ñukaka inga pircamanmi rini

hey guys. new post. get excited!

last weekend i was in cuenca! cuenca is the third largest city in ecuador and it´s GORGOUS!! it´s known as the colonial capital of ecuador. all the buildings and churches (at least two on every block) are really old and really cool. it makes for a very surreal walk through the city. anyway, it´s about ten hours from quito by bus. and the bus ride was miserable. i couldn´t sleep, it was a night bus. anyway, some of our friends chose to fly, but that was $100, and it was only $20 to take the bus. so i did it the cheap way. and it wasn´t that bad. it was. hahaha!

so after the second day we went on a two hour bus ride to inga pirca!! the title of this post is ï´m going to inga pirca¨ in quichua. wow! sooooooooooooo amazing!! it´s the largest ruins in ecuador. it was originally made by the cañari people, but eventually taken over by the inca. the inca only had it for about 40 years before the spanish came. it was really cool. we saw all the sites of the cañari and learned about them from our guide, and then we saw the incan temple of the sun that they built when they took over. it´s an interesting temple of the sun, because it´s the only oval temple of the sun. the oval was a holy shape to the cañari, so the incans incorporated it into their temple to help assimilate the cañari to their culture. very cool. we also learned that the temple of the sun is the only original ruins. the rest of the ruins were reconstructed in the mid-60´s. kind of a let down, would have preferred if they hadn´t told us and just let us think they were original, but whatever...

also, while i was in cuenca, the second round of elections took place. and, unfortunately correa won. he´s the semi-communist. he has, however, said that now he doesn´t want to get rid of the dollar anymore, so that´s good for the economy here. but who knows what´s going to happen once he takes office mid-january. hopefully everything will turn out alright.


on an unrelated note, las fiestas de quito begin today!!! so for the next week there are crazy parties in the streets of quito to celebrate the founding of the city. entire streets are closed off for las fiestas and there are bull fights all week. i´m so excited to go!!

UNFORTUNATELY my quichua field trip got called off by our professor. it was supposed to be this week, the 1st-3rd of december. ON THE PLUS SIDE (!!!) i know will be in quito on the 2nd, which means I CAN STILL GO TO THE SHAKIRA CONCERT!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

the only picture i have of halloween.
ok, i have more, but this is the only one i can put up right now. i´ll put up another later so you can see my full costume. cuz it rocked!!!
dead prom king. kali (on the left) was the dead prom queen. our back story is that we killed ourselves after prom to show how much we loved one another. morbid, i know.

noviembre

hey guys. i haven´t written in a while again. so grab a snack and get ready, this might end up being a long blog post...

elections 2006

well, some of you might be wondering about the political situation here. elections are this coming weekend. i won´t be in quito, cuz i´m traveling to cuenca. but it should be an exciting weekend. the new president will begin his term in january. so that should be interesting. what else about elections?? well, the guy who owns all the bananas in ecuador (noboa) is now being accused of spending WAAAAAAY over the legal limit on his campaign, but no one will do anything about it, so i guess it doesn´t actually matter. political campaigns are nothing like those in the states. you never see or hear ANYTHING about the candidates or their campaigns unless you see them on the news. and then you only see them kissing babies and doing polititiony things like that. never talking about anything. oh, but noboa (banana guy, not commie) has a new plan where everyone can build a new house (which is actually cheaper than buying a house) for $50-month. i´m not sure how that works, but that´s what he says. that´s all for now, i´ll let you know what happenes this weekend.

luz (electricity-power)

there´s currently an electrical shortage in ecuador. it´s only affected my house once, for about ten min we were without electricity. the electric system in ecuador is based on a series of resevoires and turbines. the resevoires are filled with rain water. well, although it´s winter here and rains for a few hours EVERYDAY, right now it´s too little too late. the resevoires get depleted during the summer when it rarely rains here and right now there´s just not enough water. i think they cut off quito last though, cuz in some towns there have been riots cuz people have been without power for over a week!! all we can do is wait for more rain. i asked my mom why they just didn´t bring in water from the ocean, and she didn´t really have an answer. probably cuz it´d be too expensive to bring it in to the mountains. i don´t know.

on a similar note, ecuador´s OTHER power source, gas, is running out too! all of the stoves in ecuador are run on gas as are the hot water systems in the newer houses. my host mom told me today that there out of gas right now. it´s on the news. so our gas tank is almost empty (they drive around in the mornings selling fresh gas tanks, you just bring out your old one and they take it. it´s about $1.50 for a new gas tank and they last a few weeks (unless your hot water system is run on gas too)), so unless more gas becomes available we´re only going to be able to cook in the microwave soon, unless we have a long term black out cuz of the no rain thing, in which case we´d just be screwed. but they must be able to get by, cuz a while back, my host mom told me that ecuador was without electricity for a whole year. this was just a few years ago mind you. so be happy you don´t have to worry about having electricity, i think that´s the life lesson here. right.

