interesting conversation with my host mom

i had the most interesting conversation with my host mother the other day. we were talking about empleadas (native women who work as maids and nannys in people´s homes in ecuador.) she was telling me about the history of her family. her dad was the chief of all ecuadorian police. she says that he wasn´t corrupt, unlike most people in government here, and i believe her. if he had been corrupt my family would be rich, and they´re not. at all. however, he made a fairly hefty sum of money. her family, while she was growing up, employed two drivers, one for the dad, and one for the family. two empleadas, one to take care of the kids and one to cook and clean. two empleados (men), one to take care of the fathers uniforms and one as a personal assistant to the father. they also employed two security gaurds to stand outside their gates at all times. her grandfather gave as a gift a native boy to her brother to play with and take care of him. he was property of her brother (my host uncle.) eventually though, he was given back to his family on the farm so that he could go to school and be free, but his family punished him for being returned, it was embarassing. later in life, when my host mom was married (her husband died 4 years ago) she had two empleadas, one for the kids, and one to clean and cook. they also had a security gaurd. now the economic situation has changed a lot, both because of corrupt politics and the dollarization in 2001 and only the rich have empleadas. now empleadas go to the states to work for rich people. she has a friend in the states that brings in two empleadas from ecuador to work for him. now most women do the cooking, cleaning, and work.
i also found out that most of the native women who walk around the city with baby´s are not actually the mothers. they are usually (every once in a while this isn´t the case) a third party set up by the parents to sell the baby to rich ecuadorian families.

i guess i found all of this really interesting and thought some of you might too. it´s something to think about anyway.

abridged version of a bunch of things cuz i´ve already been on the computer for a while...

first trip to papallacta
so two weekends ago i got invited to go with a group of people to papallacta. papallacta is a volcano about two hours from quito with volcanic hot springs! so we went, travelling was interesting as always and we got there friday afternoon. we decided that we should probably stay over night and went to the local hostel to check prices. wow, they wanted 12 dollars per person per night. heeeeeeeeeell no! this is ecuador! hostels are cheap!!! so we went to check prices at the resort that has the hot springs to see how much more it would be to just stay there. we asked for a quad and a triple room (there were 7 of us) and the lady said, ¨but don´t you want your own cabaña?¨ WHAT?! our own cabaña! of course we want our own cabaña! it ended up being cheaper than the hostel with enterace fees to the hot springs so we went for it. let me tell you about the cabaña, it had two floors, a fire place, 6 beds, a living room with a bay window, a bathroom with a jaquizzi and shower that had french doors opening onto our own patio. it also had a private hot spring that we could use 24-7! all for 20 bucks a night a person!!! lets just say it was amazing. we were in the andes, high in the andes, with our own cabaña sitting in a private hot spring with views of the mountains against a gray sky with exotic fruit trees everywhere. it was unreal. unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries and i only got 2 pictures!!! ahhhhhhhh.

volcanología

so one of my favorite classes is volcanology. it´s so fun and the professor rocks. PLUS there are 4 mandatory field trips and a number of optional trips. last weekend i went on the first field trip to two volcanoes. papallacta and pinchincha.

papallacta:
left saturday at 9.30 am and went to the volcano. got there and had to hike through the jungle. when i say hike, i actually mean forge our way with machetes through the jungle because there was no path. that´s a lie, we didn´t have machetes. but they would´ve helped a lot. anyway, the hike was sooooo fun! there were little rivers we had to go through and we all got dirty. really funny. eventualy we found out that the hike was just for fun and had no purpose. the volcanic rocks we collected we got on the side of the road by the bus. the hike was still worth it.
so then we got back on the bus and headed to a nearby waterfall to collect more volcanic rocks. another really fun hike. litterally up the waterfall. to collect green rock. everyone got really wet this time, but it washed off the mud from the first hike, so that was a plus. if you don´t like to be muddy. me and jaime (male) put mud on our face as war paint. but not everyone is as cool as us...
after that the class split up, some people went back to quito and some of us went to the hot springs in papallacta. wow. that was really fun! i ended up singing yellow submarine and exchanging drunk stories with my professor. he´s greek. his name is theo. he´s the most published professor on campus and we´re friends now.

