Who Wants to Invest in an Embroidery Machine?

Have spent two whirlwind days here in Cuenca, visiting various organizations which serve people with disabilities. I´ll be editing the hell out of this later, but wanted to get the rough draft out while Gladys is taking a well-deserved siesta.

First impression: wow, there are A LOT of organizations. One person estimated about 15 special education centers of one type or another in Cuenca alone, each with its own mission, structure, and clientele. There´s an ¨escuela particular¨ for children with cerebral palsy whose families have the wherewithal to pay or get scholarships, and an ¨escuela fiscal¨ for the same population minus the cash. Another center for people who are blind but not cognitively impaired, another for folks with hearing impairments. Yet another that´s essentially a catch-all for kids with pretty much any disability except severe physical impairments, run with donations out of an abandoned hospital. Plus universities offering certification in special education, which can translate into heaps of willing and able internal volunteers.

It´s been fascinating touring the different centers, listening to the directors and teachers, and watching how the different places operate. Everyone has been very warm and receptive, and wonderfully tolerant of my struggles with spoken Spanish: it´s gotta help that the ones who aren´t language therapists themselves work hand in hand with language therapists.

We also had the good fortune to learn about an exhibition put on by students of the local Polytech university: teachers and soon-to-be teachers were displaying work they had done to adapt and create materials for students with visual impairments. Bridgett, I wish you could have seen it: it was utterly incredible the creativity of these folks, and they have the idea of adaptation down to a T.

There have been a few moments that would make for excellent cross-cultural situation comedy:

• One of the very first people I was to give my Project talk to was the very impressive head of a provincial organization. I comforted myself beforehand with the idea that, ¨Well, at least I have the book of photos. Worst comes to worst, I´ll just show him those and Gladys can help talk more about them. A picture is worth a thousand words, you know. It´ll be enough just to show him the pictures.¨ My introduction from Gladys: ¨And Sonia is here to explain to you what her organization does, exactly, so I´ll let her talk for awhile. By the way, Sonia, Daniel´s blind.¨




• One of the directors seemed to be most proud of one specific aspect of his organization: that they had contracted local artisans to sew large, anatomically correct dolls to teach the children Where Babies Come From. He was quite insistent that I touch ALL parts of the dolls to see just how realistic each was, and I now know how to both say ¨blow up doll¨ in Spanish and to opine that his dolls are infinitely superior.




• Another of the organizations, while they were exceptionally polite and listened actively to our presentation, were really, really hoping that we were primarily there to invest in an embroidery machine that they wanted to buy for the center.
  

All in all, it´s been a great learning experience, and I think there are places and pieces where the Project could be of use. I am always inspired by any time I spend in special education facilities in Ecuador: the kindness of the children to one another, the dogged creavity of the professionals in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and always the hunger to learn and do more. Tomorrow, we´re going to visit two rural centers, in Paute and Gualaceo. We´ve been prepared for a very strong contrast: urban centers, in general, are far better resourced than their rural counterparts. Perhaps Paute, then, should get the embroidery machine.

A Trabajar

Alas, the end has come. The end, at least, of Spanish classes. Now, I´ll have to foist my grammatical ineptitude on the unsuspecting public, in hopes of learning mucho from being constantly corrected.

Speaking a new language is like being a toddler: everywhere I go, I babble, and the grown-ups around me do their best to make sense of it. The ones who are probably great parents at home listen intently, mentally note how screwed up my grammar is, smile at me, and repeat the whole sentence back the right way. The ones who just spit back the one wrong word, I imagine parking their children in front of the television while they go and have a smoke outside.

Fortunately, I´ve been truly blessed this year to have two good Spanish teachers, and I think I´ve made decent progress. Raul reminded me today that, on the last day of classes last year, I was practically in tears because he´d just revealed to me the existence of the subjunctive tense: now, I can find it in newspapers, recognize it in pop music, and say it correctly about half of the time. For the past two days, I´ve spent half of classes going over the book I´ve made from photos of the Project, and I now have dozens of sticky notes reminding me how to say what I want to say. I feel cautiously optimistic about the work ahead.

