Welcome to the Jungle

For those of you who are addicted to hearing the latest from Ecuador every Sunday (I´m sure there are a ton of you), I have to apologize. My normal Sunday trip to the market and Internet Café was thrown out in favor of an impromptu trip to the jungle. I went into Quito on Friday to pick up mail and get supplies (Thanks Steph and Matt for the Post Dispatch issues). They finally had Peanut Butter at the store, so I was content. When I met up with one of my friends, she told me that she was planning on heading out to the jungle to hangout with another of our friends. I didn´t have anything going on, so Saturday we left.

It was only a three hour trip, but very beautiful. My friend lives in a town called El Chaco, which really isn´t in the rain forest, but still very cool. The first night there, they had a big festival with a tower covered in fireworks that they shot off. We were pretty close, and the roof of the pavilion we were under kept getting hit with rockets. After that, they had a bunch of dancing acts. We drank some beers with the local friends of my friend. They were all very nice, and it ended up being a late night.

Before we went out, they were explaining what food and acts were going to be there. They also said that there would be a lot of "Peladas" there. I then jokingly asked if there were going to be a girls there. My buddy looked at me like I was an idiot and explained that "Peladas" were hot girls. I had to explain that in my site I didn´t get a chance to use that word, so I never learned it. They all got a laugh out of that, but I wasn´t amused.

Because we were up so late, we didn´t get an early start the next day. We had planned on going to see San Rafael Falls and some caves by my friend´s site. I was planning on coming right home after the caves, so I brought all my bags along (which were packed for a weekend in the city). The bus ride took longer than normal to the Falls, but it was worth it. After a 20 minute hike, the trail opened on a view of the biggest waterfall in Ecuador and the biggest waterfall I´ve ever seen. It is over 520 feet tall and the flow is enormous. Even the hike there and back was interesting and full of plants I´d not seen before. (For pics go to http://www.uct.edu.ec/napo/san_rafael.htm )

After the falls we waited for another bus to take us to the caves. I should have asked, but I just assumed that it would be like all the caves I´ve been to in the past, walk up on the trail, go in with some lights, and avoid the bats. I was about as far off as you can be. First off, the trail was just a muddy clearing through the forest (and this really was the rain forest: hot, cloudy, and constantly drizzling). Thankfully, my friend brought some shoes and shorts for me to wear. We hiked about 25 minutes; up, down, under fallen trees, slipping and sliding, and generally getting covered in mud. Now remember, I´m hauling all my luggage, so this was no treat. Finally, we got to a river and had to cross over. The water was freezing cold run-off from the mountain snow. I crossed with my bags held high, thinking the whole way that one misstep in the fast current would ruin my phone, camera, and iPod. Luckily we made it across and hiked up the river to a gorge. It was unlike anything I´d ever seen before. 100 foot vertical walls with small waterfalls all over the place and dense tree and vine growth. It was like something out of a movie. Finally we reached the "cave". It was actually a giant hole in the side of a cliff where the river passes through. we took off all our gear, set it under my umbrella, and walked through sometimes armpit deep water through the maybe 200 foot cave. As we walked, the words "Flash Flood" kept running through my head.

At the other end was more beautiful scenery. Then we hiked all the way back and waited again for a bus. By the time we got on a bus, it was to late for me to head back to L.L., so I ended up spending the night at my friend´s house. It wasn't a big deal except I had carried all my luggage on a difficult rain forest hike for no reason. Oh well, at least I can say that I´m one a very few people to hike that trail with dental floss, a book by Marcel Poust, and a grocery list.

This weekend will be fun too. It is the annual Fiesta de San Juan in my town. I really don´t know what is going to happen, but three other American will be there, so it will be good. On the 28th of August my friend from Rolla a Chicago, Conor Magee, is going to visit. That will be a blast and I´m really looking foreward to seeing a friend from home and hitting some parts of the country that I haven´t seen before. Because of this stuff, the blog posts may be infrequent for a bit, but I´ll try to keep it up to date.

SHORT NOTES:
While in Quito I finally found a soccer jersey I´d been looking for. It is for a Paraguayan team called Libertad. Not only does it say "Club Libertad" on front, but they are sponsored by...Budweiser. No I have a jersey with my site and a little bit of St. Louis on the front.

I assume you all heard about the big earthquake in Peru. I saw the first reports on the news one night, and got a call from my PC Emergency Coordinator and hour or so later. He said that we were in Tsunami warning and couldn´t go to the beach. Then he said that we might have to go into standby mode and not leave our sites. I thought the reaction time was good on PC´s part, but your not going to out run a Tsunami going 500 miles an hour. Also, my site is over 2 miles high, so I don´t think that going to the next town over was going to put me in great danger of getting hit by a wave.