pinchincha:
so sunday morning i met up with my class at 3.30 am to go up pinchincha. pinchincha is the volcano quito is on the side of. another really fun trip. we took some rickety old suv´s up the mountain and then had to climb the rest of the way. from the top of the mountain you could see southern ecuador, southern colombia, all the volcanoes in between, and on clear days, the ocean. it was unreal. we watched the sun come up over the andes and quito, hiked around and then had a mini-lecture with theo. it was cold up there, but i liked it. the ecuadorians thought i was crazy. i said no, i´m minnesotan. hahaha. gotta love bad jokes! i tried to load more pictures from the top of the mountain, but it wouldn´t let me for some reason, but í have some amazing pics if you ever remember this post and want to see them!

interesting fact: the world´s largest super-volcano is in yellowstone national park. if it would ever errupt, it would be off the volcano eruption scale and the united states would be erased from the earth. all of the united states. during the late 1980´s it had it´s biggest activity in thousands of years when the crater of the volcano sunk a few meters. after that happened, the parliment in england held a conference to discuss what england would do if yellowstone should ever errupt. yellowstone is an inverted volcano.

wow, i´m behind on this thing...

hey team, sorry about the wait on updating this. again, the internet is slow here. i´ve uploaded some pictures from the past month from various activites including-first trip to the volcanic hot springs in papallacta, trip to the coast, casa de kingman (museum that my host mom works at), volcanology field trips to papallacta (the volcano part not the hot springs) and pinchincha (volcano quito is situated on.) hope you enjoy them!! you´d better, it took me over an hour to load them...

view from the top of pinchincha, it was unreal, the shadow you see in the bottom right hand corner is the shadow of the volcano pinchincha on the clouds and other mountains

view of quito at 3.30 am from on top of pinchinca, the volcano quito is on the side of

on the hike in papallacta, it was intense, there´s even mud on my face. ok, i put it there...

prof theo. he´s greek. and takes us on field trips. good guy. we sang yellow submarine once

there was no path to walk through in the jungle and some steep climbs-decents... don´t worry, i had my keens and i didn´t fall

second time to papallacta with laurin, this was the hike through the jungle with my volcanology class

the group i went to papallacta with the first time. carly, james, maura, evan, lara, and joanna

the first time i went to papallacta and the hot springs. on the 6km walk to the resort, with my friend maura from madison

















surfing
















montañita (the town i went surfing in)

the famous blue-footed boobie on the isla de plata














kingman














kingman

artwork of kingman, in the musuem where my host-mom works















my room














the view of quito from my rooftop patio

some pictures from the coast















surfing! on the isla de plata

week after the coast

so this post won´t be as long as the coast trip post. don´t worry though, my life is never boring. especially in ecuador... i´ll start with some boring stuff that everyone wants to hear about and then there´s a really good taxi story at the end. and by really good i mean sketchy and potentially hazerdous to my well-being...

family life-
my family is really nice. there are three kids, and the mom. the dad died two years ago. at first i felt like the kids didn´t really care that i was here. they didn´t talk to me very much, they were nice and would answer my questions, but that was it. it was discouraging. but it´s gotten much better and i feel like we´re kind of becoming friends. so that´s good. my mom rocks. so nice. does everything for me, including setting my breakfast and lunch out on the table before she goes to work. i´m spoiled. i live in a very residential area of town. it all seems like it´s falling apart (and it is) but the insides of people homes are always immaculate. my house, like all the houses here, is gated to the street with two pad locks. but i´ve never felt unsafe in my neighborhood. i´ve really never felt unsafe in quito anywhere. maybe i´m just unaware of the danger around me, but i don´t think so. like any big city, you should be perfectly safe if you´re smart. and i like to think i am...

school-
ok, i go to a really expensive (by ecuadorian standards) school. the most expensive in all of ecuador in fact. that also means it´s probably the best. it also means that only rich kids go there. they´re all really fashion forward, and by fashion forward i mean really REALLY trendy but with no real taste. especially the guys. they´re all metro. really metro. extremely metro. we look at them and say, wait, you actually wear that. they sport euro-mullets, faux-hawks, and lots of oil in their slicked back hair. kinda gross. but i´ll get over it. a lot of the kids are really stuck up too. but i´ve made a few ecuadorian friends and they´re really cool. i´m meeting more and more of them as they introduce me to their friends. if you´re introduced by a fellow ecuadorian, they´re much friendlier. on the other hand, i have a million exchange student friends and they´re all really really cool. so that´s good.

