International Travel Machine

The cast of characters

2012-01-19T10:23:00.001-05:00

January 18, 2012

The cast.

You don’t move to Bishkek in where-the-fuck-ever-stan to be an English teacher and not encounter in your co-workers the usual host of oddities and societal rejects. One has to wonder sometimes what impression our students form of the world outside their borders if this is their only sustained contact with foreigners.

I went out with the Brits last night to have a beer, and it didn’t take long for the creation of nicknames to begin. It began as a way to differentiate two teachers of the same name.

“harry scary”

“Yeah, he’s…”

“Let’s all go eat dog just to fuck with him.”

“And the other one?”

“Oh yeah, the Mormon.”

“Is he really? He’s from Wisconsin. Are there Mormons there?”

“No—well, I don’t know. But he looks like he’s wearing special underwear—and it’s a size too small.”

“bearded g----“

“No, but the other one has a beard too.”

“Well, the greater and the lesser.”

“G---- the greater and G--- the lesser. Sure, that works.”

“And the girl? What’s her name again?”

“Which one?”

“The one I’d like to roofie.”

“Yeah, and then not do anything with.”

“Well, what’s her last name?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been here two years, and I don’t know.”

“How about Ritalin?”

“Too obvious. How about poodle?”

“Poodle?”

“Her hair.”

“How about calm-the-fuck-down-and-breathe?”

“Hm, yeah, but then everyone would know who we’re referring to.”

“We’ll get back to her.”

“And the gay one?”

“Who?”

“J-------“

“Oh, he’s not gay. He has a girlfriend.”

“He’s gay. He just isn’t out of the closet yet. Trust me. Gaydar clanging on this one.”

“I thought he was the Mormon.”

“No, he’s Canadian.”

“And the other girl?”

“The one who never talks? How about deer-in-the-headlights?”

“Kenny.”

“Huh?”

“Who killed Kenny.”

“Right. Never speaks.”

“Kenny Kenny”

“Or sometimes Kenny Kenny Kenny?”

(Silence from the boys. That one fell flat, obviously.)

“And the Scot?”

“Oh, brown rice, yoga…”

“It’s all to get laid. Really. He got his first date on the flight here.”

“Led Zeppelin, Beatles…”

“How about downward facing dog?”

“What?”

“Yoga move. Ass in the air.”

“Hm.”

“Have you seen that scarf he wears?”

“Uh, no.”

“Dreadful, really.”

“And what about us. You and me. I mean, Phil’s already got one.”

“No. I don’t like the one I’ve got. “

“Peda-phil?”

“No.”

“And you’re really going to marry her? And do what?”

“Take her to England. DO you know how much a visa costs? 800 pounds.”

“And there’s the interview. That should be fun. Does she ever not hate you?”

“Oh, about five minutes out of every day.”

“Nice.”

“Have you Dutch ovened her yet?”

“Dutch oven? What’s that?”

“Where you fart and pull the covers over her head.”

“Yeah. Now she knows when I’m going to do it. Says I get a look in my eyes.”

“Well, that’s all right then.”

“And Stephen. Functioning alcoholic is too obvious.”

“Last name…”

“No, nothing with cereal.”

“We’ll get back to you. And Justine?”

“Remember that joke I told about ginger babies?”

“What, the abortion joke?”

“Justine ‘pro-choice’ Derrick.”

“Fine, but it’s not my real color.”

“It’s not? What is?”

“Changes. Depends on the season.”

“Mine’s the same.”

“Hm. Justine ‘stiletto’ Derrick.”

“Justine ‘fishnet’ Derrick.”

“Justine ‘bondage’ Derrick.”

“Hey, wait! How did I end up with dominatrix nicknames?”

And so it went, with everyone continuing to riff on various nicknames. I’d gone out to lunch with the Brits, and that conversation covered farting (again), gay sex (with a story about someone admitting to sticking a toothbrush up his ass), a former girlfriend who was a Japanese jockey (who brought her saddle with her sometimes—burning a mental image that I will never, ever be able to erase)…

But also teaching. The Brits are both experienced teachers, so we discussed problems Russian speakers have with English and how to target these problems. We discussed the upcoming curriculum redesign that we’re going to be doing. We discussed the plan to give the students kindles. We discussed ways we can help the newbies be better teachers—without their knowing that we’ve intervened.

So yes, while these two guys have some obvious issues (both the products of a British public education, by the way: incredibly smart, but also incredibly fucked-up), they are both competent professionals who care about the job they do and their students (sometimes a little too much; see reference to pregnancy in conversation above).

After the beer at the bar, the two gentlemen escorted me home. They did stop on the way, however, to buy seven and a half liters of beer and five packs of cigarettes.

January 16, 2012

2012-01-16T02:28:00.001-05:00

Staying alive

Recipe for one-skillet: Soak and boil beans. Flavor as desired. Keep in fridge, ready to go. When hungry, take out one serving of beans and place in skillet. Add just a little bit of water. When water starts to bubble and the beans start to stick a bit, slide beans to one side of skillet and crack egg in the free space. Cover. Wait a couple of minutes, lift lid, and place slice of somewhat stale bread in the space between the egg and the beans. Cover again. Wait until egg white is set but yolk is still runny. Place beans on plate, add two slices of overly salty cheese, scrape egg from pan and place over cheese. Place bread on side. Enjoy.

Recipe for one pan: heat oil. Add ½ of Maggi chicken cube. Add sliced onion. After a while, add some spices—whatever happens to be around. Add sliced turnips and carrots. Continue to stir-fry. Add sliced cabbage. Continue to stir-fry. Add water. Bring water to boil. Add more spices. Boil the shit out of it. Serve with chunks of overly salty cheese and slightly stale bread.

Recipe for one bowl: mix plain yogurt and overly-sweetened liquid yogurt. Add one cube of chopped chocolate. Add slight stale muesli. Add some raisins.

Breakfast: wash and cut one apple, removing spots where bugs have entered (and left). Cut a couple of wedges of cheese. Take two slices of slightly stale bread, butter one side, grill in skillet. Add weird green jam. Enjoy with Assam brewed in hard, tap water.

Weekend: try food in local markets and restaurants. Only do this Friday evening, after teaching, or Saturday. Give yourself Sunday to recover.

Where to find things:

Mustard: in the Turkish or Russian supermarkets

Muesli: in the supermarket just south of me.

Tuna: I saw some once in the Russian supermarket in the center (right next to the Turkish supermarket)

Pork products: from the English butcher in the center of town

Apples and produce: from any of the markets. Do not buy from the supermarkets.

Eggs: from the closest supermarket. Otherwise, they’ll all break before you get them home

1.5 % milk: sometimes at the supermarket south of me. Sometimes from the supermarket north of me. It depends.

Sliced German cheese: I saw it once at the supermarket south of me.

Plain yogurt: can occasionally be found at the Turkish supermarket in the center of town.

Loose-leaf tea: everywhere

Mayo: everywhere

Bread: White is everywhere. Wheat more difficult to find.

Unidentifiable sausages: everywhere

Chocolate: everywhere

Curry: still haven’t found it

As you can see, part of moving to a new place is figuring out where to find things…

January - Morning Walk

2012-01-10T10:37:00.003-05:00

Sheep grazing in a Bishkek park.

Park in the south of Bishkek.

Admit it, you're jealous. You know you wish you lived in Bishkek...

January 9, 2012

2012-01-10T10:33:00.003-05:00

January 9, 2012

First day of classes. I teach from 2:30 to 8:30, but I’m observing two classes this morning, one at 8:30 and the other at 10. It will be a long-ish day, I’m thinking. Right now, I’m going back and forth between feeling nervous and feeling excited. I both hate and love teaching. It’s not really a job; it’s more an emotional rollercoaster. I wonder if one day it will become a job. I wonder if that’s really a desirable thing. If I’m alert and awake in the classroom, the experience can be so dynamic. If not, well, I feel sorry for my students.

