and soon realised that even with my poor level of fitness, the high altitude did me absolutely no favours! Vivid memories of P.E. lessons during which we were forced to run 1500m against our will came flooding back... as well as the image of Gemma Bass, runner extraordinaire, always zooming off in front, and Caitlin, Wizza, Miki and I lolling at the back trying to work out how to keep talking and not be legitimately accused of walking. Hrumph. I'm assured that my level of exhaustion after running for 30 mins (max.!) is mainly due to altitude, but I am nevertheless thinking of getting an aerobics DVD and being tired and puffy in the privacy of my own home! Any reccommendations welcome...

A jaunt to the jungle

2006-09-20T10:50:00.000-05:00

It’s 11pm on Tuesday night and I’m sitting at our living room table using Carolynn’s laptop, so I shall take these scribblings to an internet café tomorrow.

I’ve just come home from the café, and thinking that Carolynn was out I started merrily strumming and singing in my room until she wandered bewilderedly out of her bathroom clearly disturbed from her sleep by my guitarry racket, oops! There was great excitement today at the café with the arrival of Tiramisu (deserves capitalisation) on the menu, which takes the total number of cakes available for me to munch to 6. Hurrah! Am a cakegaletarian and like to give them all a fair chance at winning me over.. aha, also a linguistic master, it would seem, as that lovely neologism works in Spanish too as a ‘galeta’ is a biscuit. Happy days!

I’ve realised that I have very little idea what is happening in England at the moment, or indeed anywhere outside of Loja. The local newspaper’s idea of international coverage is reporting on the death of that mad animal bloke from Australia. It’s funny how quickly you can lost touch without the Times and the Today programme! One of the quality dailies here today spread out a gruesome picture of a bus crash in which 9 people were killed. I was warned that there is no such thing as tactfulness or restraint when it comes to showing images of death in the media here, but being faced with a front page image of blood and clearly visible mangled bodies was something I wasn’t exactly prepared for.

To continue along the driving theme, but in a more positive vein, today I went with Christine, an engineer for the radio station SIM runs, to Zamora. Although only 64km from Loja, Zamora is in the ‘Oriente’ part of Ecuador- jungle. The drive was absolutely spectacular. The road winds around a 2500m drop and is surrounded by breathtaking mountains and passes through shocking bursts of wild flowers, tiny villages and four waterfalls. Normally the waterfalls soak the cars as you drive past, but there has been very little rain recently so we stayed dry. The road itself put the suspension of our chunky four-wheel drive to the test; let’s just say that all of those land rovers people drive in the quiet suburbs of Britain could be well used here- Christine had to have an operation on her back after driving for a few years on the roads in a car without very good suspension. Evidence of recent landslides is all round, and at one point the side of the mountain slope blended imperceptibly with the road, suggesting that the mountain side regularly contributes to the driving surface. However, this in no way accounted for the tractor we came across on the way which was spreading huge swathes mud onto the tarmac road for no apparent reason. As we were driving back it merely made the ride even more bumpy- so perhaps it was a desire for continuity. The other interesting thing was the number of cars driving without number plates, which take a year to be issued anywhere in the Loja province; it is generally accepted that new cars simply don’t get plates for a year, and apparently in special circumstances you can apply for permission not to use number plates. Seems pretty sensible.

Zamora is a small town which has grown economically recently with the discovery of gold about 10km away a few years ago. There’s a huge statue of a gold panner on the main road, as well a blend of pseudo-classical and quite simply mad sculptures on the roundabouts. It felt so much hotter and more humid than Loja as it’s a lot lower, and the drastic change in vegetation was remarkable. We drove to a hotel for lunch where, to my own surprise and that of anyone who’s ever been in the same room as me and a dead fish, I had a whole one to myself- head and all. Thankfully its eyes were covered by the tomato sauce, which I think was a great help. I found a frozen fish in the freezer the other night, wrapped up in a friendly-looking plastic bag, and as it was about midnight and there were no nearby tomatoes to cover its piercing eyes, I screamed and threw it back into the freezer and it took me until the next morning to stop feeling jittery. So, today was a great step forward.

The food was beautiful, but being among the bare mountains and feeling completely dwarfed by endlessly rising expanses of trees was wonderful. It was refreshing to get out of the city, even just for the day, and to look out of the car window was to read. I was wondering how I would react to such dramatic scenery had I never seen images of the jungle or been able to travel before. It would have been wonderful to drop a 19th century Cambridge dweller among all of those mountains and see their reaction. Now that, my dear fellow, is what one calls a very large hill.