Honestly, the biggest question in my mind right now is whether I´ll be able to survive the pace set by Hurricane Gladys, the dynamic local woman who is co-representing the Project with me. Andrea can undoubtedly sympathize. The beginnings of a plan: Hey, Gladys, howzabout you come to Cuenca this weekend, so we can start visiting organizations on Monday? Her first response: sure, let´s start Monday morning. Second response: I, Gladys, will take a night bus to Cuenca, so we can start Monday morning immediately after I´ve been on a bus for eight hours. Third response (after I politely protested the hell out of the second one): Okay, let´s start Monday morning with one place at 8:30, then another place at 10:00, then.... And it´s nice that you´re concerned about me not travelling the night before: instead, I found a bus that´ll get me in around Sunday midnight, so I can be very well rested on Monday. Gotta go now, to find you more organizations. It´s going to take un gran cambio de mente for me to go from "one day per museum" to "six schools in five hours".

Ah well-- first, a nice restful weekend. I kind of think I should start banking naps right now, but on the books instead: a nice dinner with some gringos, and a trip to the viewpoint Mirador Del Turi.

Local Color #2: Out to Eat

One more free day in Cuenca, which I of course spent trying to fit in all the gastronomic experiences that I won´t be able to have once Gladys gets here. In honor of that, I present to you all: Local Color #2: A Highly Subjective (shit, I first typed ¨Subjunctive¨...) Report on Dining In Cuenca.

Statement #1: Cuenca ROCKS for vegetarians. It is the one part of South America which doesn´t make me wonder how my vegan friend Pete got out alive. The dominant chain restaurant here is called El Paraiso: it´s an all-vegetarian place, serving soy meat versions of traditional Ecuadorian foods and giant bowls of yogurt the size of your head. I´ve been there five or six times already in search of the fabled ¨guatita de soya¨, which is on the menu but almost never actually available.

Guatita , for the unitiated, is a stew made from beef stomach and potatoes smothered in a mild peanut sauce and traditionally served with pickled onions. It kind of reminds me of playing Mad Libs when I was a kid: one person asks another for a bunch of random nouns and verbs, and then reads them back in a story which makes absolutely no sense because it´s composed of so many disparate elements. I imagine something similar taking place in the kitchen when the first plate of guatita was born. Now, however, it´s a well known and very beloved Ecuadorian dish, so I figured I had to try it.

After many, many attempts (the cashier at El Paraiso recognized me as ¨¿Hay Guatita?¨Gringa by the second try or so), I was finally succesful last Thursday. Honestly, it´s nothing much to write home about, present activity to the contrary, but I felt a sense of acheivement nevertheless.

Other Cuenca treats are less adventurous, but possibly more tasty. Corpus Christi, the one-off Catholic celebration that turns into an 7-day Bacchanalia of candy selling here in Cuenca, says something important about the city´s sweet tooth. You can´t go a block without hitting a candy store, the ice cream places here are numerous and amazing, and all the panaderías teem with luscious cookies and cakes. Last week, I made a dangerous discovery: an incredibly elegant coffee shop with a glass case full of perfect
little cookies you can buy by the kilo. Alfajores no bigger than nickles, crispy little macaroons, adorable tiny marzipan fruits. I love watching the fancy businessmen walking in and pointing at the goodies like happy little boys at the penny candy store: one of these, two of that one, and two bucks later, you´ve got a perfect little box of treats. The only sad thing for me has been not having people to buy this stuff for: hope Gladys likes cookies!

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day: fortunately for me, I had ten of them last week. With class from 8:30 to 10:00, and then again from 12:00 to 2:00, there was really no reason not to double up on breakfast: you´ve gotta have a little something to go with that first coffee, and then there´s two prime late-breakfast hours to kill with the paper between classes. In the coast, breakfast is usually just a repeat performance of dinner: a bowl of rice, a scrap of meat, maybe a few slices of fried plantain. I still vividly remember my last breakfast in Peru two years ago: a plato de carne, sin (without) carne, eaten at sunup surrounded by policemen in one of the local mercados.