Every teaching job that I have, I want to be a better teacher than I was before. I want to try new ways to get my students to learn. What can I do to help them learn better? To learn more? To learn more deeply? I find myself experimenting more with behaviorism, with activities that are disguised drill-n-kill exercises. Turn it into a game somehow. Ultimately learning a language is about communicating, but if the pieces aren’t there, ready to go, ready to be pulled up automatically, then fluency is lacking—and accuracy is compromised. Having seen now the results of fossilization at the higher levels, I want to start fighting it as much as I can at the lower levels.

The problem is that we never have enough time in the classroom. There’s always too much to cover. Two pages in 90 minutes. New information in every class. Time required to check homework. If you make the most of your time, you can perhaps do 15 – 20 minutes of review. Cut out some of the material in the book. But what? Say you have a listening text. You absolutely need to do some pre-reading, activate schema. Then, the listening. 2 times, right? Then responding to the pre-listening activity in some way. Then checking for deeper comprehension of the text. Dealing with questions about content, vocabulary, structures. Some expansion activity, something that has the students respond to the text in some way. Set up the homework. You’re already over time, so you can forget about the other review activity you were hoping to get to, something to close the class. A couple of minutes to review what you did

January 8, 2012

2012-01-10T10:33:00.001-05:00

January 8, 2012

It’s all about managing expectation, about releasing the old routine and the old patterns and developing new ones. So I can’t wake up and exercise. Fine. I’ll wake up, enjoy my tea, and work. Later in the day I’ll go for a long walk. When it warms up and all the ice melts, I’ll embrace the challenge of building up my endurance again. Until then, I find other ways. Once I start teaching, I’ll be so worn out, this excess energy I have won’t be so much an issue.

There’s a point of release—several points, actually—when adapting to a new culture. You fight and fight (at least, I do), trying to hold on to your old life, your old patterns, your old lifestyle. Bit by bit, you release these old things and find new ones to take their place. New routines. Each experience like this—moving to a foreign country—is new, but the emotional pattern is roughly the same.

And I feel like I’m reaching a point where what I’m going through is less culture shock and more homesickness. That’s not to say that there is no culture shock—that there haven’t been bits of it and that there won’t be more. But I’ve always had problems with missing my family and friends. When I’ve spoken to other teachers over the years, the one thing I’ve noticed about the ones that have spent several years traveling and teaching is that they don’t really have close ties to their families. I could never live the way they live. I don’t envy them or feel sorry for them; I just accept that my emotional situation is quite different.

But enough of that whole deep, introspection thing. You’re here to read about Bishkek in January.

Took a walk to Osh Bazaar today. The first couple of days I was here, it was sunny and almost warm-ish (well, warm enough to melt some of the snow during the warmest part of the day). But the last few days? Cold and grey and overcast and… you get the picture. So, in preparation for my walk to the bazaar: long johns, jeans, wool socks, yak-trax on my hiking boots, a long-sleeved tee-shirt, a down coat, a wool coat (yes, two coats), gloves, mittens over the gloves, a scarf, a hat. Oh, and a map of Bishkek (not really necessary as the city is on a grid. On the other hand, all these communist-era concrete structures all look the same, so…) Oh, and side note: streets have two names.

And I set out. Forgot to mention: I brought a copy of my passport with me. You know, just in case I get stopped by the police. Which, in my estimation, was very likely to happen given that I wasn’t wearing the local costume: fur-trimmed black puffy coat with a belt, stylish black hat, knee-high high-heeled black boots, black leggings, shorts or skirt over said leggings. No, I am the stereotypical frumpy American. No make-up, no concern about fashion or how I look. My blue-tinged lips may have led some to believe that I was wearing some shade of counter-culture lipstick—but I sincerely doubt it.

But back to the bazaar. There are several things I both love and dread experiencing when I’m in a foreign country. One is transportation (ALERT: Mom, skip the rest of this paragraph, please). Talk about a thrill. You never really know what you’re going to get and, in some cases, if you’re going to get anywhere alive. I’ve experience some harrowing rides in my time. I wonder what K’Stan will bring.

The other is bazaars. Overwhelming, stressful, and likely to catapult someone into the depths of culture shock. But I was prepared. Well, not really. But I at least knew that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into and how I was going to react. And I had an escape plan.

Bazaars are all remarkably similar while being quite different (yes, I know, as far as descriptions go, that one is useless. By the way, what’s the genre or style of writing where the narrator comments on his or her narrative style as the story progresses? ‘Cause I do that a lot. And if there’s no name for it, I’ll have to invent one.)

But, Bazaars.

No, more set-up. When I was in Jersey, I went to Columbus a couple of times. It’s a bit flea market and Amish market south of Princeton. Picture, if you will, the epitome of North American chaos: cars parked in neat rows, fences around the flea market enclosure, tables set up in orderly rows with clear demarcations between them, wide, easily navigable aisles where visitors stroll leisurely, stopping to examine something that catches their eye then moving on. And the produce? In a separate section, across the parking lot, with prices clearly marked.

Now picture a tornado going straight through this scene. What you have left might begin to resemble your typical non-Western bazaar. No straight lines or rows, tarps overhanging booths wedged in to winding, tight alleyways, nothing marked with prices, no sense of where anything is. I have no sense of how large the bazaar was because it was impossible to follow a line from any one end to the other. You simply cross a street, take a deep breath, and plunge in. People hustling and rushing and bumping into one another. Everyone is on a mission; no leisurely browsing. If you stop to look at something it’s because you’re interested in it and the negotiations begin.

Now, picture all of this on top of an ice-skating rink. Because this is, after all, Bishkek in winter—and there’s no salting, no sanding, no shoveling. Children are sliding down inclines (because yes, this is on uneven ground) into the people below, women and holding onto one another for balance, teenage boys are trying to not slip and look like fools. And I’m in the middle of all this, in my frumpy North American wool coat, brown hiking boots and Yak-trax (great on icy, packed snow but pretty useless on solid ice, I must admit), my Pacific Northwest-looking blue striped hat, my wide eyes and vacant expression, trying to pick my way gingerly across the ice, slipping occasionally, arms flailing…

And now I’m in my room, on my second pot of tea. Boiling a chicken thigh to make some soup. Mentally steeling myself for the challenges to come. Because tomorrow, I meet my students.

To be continued…

(And yes, I know it’s hackneyed. But there you have it.)

LATER

Just spent ten minutes on the Russian Rosetta Stone. My brain is SO FRIED right now. Wow.

LATER

In trying to figure out how to address the now boiled chicken leg in a pot of water (a pot which I will need to make soup in), I wandered into the bathroom, sat on the toilet (with pants still up, mind you), and set the pot of chicken + water on my lap in order to pick the meat off the bones. Let’s just say that Pavlov was on to something with this whole stimulus + conditioned response thing. Now I have a pot of chicken in my bathtub, and empty bladder, and no idea how to proceed from here. (For those of you who are still confused, I had to set the pot in the bathtub so that I could use the toilet).

Yeah. I’m definitely tired.

LATER

Things that make America great (and no, NASCAR is not on this list):

Water fountains, frozen vegetables, the to-go container for hot beverages (wasteful but brilliant), peanut butter, fast food restaurants and gas stations that don’t charge you to use the toilet…

See, if we could just export some of the stuff on this list, fewer people would hate us.

LATER RANDOMNESS

Why has my music program classified Thus Spake Zarathustra as romantic music?

First images of Bishkek

2012-01-07T03:56:00.004-05:00

Ride at your own risk, I think.

No one has the Soviets beat for creating beautiful, durable structures...