The hotel had its own fish ponds and an enclosure full of frogs (with a sign which I’ve also seen in Spain: ‘Ranas con pena de muerte’- ‘Frogs with the death penalty’) and two of them looked as if they were kissing, so I was slightly confused as to which was the handsome prince, but maybe both frogs turn into royalty on this side of the equator.

Back to Loja. Tonight at 10.30pm, despite the law that forbids campaigning at this stage, a truck fitted with a comedy-sized loudspeaker was driving through the town encouraging all within hearing distance (at least 60% of the town) to pay attention to the words of Ecuador’s next President… Objection 1: Probably best to break the law publicly only after you get into office, Objection 2: BE QUIET!

Last night I was driven to the part of town where Irma lives for our first Bible study together. Having managed to avoid killing the huge pigs that were playing with the children in the streets, I arrived, and spent three and a half hours chatting with her and her family, and reading through the first chapter of the Gospel of John with them. It was really interesting and great to chat to Irma out of a work context- she really struggles with the idea that the SIMers who run the café and for whom she has worked in the past treat her as an equal, and ask her to eat with them. Whenever I offer to make her a cup of tea in the café she looks slightly embarrassed and says no, but she said last night that being treated as equal was something that had surprised her greatly but pleasantly about these new ‘gringos’. She is one of 12 children and has 7 of her own, and as all but about 3 of them live on the same street I soon gave up trying to remember names!

I finished reading ‘A Room with a view’ yesterday, and one line seems particularly relevant to today:

‘To descend from bright heaven to earth, whereon there are shadows because there are hills.’

How to be a domestic desastre...

2006-09-16T12:21:00.000-05:00

Saturdaz. For some reason, probablz to do with the frequencz of their usage, the Z and Y buttons on this German laptop are the wrong waz around.

I am now officiallz in permanent housing! Kati moved out zesterdaz, so I transferred mz mess across the corridor and mz room is now a haven of tranquilitz and transient tidiness! I’ve got a little balconz (which looks out onto a car park) and an en suite, which feels all a bit glam… didn’t expect to have a personal bathroom here, but verz grateful for a space to relax and retire from an increasinglz busz life here. I put up mz usual quantities of postcards and photographs and mz neice/nephew in waiting is now proudlz propped up on mz bedside table.

As the dazs go bz , things that I want to write about get quicklz replaced with new things that have happened, new insights into the Ecuadorian mindset and more amusing anecdotes! Zesterdaz I went to the big(ish) supermarket, which is a taxi ride awaz, and also went to a home store where I bought two candle holders and some tea lights (no rules against candles here!). Spending less than 3 dollars on items would not normallz phase me. However, having waited about 15 minutes due to the absence of anz form of Customer Services desk to whisk awaz the group of 7 middle aged women trzing to get their heads around the ‘take awaz now, paz later’ deal on a shinz new microwave, mz own ordeal began. First of all, what was mz Ecuadorian citizen number? Terrifzing memories of the mobile phone ordeal came flooding back, but once I gave them mz passport thez seemed happz enough. Where did I live? How is it spelt? What was mz name? (I remind zou- THREE DOLLARS!) The kind woman left out the D.O.B. and phone number fields, probablz due to the fuming woman behind me who was less than chuffed to have been kept waiting, and had kindlz expressed this to me bz prodding me in the back several times. During mz transaction, the middle aged women seemed to grasp the concept of pazing high interest rates on items bought months ago which one has ceased to use, and excitedlz tried to rejoin their place in the queue (mine!). Mrs BackProdder and I were having none of this and the radiation-hungrz women were swftlz repelled. La pièce de résistance was mz receipt, which is over 30cm long, and had to be stamped bz the security guard before I could leave the store. That means 10cm of paper per dollar that I spent. I wonder if the microwave women have to provide (10 x cost of microwave in $) centimetres of paper before thez are allowed to take it awaz?

