AWOL! Em and Chris in South America

So…..let’s see here. It’s been a while since our last major post. We’ve been pretty busy in Cuenca with classes and cultural events…and also eating meals with our host family. We have spent a lot of time hanging out with them around the dinner table. My favorite part of Spanish school is conversation hour. We occasionally get to leave class and go visit interesting parts of Cuenca. The Friday before my birthday, my teacher took us to the “mercado”. I like those kinds of market places. They are full of interesting fruits, vegies, roasting guinea pigs (cuy is a common food here), clothes and all kinds of other items you could possibly want to buy. We were wandering through, asking the name for this or that, talking to our teacher, when she pointed out the curanduras (local healers, who are mostly very old ladies, wearing more traditional clothes). Personally, I would prefer a regular doctor. I figure there are some natural remedies that can be very beneficial to people, but this procedure just left me baffled. There was a long line of women waiting to pay $1 to have their child “cured”. First the curandura picks up a bunch of leaves and flowers and proceeds to hit the kid with the plant on their forehead, chest, stomach, back and arms. I could smell the herby aroma from where I was standing. It is possible the plants could be good for clearing up the sinuses or something like that. Then they take an egg and rub it lightly all over the babies body. I am never sure if I am getting to story all right when people explain things to me in Spanish, but I think my teacher told me they are pulling the bad stuff out of the child’s body and putting it into the egg. She also said sometimes they crack it at the end and if there are specks or blood in it, then it proves someone gave them the evil eye. For adults they smell some kind of alcohol and rub it on their faces, but they don’t do it to babies. The next part is the real kicker. The curandura takes a swallow of holy water and then spits it back out on the customers head and then repeats the process for their back. If I was sick, I think the last thing I would want is someone spitting on me…We watched them work for a while and the other thing that surprised me was that it was the same basic treatment for everyone. They didn’t ask what was wrong with the kid to adapt the remedy to the disease. I guess if you believe an evil spirit is causing them problem, then it makes complete sense. I think I will just stick to modern medicine for the time being.

 

Which I actually needed last week (or maybe I needed the curandura! Who’s to know). It seemed to be just a 24 hour bug, but I was miserably sick. I’m glad we are staying with a caring host family and not in some hostel with a shared bathroom. The youngest daughter is 22 and she has a friend who is a doctor, so he came over and checked on me. They got me some medicine and all that. The next morning our host father was flipping through the newspaper and there was a picture of my doctor helping a patient. The article had something to do with senior citizens and medicine. I couldn’t understand much more than that, but it seemed funny that I got a house call from a “famous” doctor 🙂 Both Chris and I really like Cuenca. It is the 3rd largest City in Ecuador, but it is worlds away from Quito and Guyaquil (the 1st and 2nd biggest). It feels so much smaller, more manageable and safer. The people don’t drive quite as crazy and it is also quite pretty with the downtown historical center filled with colonial buildings and tons of catholic churches. 4 rivers flow through it causing trees and plants to flourish, and it is in a valley surrounded by beautiful mountains in which ever way you look. It was one of the places on our list of a possible place to return to after our 3 months of traveling and stay while Chris does school and I teach English. So, I thought I had better figure out what schools were out there and get some information. All the Spanish schools we attend are come and go whenever. Many students are there for college credit, and they have a specific schedule, but the rest of us can arrange ourselves. I assumed the English schools would be the same, but I found out that most of them run on the University schedules and will be starting at the beginning of October. We will be in Peru then, so things won’t work out perfectly. Nevertheless, I got offered 2 jobs at 2 different schools in 1 day. I didn’t want any job offers. I just went to get information about the schools, but I guess the normal people who come in looking for a job don’t already have a credential and a masters in Education. Even so, the pay scale for me in one of the schools was $2.50 per hour. A normal work load for the teachers is about 25-30 hours per week, so if you do the math it is about $270 a month. We certainly won’t be rolling in the dough, but on the other hand a nice apartment isn’t supposed to cost more than $150 a month. That is about what we were expecting, and our host family said it was a pretty normal wage for here. So, I don’t know how people can raise a family on that even with the cost of housing and food being so low. If we decide to come back there is a intensive language program starting in November, so we have to get going with the rest of our travels. So, it is off to the coast to try and see some whales before we move on to Peru.

 

We enjoyed quite feast with our host family. Check out the cake! Our host family in Cuenca has been extremely hospitable and we´ve had a lot of spanish practice. Alicia (our Cuenca mom) is awesome in many ways, but above all her cooking is the best. It is a mix of Italian and Ecuatoriano and other things. Que riquicimo!

(Emily with ´hermana´ Gina)

The whole gang. Unfortunately my camera was acting up, the pictures are a little fuzy.

Note from Emily to her family back in Fairfield: I hope that you prepared and enjoyed my cake 🙂

More Pictures here: Photo Album – It´s a little cluttered but oh well.

