catch-up part 2

I'm sitting at the computer here at home (1 of 4, Mauro who who runs the house is a computer programmer and this is his workspace), the kitchen door is a ajar and inside my housemates are toiling over dinner (I worked on the salad, I figured that gave me a little bit of time to slip away and write this). I got back from my belly dance class about half an hour ago, and Flaca (spanish for skinny chick-- I don't even remember her real name as I only ever heard it once when I moved in) is busy making Shnitzel, such care put into the seasoning and battering of every individual cutlet. Eva is taking out her aggression on Spetzle batter (not sure if I spelled that right), Aline is reading a magazine at the table (Cosmo in French I think), Sabine is chatting, making herself useful wherever she can, the music is going (programmed by Mauro to turn on at exactly 9 AM every morning and play a random shuffle of songs all day long, speakers hooked up in the kitchen, the living room, the computer room...) and Mauro, whose main dinner responsibility is to set the table and do dishes later, is in his room, door closed, probably reclining. Alfonso and Sebastian, our regular dinner guests, are on their way, probably with bottles of wine in hand. It will be another romantic candle-lit dinner for 8.

I feel like there's so much to catch up on, I'm a little overwhelmed. A quick observation about work-life, and then on to other news. We've all become accustomed to the power going out at least once a week in our office, and generally in our office neighborhood. We never know when it will happen, but what's certain is that it happens with frequency, and when the power goes out a resounding "motherfucker!" (or something to that effect) can be heard all over the office as people's computers shut down mid-article, mid-editing, mid-research. After the initial anger a calm fills the place, people leave their desks and shuffle to other people's desks, prop their legs up on chairs, chat, read, take little naps, do Spanish homework, plan their weekends, laugh about nothing in particular. Sometimes the power comes back on quickly and we resume work, sometimes it doesn't and we go home. We've become so accustomed to these power outages (and mini-vacations) that when a week goes by without them, we all feel a little cheated. Power outages are the single best metaphor I can think of for life in Ecuador (and life in general): Shit happens, you can get angry if you want, but it makes more sense to recover quickly and enjoy the moment as it comes.

Back to what's been going on: A feel days after we got back from Guayaquil it was Halloween, and after discovering a costume store across the street from our house, renting wings, buying some cheap fabric and making pixie skirts and dousing our faces in glittery makeup, we were ready to celebrate. Only later would we find out that Ecuadorian President Raphael Correa has recently outlawed Halloween in Ecuador, an attempt to fend of Americanization in the spirit of Hugo Chavez, who he admires greatly. As such, costumes and decorations for Halloween are officially against the law in Ecuador, though you wouldn't have known it if you had been out that night in the Mariscal, Quito's main bar and gringo area. My fellow Pixie and I were outside of a bar, waiting to go in, when the bouncer told us there was an 8 dollar cover charge. For shame! I would never even pay that in New York City, nor did I have 8 dollars on me that night. We tell yell to our friend, who is already half inside the door that I don't have the 8 dollars, that we'll go somewhere else and meet her later. A gringo dressed as Burt (of Ernie and Burt) overhears us and says "Who doesn't have 8 dollars?", as in , how could you possibly not have 8 dollars, and we get angry and reply "we aren't tourists, we live here, that's a lot!" but he doesnt seem to grasp this concept and replies with something snarky. Just then I wished that somebody around as had a video camera, so that they could film two pixies kicking the crap out of Burt, and we could becomes the next YouTube stars, sponsored by costume companies all over the world. We want to tell him to take his rich ass to the Galapagos Islands (basically only the wealthy can visit the islands these days) but he has slipped away into the night before we get the chance.

The following week was a bit of a blur, the only thing I remember with certainty is that I spent 2 mornings in the Migration office, trying to get my Ecuadorian ID card and exit papers. The first time I was sent away because the migration official laughed at my fake letter from my fake spanish school for my fake student visa, and told me to come back the next day with a better letter.

This past Friday was Day of the Dead, which we had originally wanted to spend in a city in the south called Cuenca, but its a 13 hour bus ride and we didn't have it in us to get on yet another overnight bus so soon. Instead we spent day of the dead in Calderon, a town outside of Quito, and wandered around the cemetery all day taking pictures of people hanging out on top of their dead relatives (literally, the cemetery is small, there aren't any paths, and the only way to get around is to step over the mounds of earth that hastily cover the bones of the deceased.) Whole families drank beer, caught-up, children ran around the cemetery, people prayed, cleaned and decorated graves, and offered the dead their favorite foods and drink. Some graves were unvisited, no flowers made of colorful foil, no glasses of soda, no candy wrappers or bread rolls. These are the ones whose family is also gone, the forgotton, the ones we feel terrible seeing abandoned, the ones we will all eventually become.