Zesterdaz was a humbling experience, as two girls I met at the café came round to learn how to bake. There has been a severe gas shortage in the citz recentlz (alack, I have never even heard the song of the gas truck in all of mz time here!) so I was worried that we might run out mid-cooking. However, the greater problem was our furnace of an oven which turned the bottom of the cookies blacker than the darkest night and hard enough to potentiallz throw at the builders who have still not stopped banging about all daz! So, it wasn’t exactlz mz crowning moment in the kitchen, but probablz more successful than the chocolate floor cake Katz Densham and I made all those zears ago…

English club began at the café on Thursdaz night, and Colin, an Australian teacher, and I spent a tiring two hours trzing to accommodate verz different language abilities, as well as trzing not to argue about whether or not it was important for us to insist that prepositions be correctlz used. No priyes for guessing which side I was on…

On Mondaz I am going to lead a Bible studz in the house of one of the women who works in the café. She and her familz live about a mile out of town, and mz instructions were ‘Follow the river and when zou reach some houses ask for Irma.’ Fortunatelz, I have made mz complete orientational incompetence well known to those around me, so I’m being taken on a trial run tomorrow! If I never write again, assume the worst…

Bitios y Bobios

2006-09-13T22:16:00.000-05:00

Exciting update: I have just discovered the existence of the ´Casa de Cultura' of Loja! It seems there are benefits to the total lack of broadband here. Just popped in to check my emails on the way back from the cafe and have just spent half an hour or so chatting to the guy next to me (well worth the $0.40 of lost emailing time!) who has proved that not all friendly people here want to speak to you in English or call you ´baby´ and giggle with their friends. He’s a writer from Cuenca and is spending a few months here running theatre and dance workshops and hopefully introducing me to some local writers, huzzah!

The past few days have been really lovely and full of fun, as usual. Today I went with Kati (the ‘passing through’ Peruvian who’s currently living in my future bedroom, and thinking of extending her ‘visitita’ for another 3 months!) for lunch with some of her friends across town as she assured us we had been invited. We arrived to find the husband in his PJs welcoming us with open arms and then suddenly realizing he’d forgotten to tell his wife he’d invited us! Ah, los hombres.

I’ve been reading lots recently which has been great, I just finished ´Song of Solomon´ by Toni Morisson and have started Forster’s ‘A room with a view’. Which is slightly ironic as I have yet to unpack as I’ve been waiting for Kati’s ever-evasive departure date (not that I want her to leave), and my current resting place has three windows, all of which lead only to other parts of the flat, so ‘view’ is a bit generous unless one has a penchant for frosted glass. One advantage is that when I lock my keys in my room I can simply climb in through the lounge window. Just like being at home!

As typing is an intrinsically manual act, perhaps an update on my hands would be appropriate right now. There are very few reasons in the world why I would chop to the skin all of the nails on my left hand, however, since I am now officially learning the guitar (and can play 9 chords, slowly and painfully- in every sense!) I have become a one-handed taloned spiky thing. Not sure how you’d say that in Spanish. The ends of my fingers are also red and sore, but for the first time in my life, and possibly the first time among fingers in my Mum’s line of ancestors, they are warm.

It really feels as though I’ve been here for much more than a week. However, as usual, a C.S. Lewis quote will help us all out:

´We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’ we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty.’

This made me giggle, and also prevented me from gushing about the strangeness of suddenly being in a new place and it rapidly attaining an astonishing level of normality.

Tonight at the café I was teaching French to a Spanish girl whose teacher appears to have spent about as much time in France as Fidel Castro has spent volunteering in a soup kitchen. It was a bit confusing but fun! Tomorrow I’ll be running an English conversation class for a few hours, and I’m also going to start working with a deaf girl who wants to learn English.

Campaigning here for local and presidential elections reached a noisy climax a few days ago, and I was interested to find out that the candidates have a blanket ban on campaigning during the 3 weeks running up to the elections to let people ruminate without pressure. Or possibly to try and choose which of the endless candidates has the prettiest nose- good job I’m not in politics, my sisters would say. Because our flat is in the historical part of the town we have to put out a national flag on certain dates, and if we fail so to do we duly get a hefty fine! It seems that certain administrational abilities flourish here, whilst I learnt this morning that the Christian radio station which broadcasts from the ground floor of my building has been asking the local authority to register their ‘new’ ownership of the station for 5 years!

Madness. This feels like a very fragmented reconstruction of the past few days, but hope it brings a snail to your face. Ooops, I meant smile! So glad that Freud is dead…

Loja Fair

2006-09-11T13:22:00.000-05:00

¿Eshakyspeearry es ingles?

2006-09-11T12:44:00.000-05:00

Phew, having trecked around looking for an internet cafe that wasn´t full or slower than a tortoise on sedatives, I am back in my usual haunt ready to recall some of the lovely madness of the past few days! Hope the photos help to imagine what it´s like here...