The mountains, in general, are more genteel than the coast: breakfast here is its own event, usually with eggs and some kind of bread. Humitas are popular--they´re basically tamales de nada, fluffy little lumps of sweetened cornmeal. And coffee, thank God, does not mean Nescafe: there are places in Cuenca that serve a better latte than Berkeley.

My favorite place for breakfast (honestly, for most meals) is a Columbian cafe called Molliendo: it´s like Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors, but for arepas--the traditional Columbian bread thing, which is kind of a cross between a pancake and a tortilla. I´m a bit scared of many of the combinations (steak AND plantain? tuna salad?), but the desayuno columbiano is pretty hard to beat: 2 bucks for scrambled eggs, arepa, juice, and coffee.

And two bucks, for the record, is a bit on the high side. I have trouble remembering that Cuenca is the most expensive city in Ecuador when there are so many $1.50 lunches to be had. Last night, though, I joined a bunch of gringos for a dinner at Villa Rosa, which is, bar none, the fanciest restaurant in this fairly fancy city. It´s the kind of place where the waiters push your chair in for you, and one of them spent about half a minute lovingly rearranging my jacket on my chair because I´d just stuffed it up against my back when I removed it. Dinner was absolutely exquisite--filet mignon for the meat eaters, fancy fancy wines. Average cost: 10 bucks a head.

I tried, today, to get back down to earth a little with the $1.50 almuerzo at another vegetarian cafe. Instead, though, I learned the hard way that in Ecuador, it´s entirely possible to have more than one 1-95 Calle Gran Columbia. Either that, or my guidebook wants me to eat lunch at an auto parts store. After walking for blocks in the rain and taking a cab to the middle of urban nowhere, I finally gave up on Good Affinity Tea House and Soy Products Boutique, in favor of a nice hot chocolate at Cafe y Canela, a place with cranky, cranky servers and delicious, delicious treats. The weather has been awful today: hope it improves soon!

Local Color # 3 Home Cooking

As fabulous as it is to eat out every meal for under five bucks, I have discovered that it´s equally exciting to be able to buy fresh food in the market and cook it myself, thanks to the kitchen in Hostal Macondo. On the menu recently:

Habas con queso y salsa de tomato casero (fava beans with cheese and homemade tomato sauce: I was shooting for ají, but think I used the wrong vegetable)







Paella Andina (aka, ¨take a whole bunch o´stuff from the market and throw it together in a skillet: I used choclo corn, peas, pepper, onions, garlic, and cilantro, on a base of toasted wheat berries, which I think are more traditionally thrown into soup).






Carne de Soya Con Guisantes y Tomate: I found some fake hamburger at a health food store and gave it a whirl. Pretty tasty.

Gladys has arrived (yay!), and I´m going to cook for her tonight. We´ll see what´s on the menu....

Local Color # 1: Shopping

Last year, I had great plans for my blog. I was going to make wry social commentary on all aspects of life as a traveler in South America. Intended blog posts included ¨Top Ten Weird-Ass Things One Can Buy on a Bus¨ and ¨Signs that your bus trip is doomed, doomed, doomed.¨ (#1 on that list: the front of the bus has a huge mural of the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus, captioned, ¨If this be my final voyage, your will be done, Lord.¨)

Alas, life happened, and I ended out not writing much of anything once I started my work for "the Project". I´ll try to fix that this time around.

Since today is market day in the Plaza Rotary in Cuenca, it seems like as good a time as any to express my absolute love of Ecuadorian markets. I´m finally at the point where I´m really over the haggle-like-a-gringa-over-sweaters-for-the-gringa scene (Otavalo, I´m looking at you), but the ordinary, bread-and-butter markets of Ecuador are sixteen different kinds of fabulous.