Yup. It's Lenin.

Tired...

2012-01-05T22:07:00.000-05:00

Having met one only other teacher here (the one who arrived the same day as me—the teacher who taught in Libya. Cushy gig, as it turns out), I’ve been wondering what the other teachers are like. Most have been on vacation, and the ones who are still here have actually seemed a little unfriendly—or, at the very least, not very curious about the presence of two new teachers.

Ahem, but anyway, now I know. I think I’m living in a frat house. Middle of the night, woken up to music blaring. It’s a Thursday night and I know that at least some of the teachers need to work tomorrow, so I ask, “WTF?” I’m tired, I’m jet-lagged, I’m stressed about starting a new job, and you’re going to blare your music and have the world’s f-ing loudest conversation in the middle of the night? This does not bode well for my relationship with the other teachers. Ass-monkeys.

The other teacher, the one I’ve met, is your standard-issue Brit: steering the conversation to make himself look intelligent, clever one-liners that have clearly been repeated to every new person he meets, conversation that appears confessional but is surface-based, bragging about the American women he’d bedded because of his accent. I’m not impressed, but I’m behaving myself. So far.

And yes to my language teacher friends reading this, I know that list does not have parallel structure. But I’ve just been woken up by a teenage boy who’s gotten drunk for the first time since going away to college and is now playing the first thirty seconds of every song in him music collection (probably for some local girl he’s trying to impress).

My prediction: the guys here will all have local girlfriends, but none of them will have made any effort to learn either Kyrgyz or Russian. Except for the one granola guy who will be fluent in both—but he’s a little weird anyway. They will all be at the extremes of various scales: alcoholics, pot-smokers, seekers, anti-social... There will probably be a couple of other females. At least one will be granola-punk. The other might be a lesbian. (Or this might be the same person). At any rate, I will be the only normal person here.

LATER.

I was able to get back to sleep around 2am, and then I was woken again at 4am. Fine. I’m a morning person. I made some tea, organized some of my files, then decided that it was time to get started figuring out my prison workout possibilities (prison workout because I have to be able to do it in a small space, for those of you who were wondering about that one). I’d been avoiding it because of the whole not wanting to disturb my downstairs neighbors thing. But let’s face it—nothing motivates you to pull out the jump rope at 5 in the morning more than knowing that there’s a drunk frat boy living beneath you, trying to sleep one off. (For the record, I hate jumping rope. It makes me feel uncoordinated and out of shape. That sh!t’s hard. But for some reason, I’m starting to feel a lot more motivated about doing it.) Anyway, the workout routine will probably be based on the cross-fit format, where I pick a few exercises and do them a bunch of times. When the weather’s nice, I’ll try to get out and run, but I’m thinking that I can’t really depend on being able to do that. I’ve heard that there’s a yoga studio down the street; I’ll probably go and see if I can find it. I’ll need to stay active, especially in the winter when I’ll be stuck indoors a lot.

Ok, back to prepping classes. I’ve made up a self-assessment rubric for speaking, reading, writing, and listening that I’m going to have the students fill out once a week. I’ve never done this before (idea inspired by ETS and my increasing interest in finding ways to develop learner autonomy), so we’ll see how it works. I’m sure the idea will need to be tweaked…

The Kitchen

2012-01-04T21:07:00.001-05:00

My digs

2012-01-04T15:17:00.001-05:00

Tea. Maybe.

2012-01-04T08:35:00.002-05:00

January 4, 2012

6:30 here. Just woke up (well, been up and down the entire night, but I do feel rested). Currently eating an apple (yum), yogurt (too sweet, but I have yet to determine which yogurt isn’t sweetened, so I went with what I recognized), and some bread (white, but with a good crust). Normally, I’d also have a tea. It’s starting to bother me, not having the ability to prepare myself a cup of tea. It’s not the caffeine that I need—I only drink about a cup or two of caffeinated tea. It’s more Freudian than that, I’ve decided. My version of sucking on my thumb, I guess. Self-soothing. When I kept waking up last night, all I wanted was to be able to fix myself a nice, hot cup of some fruit tea. The answer to this is to get an electric kettle, I know, but I’ve been holding off just in case there is one in the potential kitchen (I’ve been trying to figure out how to refer to it. Potential kitchen isn’t quite the effect I’m going for. Sometimes you can pair a noun with an unexpected adjective to create a noun phrase that is unique but also carries meaning beyond the two words. But in this case I haven’t found the right adjective yet. Damn, I really want some tea.) So, not hopeful kitchen, not unexpected kitchen, not expected kitchen. Hoped-for kitchen? Not unique in any way, but perhaps the phrase that best captures the situation. The HFK. (Now that sounds like an acronym for the secret police).

But here are my moments of yea (so far):

- Walking into my room for the first time and discovering that it was warm

- Seeing the washing machine in the hallway & the drying rack in my room

- Finally finding the beans in the supermarket (I had looked in three supermarkets had hadn’t seen any. When I found tahini in one place, though, I figured there had to be beans. Just a matter of not giving up.)

- Big one: seeing a person at the airport with my name on a sign. I had been told that someone would be there, but, I’ll admit, I had my doubts.

Things that intimidate or concern me:

- Not having a stove or sink

- Having to buy meat from someone standing behind a counter. I don’t even do this is the States because I can’t identify the parts of some animal. Now I have to do it in Russian? (See why I was so intent on finding beans?) The yea part of all this is that at least I probably won’t have to learn the words for the parts of a pig (muslim country, you know). On the other hand, there’s that whole mutton thing to deal with.

- Will I get lonely? I spent yesterday by myself, and even that was tough. I’m a loner by nature, but I’ve spent the past couple of years sharing an office with someone and working closely with groups of people. And then there’s the whole living with someone. I was just getting used to that, and I don’t even have a flat mate here.

- No gym and no place to run. This is a big one. I need physical activity for my sanity. For now I’ll just have to slap on the Yak Trax and try to walk quickly through the city. But this one does concern me.

- The older I get, the more spoiled I get about food. Unfortunately, I’ve finally made the link between what I eat and how I feel. This has led to me becoming extremely picky about what I eat. Less salt, less sugar, more whole grains, lean meat, lots of veggies… Yeah, I’m going to have a problem with this one.

LATER.

The thing about moving to a foreign country, at least for me, is that the highs are higher and the lows are lower. Right now, the ultimate high: I have tea.

My search for tea in various countries could form the basis of a travelogue, if I ever wanted to go in that direction.

A BIT LATER

I’m trying on-so-hard to not be disappointed. Thinking about the concept of heaven or any type of afterlife, really. It’s easy to bear a great number of difficulties if you fully believe that at any moment, things will improve. I was willing to bear the temporary situation of not having a kitchen or a sink because, in my mind, I had created an imaginary kitchen with not just a sink and a stove, but an oven as well. (And some additional outlets).

Alas, it was not to be. My kitchen, so to speak, is a hot plate in my room. Same outlet that the television, fan, laptop, blow-dryer, and reading lamp will all be using. My sink will remain the tub. So much for the container of baking powder I brought with me. Seven months of stir-frys and a room that will soon smell of cooking oil.

Oh, and the washing machine doesn’t work.

And so I will cope with this the same way I cope with everything. I will feel sorry for myself for about five minutes, and then I will begin the process of adjusting to my new reality. I will go to the store and buy some cooking oil and beans, I will start soaking the beans, and tomorrow for dinner I will have a nice veggie and bean soup. And now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I will be able to make myself a nice cup of tea.

I had been wondering why this was considered a difficult gig—a hardship gig, almost. Now I see why. For me (of all people!) to not have a working kitchen… well, that’s a bit rough. I will openly and freely admit to having become spoiled on the kitchen front.