On Saturday afternoon we went to the Loja fair, which is a little out of the city and truly put Loughborough fair to shame (though it pains me to say so!), both in terms of scenic setting and near-death experiences provided by the rides (assuming most people think that´s a positive thing!). The ridiculously dangerous rides were surrounded by hundreds of stalls all selling the same thing- sweets made out of nuts, little white bundles that looked like meringue but were really heavy and much more sickly, and an amusing number of novelty-sized brightly-coloured guitars! If I were an economist I´d probably be interested as to how so many people can make a living by all selling exactly the same things right next to each other, however, it did mean you never had to queue! There are also two shops opposite each other down the road from my flat that both sell yoghurt and pan de yucca, whereas finding a bookshop is a bit more tricky... maybe I´ll start writing great works of literature in yoghurt.

Anyway, back to the fair. Before buying tickets for the bull fight we asked whether they would kill the bull, as none of us wanted to go if so... however, we were told that it would be ´pura comedia´, so we paid our $6... there were two ticket options, either in the sun or in the shade. We went for the sun, which was half the price, and were highly amused to discover that the extra $6 dollars for shade got you an umbrella. The stadium was packed and it was very hot (slightly Rudolf-esque now) but great fun looking over the walls to the mountain sides which were clear of all but a few houses unlike those in the town, and watching screaming people hanging upside down and seeing the beautiful bright colours of those around us. I can now say that hearing and reading about bull fighting comes no way near to depicting the sheer cruelty of it. After the first matador had come out on his horse and the glittering footmen had paraded around the stadium with their shocking pink cloths, they brought in the bull which was incredibly angry (I didn´t realise until told afterwards that they lock them up in a small, dark room for 3 days) and at first the footwork of the horse was at least slightly impressive as it dodged the bulls´s horns. However, despite being told it was all just going to be good fun, the spears were plunged into the bulls back and it glistened in swathes of blood as it grew weaker yet put up a good fight considering the total lack of equality on the two sides. I won´t go into more detail, but needless to say it´s an experience I will never repeat. The girl next to me said ‘It´s like being alive at your own funeral’, and we left as soon as we could before they could kill the third bull. Much as I´m against homicide, I don’t think I was alone in wishing the bull had swiftly planted one of his horns into the buttocks of its killer.

Saturday night was the first ´Noche de Fe´, which is a Bible study run weekly at our flat, to which about 10 people come every week, mostly through the contacts made by those who teach English at the University or through the café. It was good to get chatting with people here about their thoughts on God and the world, and to see that some of the misconceptions about what the Bible says have been corrected during the studies so far. Yesterday morning I went to a church near my flat, to which a few other people from SIM go. It was great to feel at home straight away in such a new place and know that we had so much in common, and although I´m going to visit a few local churches before deciding which to attend it was great to see that the church had a great vision for helping people in Loja.
Sunday afternoon was pleasantly spent reading and making a huge batch of soup from the ridiculous number of vegetables I bought from the weekly market that morning. The market stretches the whole length of a very steep street and I wandered around bemused and vitamin-eyed taking in so many bargainously-priced vegetables, fruits, flowers and beans! I asked one man how much a bulb of garlic was, and he said ‘one for 25 cents’, which is about 12p, so I asked for one, and instead received a bag of 13, which makes each bulb of garlic about 1p at my calculations, and probably means I won´t have to buy any more for a long time! Carolynn and I spent an hour last night sorting out the cupboards in our flat which contain the remnants of supplies people have left over a fairly long period. We found 8 separate pots of baking powder, about 10 separate tubs of hot chocolate, powdered yoghurt, 10 vanilla pods and endless bags of nameless powders which were either loosely identified and tentatively placed in larger tubs, or doomed to be collected tonight by the singing rubbish truck. It nostalgically felt a bit like a Friday night at my house when my Dad ruthlessly raids the fridge and condemns sadly wilted salad and lingering Tupperware pots of potatoes to an untimely end.

Last night was the first ‘English Night’ I have experienced. This happens every fortnight in the flat above ours, and is a blend of socialising and trying to teach a bit of English and generally get to know people. An update on my accent status is relevant at this point: I cannot lose my Spanish accent, as it has unwittingly become my defining characteristic. My new friends take great delight in talking to me with a lisp, calling me ´tía’ (literally ‘aunty’, used in Spain as something equivalent to ‘mate’) and using the ‘vosotros’ form of address for a group of people which is obsolete here and sounds about as trendy as someone greeting a group with ‘Good morrow, fine gentlemen.’ This has also lead to pronouncing English words according to Spanish phonology, so ‘teacher’ becomes tee-atch-air, and Shakespeare becomes Esh-shake-ee-spee-arry. Someone had a video of Henry V and so I asked if anyone had read Shakespeare in English…

‘‘he was English?’’