Plaza Rotary is absolutely craptacular: it´s the place where everyone goes to buy Bart Simpson piggy banks, batteries, thousands of shoes, and aphrodisiacs--sometimes, I think, from the same person. Next to it, though, is an indoor food market that is like no farmer´s market you´ve ever seen--for one thing, it´s better organized, and probably cleaner to boot. You know how American supermarkets have signs over all the aisles, saying ¨Cereals¨, ¨Feminine Hygiene¨, and ¨Produce¨? Same idea, same aisles, but ¨fruit¨consists of 10 or 12 families, all selling pounds and pounds of crazy Ecuadorian produce like taxo and tree tomato. There´s a seperate aisle for just pre-cooked beans and such, and it´s about 20 feet long with 6 different vendors. I don´t, as a rule, take pictures in markets, because I´m not nearly as stealthy as some people I know (go Chaya!) and it seems weird to be clicking away at other people´s daily lives. So you´ll just have to imagine it. Another fun market here is the flower market: nothing but flowers (isn´t that a song?), all day, every day. Oh wait, I´m lying--next to the market, there´s one stall that sells truly awful beverages with proported healing powers.

Next to the food markets in towns like Cuenca, my favorite markets are definitely the indigenous markets, which are huge social activities as well as commercial endeavors. Families from all over the area dress up and head into town early in the morning, to spend the day buying, selling, and chatting. On the way to Ingapirca, our guide explained some of the significance of what different people were wearing (if you´re from the culture that wears the white hats, you put two dangly things in front if you´re single, and in back if you´re spoken for...), and it´s been great fun for me ever since to try and decipher some of the hidden curriculum. The best, though, is watching the kids--dusty little girls in gorgeous bird-bright skirts running through the markets, or babies peeking over their parent´s shoulders at all the fuss outside their booth. I don´t want to romanticize anything, but Ecuadorian kids are just beautiful.

And soon enough, I´ll be meeting more of them: Gladys is joining me in Cuenca on Sunday, and we´ll be visiting a few special education facilities while class is still in session. Today was a repeat of the Gringo Shopper Comedy that so many of us from the Project know so well, as I went from stationary store to stationary store looking for stuff to make a couple demonstrations of the work we do. Favorite moment was definitely after about 10 minutes of charades over the stiff plastic stuff we use to make communication boards. Finally, the shopkeeper found some that was the wrong color, cut off a piece, and told me to go three doors down, show them the piece, and demand to pay no more than 20 cents for ¨eso, pero transparente." She didn´t have any, but she wanted to make sure I didn´t get ripped off. Note to Bridgett: laminas are more expensive now (15 cents versus 10), but they have even more fun themes, including The Perils of AIDS and A Brief History of The Internet. For the matching boards, I decided flowers would be better, but it´s nice to have the option.

Let us Practice Now with the Verb "Equivocar"

Happy Wednesday to all. I´m in the middle of my week of Spanish classes, which so far have been excellent.

One really lucky thing for me is that I´ve been able to study with the same Spanish teacher for the past three years now--it´s nice, like visiting an old friend in Cuenca. Alas, like almost all people in this most-expensive-city-in Ecuador, Raul has more than one job: he´s now also the vice principal of a high school that´s currently smack dab in the middle of finals week. Because of this, I can only take two hours or so a day at the cozy little Abraham Lincoln Center.

I spent Monday morning touring all the various Spanish schools in Cuenca, trying to pick up a few more classes. Most only had them at the same time Raul is available, and one was positively cult-like in its insistence on 20 hours a week for two weeks, starting yesterday, but after the placement test. End result: I now take morning classes at CEDEI, which I like to think of as the McDonald´s of Spanish schools. It´s huge, crowded, and homogenized, but it can give you what you want when you want it, and quickly.