BUT – here I am. And I’m starting to think that it doesn’t really matter if I can’t identify the meat I’m buying since it’s all going to go into a pot of soup anyway.

: )

LATER STILL

Not to brag or toot my own horn or anything like that, but I must say, I’m quite impressed with my (nearly) indomitable spirit. Nine hours have passed since the hot plate incident and since then I’ve built a functioning kitchen and worked out a routine. First, I moved the television away from the one working outlet and placed the hotplace on the TV stand. I then moved the cabinet with the cooking utensils next to it. I went to the grocery store and picked up soap and a sponge, some oil, some spices (oddly enough, I was totally unable to find salt. Go freakin’ figure), some beans, some tea (Hurray for loose leaf Lipton Yellow Label!), some onions, some leeks, some carrots, some cauliflower, and a couple of plastic containers. The plan: make soup for dinner.

When I got home, I washed all the dishes in the tub and set them on my windowsill to dry. (When I say all the dishes, what I mean is the one plate, the one bowl, the one pot, the one skillet, and the three knives…).

Boiled a couple of eggs and destroyed the pot. Who the hell puts plastic on a container intended for cooking. Ok, I admit, destroyed is putting it a bit strongly. How about “made it very difficult to actually handle the pot when it is hot”? But lunch consisted of bread, cheese, and apple, and a boiled egg. Yummy.

Got my teaching schedule: six straight hours of teaching, four different levels. Prep is going to suck, but I’m kinda looking forward to it. It will be a welcome relief after… well, you know. I get so, so nervous when I have to start teaching, but let’s face it—I like to be in charge. I don’t know what I need to be front and center, all eyes one me. I’d much prefer to play the role of puppeteer. But, in a pinch… well, I’ll take what I can get.

Oh, and I get to write my own tests and come up with my own grading system (based, of course, on speaking, listening, reading, and writing). Should be fun.

Tomorrow’s projects: start prepping my classes, find a place to run, visit a yoga center, meet the director of the school, find salt, find a broom.

Other things I’ve managed to accomplish:

- putting up an extra sheet for use as a shower curtain. Yeah, it gets wet, but it’s so thin that it dried super-quickly. AND it gives me a bathroom “towel” to dry my hands on.

- Determined that there really is nothing worth seeing several blocks East, West, and South of me. But the mountains are South. And as soon as it gets warm enough…

- Bought a power strip that doesn’t work.

- Bought a phone card. Oh, reminds me—I need to charge my phone tonight. Hm, charge the phone or the computer. Toughie.

Bishkekekekekekek

2012-01-04T08:34:00.001-05:00

January 3, 2012

Made it to Bishkek. Let me just say—it’s so, so, so nice to have someone pick you up from the airport. After a 24-hour travel experience, the absolute last thing you want to have to do is deal with the taxi drivers crowding around the doors of an airport. I would say that I’m never going to take another job where someone isn’t there to pick me up, but I know myself too well. After all, whatever happened to “I’ll never start a job where I have to move to a cold, Slavic, northern country in the middle of winter”? Yeah. See what I mean?

So now I’m in my room. Just got back from the supermarket. It’s half a block away from me—amazing. Pickings are slim (even with my nonexistent knowledge of either Russian or Kyrgyz, even I was able to discern a paucity of edible items—the store mainly consisting of aisles of Tupperware, dishes, laundry detergent, and soap (and entire aisle of soap, as a matter of fact). But I was able to pick up breakfast (and a couple of bananas, of all things) and toilet paper. So, I’m back in my room, noshing and typing.

But no tea. And therein lies my biggest concern to date. I have a room, a toilet, a bathtub, a refridgerator, and a small accumulation of pots and dishes. But no sink, no oven—in other words, no way to cook food or even boil water. This, in my opinion, is a problem. When I oh-so-delicately pointed out my situation to the academic manager who had come to pick me up from the airport, she seemed quite surprised, and thought that there was another room that may or may not have a stove in it. (Oddly enough, the missing sink didn’t register with me until after she had left. But as I have a working tub, it’s not an immediate concern of mine.) As for the potential stove, she promised she’d call and ask someone who may or may not be able to look for it today. And she left.

And then it came time to plug my laptop in and try the wi-fi access. (Yes, I know, the problems of the privileged). I looked at the walls of my room, searching for an outlet. I found one, right by the window. And… that was it. Just the one. Not even a double outlet, just a place for me to plug in one thing at a time. But what concerns me even more is what I noticed when I started looking at it a bit more closely. Turns out there’s a wire leading from the outlet to the window—and out of the window. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. My room does not actually have electricity. I have two wires, with electricity, leading into my room. One is connected to this outlet, apparently tacked to the wall but not connected to anything in the wall. The other wire? Just sort of hanging out, little pieces of metal wire coming out of the end.

Worst of all, the other new teacher who arrived on the same flight from Moscow was teaching in Libya before this, so I dare not complain about anything. ; )

My roommate in the Czech Republic, when asked what impressed her most about the Czechs, replied that it was their ability to shower without a shower curtain and not get water anywhere. I don’t have matching skills, so I’m expecting that my shower will create a bit of a mess.

Did I mention that there’s a 16 kg kettle ball in my room? It’s next to the small-ish pile of dishes.

Re-launch

2012-01-04T08:33:00.000-05:00

January 2, 2012

My first impression of the airport at Moscow—this up disembarking from the plane—was that it smelled like stale cigarettes. Not unexpectedly, by the way. I was more surprised that the smell was not stronger.

Hm. For some reason, my computer keeps changing my font size, type, and color without any input from me. It also keeps changing the location of my cursor. I’ll be in the middle of typing a word and the cursor will more about half a sentence back, meaning that the rest of the word I was in the process of typing is now in the middle of a word I completed seconds before. And I feel like my computer keeps trying to change the format or style or something of this document. There is a blue line that keeps appearing in different locations. Damn machine.

Damn, I’m tired and fuzzy. Difficult to write anything substantial or interesting or intelligent when all one is inclined to do is stare at the glare of the lights on the terminal floor. Shiny floor. Nice.

Flight leaves at 10:55. It is now 7:35. And I’m tired of my cursor moving. Time for a nap, I think…

Been a while...

2010-05-02T03:27:00.005-05:00

It is now 4:30, May 2. I couldn't sleep, so for some very odd reason I started flipping through old high school yearbooks and reading what people wrote to me. The highlights:

"So whatever did happen to your blue hair? It was cool! It's been great this year your Deirdrelossophies are the only thing that keep me going. Stay original!"

"You have been like a sister to me; not only a martian sisster but also a real sister (one who I get along with)."

"Your pretty weird but I think individuality is a cool thing. Which it is."

"You are a great friend and an even better percussionist. I hope to see you next year. It would be a waste of some excellent talent if you stopped. I couldn't have made it through either season without you. P.S. Please stay next year! I need you!"

And my absolute favorite:

"Well, you're a neat person to know, keeps me on my feet and makes me aware of my mistakes."

But the one that meant the most to me (and still does) was from E.T. in my senior yearbook:

"Out of all the percussionists I have ever met your are the best and the nicest. I would like you to know you are a great role model and I hope I can succeed you God knows I could never exceed you."

That was from a guy who, at sixteen, was still a freshman. His girlfriend convinced him to join the marching band and, because he was so big--at least three times my size--they put him in marching percussion, on base drum. He had problems concentrating and learning new material, was always making mistakes in both playing and marching, and had some serious anger management issues. I worked with him as best I could, but I also didn't take any of his crap. I remember one day, when he was really frustrated after a long practice, he stormed into the instrument room and threw his bass drum into the corner.