holidays

one thing the people do right here is decorating for holidays! my host family and i decorated our house for christmas last night. it´s sooo nice. no one decorates the outsides of their houses here, but the insides are immaculate! i love it. my favorite thing we have is a train around the christmas tree (it´s fake although lots of people do have real trees, my host mom won´t allow them to have a real tree thought cuz she thinks cutting down pine trees is bad for the environment). it belongs to my host brother esteban, who´s 19, and he´s had it for about 10 years. he told me that it´s the most expensive christmas present he´s ever asked for/recieved. 10 years ago my family was well off, the toy train (it runs, has lights, and makes sounds!) cost one million sucres (the ecuadorian currency before the dollarization in 2001). at that time my host family could have bought THREE CARS for the same amount!!! crazy... mom and dad, feel free to spend three cars worth of money on me this christmas :) hahaha! but that´s christmas. we´ll have turkey for christmas dinner, which is a tradition, but it costs about $40. keep in mind that my host mom makes about $160-month. this year it´s free however cuz adrian, my lawyer host brother, gets his turkey this year. what does that mean? that´s what i asked cuz they kept talking about how adrian would get his turkey this year. when you become a lawyer in ecuador you have to buy your license after you graduate law school and then you get a license number and it´s officially recorded and all that jazz, when you get your number (once in a lifetime, you don´t renew it) you get a free turkey for christmas that year. so we get a free turkey!!

speaking of turkey, it´s thanksgiving thursday!! no, they DON´T have thanksgiving here. so all of my friends and i are going to applebee´s for thanksgiving lunch (i´ll probably get the fajita wrap if they have it) and then we´re going to the american sports bar to watch football! however, we heard from a friend today that there´s some other bar that´s serving REAL thanksgiving food all day and playing american football. so we might look into that...
unfortunately, there won´t be snow here, but when it gets cold, there IS snow on the mountains, and it´s really pretty. i love living in the mountains!

soccer

i went to my first soccer match on sunday. pathetic i know, but i´ve just never gone! anyway, i went with my host brother esteban. it was CRAZY!!! sooooo much fun, soooooo many people. and the fans are N U T S here. it was nacional vs. barcelona. ok, nacional is one of the teams from quito and they´re the best in the league. they won 4-0 (barcelona=struggle). barcelona is, contrary to popular belief, NOT FROM BARCELONA SPAIN!! they´re actually one of the teams from guayaquil. i asked the people around me why they´re named barcelona and not, oh say...guayaquil?, and no one knew. strange. probably a mystery i´ll leave ecuador without ever knowing... anyway, the barcelona fans are PARTICULARLY out of control. if you go to a home match of theirs, and you support the other team, and the other team wins, people have been know to be killed for supporting the wrong team. so i knew this when i went to the game, and i didn´t really believe it, but when we left there were armored vehicals surrounding the stadium doing riot control!!! ahhhhhhhhh! fortunately i wasn´t wearing a jersey. but, nothing happened that i heard of. they actually make the barcelona fans wait in the stadium half an hour before letting them out so that the nacional fans have time to get away... right... anyway, i ended up seeing some of my friends (gringos, who stuck out like it was their job at a soccer match) and they came and sat with us. so it was fun.

it was a good day.

to my mother

mom told me that people were confused about my blog, so let me clear a few things up for anyone who´s confused. fist of all, sorry if my blog is misleading, i write the way i think and speak, and i guess it tends to be slightly sarcastic. woops! anyway, i LOVE it here in ecuador. i wouldn´t change a thing that i´ve done or that´s happened to me since being here. (except maybe the halloween incident, it would´ve been nice to have my keys...) i´m really happy i chose ecuador and that i´m here for a year. it´ll be sad to not see people back home for such a long time, but i think it´s worth it. i´ve been learing a lot here. i know i say that classes are easy (and they are) but what i mean is more that the grading and the amount of homework is easy. i really have learned a lot in my classes and i go everyday, so don´t think i´m just doing nothing. i love the people of ecuador, although they are a bit closed and it´s kinda hard to make friends here, they´re good people.

also, a disclaimer: i am not an alcoholic. i do WAY more than just drink here, some of my stories on the blog are drunk stories but that´s just cuz they´re funny and i think people will like them. but i really do all sorts of stuff. its just that i can´t really make going to a museum and seeing a whole bunch of works of goya, piccaso, and miró into an entertaining story. so keep that in mind. and when i get back and you see pictures of everything i did, you´ll understand (sorda) how much i really have done here and how much i´ve gotten out of it.

ok, that´s all for now. happy holidays to everyone!

here´s the only pic i could find of the runway...
i need to work on my posing, but it was my first runway show, cut me some slack! hahaha, you don´t know how crazy this weekend really was!