It´s been interesting, bouncing back and forth between two very different institutions. The secretary at Abraham Lincoln clucked softly and used several subjunctive ¨hopefully¨ phrases about CEDEI´s ability to teach me anything; CEDEI is quietly, paternally curious about how the other half lives. My teacher at CEDEI is an impeccably dressed middle aged woman who makes me read aloud from stories about divorce and child labor when she isn´t elegantly diagramming verb tenses and assigning me worksheets; Raul has perhaps three pairs of pants and begins each class by asking what I´d like to learn today. Somehow, the styles are complementing each other, and I think I´m beginning to figure things out.

With one enormous exception: bus travel, I fear, will forever kick my ass. Yesterday, after class, I wanted to visit the Mercado Diez de Augusto. It was six or so blocks uphill in the rain, so instead of walking, I sensibly took the bus that was marked Urban Route, Free Market. Forty five minutes and several villages later, the bus stopped in a field in the middle of nowhere, and the bus driver kindly helped me conjugate the verb "equivocar", which is a polite way of saying, ¨to screw up." Sometimes, I need to remind myself that not asking directions for fear of looking like a dumb tourist is a strategy that can backfire in stupendously dumb tourist ways later on.

Another day in Cuenca

And now begins the week of classes: an hour and a half in the morning, three in the late afternoon (to the left: the courtyard at Abraham Lincoln Cultural Center and Spanish School). Leaving plenty of time in the middle of the day for poking around museums, getting lost downtown, and attempting to resist the siren song of street food.

The problem? There is this one snack food, chochos, that just doesn´t get offered in restaurants. It´s a tasty little ziploc baggie of cold white beans, seasoned with red onions, tomatoes, and vinegar, topped with corn nuts and crispy plaintains. Sold, alas, by random street vendors who don´t seem that keen on washing much of anything.

Common sense tells the traveller that there is a heirarchy of street food. Least likely to cause problems is anything that is deep fried right in front of you, and served too hot for the seller to touch it first. From there, we venture into the largely benign territory of humitas (tamales, encased in corn husk) and individual pieces of meat with their highly cooked accoutrements. Things get a bit dodgy when the item on offer was once very hot but is now merely warm, especially if it´s the midafternoon or so. Chochos, an essentially raw product with definitively raw garnishes, are a roll of the dice below that. Recently, I´ve discovered the absolute low point of street food. Remember how I said that the Corpus Christi festival in Cuenca lasted seven days beyond the main one, and ended on Friday? Well, some of the vendors are still trying to unload their extra sweets.

When I haven´t been performing mental gymnastics about the risks involved in chochos, I´ve spent a pleasant day so far doing various errands and reading the paper with a dictionary at my side. The weather is gorgeous today, bright blue skies and fast-moving clouds, and the cobblestone streets of the old city are almost impossibly picturesque. Laundry is fairly straightforward, but shopping here is a bit of an adventure: I still can´t quite figure out the rhyme or reason behind which store sells what. I picked up some quinoa today at a place that also offers electronic appliances and sandals, and got an alarm clock from a music store a few days ago. (And, three days later, I´m popping back into this post to mention that I have just discovered that the absolute fastest internet connection in Cuenca is in the yogurt shop I just stumbled upon.)

Alright, I think my laundry should be ready about now, so I´ll sign off. Hope everyone is having a pleasant week so far!

Ingapirca!

Ah, lazy weekend. Lazy for me, when I´m travelling, means paying someone else to figure out the busses. Hence, I just got back from my second organized tour in two days, this time to Ingapirca. This one, alas, was a larger group of people, and it was conducted in English by a suave young man who had clearly picked up many of his cool English mannerisms by watching soap operas; he pronounced every sentence like he wanted to go to bed with it. Once I got over that, though, he was actually a very knowledgeable guide.