"E-!" I yelled at him. "You do NOT treat your drum that way!" I was standing right next to him. He still had his bass drum mallets in his hand as he turned around to face me. He raised his right hand as though to strike me with the large mallet. I stood there, looking up at his face, not backing down, not moving. After several seconds, he finally lowered his arm and stormed off. "I f-ing quit" he muttered as he stormed out of the instrument room.

He was back at practice the next day.

I used to wonder what happened to him after I graduated. I don't think he stayed in band too long. School was just not the right environment for him. I do know that he liked cars, and I had heard, a few years after I graduated, that he had found work as an auto mechanic and was doing quite well--was maybe in charge of the shop or something. So I like to think that he maybe found his place in the world.

More hiking

2009-07-12T05:38:00.007-05:00

First of all, I'd like to mention that I had written quite a bit about living in Ecuador that I wanted to post here, but for some reason, I can no longer transfer text from MS Word to Blogger. Well, I can, but then blogger only recognizes it as hypertext and will not publish it. I have a feeling that the problem is on the MS Word end of things. I have the newer version (which I hate, hate, hate), and since then, I have been unable to transfer text. So... you will not be able to read my insights on the language and life of Quito. Shame, really, because while most of what I wrote was the standard crap, there was actually some decent stuff there. Oh well.

Anyway, I went on another hike yesterday. This one was excellent! It was downhill, so not too intense--and, most importantly, no super steep cliffs to pick my way down. Anyway, here are some pictures. My camera really isn't that great--it just doesn't capture the crispness of the landscape and the colors. Older camera, but at least I won't cry when someone steals it. Well, if there are pictures on the memory card, I might squeeze out a tear or two...

This is from my trip up the Teleferico a couple of weekends ago. Here you can see Quito...

A picture of me in the restaurant at the top of the Teleferico. Just in case you've forgotten what I look like...

This is Cotopaxi.

This is from yesterday's hike.

Also from yesterday's hike.

My day...

2009-07-04T20:36:00.002-05:00

Warning to my friends and family: travel with me at your own risk. I can usually get to places. Getting back, however, is another matter...
Today I went to Cotopaxi with a friend. We had meet with a guide, a friend of one of my friends here, and discussed a trip to Cotopaxi, the big volcano here. It is 5897 meters, and basically, when it finally blows, there is going to be a very big mess to clean up...
We meet at 7am in Quito, and headed down. Cotopaxi is about two hours south of Quito by car, and our guide had a car. Well, he had what could very justly be called a shell of a car. We couldn't quite see the road through the floor, but it was obvious that there was very little separating us from it. Wires were dangling from several locations on the driver's side, and thus we rattled our way down to the entrance of the Parque Nacional Cotopaxi.
From the main road, it is about 6km to the entrance, where you pay. We drove the entire distance through a thick, eerie fog. Our guide had picked up a man, an indigenous, who worked near the entrance selling alpaca ponchos to tourists, to give him a ride. He and my friend spent the bumpy ride arguing about having children. To this man, there was something fundamentally wrong with any woman who doesn't want children. (A normal attitude here. As my friend, another female, put it "no soy machina de hijos").
From the entrance, it is another 13km to the Laguna de Limpiopunga. At this point, the fog was so thick that we couldn't see the giant ditches which had formed in the dirt road we were on. We drove through a couple of shallow rivers and bumped along. All we could see were the plants by the side of the road: thick grasses dripping with water from the low clouds. It was cold in the car, but I was reluctant to add any layers, knowing that it would be even colder up ahead.
Once we reached the Laguna, the fog started to clear slightly, and we could catch a glimpse of the base of Cotopaxi. From the Laguna, it was about 12km up a series of switchbacks to a parking lot. Once in the parking lot, we had already crossed the snow line. The snow at that point wasn't everywhere on the ground, but it was definitely there. Here, again, the fog was so thick that we couldn't see much of anything. There were no trees and no plants of any type. At this point, we were at about 4,200 meters above sea level. The wind was blowing so hard that we could barely open the car doors, and it ws snowing. We bundled up in everything we had brought and set out and up.
Cotopaxi, remember, is a volcano, so we were walking in volcanic ash and rock. Imagine walking up a steep sand dune, the earth shifting beneath your feet with every step, with the wind blowing stinging snow against your face and taking away the very little oxygen you are fighting to breath. That is Cotopaxi.
I made it up a ways, but then stopped when we reached a ridge, drop offs to either side of the path. At this point, my fear of heights kicked in. Now, my fear of heights is a funny thing. Some days it is better, some days it is worse. But on just about any day, when I am faced with a strong wind and a cliff, I freeze. So I froze. When my friend and the guide caught up to me, I announced that I would psychologically not be able to go any further. My friend announced that she ws freezing and not having any fun. And so we turned back to the car, not having made it that last 1km up to the refugio.
Now, I like hiking. But when I picture hiking, I picture trees and plants and nature. This wasn't quite climbing, in the sense that you need special equiptment, but it was somewhere between hiking and climbing. Treking, the guide called it, and I think it is a good word to use to differentiate it from hiking as I've always pictured it.
Once in the car, we decided to go to the Laguna and walk around it. We bumped down the switch backs, gradually leaving the snow and wind behind. But before we reached the Laguna, we heard something snap, and the car stopped.
Our guide got out and disappeared under the car on the passenger's side. He got back in, face grim, and tried to start the car. Nothing. He got back out again and disappeared. A few seconds later, back in the car, he managed to get it to start, but it wouldn't go. Car off again, he turned to us and gave us our options: wait in the car until another car passed and see if we could get a ride from them, or start walking to the main road. We chose the walk.
So I spent my day walking from the base of Cotopaxi to the entrance to the park. And now you all know why I carefully gave the distances from one landmark to the next. All in all, it wasn't too long of a walk, and the ground was more or less level. But I had everything I had brought with me in my backpack and, as this is Ecuador, it started to rain while we were walking.

So now I need to decide if I want to go on another hike tomorrow. I think I may wait until tomorrow morning and decide then. It will be a mountain, but when I ask about it, I can't really get a straight answer. People here are not so good at giving direct information. I have no idea if it will be like Cotopaxi or if it will be more like Pasachoa, where I went a couple of weeks ago. I'm afraid that if I go and it is straight up a windy mountain, well, I'm not going to be able to do it. And I will be stuck waiting for the rest of the group to go up and come down--and probably waiting in the rain. So, I just don't know.

2009-07-04T20:33:00.001-05:00

For some reason, I'm having problems posting to blogger...

More Buenos Aires pictures

2009-06-02T19:57:00.005-05:00

So, here are some more Buenos AIres pictures (as promised). Enjoy!

This is a picture of me eating a french fry. Oddly enough, in almost all of the pictures of me from this trip, I'm eating. Hmm....

The Casa Rosada (presidental palace). I think it was pink even before they elected a female president.

In San Telmo.

In La Boca.

In a park in Palermo.

Buenos Aires

2009-06-01T08:05:00.004-05:00

My trip to BA was excellent. I got to see my friend Natalia, who I hadn't seen since I lived in Valence, France (about four years ago now) and meet her mother and boyfriend. She is super happy in her life there--a lot happier than she was back when we were in France. We talked about the states of our lives then and now, and about being content professionally and personally. All in all, a wonderful visit.

BA is an amazing city, and I plan to return some day (when I have more time and money). There are not a lot of museums, but there is so much to do. There are cafes and bars (and people are not afraid to go out after it gets dark), there is shopping, there are tango classes, there are festivals and concerts and outdoor markets. I spent most of my time just walking around the city. I would leave about 9 or ten in the morning, and walk until about six or seven. I ate pizza and pasta and alfahores and empanadas and chorripan and meat.

Anyway, here are some pictures of my trip. Hope you enjoy!

Ok, I'm off to the gym to try to work off some of those alfajores I ate in BA. I'll post more pictures later.