Tortillas and Circuses

I hate to admit it, but I was extremely disappointed with the circus. I ended up going 2 times (it was in town for 10 days) and both times were pretty much the same. The had a big tent set up in the middle of town with lights strung up all over and loud music playing, so I thought it would be a little better than it was. The tickets were only $1 ($.50 the second visit), so I didn´t lose much.

The show started with a girl of maybe 16 years coming out to hip-hop music (they call it Raggeaton down here) in short shorts and a bra and "dancing". I say dancing, but it looked more like she was having a seizure. There were a lot of whoops and cat-calls from the crowd, but I wasn´t that impressed. Next, a clown and a guy in a suit came out and did a 15 minute routine. It was basically a vulgar (a lot of penis and homosexual jokes) version of Abbott and Costello. I understood a lot of it, but I didn´t think it was close to funny. The rest of the crowd was laughing hysterically. Especially when the clown would grab the other guy´s butt. They are very sophisticated, comically speaking, down here. This first part was the same both times I went to the show. The middle was different though.

The first time they had a juggler and the second time they had a fire swallower. At least that was something that I couldn´t do, but definitely no Cirque du Soleil. Both times after these acts they had a knife thrower. He brought out the girsl from the beginning of the show. She didn´t look confident and I was nervous that he was going to hit her. He got close and it wasn´t the, "Wow, that guy is good!" close, it was the, "Holy shit, this girl is going to die!" close. After her, they brought up someone from the crowd to get thrown at. I was hopping they´d pick me. I imagined the phone call I´d have to make to the PC office to explain that I had a steel throwing star lodged in my leg. That would have been a good blog post!

After this, both nights they then two guys come out and balance sticks, knives, and other junk on their chins/foreheads. This was OK, but it got a little boring after 10 minutes. Then the clowns came out and did some more ass-grabbin´ to the delight of the audience.

There was then an intermission both nights and the clowns came out selling food. A clown really looses some of his gravitas when he starts haggling with the person next to you about trying to buy a $.50 candied apple with a five dollar bill. (Note: "No tengo sueltos" or "I don´t have change" should be the Ecuadorian national motto)

After intermission, it was crowd participation time. The first night they picked 6 guys from the crowd and had them act out a scene where one guy sold a real live duck to another guy. The lines for all the guys (we had to watch all six do this) were...

- "Would you like to buy a duck?"
- "Does it bite?"
- "No."
- "Sure."

...That was it! The guys had to do the scene normally, angrily, sadly, and then do it acting like women. As you can see, this is a recipe for hilarity. I was more concerned with the torturing the poor duck as the performed this scene 24 times, but the crowd again went wild. Move over Dennis Miller...It´s guys with a duck!

The next time I went, they pulled three kids from the crowd and had them leap-frog each other. Again, "Gold, Jerry! Gold!" And that was all. A let down, yes, but who else do I know that can say they´ve seen a circus south of the Equator.

Not a lot else going on this week. My landlord and I fixed my roof this week, which is nice. Since I have some space let, I´ll talk a little about my humorous problem with Spanish. First off, Spanish is a subtle language. A slight change can make a big difference. For example, "Yo tengo 29 años" means "I´m 29 years old", but "Yo tengo 29 anos" (a difference of only a "ñ" versus a "n") means "I have 29 ass holes". I haven´t got caught in that one, but the other day I was at the market and asked for some pork. The vendor asked me how much I wanted, and I said I wanted a "Libre". She was confused and asked me again. I repeated that I wanted a "Libre". This went on for a while until that lady in the next booth said that I wanted a "Libra". I had been saying "free", when I wanted to say "pound". A very Back to the Future Part I moment ("Gimme a Pepsi Free"). Also, at a restaurant I I got a burrito that was frozen in the middle. The waitress was very surprised as I explained to her that there was "helado" in my burrito. I meant to say "hielo" or "ice, but I actually was telling her that somehow they had put "ice cream" in the middle of my Mexican food. Another time, the teachers in the school were asking about my family. They asked what their jobs were. When they asked what my sister did to make money, I said she was sick. "Enferma" as opposed to "Enfermera". They got a kick out of that. If I just grabbed their butts, I could take it on the road.

P.S. - Just saw that Rick Ankiel has hit three Home Runs in three game in the Bigs. I´m pulling for him (like I´m sure everyone else is). I almost cry at the end of Rudy, so I guess I´m a softy for sport´s stories.

Going off the deep end

I finished reading one of the books I picked up in Quito. The book by Tom Miller is called The Panama Hat Trail and i highly recommend it. The book is over 20 years old, bu the experiences the author has in Ecuador are exactly like mine. As he follows the production of Panama Hats (Which are and have always been made in Ecuador), he runs into PCVs, eats some Guinea Pigs, and eventually ends up in San Diego (with a side trip through St. Louis). In one story he goes to a very small town to see a fiesta. I know somebody from that town and showed them the book. He was super excited to see his small town mentioned in an English book and knew one of the ladies mentioned in it. Check it out at your local library!