Ingapirca, or "Wall of the Inca", is the largest set of Incan ruins in Ecuador. It´s not much in relation to what most people imagine a ruined city to be like (I can best describe it as like a button that fell off Macchu Picchu´s sweater), but it´s fascinating in its own right as the one place where the Inca cohabitated with another tribe, the Cañar, without either group getting slaughtered or assimilated. End result: you´ve got your patriarchal, sun-god worshipping Inca stuff over here, and your matriarchal, moon-good worshipping Cañar stuff over here, and it kind of blows your mind to imagine them both living together in a pretty small space. Did the king of the Incas and the queen of the Cañaris pull any of that West Side Story crap when their handlers weren´t looking?

I went to Ingapirca last year, taking the bus and eavesdropping on other people´s tours, but I returned this year because it was Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun god. Groups of musicians and dancers come from all over Ecuador to Ingapirca to perform, mingle, drink their asses off, and celebrate the harvest. Alas, we were there on the third and final day of the festival, and nothing was running on time (possibly because everybody was still hungover from Saturday night.) We sat around the amphitheater for about forty five minutes, heard a couple songs, and had to leave for lunch.

And a fine lunch it was, at least from my perspective. Although the main attraction was pork (which our guide informed us is made seven different ways in Ecuador), I was very pleased with the bottomless platters of choclo corn that were supposed to serve as an appetizer. Perhaps the best part of lunch was the location: a kitschy hostería, or vacation complex, with a truly bizarre sculpture of a 10-foot tall ballplaying guinea pig in the children´s play area. Behold!

Tommorrow, it´s back to work, sort of. I have three hours of one to one Spanish tutoring booked for the evening, and am considering picking up a couple hours of group lessons in the morning. This will be the year I master the subjunctive! Even though I currently can´t say that in Spanish, because I think that it, itself, is a subjunctive phrase.

En Cajas, No Se Puede Nadar

Parque Nacional Cajas is a really beautiful wildland near Cuenca: like many things in Ecuador, it´s ¨megadiverso¨, meaning, essentially, that God took about four distinct bioregions and stuffed them all into one area. The park spans everything from tropical forests to bucolic pasturelands to haunting, windy páramo, and has 157 different species of birds.

I had a very good time hiking through two different parts of the Park (the grassy páramo and a semi-tropical paper tree forest), with another tourist and an excellent guide. Both of whom were pressed into service when I came thisclose to falling off a cliff and tumbling down into a volcanic lake: my foot hit a rock on an otherwise straightforward path, I fell in the wrong direction, and it actually was touch and go for a moment there. My last thoughts, had they not been able to pick me up and set me back on the path, would have been ¨what the hell: I hitch-hike in Puerto Lopez, I swim with pirahna, I don´t even stumble on Laguna Quilotoa and this kiddie trail is what does me in?¨ All three of us were a bit rattled, but fortunately, I didn´t get hurt. For the rest of the hike, though, everytime we came even a little close to any kind of water, the guide kindly reminded me that ¨you´re not allowed to swim in Cajas¨.

Near-death experience aside, it was quite a good hike: we saw a number of birds, including hummingbirds that live in one of the coldest parts of the park. They´re black to gather heat into their bodies, they eat insects because there aren´t enough flowers to be their whole diet, and at night, evidently, their body temperature goes down to 8 degrees celsius--so close to dead that you can just grab them where they sleep and they´ll be too catatonic to notice. We also saw some pretty neat flowers, including the little round ones in the picture: they are unique to Cajas and don´t grow anywhere else.

After the hike, we had lunch at a trout farm, the main gimmick of which was that the day´s catch of trout is actually dumped into a fountain in the middle of the restaurant. Every now and again, one of the staff comes out of the kitchen with a net and a bucket, and scoops up a dozen trout while the diners watch. In Ecuador, I pretty much have to think of fish as a vegetable, and I admit that these guys were tasty little vegetables. As my brother would say, it´s probably the suffering that makes them delicious.

Cuenca: Jesus Loves Both You, and Bonbons

I´m enjoying my first day in Cuenca as I type this: got here last night and immediately had a silly grin on my face. Cuenca is probably my favorite city in the world: the third largest city in Ecuador and a UNESCO world heritage site because of the beautiful, well preserved historical buildings. There´s probably a museum for every church in town, and there are 52 churches, so I geek out on museums every time I come here. Many streets are still paved with cobblestones, and thoroughly modern business is conducted in buildings which date from 300 years ago.