New Apartment

2009-03-28T18:13:00.006-05:00

Okay. Back in Ecuador after a brief week in the States (drove through Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and back to Virginia to catch a plane at 6:30 in the morning). I'm now in a new apartment that has (get this!) wireless internet access. This means that I can waste massive amounts of time mucking about on Facebook or reading the news or just following brainless links. Life is good.

It also means that I can post pictures of my new apartment. This place is great. It is less than I was paying before, it is about four blocks from where I work, and everything is included (gas, electricity, water, cable, internet). Oh! It even has an oven and HOT WATER. Yes, life is good.

The apartment is on the top floor of a building--There are three floors beneath us. I think the apartment was a later addition built onto the roof. We have to climb a staircase, exit the building, then we get to our front door.

This is the view from our balcony/entranceway. As you can plainly see, there is a very nice looking church just a few blocks south of us. And you can't see it in this picture (Quito weather has been pretty nasty lately), but just to the left of the church is the Angel of Quito atop the Panecillo. A little to the left of the church (just out of this picture) is the planetarium, again, clearly visible from our apartment in good weather. Further to the right are mountains (including Mount Pichincha), and further to the left is Amazonas Street (which I can see from my window).

This is what my room looks like after I have spent a week teaching (and feeling sick). Right after I took the picture, I cleaned my room. I don't know why I didn't take another picture. Oh, right. I was on the internet looking at a story about Michael Jackson's body double.

Here is our kitchen. I LOVE this kitchen. Well, yeah, there are some strange things about it. For example, we might just possibly have the world's smallest kitchen sink. There is also no room for the dish rack next to the sink (kinda poor planning, if you ask me, but...). Sh*t, I can't complain. I have both an oven AND hot water AND a microwave AND a sandwich maker. I feel so spoiled.

Right behind the barrier is the little sink where I can do my laundry. It is a bit too small for jeans and sweaters, but for tops and underwear and socks, it is just perfect.

This is the living and dining area. Nice TV with a cable box AND a DVD player. I would have liked to have had a couch, but again, who am I to complain? I have a luxury apartment.

So, I used the pronoun "we" in describing my apartment. My roommate is another teacher. She is from Canada, from (get this) Metcalf. I KNOW! She was amazed that I had ever even heard of it, let alone been there.

So, this cycle I'm only teaching four hours a day, instead of my usual six. It means less money, but I'm such a tight-wad that I think I have enough money saved from teaching to make it the next two months. After that--well, we shall see what happens. I'm currently taking six hour of private Spanish classes a week, plus the hour a day conversation class at my school. That adds up to about eleven hours of Spanish a week. I also joined a gym a couple of months ago (it is one block south of my school and it is AMAZING. Well, when the machines don't break on you). I'm also still trading Tai Chi for Balintawak lessons (though we didn't do anything last week because I was sick).

Well, I'm hungry (as usual). So I'm going to rummage through the fridge and see what I can find...

Couple of Pics

2009-02-01T13:14:00.005-05:00

Here are a couple of pictures from my trip to the jungle. I haven´t been taking that many pictures in general because I don´t want anyone to steal my camera.

2009-02-01T13:14:00.001-05:00

October 8, 2008

I officially begin working tomorrow. I have a meeting from 9am to 3pm, during which I will receive my text book so that I can begin preparing my classes for next Tuesday. Of course, I won’t officially know what classes I will be teaching until next Monday afternoon, but my boss is pretty sure that my schedule will not change. If it does, I will still have at least part of the class prepped for the future.

I will be teaching the Academic 1 class, which is sort of a gateway class. Apparently, it is a tricky class for both teacher and students—lots of grammar, that sort of thing. The thing is, I looked at the text book already, and it is mostly metalanguage, the language used to talk about language. So the emphasis is not so much on usage, but on being able to speak about usage. I’m not sure about that. I think I need to see how it fits in with the larger picture—what the eventual outcome will be. Overall, I’m not a big fan of teaching students metalanguage that they don’t absolutely need (Noun, they need. Nous Clause, not necessary for communication). So we shall see.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to try to learn Spanish. While most of my brain power is taken up with that task, there remains a small part of mind, separate. This part is sitting back, observing the process that I go through as I try to make meaning of Spanish. As a language teacher, it is fascinating to me not just the language itself, but the process of learning it. I think perhaps my most valuable resource as a language teacher is myself as a language student.

There is a definite process, and it reflects the process I learned so much about in my Second Language Acquisition class. My Spanish began with basic phrases: How are you? I am fine/tired. Tengo hambre. These are all things I needed for my first few days, and I already knew them from my Spanish class back in the States.

Next, I began to separate out Ser and Estar—a process which will continue for years. It is not Soy cansada, it is Estoy cansada. I also began to use mini formulas to express wants and needs: Quiero, Pienso que, and so on. I also tried to interact more with my family here, to tell them what I was going to do during the day: Voy a… Along with this came better listening comprehension, but only if words were spoken clearly and well-enunciated, and tenses were kept in the present. Context, context, context.

The next stage, the one I am on now, is an attempt to learn many, many more words and to start using the past tense (simple past). I am learning words and tenses as I need them. So I know how to say I was (fue) but not we were or they were. Most of my past tense experiments involve regular –ar verbs, though I did learn the regular –ir verb ending for Yo today.

All of this is driven by a deep desire to communicate. I am constantly so frustrated with my inability to say what I want to say and my inability to understand everything that everyone here says to me. But this is all motivation and affective filter. One of the girls here is not happy, and she has no desire to speak or study or learn Spanish. Another girl here adores Latin American culture, and she does everything that she can to speak in Spanish whenever possible.

There are certain corrections that my family here always makes: mal and malo, bien and bueno (adverbs versus adjectives). None of that registers with me because I’m simply not ready to learn it yet. (The same with Por and Para. Just can’t grasp it yet.)

Recently, I feel like my listening comprehension is getting worse. I think it is because my family here is speaking more quickly with me and using more tenses (they are definitely using the past tense with me). But it seems like, as soon as I start to feel that I am understanding everything better, I wind up trying to have a conversation with someone I can’t understand at all. Regardless, I do believe that my Spanish is improving (and rather quickly. The other girls here spend four hours a day in Spanish classes and I spend an hour a day in a lesson. And I feel like my overall progress is not that far behind theirs). The good news is that I am speaking much less Franspanol. (Although, oddly enough, I have been speaking a bit more Spanglish. Go figure).

October 11, 2008

Quiet Saturday morning. My host mom and her family are spending the weekend at the coast (it is the anniversary of her father’s death. Ah, and speaking of anniversaries, my birthday is the anniversary of my host mom’s husband’s death, 14 years ago. Needless to say, I’m not planning a big party.) I was supposed to be the only one in the house (my host mom made sure that the other two guests here—one American and one Dutch girl (different people from those I introduced earlier)—had weekend plans so she wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of them. And me? She asked me if I needed any food and told me to make sure I locked the gate before going to sleep.

Anyway, I was both looking forward to and slightly dreading two days of solitude. I haven’t been alone much in the past four weeks (other then an hour or two in my room, reading or writing on my laptop). Normally that would wear on me, but here I seem to have struck a nice balance. I was talking to my mom yesterday about my need for a familial support network (more than just having friends or acquaintances, I like to feel like I have family. Of course, I classify most of my friends as family, so…). Ah yes, anyway, as I said, I was supposed to be here by myself, but the other American girl, who had made plans to go to Mindo with some neighbors, wound up staying here. So now I am not alone, but I’m actually happy with the situation. We went out and had Vietnamese food last night (tofu and veggies on a shredded salad—not a starch in sight!).