Note to self: Refuse all attempts to pretend you thought Che Guevara came from Birmingham.

Campainging

2006-09-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

Candidate posters for the upcoming local MP elections

Pre-squished state...

2006-09-09T11:57:00.000-05:00

With Jadira, a firework buddy, just before getting crushed

Loja by Night

2006-09-09T11:53:00.000-05:00

The view over the city from one side of our roof- Andes not visible!

Mujeres Cuencanas

2006-09-09T11:47:00.000-05:00

These women are from Cuenca- the city which organises and pays for the Loja Feria every September.

''Teach me to speak like you...''

2006-09-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

Normally when in a foreign country one would expect any linguistically aspiring locals to make the most of one's skills in a native language. But, as I'm learning quickly, 'normal' has a pretty elusive definition in Ecuador! Last night was the third time this week I have feared at least for my hair, if not my life, in a packed park watching a blend of fireworks and guerilla warfare. Whilst trying to avoid the leaping flames and getting crushed by the fleeing crowds, I spent the evening teaching an Ecuadorian girl how to speak her own language with my peninsular Spanish accent. As many will testify, I love imitating accents, however, listening to my new friend lisping and spluttering her way through comedy phrases trying to sound like a Spanish person via an English girl whose accent is currently undergoing strange changes anyway was hilarious! Most people here ask me if I've lived in Spain and I'm currently wondering whether to force myself to make the necessary changes to hide my Peninsular bent, or whether that's insincere and I should just wait for nature (and linguistic accommodation) to take its destructive course. Ideas or suggestions on a flying pigeon please- post takes three weeks here and it might be too late by then!

The feria madness continues- last night ended in a huge wall of fireworks cascading over the main square and some watched with horror and others with delight as the small children congregated on steps of the nearby cathedral tried to protect themselves as best they could from the relentlessly falling flames! This afternoon I'm off to a bull fight with some people from the cafe- am not at all keen and have no great desire to see one, but I guess it will be an 'experience.' I wish we had gone yesterday when the bulls fought with giant inflatables, including Superman and Barney the purple dinosaur. Talk about cross-cultural!

I'm having trouble adjusting to the differing ideas as to what is acceptable personal space here. Yesterday a man whacked me square on the back in the supermarket as I was in his way, then when I turned around he looked at me with gentle eyes and asked most politely if I would please mind stepping aside! I've heard tales of people in saunas with only one other person, and the Ecuadorian people would think nothing of two strangers sitting so close to each other that their legs are touching, despite the space elsewhere. Think I'll stick to the Turkish steamer.

Last night I was taken by Fabrizio, a guy from the cafe, to buy a mobile phone. Before reading on I refer you to above comments about 'normality'. Having found a shop which had a Nokia phone for $48 that looked fine, we sat down with the shop owner to began the epic voyage to being a phone owner. The first hurdle was that I'm a guiri- a foreigner. People seem worried about selling things bigger than a piece of bread to non-Ecuadorians in case of... well, I'm not sure what really! Anyway, we managed to convince the guy that I am now a lojana and was not about to embezzle him. Then came the question about my local ID, which of course I don't have as the embassy in London messed up my VISA so my passport is currently in Quito with a lawyer. Thankfully I had a copy of my passport in my wallet, which the guy perused for a long time (it's at times like that you're glad you put some lipstick on before having your photo taken...) and then told me he'd have to phone HQ. So, I dictated my passport number to him as he spoke with someone in Quito about whether he could sell me the phone. Then came the funniest argument I've heard in a long time. I'd written my name on a piece of paper for him at an earlier stage in the process: Lydia Jane Rose. Pretty 'normal', ¿no? However, Mr BossMan in Quito was less than convinced that I was a real person not because my passport number didn't show up, nor because I wasn't Ecuadorian...

Man in Shop to BossMan: ''Hmmm.. I'm not sure, yes, it does seem strange.''
Man in Shop to me: ''This is your name?''
Man in Shop to BossMan: ''She says that's her name.... no, I don't know.''
Man in Shop to Fabrizio: ''Is this her name?''
Fabrizio: ''Yes, what's the problem?''
Man in Shop to BossMan: ''Apparently she only has one.''
Man in Shop to Fabrizio: ''Why doesn't she have another name?''
Fabrizio: ''Ah, she's a guiri, they only have one surname.''
Man in Shop to BossMan: ''Apparently guiris only have one surname!''