Cuenca´s also known as one of the cultural hotspots of the country: right now, it´s hosting an international film festival. One thing that will forever endear this city to me: Cuenca takes its festivals seriously, and the Corpus Christi observation that´s one night everywhere else is still going on here, six days later. Which was absolutely FABULOUS: I got to my hotel, felt hungry, had no guidebook, took a cab to the one restaurant I remembered how to find, and discovered that it was surrounded by blocks upon blocks of music, dance, food, and sweets. Corpus Christi is a Catholic festival commemorating the Eucharist: I have no idea how it´s observed in other places, but in Cuenca, it´s all about the candy. Dozens of white booths are set up, with tables piled high with different kinds of sweets--taffy, chocolate, marshmallows, little sculpted berries with sprinkles for seeds, blocks of gingerbread and frosted little cakes. The door-pull taffy from Baños made an appearance, though the seller had to make do with stretching it from a streetlight. It seemed like the entire town was out at the Parque Calderon: families, couples, gaggles of teenagers. Fireworks were going off, erratically, and every now and then, someone would set a square helium balloon on fire and launch it into the air. Stumbling on that was one of the most serendipitous experiences I´ve had as a traveler.

Tonight´s the last night, so I´m going to check it out again, and then hop into bed a bit early for tomorrow´s trip to Cajas National Park. I´ve been assured that the hike I signed up for is much more ¨tranquilo¨ than last year´s my-god-we´re-gonna-die-several-times-in-six-hours excursion to Laguna Quilotoa, so I think I´ll enjoy it.

Guayaquil: It´s Not Even A Dry Heat

Yes, Mom, I´ve gotten into and out of Guayaquil in one piece. Evidently, this city used to be the South Central LA of Ecuador: a place with a horrible reputation for all kinds of theft and sprawl. Typically, the only Westerners visiting it were businessmen, who holed up in fancy hotels and ate at McDonald´s (there are still an awful lot of American chain restaurants to be found.) In recent years, though, much of it has been completely overhauled, and I found it to be a pretty pleasant city, on the whole: busy and loud, but less heavily touristed than Quito, with well tended little parks every handful of blocks. The Malecon, or beach promenade, is a sparkling pedestrian zone with gardens, playgrounds, random observation towers, and fountains, all cooled off a bit by the breeze from the river Guayas.

I had a fabulous time at the MAAC (Museum of archeology and contemporary art), which is exactly what it sounds like: in this corner, you´ve got everything from before 600 AD, and in that one, everything after 1980. Not so much with the in-between stuff. It was easily the chicest, most polished museum I´ve ever been in--all sharp angles and spotless white floors. Large groups of schoolchildren were touring the archeology exhibits (10,000 Years of Ancient Ecuador): I imagine the chaperones needed to be especially vigilant at this museum, because the next room over from the arrowheads housed a series of semi-pornographic meditations on ¨love and death¨.

After the museum, I went for a little stroll to the neighborhood of Las Peñas, which is the city´s art district and a heavily touted tourist destination: it´s very spruced up to resemble an idealized version of a traquil hillside village. It was cute, but far less exciting than the main reason for my time in Guayaquil...

Parque Semanario (aka Parque Why the Hell are There So Many Iguanas?) It´s a little park, maybe half the size of a city block, that for some reason yet unknown to me has a land iguana population of several dozen animals. They don´t live anywhere else in the city, just here. And they have pretty much taken over the place, sunning themselves on park benches, mating in the treetops, and falling asleep in the middle of the path. The locals are pretty well over it, but tourists flock here to take pictures of themselves with the iguanas. It was great fun just watching the people watch the wildlife.