And now I am sitting at the dining room table, eating yogurt with granola and bananas and drinking my tea. I am boiling water to put in the water cooler (can’t drink the tap water here, so we keep boiled water in a large cooler in the kitchen) and also preparing some ginger tea for later. Nothing too exciting (but even if there were anything exciting going on, I wouldn’t write about it on this very public ‘blog).

Today I plan on mailing my absentee ballot, if I can find either a post office or the American Embassy (from the information sheet I received with my ballot, it looks like I can mail my ballot from the Embassy for free). I also need to get on the internet for awhile and then start planning my first few days of classes. I don’t have my book yet, but one of the coordinators at the school offered to e-mail me the first unit in the book as a PDF file. So, while I won’t have any of the teacher’s materials, I will at least have enough to start to plan what I want to teach my first few days. I’ve already looked at the book, and the first unit is insane. I’m going to be teaching dependent and independent clauses on the FIRST DAY of class. I’ve been raking my brains, trying to come up a way to present it to my students. I’m going to do my best to come up with a way that is as inductive as possible (though I know that I will reach a point in the lesson where I need to explicitly explain the information to my class).

It is crazy—just looking at the book and starting to plan, I’m excited. I didn’t really realize how much I missed teaching until I looked at the book and thought, “Oh sh-t, how the h-ll and I going to do this?” It is like a puzzle that I get to solve. And not just some simple puzzle with only one or two dimensions—I have to think about teaching methodology, psychology, sociology and sociolinguists, grammar, reasoning processes, second language acquisition theory, organization, timing, classroom management… not the mention all that I have to keep in mind while I am physically in the classroom: error correction, timing and management, classroom control, language use (no Spanish in my classroom!)… Yeah, I’ve missed teaching.

December 12, 2008

Well, I survived my first cycle. Eight weeks of six hours a day contact time, plus hours of prep time and test grading at home. I only got sick once (well, twice, if you include stomach issues, which are so common down here I’m inclined to not include my particular stomach incident—though it does come with a story, which I suppose I will relate later), which is pretty amazing, when you consider that I was dead on my feet most of the time. Weekends were busy with more class prep and social activities (believe it or not, I did manage to maintain a rather healthy social life through all this). So now I have a month of vacation, and I plan on using some of that time to catch up on the blog. The question is where to start…

I was teaching three classes of Academic 1, known as the hardest class for both teachers and students. Students go from having two grammar points a week to two grammar points a day. Teachers need to help them adjust to the new pace and complete grammar focus. Rarely is there time for games—just grammar, grammar, and more grammar. I like grammar, and it was too much for me. I would rather have gone a bit slower, done less grammar, but really worked on it. But one must follow the book. So my students are I were off on a rapid tour of English grammar (as an example, we managed to cover all twelve verb tenses and aspects in, let’s see, six days. That is just beyond insane).

My first class began at 7am, which meant waking up at 5am to get ready, eat breakfast, and walk to class. It ended at 9, which is when my second class began. So, four hours of straight teaching, first thing in the morning. Then, off to an hour of Spanish class, followed by two free hours to run errands, prep classes, grade tests, request copies—random teacher stuff. Then, two more hours with my afternoon class (and I’ll be spending quite a bit of time talking about this class—I started to refer to them as my monsters, and I really dreaded going in to face them. In fact, I blame them for making me sick. I walked into the class fine, but came out feeling like I was going to die. Monsters.) After classes, more time to take care of random teacher errands or practice some Tai Chi with my friends or go to the Alliance Francais, then home to work on lessons until dinner, then more lesson planning, then a complete collapse into bed at about, uh, hate to say it, 9pm-ish.

My first week started fine. We had our teacher’s meeting on Monday, then our first day of class on Tuesday. On Wednesday, however, about an hour before my third class was supposed to start, I developed what I will euphemistically refer to as stomach issues (and what other teachers refer to as Ecuabelly). Now, I had purposely come down to Ecuador a month before I was supposed to start teaching for the sole purpose of contracting and then getting over any and all stomach issues before I had to face a class. My stomach, as usual, had other ideas. So, after pestering all the other teachers in the school (and the secretaries as well) for some type of medication that would have the same effect as a cork, I found myself in a pharmacy, ten minutes before class was set to start. Now, my 2-4 class was all teenagers, and the last thing I wanted to do on my second day of class was run to the bathroom every fifteen minutes (I tend to exaggerate in my stories, but this is no exaggeration. It was bad.) So I tried to explain to the pharmacist that I was having stomach issues and that I needed something quick. All this in Spanish, of course. He kept asking me if there was any way I was pregnant (embarazada, to which I of course said no, thinking that if he didn’t give me something soon, I was going to be very embarrassed in front of my class). Finally he game me something, which I gulped down as soon as I was out of the Pharmacy. I walked into class praying to the ancient volcano gods of Ecuador that there would not be an eruption (okay, so that was a little crass). Thankfully, the medicine did its job and the class went without incident.

Of course, the problem with having stomach issues is that it is impossible to eat anything, so I went a couple days without food. Not good when you are starting to teach and need all the energy you can get. But on Friday I managed to choke down a bit of food, and I may have actually eaten a meal over the weekend, so it all worked out.

December 21, 2008

Ha! So far, I have had less free time during my vacation than I had thought I would have. Of course, three hours a day of Spanish classes (and the resulting homework assignments) have made my life a little busy. So much for catching up on my ‘blog entries. I need to post something soon, however, or else people will wonder if I am still alive. Not having any internet access where I live (and being too lazy—and cheap—to walk down to the Mariscal to pay for internet access) means that I am so far behind on e-mails, Facebook, and my ‘blog that I could use the rest of my vacation time working only on getting caught up and still not be finished in time for school to start again.

Been feeling a little homesick this week. I doubt it is because it is so close to Christmas—I am used to spending holidays away from my family, in different countries. I think it is just a combination of factors. As busy as I am right now with my Spanish classes, I still have more time now to think about my family and friends than I did when I was teaching. Also, some of my friends in Ecuador are currently in the United States, spending Christmas with their families. Also, I’m in my third month here. That is usually when the second wave of culture shock hits. There is nothing specific I can put my finger on (unlike in Prague, where I could list just about anything as a cause of culture shock), but I do have certain symptoms of culture shock: not wanting to leave the house, feeling a bit down, a general sense of malaise… Granted, I could be mistaking culture shock for homesickness, or vice versa… or maybe it is a combination of the two. And, after a week and a half of vacation, I find myself eager to start teaching again, so I can throw myself into my work. Good coping mechanism or avoidance technique, I don’t know…

Homesickness or culture shock aside, I have to admit that a lot of things here are pretty good—and have fallen into place better than one might expect. After my first day of classes, I walked into the teacher’s room at my school and overhead one of the other teachers talking about Tai Chi. It turned out that he was interested in the same style of Tai Chi that I studied in Salisbury. So now we have a martial arts exchange: I’m teaching him Tai Chi and he is teaching me some Pilipino stick fighting. We were meeting for that three times a week (until he left with his family to visit Chicago for Christmas). He married an Ecuadorian and they have a kid (I’ll write more about them later because I do have a story), and they are all great: they’ve invited me to their house and they feed me good, non-rice food… and keep me supplied with books.

I’ve also become friends with the French teacher at my school, and we have been trying to get together about once a week to speak French. I have to say, there is nothing quite like spending six hours teaching English, then spending another couple of hours speaking French, then going home and speaking Spanish. It is exhausting, but the fact that I can do it still amazes and impresses me. None of these languages is perfect (yes, at this point, even my English is suffering a bit), but I feel like being able to function in three languages, even at a rudimentary level, is just pretty freakin’ cool. It is like that third language moves me to a new level…

It is interesting, too, how my brain stores and processes the three languages. Despite a few problems here and there (like fighting the urge to say, “I have hunger”), my English is more or less solid. Using English is still like breathing—completely natural and automatic. French and Spanish, on the other hand, are being storied in a different part of my brain. It is like I am keeping English in one room and French and Spanish together in a different room. This means that I really have to struggle to keep French and Spanish separate. If I use one language for long enough, I usually don’t have problems. But when I have to switch, then I start to mix words. And if, for example, I’m hanging out with a group of friends where one speaks French and Spanish and two speak Spanish and English, most of what I say is a mix of French, Spanish, and English. But code-switching in this way has always interested me, and I love doing it. It gives me so much more freedom to say exactly what I want to say than if I were confined to one language.