Saturday morning we headed to Baños, a small town surrounded by a curtain of lush green, an an active volcano, an easy 4 hours away. Baños is a haven for hiking, biking, rafting, bunjee jumping, horseback riding, and just about anything else out-doorsy you can think of. We checked into our Israeli hostel and went out to find Cuadrones (pretty much like Go Karts) to rent to ride around the town and up to the lookout point for the waterfalls that Baños is known for. Amanda has her license on her and so she is allowed to be the driver, I get in and ride shotgun beside her, the go kart guy quickly shows us how to drive the thing, gives us helmets, points us in the direction of the road we are supposed to go on to get to the waterfalls, and with a screeching vroooom we are off! Within ten minutes we realize the road he has directed us onto is not the peaceful dirt road we had imagined but more like a two-way highway! Two crazy girls riding in a tiny go-kart among cars, buses, trucks... we are pretty sure this might be the end of us. We tell each other that its fine, we can always turn back, we don't have to go through with it, but by now the adrenaline has kicked in and there's no way we are turning back, wether we are shrieking the whole time or not! We ride on, eventually the highway becomes a narrow road, seemingly more manageable but with many a hairpin turn. At a certain point we decide to turn back, it is only halfway through the turn that we realize there's no way to reverse in a gokart, and now we are stuck in the middle of a narrow 2-way road, with no clear vision of what's coming from one direction as we are right in front of a pretty steep turn. We freak out, jump out of the "vehicle" (we named her Martha) and start pushing like crazy, trying to at least get the thing on the side of the road before anyone drives near. Martha is heavier than we thought she would be, eventually we enlist the help of an amused onlooking driver, straighten her out, and jump back in. We drive to the top of the road, get an amazing view of the city below, and drive back, never once stopping or attempting to reverse.

Next day I spent much of the day hiking to the mirador del Virgen, a statue which sits atop 700 very steep stone stairs! Along the way i met a very nice German couple and a local guy from Guayaquil (the city we had visited the weekend before) who I swapped contact info with and who I hope to see if I ever make it back to Guayquil. Then I met up with my friends again (who had gone biking during the day) and we rushed to the bus station, to catch a bus back to Quito. Of course as it was a holiday weekend, Baños was flooded with gringo and ecuadorian tourists, and of course the bus for which we had bought tickets earlier was broken, so it was a mad dash to get on all the remaining Quito-headed buses and see if three seats were left anywhere for us. On one bus the driver assured me there were seats for three, but when we got on we discovered that it was really just seats for two, and that he had forced a woman with a baby in her lap and her 8-year-old child next to
her to squeeze into the space of one seat, the 8-year old standing in her mother's leg space. I refused to do this to the woman and told the girl to take her seat back. We got off the bus and looked for another.

Finally we found a bus with seats, and the three of us got on and found our assigned numbers. Of course I end up in a broken seat with no leg space at all, my knees crunching painfully into the seat in front of me.The woman next to me, sitting in the window seat, has a sleeping 1-month-old wrapped in blankets in her lap (so many children in Ecuador! Babies are wrapped in blankets and taken everywhere, children are always sitting in people's laps or on the floor.) Within the first half hour of the ride, I'd been enlisted to pass chunks of bread from the father's hands behind us to the mother's hands beside me, and to pass the infant back and forth from the mother's hands beside me to the father's hands behind us. We hadn't gotten very far when the bus stopped. Looking out the window, an endless line of cars and buses stretched in front and behind us. Volcano Tunguragua had erupted, had been erupting in small bursts all day, (sounds kind of like a car engine exploding) , shooting sheets of ash all over the road. After the eruptions it had rained, turning the ash into thick mud, so thick that no vehicles could drive through it, and we were stuck on the road, not moving at all, for 4 hours. I assumed we would eventually just turn and drive back to Baños, but our driver seemed to be waiting for something though no one could explain to us (in slow enough Spanish) just exactly what. I read Milan Kundera, listened to someone else's Ipod, passed the baby back and forth a few more times, napped, got off the bus a few times, made dinner out of potato chips, wanted to pull my hair out, massaged my bruised knees, and then the bus started moving. I guess the mud had been cleared out though I can't say I understood how, when, or by whom. In any case, 4 hours more after that, at 1:00 AM we were in the bus station in Quito, arguing with cab drivers over the price of our ride home.