I enjoyed my time in Guayaquil, but admit I wasn´t sad to see the end of it. The humidity was getting to me, veg food was hard to come by, and my hotel was, um, worth every penny of the 12 bucks I paid for it. The bus ride from Guayaquil to Cuenca is quite scenic, taking you from the banana plantations of the Guayas province (seriously, kids, buy the fair trade bananas! The conventional ones are like something out of the antebellum South) to the Southern Andes. Got into Cuenca around nightfall, which leads to the next post.

Welcome to Not-Panama!

Greetings from Guayaquil, a city which is most definitely and thankfully ALL THE WAY IN SOUTH AMERICA. It felt a little touch-and-go this morning, as I landed in Miami at the exact same gate as last year, then discovered that the flight number and departure time was also the same. (For the one person reading this who hasn´t heard me rant about last year´s Flight From Hell, let me summarize by saying that it involved firetrucks, 10 hour delays, and a surprise 3:00 am detour to Tocumen International Airport.) I don´t think it´s common in the States, but here, when the plane lands, everybody claps like the pilot just finished a symphony. I may have been the only one who was really just applauding the not-Panama-ness of it all.

Everything´s been pleasantly uneventful, though it was a little unnerving to find that the entire airport staff at Guayaquil was wearing face masks because of swine flu paranoia. All arriving passengers had to get their image taken with a thermal scan camera, to isolate folks who might have a fever. The guys at customs said there weren´t many cases in Ecuador: my guess is that they´re just trying to keep it that way, and the country is small enough with few enough entry and exit points that they can actually mount an offensive. It was a little odd, though, going through the special Swine Flu Mini-Customs and then, at baggage claim, discovering that live pets were circling around on the conveyer belt like ordinary luggage. I guess they can only freak out about so many disease vectors at a time.

Nothing much else to report, as I´ve only been here two hours and it´s dark and unsavory outside my hotel. Off to bed now: tommorrow, the long-awaited Parque de los Iguanas!

Fourth Time's the Charm

Another June, another suitcase, another blog.

As a public school teacher in the U.S. , I'm blessed with a job that gives me time, in the summer, to do something completely different. For the past three years, I've been extra-extra-extra blessed to have something amazing to do with that time--to be one of a group of educators and therapists working to share basic assistive technology strategies with individuals and communities in central Ecuador. Year by year, I like to think I've refined my summer plans to just about the best travel scheme around: two weeks of inspirational, life-changing volunteer work, bookended on either side by a bit of "since I'm in the neighborhood" South American tourist play.

Memorable traveller's moments include fishing for pirahna and drinking spit beer in the Amazon, dodging rock-throwing villagers near Macchu Picchu, and a surprise detour to a five star Panamanian hotel. The real highlights of summer, though, have always been my time with American colleagues and new Ecuadorian friends--working together with teachers, families, and individuals to expand opportunities for individuals with disabilities in some of the most beautiful and challenged communities I've ever been privileged to visit.

This year is a new opportunity, a little bit outside that comfort zone: for a lot of different reasons, the organization I volunteer with will not be sending out a large delegation this year. Instead, I'm going solo, to meet up and travel with the in-country director. We'll be reconnecting with groups that we've worked with in the past, and also making new connections for possible future projects. I think the unofficial term we've come up with is Continuity Ambassador--in my own stumbling way, I hope I can do something to help maintain the strong connection between the Project and the people we've reached, and I'm deeply excited about the opportunity to help us reach further.

By popular demand, then, here's this year's blog. It'll cover my first ten days (including the week of Spanish lessons in Cuenca that I desperately hope will reduce my Holy Crap No Translator anxiety...), two "working" weeks in the Imbabura, Tungarahua, and Cañar provinces, and final tourist week in and around the Caribbean port city of Cartagena, Columbia.

Insert standard legal disclaimer: all views, ideas, and opinions expressed within this medium are entirely the author's, and should not be taken as representative of the Project, even if you figure out which Project it is. Especially if the aforementioned Views, Ideas, and Opinions are ridiculous. Or involve the consumption of street food.

On we go. First stop: Guayaquil!