halloween!! ec style

some people were missing halloween in madison this past weekend. i wasn´t. not really. i walked in a runway show and went on a chiva!! one of the best halloweens of my life i think...

so monday night, the 30th, we got a chiva in quito. a chiva is a giant party bus. there´re no windows, railings so you can go out back and on the roof, a mariachi type band, and endless canelaso (traditional ecuadorian drink. like apple cider, but juice from a fruit i don´t know the name of with aguardiente-harsh alcohol, and it´s HOT.) we decided that we should make it a halloween chiva, so we wore costumes and brought halloween twister with us!

i probably had the best costume of my life too. me and my friend kali (who went to HS with kraemer and adam h) went as the dead prom king and queen of ´92. it was sweet. i´ve got some great pictures that i´ll hopefully put up some day. on a chiva you also elect a king and queen of the chiva. but if its a birthday chiva it´s always the birthday person, blah blah blah, and for us it went to best costume. which we won!! so we got a t-shirt and a bottle of aguardiente as a prize. then they all danced around us in la plaza san fransisco, which is the largest plaza in historical quito. it was sooooo fun. but it gets better. and funnier.

the chiva dropped us off after 2 hours of crazyness in front of Friday´s. so we went in for chicken fingers and drinks. well, we got in and i realized that i had lost my prom king sash on the chiva so i ran out and got it back. upon returning into friday´s i saw that no one was at my table and everything was gone... so i ask a waitress (who was also dressed up for halloween) where my friends went. now our table was in the front of the resteraunt and we were the only gringos and ecuatorianos in costume, keep that in mind. she says to me, ¨ya se fueron¨ ¨they already left¨ so i´m like what?! i didn´t see them leave, but there´s nothing there so it must be true. so i run out of fridays to find them and can´t find them anywhere. so i get in a taxi and go home. after paying the taxista and getting out of the taxi (which then drove away) i realized that i had left my keys and phone at kali´s house when we were getting ready! ahhhh! there´s a giant fence in front of my house with two padlocks and no doorbell! ahhhhhhhhhh. so now i´m just standing in front of the gate on the street, a little drunk, wearing a destroyed suit, fake blood, and lots of makeup to make myself look dead, with no way of getting home, getting a hold of my dissappeared friends, of calling my house to have them let me in! so 10 min later i decide that the only rational decision is to scale the fence... smart move huh? i was fairly convinced at the time that the police were going to come by and arrest me for attempted burglury in a sweet costume. well, i finally gain the fence, which is flimsy, sharp, and 10 feet high, and i fall over the other side into our yard, where i FORTUNATELY didn´t land on the cactus... sweet. so i then have to go to the door and knock maddly until my host dog woke up, who then woke up my host mom, who let me in. and told my i looked guapo. which i laughed really hard at, cuz i looked dead. literally. needless, to say it was an eventful halloween.

i found out the next day that my friends had just switched tables. stupid waitress, ya se fueron my ass.

guayaquil, how i heart thee

so last weekend i went to guayaquil. why did i go to guayaquil you might ask? i´ll tell you why, it was guayaquil fashion week. www.guayaquilfashionweek.com if you want to check it out. (pasarelas means runway if you want to see some pictures.) why did we go to guayaquil fashion week? why not! and we know the owners of a company that had a booth and a runway show so we got staff passes and went to everything for free! the company is Dealer T-Shirts, they obviously make t-shirts. they guys who own it, carlos y adrián, are my age and they knew one of the guys from north carolina cuz he had met them on a mission trip to ecuador once, so they invited him and told him to bring whoever he wanted.

so we get to guayaquil and carlos y adrián pick us up at the bus station and drive all 7 of us around in a truck to a bunch of hotels till we found a room. the hotel people sucked and they kept telling us there was no room. which was a lie. they thought we looked like trashy gringos (which we did, we had just gotten off a 10 hour bus ride...) who were going to trash their rooms. so we´d ask for a room and the people behind the desk would look at one another and say, no, there´s no room. whatever. happened at like 5 hotels in downtown guayaquil. they weren´t even nice hotels. they were decent, but not 5 stars or anything. so we finally found one in downtown guayaquil about a block from the iguana park. so that day we went to the iguana park, which was amazing!! it´s a whole city block in front of this gorgeous old church and it has about a million giant iguanas! you could pet them and everything. but you had to be careful becuase they shit a lot from trees so you had to stand in the sun, or risk the shade. they also randomly jump out of the trees... after the iguana gardens we went to ¨la bahía¨which is a GIANT market where they sell knock-off crap. everything is knock-off and i felt dirty being there. ahhhhhhhhh!!! i didn´t buy anything. but one of my friends bought 4 t-shirts as a joke, and they are disgusting. needless to say, we made him wear one of them to fashion week... hahaha!! so later that night we went to fashion week.