classes-
for the most part they´re really good. i did, however, get into a philosophical argument about properties of language with my phonetics professor for half and hour during class last week. she tried to tell us that saying things like hello or how are you, don´t count as communication and that poetry is a seperate property of language from communication. no one was buying it, but i was the only one who would say anything to the prof. but everyone agreed with me, and told me so. they were also happy becuase it´s a really boring class and it made the time go by faster. also, my novela ecuatoriana class is a joke so far. i think it´ll get better, but last class we read 15 pages alound on "novels for beginners" that described what a narrator, what a setting, and what characters are. it was the biggest waste of 1.5 hours of my life. not college material. if it happens again next class, and i have a suspicion it will, i´m going to say something, or walk out to do some serious reading. like i said, though, once we begin reading the novels i expect it to get better. however, i LOVE my other classes. i´m in the BOOM-latinoamericano, a literature class with a great professor. i´m also in quechua, the language of the indigenous people of the northern andes. i love it, and later in the semester we have a field trip to the incan trail where we get to hike the andes and stay in indigenous communities!!! there are lots of field trips at my university. and in my volconologia class, we have 4 mandatory trips to volcanoes around the country and 4 optional trips. i´ll be going on all of them. tungurahua is the volcano 65 miles south of quito that went off a while back. we get to go there as a class. we get to go to parts that residents aren´t allowed to return to yet. i´m so excited. so that´s my school life. oh, and the campus is rediculous. it´s beautiful. it´s more than that. it´s flat out unreal.

ok, classes, school, family, i think that´s all the stuff people have been asking to hear about, so now i´ll put up the fun story. the taxi story...
so the other night i was in the mariscal sucre districe of town, aka gringolandia, it´s where all the clubs and bars are... with some friends, we went there to eat and have a few drinks after salsa class (which i love, our teacher is from cuba so we´re learning cuban style salsa.) so it´s about midnight and one of my friends has to be home, so we decide to share a taxi cuz we live on the same street, although i live a bit further down. so we drop off joanna (my friend) on a little side street where her house is and i tell the taxi driver that i live further down the street and to turn to the left. so he does. well, the street are a little narrow here sometimes and there were cars parked on both sides. there´s also a SUV coming in the opposite direction and a police officer walking around for some reason. so, there´s not really room for both cars to pass to the police officer steps in and starts directing the truck and my taxi to that we both make it through. ok, now i have to admit i´d had a few drinks and wasn´t completely sure of what was going on. i wasn´t wasted or anything, don´t get me wrong, but i wasn´t exactly paying attention to what was going on. well, all of the sudden the suv and the taxi are even and the driver in the suv starts screaming at the taxi driver! i´m not sure why, but i guess the taxi driver did something wrong and the other dude is PISSED about it! so the taxi driver is saying things like, ´"i´m just trying to serve this gentelman and he´s a gringo and doesn´t know the area well" blah blah blah, meanwhile i´m like, hey don´t drag me into this, i´m just trying to get home! and the suv guy is yelling things like "yeah, but you´re from around here and you know the rules" blah blah blah. well, i don´t think the police officer really cared, cuz there was no harm done to the suv or the driver, but he finally came up to the taxi and asked for his papers. ok, your papers are a big deal here, if you don´t have them, you´re kinda screwed. well, the police officer looks at them, and then, i´m not sure why, shows them to the suv driver. well, the suv driver grabs the papers and speeds away!!!! ahhhhhhhhhh!!! so the taxi driver is like, "shit. you need to get out of the taxi and walk cuz i need to try to get my papers back!" i´m like ok, here´s the $2 i owe you and i walked home. wow, i could have been seriously harmed in that situation. i told my family about it and they said there´s NO reason the cop should have shown the papers to the suv driver and that the whole thing was VERY VERY shady. i guess i´m lucky to be alive and well...

trip to the coast (that´d be the pacific coast if you were wondering...)