When we first touched down in Quito, Em and I were both impressed with the size of the city. It sprawls North to South in the shadow of a group of tall mountains that stand to the east. The history surrounding Quito is pretty fascinating. It has a lot of history and historical sites as well as having a lot of modern and international influences that resulted after petroleum was discovered. The origin of the city is somewhat interesting. After the Incas defeated the indigenous people, they set up Quito as a second capitol. Quito had particular significance for the Incas because they believed they were setting up a city at the center of the world. Actually there is a mountain in Ecuador that technically is the highest place on earth. The logic is this, since the Earth is the widest at the equator and the mountain is the highest mountain on the equator, if you stand at the top of that mountain you will be standing on the top of the world. So they say.

Unfortunately, we did not get the chance to go either to the “Mitad del Mundo”, which is about 40 minutes north of Quito, or to the top of the world. Instead, we went to Otavalo which is regarded as the biggest market in South America. Saturday is the big day, so we hopped on a bus to see what we could see. The crafts were all quite beautiful (and we bought some of course): woven scarves, socks, blankets, dresses, sweaters, paintings, instruments, spices…..pigs, sheep or horses if you have the need or desire. Eventually it began to blur together as we went down street after street. So we called it a day and returned to the hotel to enjoy a vibrant sunset. On Sunday we strolled around the market, much smaller now, for a little while and then took the bus back to Quito and met our host family.

The rest of the week in Quito we were pretty much exhausted. I think it was the mix of the altitude (Quito is on average 9000 ft above sea level), Spanish classes and the fact that we were living with a host family. At the school we were attending, I think their curriculum and requirements are more geared towards students earning credit for universities. Which means a lot of homework. In addition to that, staying with a host family basically is an extension of school. It’s hard work to even try to get the most basic ideas across! They were very friendly and helpful, but it is fairly frustrating to have to concentrate so much just to talk about the weather or the food. Oy!

We did have a chance for one excursion. There is a group of mountains to the west that towers over Quito. There is a tram that goes way, way up to a vista point that overlooks most of Quito. We thought the air was thin in Quito! After walking just a few feet along the not-so-steep path, we were gasping for breath. The view, however, was amazing. We could see Cotopaxi and a couple other major mountains as well as the majority of Quito.

After finishing our week in classes we headed down towards Cuenca. We stopped over in Riobamba for a night in order to take a train to the “Devil’s Nose”. The train is pretty cool, you can sit on top of the train for the duration of the six hour train ride. It gets really dusty (we returned with basically a layer of dust on our clothes and our hair was totally filthy) and on the day we went it was pretty cold as well. But the elements are part of the experience, and I loved it. Em was freezing much of the time, but it wasn’t too bad for me. On the way back, however, it dumped down rain. Luckily during one of the stops, Em and I had gone inside the minute we felt raindrops because we had the laptop and didn’t want to take any risks. However the other passengers weren’t so lucky, The train did not make any more pauses and the rain started coming down really heavy. By the time we made the next stop there were a lot of drenched and bedraggled passengers.

For us, the rain wasn’t too much of a surprise. It was just one of those weekends. When we were in Riobamba none of the ATMs were working for us. Also, the school we had enrolled in for our stay in Cuenca said that they would be in touch about our host family but we did not get any information back. Normally this wouldn’t be too much of a stresser, but since our funds were running low we really just wanted to be able to stay with our host family and have some sort of home base while we figured out what was up with our bank cards. But…no word. We tried calling the director of the school, but he wasn’t home…we tried emailing to no avail. So come Sunday, we arrived in Cuenca, paid for a night’s stay at a cheap hostel and we were left with only $3 between the two of us. Luckily, food is cheap here, so we had a luxurious diner of three small rolls of bread which cost us all of 30 cents. However, at that point spending ANY money was stressful because we might need it for a phone call or for Internet access or whatever else might be needed to get us out of our predicament.

Thankfully, things worked themselves out and we are now staying with a wonderful host family and have ATM cards that work (we still don’t know what the deal was). There are people constantly coming in and out of the house so we get a lot of practice. A lot of good food as well. Our host mom, Alicia, is a really good cook. We are enjoying Cuenca a lot as well. It is a bit smaller than Quito, but it feels much safer and is much quieter. The cathedrals, churches and other buildings in the central part of town are also quite beautiful. It’s a nice change from the hustle and busyness of Quito.

In our experience so far in Ecuador, the points of interest are the cities, the people and the rich history of the country. In Costa Rica, it was the natural wonders of the country that are the main attraction, but so far there hasn’t been much to see here. From what we’ve seen of Ecuador, at these higher elevations it is a mix of high desert and some sparse, alpine(ish) forests. Things did seem to get a bit greener as we went south towards Cuenca. I’m not sure if that is due to the rainstorm, or if it is just greener in these parts. It is a big contrast having come from Costa Rica where everything is lush, green and vibrant. We have yet to see the jungle or the coast, however. And we have yet to see the Galapagos islands, which we’ve heard are one of most amazing things in the world. So while we are getting a lot of cultural experience, there is a lot we have been missing on the natural side of things. We’ll see how things pan out in the next couple weeks.