So, it turns out that the confusion stemmed entirely from the fact that I am not Lydia Jane Reading Rose, incorporating the surnames of both father and mother as happens with names here and in Spain. I thank my parents for at least giving me a middle name, as I can't imagine the faff of convincing BossMan that Lydia Rose was the name of a living, breathing phone-seeking person. Phew!

Needless to say more confusion and complication followed, but I won't bore you with that... at least now I've got a mobile phone. Which, of couse, currently won't let me text the UK :-)

Market Day

2006-09-07T17:02:00.000-05:00

It´s 4.30pm and I´m just about to go and start work! My first few days are definitely allowing me to ease into la vida lojana very gently and enjoyably! For the first time in months I´ve had time to read over the past few days, and although there are few occasions when there isn´t something more appealing to do, it's really good to have a change of pace and I´m beginning to get lost less often and feel a bit more at home.

Today I went for lunch with Caroline, the Australian girl I´m living with who has been very helpfully showing me where everything is! Lunch is the main meal here and we went to a Mexican café where we had 3 courses plus drinks for $1.80, which is pretty standard! After that we went to the main indoor market which I think will soon become a favourite haunt. The number of fruits that I didn't recognize was hugely exciting, and I bought a huge pineapple, mango and some teeny weeny bananas which were all duly blended into a juice of wonder when I got home! The meat section of the market was, however, less successful, as I had to leave after about 10 seconds as the smell was so overpowering and the sight of so many carcasses and unidentified organs less than pleasant! We compensated for this by buying a lovely tall-stemmed white flower for 25 cents which is now adorning our living room table! I also had my first taste of yucca today, which doesn't sound very appealing, but is lovely warm sticky stuff that is a bit like bread but different enough to be just a bit confusing to the old taste buds. Great! There were heaps and heaps of chocolate slabs piled up in the market which sent me into temporary overdrive until Caroline told me it was all sugarless and pretty grim, so the taste buds had to be satiated by the chocolate I brought with me.

Just wandering around the streets is fascinating. The national elections take place soon so there are candidate posters everywhere and apparently there are over 40 people standing for President, so no one really knows who to vote for! As I walked to the internet café I passed a man handing out flyers dressed in a huge white cape with his candidate's face on the back, which blew impressively in the wind and made me think that British politics would do well to inject some superhero-style campaigning!

The Feria that's in town until he 17th September makes Loja a very different place at the moment, so I'm told. The taxis are taking about 60% more business than usual and there are often street bands and there are beautifully dressed women everywhere. Yesterday a guy came up to me and said "¿puedo ser tu amigo?" which means "can I be your friend?" It made me think of many train journeys when I've wondered how many people in the carriage could be great friends if only we dared be less British and have a natter, but this was just a little too weird!

If you're ever looking for a legal DVD or CD, don't come to Ecuador. Whilst wandering around this morning I passed about 10 shops dedicated purely to pirated recordings, in several of which a few armed police men were browsing. I also came across Pema trainers this morning which had a slightly disfigured puma on them and looked like they'd last about 5 minutes!

The worst news of the past 24 hours is that I've had to make tea in the microwave, which, I know, will send my parents into the depths of despair. Even when there isn´t a gas strike we don't even have a tea pot, which I know must be pretty shocking for those who are bothered by such things! I went for lunch at an Australian couple´s house yesterday and they hadn't had water for 3 days as they were higher up in the mountains, their two boys were quite happy to not have had showers!
It's so wonderful being surrounded by the Andes. It makes a nice change from Cambridge! You'd definitely want to make sure your hand brake was well oiled (although, if I remember correctly following a Cambridge yob telling me to oil my squeaky bike brakes, you're not supposed to oil them, but take oiling to refer to general maintenance) as some of the slopes the cars have to stop on are steeper than any I´ve ever seen! I'll try and upload some photos soon, although there's a strange lack of USB-looking holes on this computer… maybe I'll paste them to the screen, that might work. Abrazos!

Things that go bump in the day

2006-09-06T22:29:00.000-05:00

You’re tired. Your body is pretty confused and desirous of sleep. Your legs are heavy and you’re pretty keen to try out the two pillows which are intriguingly of different sizes, nicely framing the beautiful floral explosion on the top pillow. Thankfully, sleep comes quickly, probably because you’re pushed over the edge of the awake world by the arduous task of remembering not to flush the loo paper. Then, just as the sun rises and the normal world begins to stir and stretch warm feet into the morning, THE LOUDEST BANGING IN THE WORLD gently knocks you out of your dreamy state. Two gentleman next door greet the dawn with a relentless serenade of hammer banging, and you feel not a little silly for having set your alarm for 8.30. A few minutes later, the fireworks begin. Aha! I hear you cry, this must be mere fabrication, for no sane person would waste fireworks during the daytime. My friend, you have underestimated the determination of this town to prevent any sleep beyond 7am!