ok, i wasn´t going to update this till the end of the week, but i know you´re all sitting in front of your computers wondering what i´ve been up to. and i can´t keep my audience waiting after all, famous is as famous does. and famous updates his blog. (wow, i´m a loser)

so last weekend (it´s been a while since i´ve written anything) i impulse went to the coast. here´s some advice, take impulse trips. i´ve done a few and they always end up being some of the best times of my life. like when we went sky-diving, or the time i went to texas. actually, i´ve never been to texas, but i´ve met some people from texas and i imagine it would be a good time. anyway, my trip to the coast... (p.s. get a snack and a beverage cuz this is going to be a long post. but i promise you it´ll be worth it)

so i decide to go to the coast with some friends. there ended up being 8 of us and i couldn´t have asked for a better group, everyone was amazing-me, adam s, taylor, rachel, kaiti, courtney, joanna, and michelle. we were headed to a little fishing town with some amazing beaches that we read about in lonely planet called Puerto Lopez. it´s about 10 hours away by bus. well, it should have been 10 hours by bus. but we had some problemas with the bus companies... let me tell you about it. we planned on taking a bus from quito at 8.30 pm on thr night, sleep on the bus and eureka you´re at the beach in the morning. didn´t work out that slick. apparently you need to buy tickets for the bus in advance and we didn´t know that. so the 8.30 bus only had 3 seats left. so now 5 of us can´t go. or so we thought, until we found out there was another bus leaving at 11.30 pm that had plenty of seats open. so we bought tickets on that bus and waited in the SKETCHY (a lot of things are sketchy in ecuador) bus station. we sent one guy on each bus and i ending up on the 11.30 bus. now, there was another problem, we thought that our bus went directly to puerto lopez, but found out that it didn´t really. it went through portoviejo though and they (the bus people who sold us direct tickets to puerto lopez...) told us that there was a bus from portoviejo to puerto lopez. another lie. at about 7 am my bus arrived in portoviejo and met up with the other 3 and took a taxi to the other bus station in town where we got on a bus that went to jipijapa, where we could find another bus to puerto lopez. so fine. we do that. and in jipijapa we wait around for another bus that goes to puerto lopez in an even SKETCHIER bus station. finally one comes and they tell up it´s an hour to puerto lopez on this bus. now this bus was another adventure. finally we´re driving, and we remember, hey, isn´t there a guy on the roof tying his bike down? yes, there is. but 5 min later he climbed through the window of the bus and found a place to stand in the aisle (the bus was packed.) so two and a half hours later we end up in puerto lopez. i know this sounds like a lot to go through to get to a beach, and it was, but i´m actually glad that it happened like that. we got to go through RURAL RURAL ecuador and see things that we never would have seen on a direct bus. man, it´s a different world out there. these villages are sooo poor. the people live in little thatch roof huts with dirt floors, and there are wild dogs, cows, unknow animals roving around. but the most amazing part is that there are posters for presidential candidates (it´s an election year and there are 16 candidates) EVERYWHERE. people also paint the walls of their houses and the few cars that are there with messages of support for different candidates. they´re are so dedicated to these politicians, but the politicians will never do anything for them. never. i´ll write more about ecuadorian politics closer to the election in october, but they´re screwed up to say the least... i don´t know, life is so diffent for these people, it´s hard to see.

anyway, we FINALLY end up in puerto lopez and we meet two taxi drivers at the bus station who agree to take us to a hostel. these guys were awesome and became our unoficial guides for the weekend. they drove us around in these awesome little motorcycle taxis that vibrated like mad and always seemed like they wouldn´t make it. but they did. every time. our hostel was right on the beach and was more of a little resort that a hostel. it was 6 dollars a night and seemed like something out of swiss family robinson. it was awesome. we rented one 2 person cabin and one 6 person cabin. so now it´s about 10.30 in the morning and we decide to go to a beach in a nearby national park. the beach is called los friles and it was gorgeous. the water was amazing and the beach was clean and empty. we had so much fun swimming and screwing around in the water. we found out that marco polo in the ocean is both really really fun, and really really difficult! good times. anyway, since the beach was in a national park there were hiking trails from the beach up a cliff to a lookout point. half the group went on that trail, but kaiti, courtney (both from colorado) and i decided to walk to the far point on the other side of the beach. it was so fun, we hunted crabs, star fish and sea anemonies on some bolders farther down and finally made it to the far point which afforded some amazing views of the ocean and the park. so we spent the day there and then our cabbies came and picked us up and took us back to town. the park closes at 4 pm so we still had plenty of time.