let me tell you about fashion week, it´s a joke. we thought it was going to be really sweet and have all kinds of ecuadorian designers and stuff. no. nothing of the sort. there were like 20 boothes, some of which were guess, and miss sixty. which are huge in ecuador, but not ecuadorian companies, and nothing that should be in fashion week. there was also a body suit booth. we didn´t really understand that one but there were workers at their booth wearing ONLY the body suits. awkward... and there was a booth called ¨Go God.¨ it was a christian camp that just HAPPENED to sell t-shirts like they do at every camp. somehow they made it into fashion week. what?! ok, there were a few real designers there. there was a shoe lady who hand painted high heels. those were cool, i was going to buy some as presents for my sisters, but they were $90 and i didn´t know what size they would wear and thought it was too expensive to guess. sorry sisters. right, so now it´s time for the runway. we go in and it´s terrible. tonights runway is X-Fashion. well, we decided that the X meant that it used to be in style. it was american eagle, armani exchange, hollister, ect. clothes on the runway, WITH THE PRICE TAGS STILL ON!!! why did we come again?? also, the models were terrible. the runway show was saved by the next segment that was the swim suit and bras section. that had real models. and we loved it... hahaha! so we left after that cuz we were bored and went to las peñas, which is a historic section of guayaquil on a hill and all the houses and buildings are painted pastel colors. very pretty. we went to a resteraunt there and then went to carlos´s house to party a little bit.

saturday we woke up in the hotel, got breakfast, and went exploring around guayaquil again. we went down to the newly re-developed waterfront, called the malecón 2000. which is awesome! i went to pingüino, the ice cream company here, and got a cone. then i found out that for 15 more cents i could buy a cheap plastic power rangers mask. so i did. i got a green monster thingy. it was sweet. but not as sweet as when i had the idea to have my picture drawn by a street vendor wearing the mask!! hahaha. it´s a great drawing. good times. so a few min after that we get a call from our designer friends and they tell us we need to be at fashion week by 3.30. we were like, why, it doesn´t start till 7ish. that´s when they told us that models had to come early to get ready... WHAT?! no one told us were were IN fashion week! well, we were. it was rediculous! so i walked in the runway show that night with my friends. hahaha!!! it was a crazy run-way show. all their friends were their models and there was fire and lots of skipping, air-guittars, and fake fights on the runway! lol! it was out of control... we all would just go in back and change t-shirts with someone else and go on the runway again! they also sent us down in pairs sometimes and i got paired with one of the real modelas who wanted to be in the crazy runway. it was hot. so somewhere out there is a pic of me on the end of a runway with a real model! hahaha! if only i had that picture. it would be my facebook picture so fast. afterward we went back to carlos´s house and the afterparty was out of control! i mean REALLY out of control! that´s all you need to know...

so the day after was just a recovery day. we hung out on the water front again and then went back to quito. we all got off the bus in quito and were like, ¨what the hell just happened?!¨

elections 2006, primer vuelta Oct. 15

elections: wow. so they took place on sunday and i woke up because there was an earthquake (my first one ever!) that shook my house!! ahhhhh. it wasn´t that big, nothing fell off the walls or anything, but a suburb away where one of my professors lives, it was a bit worse and some of the walls in his house cracked!!! oh no! about 10 min later there was another earthquake of the same size. main point of this story: i can read the signs and see the future... i thought to myself right away, elections, earthquakes, this can´t be good. and it´s not. first they told us that the winners were correa and noboa, and that they´d be the two running in the second round of elections. well, no one wants to vote for noboa cuz he´s old and really rich and just moves his hands and says ecuador a lot. but he has a smart wife. but NO ONE wants to vote for correa cuz he´s flat out a communist. he wants to get rid of the dollar (which is the currancy here) which would screw over the country and send the economy, which is already fragile, into a downward firey spiral, and cut all contact with the US. he also supports the colombian gorrillas saying they´re just fighting for their rights. oddly enough, i don´t think the gov. is poor ecuadorian families on the border, so killing them isn´t really doing anything for their rights... but he´s in first place! yipee!!! ecuador might go commie and i´ll be sent home in january!!! but WAIT, the fun doesn´t stop here! not all the votes were counted!! and the company who was supposed to be counting them with their fancy computer system up and left!!! so now ALL THE CANDIDATES, some 15, are crying foul and claiming fraudulant elections. all the votes are now being counted by hand. gee, shouldn´t be any problem there... oh, and most people believe that if correa, the commie, wins, it´s not so much a question of how screwed will the country be, it will be no matter what, but will ecuador kick him out and get a new president before a military dictator takes over? so anyway, elections have been interesting and i´m anxious to see what ends up happening. also, most presidents last about 2 years before being peacefully kicked out of office, out of the 4 year term.