This week I was visited by a PC Trainee for two days. He is going to be stationed in Latacunga (One hour south of me), so they wanted him to visit me and see what life is like up here. When I had my PCV visit, I came to La Libertad to visit the old PCV here. It was pretty boring and I just read books all day. I didn´t want John´s visit to be the same, and it wasn´t.

I picked him up in Machachi on Sunday afternoon. We first headed to L.L. and watched a few soccer games. On the way home I met a towns person who asked if we were going to church. I said no because I´d been to mass three times the day before and I didn´t want to force John. Then I found out that it was a "Special Service" for the lady who is hosting the town festival in two weeks. I felt that I should make an appearance and John said that he wanted to see it too. The mass was pretty standard, but afterwords we had a procession where they carried their statue of John the Baptist to the woman´s house who is having the festival. There we placed the statue in a home made "Grotto" and ate and danced. The procession activities and the music was led by a couple of Evangelists from Quito who often come to town to help out. As they were leaving they made a speech and told us (about 30 people) that we were supposed to have a good time, but that we didn´t need alcohol to do it. Everyone agreed and John said that it was cool that they could party without booze. I told him that we´d be pounding beers in 5 minutes. Literally 10 seconds after the Quito group left, someone came into the room with a bunch of beer. We ended up leaving after a couple hours of drinking. John was surprised that they would say one thing and then immediately do another. I wasn´t surprised.

The next day, John and I climbed the "Mountain" closest to my house. It is called Santa Cruz, and is really just a very big hill. It is around 12,500 feet at the top and the view from their was amazing. We could see Mt. Cayambe and Mt. Chimbarazo (which are about 120 miles apart) and Cotopaxi was right in front of us. I told some of my PC friends about it and they said, "Finally we have a reason to visit you". The next day, John left and said he had had a great time.

His visit was a huge morale boost for me. I was originally worried that this new guy was going to come in with great Spanish and make me look like a fool. One of the first questions I asked him was how his Spanish was. When he got here, he tested at the same level I had after training. Since he has had two months of Spanish classes since then, I thought he would kick my ass. This wasn´t the case. I had to translate a lot for him and after he left, someone came up to me a said, "He dosen´t understand anything". John is a good guy and I´m sure his communication skills will improve, but it was nice to realize how much I´m learning.

A month ago my boss visited my site and during a meeting with the woman´s group he said that PC would pay for any trips we wanted to make that were for "Technical Exchanges". One of the ladies recalled hearing at an earlier PC meeting about another woman´s group that seemed interesting. I knew who she was talking about told her that I could set up a small trip for the end of August. During the weeks while I was waiting to get the paperwork filled out, we had another meeting of the group, and they started talking about their trip. I hadn´t heard about another trip before, but they had the dates, departure times, and even who was bringing food figured out. They then turned to me and said, "Jay, tell your friend that we are coming". I was shocked because they hadn´t mentioned anything about this to me before, and the city that they were planning on going to wasn´t close to where the other woman´s group is. We tried to work this out, but it wasn´t a good idea to take all the woman to the other small town. They then asked if I new anyone in the city they wanted to go to. I said that I knew a guywho was working on a small farm. The climate there is very different, so I said that I didn´t think it would be very helpful. I thought that that was the end of it, so I kind of forgot about it. Then on Wednesday the head of the group asked if my friend was ready for the trip. I realized that they still wanted to go, so I made some calls and set it up.

We left Saturday at 3:00AM on a charter bus and headed North. We got to the farm at about 8:00 and were only supposed to spend 30 minutes there, but a lot of the 60 people we brought were really interested. We ended up spending a couple of hours there. I didn't really have to do that much planning, but when I have to write it up in my work report next month it will sound a lot better. I should have one of the biggest "Tech Exchanges" in PC Ecuador this quarter.

After the farm we went to the hot springs nearby (the real reason for the trip). The springs were nice and there were a lot of people there. I really just hope that I didn´t pick up a skin disease from all the people swimming in there whitey tighties or with their boxer briefs under their swimsuits "Cousin Eddie Style". I was surprised at how many of the kids didn´t know how to swim. The young ones sure, but 14 and 15 year old wouldn´t go out to the middle of the pool. I helped some of the younger kids learn, but since they only get to get in the water infrequently, they probably will never learn. We got back to L.L. around 9:30 and I was exhausted.

Tonight I´m going to the "Circus" that is currently set up in the center of L.L.. I´m sure that it will be an interesting experience. Look for it in next week´s blog post (That´s called a teaser).