so we walked around the town for an hour and stopped at a little panderia (bread store) that we nick-named the pan&porn becuase there was a large add for pilsener beer featuring a topless woman in the store. we´re not sure why. but it was funny. there actually a lot of adds like that for beer here. in the most random places. then we went to the liquor shop and picked up some alcohol that we´ve never heard of (which was terrible) and some beer. then we headed back to take showers before going to dinner. more good times. showers&shots. hahaha. ok, food on the coast is amazing. it´s all fresh seafood (i love seafood now.) it´s soooo good and sooo cheap. food like that would cost between $35-40 a plate in the US, and you can´t even order some of the sea-food they have here, but it´s only $5-6 here. wow. i had shrimp, fish, calamari, and i even tried a traditional dish called ceviche that has about every sea creature alive in it, and i loved it! then we went back to the hostel and struggled our way through mystery alcohol and beer on the beach. so that was our first amazing day on the coast.

day two. our cabbies also happen to work for a boat tour company and they set us up for a trip to la isla de plata a.k.a. the "poor man´s galapagos." so at 9.30 we got on a boat and set off with the cabbies brother who was our tour guide for the day. it´s about a 1 hour boat trip to the island, but we spent 2.5 cuz we went whale watching. more specifically, hump-backed whale watching. it´s whale season right now from ecuador to the middle of colombia. they come here for the warm water to mate and birth before returning to the antarctic. sirvirio (our guide) explained that they need the warm water to mate due to shrinkage of the males penis in the antarctic. sirvirio explained all this to us in spanish and everyone was cracking up and thinking about the seinfeld episode where george is trying explain shrinkage in a pool. hahaha. we have the explanation in spanish on video tape. lol. anyway, whales are amazing. and huge. they were swimming 20m from our boat and then they would randomly jump up. it was unbelieveable! eventually we made it to the island though and took a 3.5 hour hike around the island where we saw all kinds of rare birds and stuff. it was awesome. there were people from all around the world on the tour with us. including our newest friends carlos and his wife from spain. they´re around 40 and he does the budget for the defence department of spain it turns out! they were awesome. anyway, after returning to puerto lopez we hopped on a bus to montañita, which is about an hour away and the surfing capital of ecuador. sketchiest bus i´ve ever been on. didn´t feel safe. especially becuase carlos told us that he and his wife had been robbed on a similar bus at night. two guys with sawed off shotguns hijacked the bus and held the driver hostage while one of them took everyone´s money and beat up the money collector on the bus. yeah. that kind of thing happens on these busses. but not to us, thank the lord.

ok, day three of our trip (hang in there, it´s the last day you have to read about...) so we make it to montañita and go to another hostel. not as nice as the last one, but it got us through the night. we went to a resteraunt-bar called the chief. there was also a large dream catcher hanging between two buildings on main street. i´m not sure why. no one knew. hmmmm. but the chief was an awesome resteraunt and kaiti got the most amazing burger i´ve ever tried in my entire life. paired with the most amazing mojitos i´ve ever had, it was a good dinner. we also made friends with the chef, who´s name is boris. boris took us clubbing later that night. nice guy, looks like he´s about 16, is actually 27 and has a large tatoo of the statue of liberty on his forearm. the first club was fun, but emptyish, so we dicided to go to the other one in town that was only a block from our hostel. wow, never going there again. median age-14. there were also some really gross 40 year old women grinding with some 10 year old boys. what??? so we said, no, not cool, and left. boris was confused about why we didn´t want to stay there, and when we explained, he said, oh it´s probably the mom and her kid. yeah, that makes it better. not. so we went home for the night. got up in the morning and tood surfing lessons. soooo fun. $12 for 4 hrs with a private instructor. sweet. i can surf now. and half hour into our class, carlos from spain showed up and joined our class. we had no idea they were coming. we had told them it was our plan the night before but they were going to guiaquil the next morning to catch their flight back to spain. but they got a later flight and came surfing instead! hahaha. so later we went to a resteraunt that had been recomened to us by some french guys the night before called the burro loco (crazy donkey) and had some more amazing seafood. at the burro loco a mary kate and ashley movie was playing, followed by bring it on 3-all or nothing, both in english with bad spanish sub-titles. another entertaining meal. finally we hopped on a bus to puerto lopez where we had previously bought tickets for a direct bus to quito. traveled, safely, through the night and ended up in quito at 6 am. some of us had class at 8.30, but i fortunately didn´t have class till 12.30.

so that´s it! my UNREAL trip to the coast. one of the best weekends of my life. and i´m tan now.