Today began well, but got better! It’s strange to try and condense so many new sights and sensations into a few anecdotes, but the more I see and learn about life here the more I realise how much more there is to discover- as tends to be the case with most things in life!

Last night a few of us went to watch the night time fireworks, which I certainly enjoyed more than the morning ones! At the moment in Loja there are lots of celebrations as a doll of the Virgin Mary arrived in town a few days ago bringing with it masses of pilgrims who process behind it as part of a huge fiesta which takes place at this time every year. We went to the main square in the town and joined thousands of people from all over Ecuador, many of whom travel down especially for the fiesta. The colours and smells were amazing- people were handing out popcorn {which, I learnt today, is a common condiment with soup here!} and many were in indigenous dress, which made for a strange culture combination! Lots of the women in town are wearing the traditional pleated skirts, ponchos and flat bowler-style hats, with brightly coloured shirts. Each area has its own colour so you can tell where someone is from by looking at the colour of their skirts- there are no indigenous people from Loja city but the nearby Saraguro wear black ones.

There were two huge towers from which most of the fireworks were let off, which looked a bit like cardboard pylons, which doesn’t seem unlikely as parts of them set on fire when errant fireworks did their stuff. The main excitement basically came from the fact that you never knew when you were going to be set on fire. Huge sparks jumped across the square and dispersed over the waiting crowd who delighted in running away and chuckling merrily as people’s hair set on fire. One man was whirling two burning hoops on each hand, which looked really impressive, but as he gave no warning as to when he was about to begin and was usually right in the middle of a tightly packed group of people, more screams and cheerful running ensued! Near to us a group of people were lighting huge paper lanterns which had smaller lanterns hanging from them, and setting them off to fly into the air. This they did, and the bright colours floating against the dark sky were really beautiful and looked like tiny hot air balloons. Unfortunately, several got trapped on nearby buildings and trees, started to burn, burnt out, and then set fire to whatever had impeded their upward voyage, perhaps in search of revenge! Luckily, after the first few had burnt someone called the fire brigade who then waited around to protect the next arboreal victim.

Speaking of the emergency services, next to the fireworks was a huge stage. After the first batch of fireworks a group came on to play. It consisted of 5 guitars, each delicately picking out a different melodic line, and blended with the clear tone of the panpipes and the wailing voice of the singer bemoaning his departed lover, the sound was amazing. I later leant that the group was made up entirely of local policemen! A definite improvement on ‘The Bill’, I’d say.

Hmmm, it’s really time for sleep again now and I’ve not even written anything about today! A few exciting discoveries I’d like to share:

The name of the amazing fruit is babaco, and it looks like a deflated yellow football.
I’m pretty good at making cappuccinos
In Ecuador, when you hear the sound of what you assume to be an ice cream van, the tinny tune is in fact announcing the arrival of the rubbish men or the lorry bringing gas and water! Rubbish bins are collected daily and must be brought back in immediately after being emptied or they will soon be given a new home!

Please excuse the random entries below… the computer I’m on doesn’t allow you to see all of a window at the same time which makes using this quite tricky!

Buenas noches!

Three Flights of Stares

2006-09-05T16:15:00.000-05:00

Plough, vessel, plough the British main,
Seek the free ocean´s wider plain;
Leave English scenes and English skies,
Unbind, dissever English ties...

-Charlotte Bronte

Well, despite the distinct lack of ploughing vessels during my voyage to Loja, ´Garden of Ecuador´, I have indeed left English skies and arrived after many hours of confused body clockage and a few too many aeroplane meals! It is really good to have finally arrived, and whilst today has been pretty overwhelming and my poor map reading skills only just allowed me to navigate unfamiliar streets to find an internet café, I´m feeling as much at home as is probably possible after less than 12 hours!

My journey began in great style and aplomb as Mum, Dad, Steve and I ploughed through the M1 traffic for about 4 hours, fought a daring battle with the ´signs´ at Heathrow airport and then ended up in Knightsbridge en route to the travel lodge (sorry, ´travelodge´, pah!) where Mum, Dad and I had about 4 hours sleep before arising at 4.30am to get to the airport. Despite having been told I was allowed 2x36kg of baggage, the very nice lady from Iberian Airlines warned me that I should be ´more careful´ in future as both of my bags were over the real limit of 20kg. I define ´more careful´in that context as ´less incapable of spending a year without so many flippin´books!´

My flights to Madrid and then from there to Quito were fairly uneventful. Someone else was in my seat for the first flight and it looked like I might get upgraded to business class for one beautiful moment, but alack I was just put on the back row next to the window and a very tall basketball player who clearly had need of the leg room. The highlight of the Madrid-Quito flight was, without doubt, the description of one of the flims they were showing, ´Shaggy Dog´, which read: ´A man tries to lead a normal life despite sometimes turning into a sheep dog.´Tragic, really! The Spanish translation of it reminded me of the ´Honey, I... (insert foolish action here)´flims´: ´Cariño, estoy hecho un perro´ (´Darling, I´ve turned into a dog.´)

After 10 hours of trying to avoid DVT by wriggling my feet around and taking superfluous trips to the loo, we finally arrived in Quito. Short periods of turbulence became reminiscent of Loughborough fair rides as the plane erupted in ´oooooooh´ and peals of gleeful laughter, perfectly complemented by the eruption of applause as we landed. It was raining! I was met by the owner of the guest house I stayed in last night, and as we drove through the town I was struck by the huge ascending slopes at differing heights around the city. The driving reminded me a little of being in India last summer, when a car horn meant ´hellooooooo! i´m here! how are you?´, all rather cordial really. I saw virtually nothing of Quito as my body commanded me to sleep for 9 hours until I arose at 3.30am this morning to go back to Quito airport and get my internal flight to Loja. Driving to departures was a world away from Heathrow as my driver pulled right up outside the check-in area and parked outside the double doors! By this time, I was feeling a little queasy and my head had been throbbing for most of the night, so I was glad to get on my last plane for a while and thankfully managed to convince the Hombre de Seguridad that my flute wasn´t some kind of silver plated bomb. At least I was allowed to take Vaseline on this flight, although the absence of a UK-style comedy list of prohibitied items such as ´curry´and ´mayonnaise´ was a little upsetting.

The flight to Loja was stunning. As we left Quito before the sun had risen, the city spread out beneath us like a giant navy switchboard. I´m easily amazed by the sky at the best of times, but the clouds this morning were absolutely breathtaking! As we rose higher the light began to grow and layer upon layer of cloud folded up around us and over the horizon. There was a storm in the distance and huge flashes of orange light burst through the clouds, which looked alternatively like broccoli and fine sculptures (not that you couldn´t make a fine sculpture of broccoli, in fact, au contraire...) At first I couldn´t tell where the clouds stopped and the snow-topped peaks that poked through the blanket of white began and the enormous protruding mountains looked as though they were the same height as us. All of this beauty was only slightly upset by the fact that I made good use of my sick bag as we landed (and consequently felt better than I had in days) but it soon resumed as I stepped out of the plane to find myself surrounded by beautiful, enormous mountains and a sense of calm and peace that´s hard to put into words!

I was met by Bob and Millie, the couple who run the café I´m going to be working in, and they drove me to Loja city which is about 45 minutes away. Since then, there has been a whirl of information, maps, instructions and all sorts of other things I´m probably going to forget! I´m currently living with an Australian girl, Carolina, who´s teaching English at the University, and Katia, a mad Peruvian who´s just passing through and merrily chatted away this morning as I mentally snoozed and tried to look awake! First impressions of Loja are that people are just lovely here! I went into a guitar shop on the way here to look for a book as there´s a spare guitar in my flat, and just had a lovely chat with the owner who says that his brother is one of the best guitarists in the country (and South America, apparently...) and that he´d love to teach me guitar and have me sing in his band. Which is, as yet, unformed. Sounds promising!

I went to Bob and Millie´s for lunch and visited the main shopping centre of the town and bought some milk in a bag, as you do. I resisted the urge to buy jam in a bag and went for the conventional jar. I had papaya for breakfast which was delicious and the juice of a strange fruit found only in Ecuador for lunch, whose name I´ve forgotten... it begins with B, and it´s not banana. Although we did have fried banana for lunch which was amaaaaaazing!

The next few days are going to be pretty mad I think- already got quite a few invitations for lunch and I´m going to the café tonight to see how things run. Most of the students aren´t in town at the moment as term starts next week, so things are pretty quiet. So, am happily settling in and enjoying feeling a bit lost and overwhelmed as it´s pretty hard to be scared in a place of such friendly faces!