And I’m already thinking about what language I want to study next. I’m not going to start another language for another several years—I’m still learning Spanish and I really want to improve my French—but it is interesting to think about. For example, do I want to go the number route and learn Chinese or Hindu? Or maybe go political and learn Arabic. Or I could just learn Russian, which, let’s face it, would impress the shit out of people (and I’m not above wanting to impress). Or, I could go completely obscure and learn something like Welsh or Cherokee. So many languages, so little time. I almost wish I’d started with languages earlier in my life, but then I probably wouldn’t have focused on music. (In fact, the oboe would impress the shit out of people if they knew what it was. My problem is that I went just a little too obscure with that one…)

Ah, what else… oh, I just found out that any time I go to the doctor or dentist (yes, the dentist is included in this one) my co-pay is only two dollars. This doesn’t cover preventive care, but… wow. I do have some medical care when I’m in the States (as a result of having been in the Army, I can now use VA clinics for certain things), but the care is spotty (no one really knows what is covered and what isn’t and if there is a co-pay or not and, to me the most important, what happens if there is an emergency and I wake up in a civilian hospital) and there is not dental care. Not everything is perfect, though: if I go to the doctor, I need to go armed with enough Spanish that I can explain my problem to him or her and understand his or her response. On the other hand, most problems are going to involve the word stomach, and there really is a limited amount of vocabulary necessary to explain the symptoms of Ecuabelly…

But, back to my eight weeks of classes. Most of the time, things went well. My two morning classes were delightful, but my afternoon class was not great. Most of the students did not want to be there. Some would just sit in the back and speak Spanish. When I would try to get them involved with the class, they would turn to me with blank looks on their faces and blink a few times. A few students could barely string together a sentence in English. And when you contrast that with some other students I had in the class who were damn near fluent, well, you can see the challenge that presented. I know some of the students thought the class was boring, but what students don’t seem to understand is that an interesting class goes both way. The teacher can have interesting lesson plans and can make all the jokes in the world, but if the students don’t make any effort at all, the result is going to be as boring a class as it would be if the lesson plans themselves were boring. So much depends on the chemistry between the teacher and the students…

Then, on the third test, I caught two students cheating. They were the two worst students in the class, so why the cheated off each other, I will never know. Even without any penalty for cheating, their grades were in the 60s. Morons. Of course, when you catch students cheating, your stomach just drops--mainly from the hassle of having to deal with it. I would up giving the students zeros for the parts of the exam that were obviously copied. Yes, I let them off really lightly, but I knew they weren’t going to pass the class anyway, so I really didn’t care. Then, on the final exam, I made a point of moving the desks in the classroom as far apart from each other as I could. When the cheaters sat down, they tried to physically move their desks closer together, then got annoyed when I told them to move the desks back to where they were. Was I picking on them? Hell yeah, but I made sure to do the same to the entire class. Only pencils on the desk, everything else in backpacks, all backpacks on the floor, no one gets a test until everyone has followed the instructions…

And what I’ve discovered about myself as a teacher: I still need to work on classroom presence, but it is improving. I have almost endless patience when a student doesn’t understand the material, but I have almost no patience when I have to play disciplinarian. There have been times when I’ve wanted to scream at my students, but I always remember that screaming makes things worse (I remember that the teachers I had who were screamers were the ones that no one respected, but the teachers who managed to control their classes without screaming where the ones I respected the most. Hence…) I’ve actually found that the most effective way of focusing the class’s attention on my is to stop talking and just stare at them. They will continue to talk to each other for awhile, but then, one by one, they will notice me just standing in the front, doing absolutely nothing. This makes them uncomfortable, and they will start telling each other to be quiet. Thus, I’ve gotten the class to do the job of policing each other for me. And I really like having them be responsible for themselves and each other. I feel like so many students are just completely passive in the classroom. My best students are always the ones who are actively involved in their learning. They enter a classroom knowing what they want to learn and what they need to do to learn it. I am almost unnecessary—which is a good thing. But then there are the students who will not do anything unless explicitly told to do so. I want to figure out some way to help these students realize that they are more responsible for their learning than I am. I’d like to design my class so that, little by little, my students have to take more and more responsibility as the cycle continues. But something like that will take probably several cycles of experimentation and observation…

December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas! My host family is at the cost right now, so it is just another guest and me. This is a new guest, from the Netherlands. Her English is kind of so-so (she has a pretty thick accent), so I spend a lot of our conversations either pretending that I understand her or asking her for clarification. Ah, life in a foreign country…

Anyway, today I just sort of hung around the house. I watched a couple of movies, ate tons of leftovers from last night, and, uh, well, that’s it. Nothing too exciting there. But Sunday I leave for the jungle, so I figure I have to get my fill of boring before I take off.

Last night we had our big dinner, at about 10 in the evening. We had chicken and veggies AND a salad. I was just about in heaven. Two rounds of veggies in ONE DAY, let alone in ONE MEAL. Today I’ve been scarfing down leftover veggies as quickly as possible.

Anyway, enough about food. I still need to finish telling my stories from the past two months. After my first week, I fell into a routine: wake up, teach, prep, eat, prep, sleep. Saturdays I would go to the Valle and hang out with some friends (and practice some Tai Chi too). All in all, a pretty nice routine, but pretty exhausting.

Well, the weekend before our absolute last week of teaching, I went to the Valle. My friend, Chris, has a car, so Saturday morning Chris, his wife Sabrina, their four-year-old, Eric, and I piled into the car so Chris could drive us into Quito. We were four blocks from my house at a pretty crazy intersection. Most of the roads near my house are one way roads with no stoplights and awful visibility. Chris stopped at a stop sign, then decided to cross the intersection. There was a bus stopped in the first lane of traffic, so he couldn’t see what was in the other two lanes behind the bus. When he got around the bus, two motorcycles appeared on the other side of the bus. Now, as crazy as taxis drive through Quito, nothing beats motorcyclists for sheer insanity. Apparently, stop signs and stop lights don’t really apply to them. If you happen to be walking down a sidewalk, you still have to keep your eyes and ears open for motorcyclists. On the sidewalk with you. If you are crossing a street while the light is red, you need to check between the cars just in case a motorcyclist comes speeding through. Anyway, Chris and one of the motorcyclists saw each other, but it was too late. The motorcycle slammed into the driver’s side of Chris’s car, and the motorcyclist flew over the car, head over heels, and landed in the street on the other side of the car. He sat up almost immediately, so he was okay. But meanwhile, a large crowd of angry, screaming Ecuadorians surrounded the car and wouldn’t even let Chris move out of the intersection. (They did this because around here, if a car hits someone, that person is automatically responsible. Most people, after hitting a pedestrian or anything else, drive away as quickly as possible. That’s just accepted behavior here. When I told the story of the accident to people who had been living here for awhile, their first question was always, “Why didn’t he just drive away?”)

Anyway, Sabrina’s family owns a clinic so she called them to send an ambulance for the motorcyclist. Chris left the car in an attempt to calm the mob, leaving me in the car with the son. Now, I’ve learned quite a bit of Spanish since I’ve been here, but, quite frankly, mob Spanish usually isn’t covered in basic Spanish textbooks, so I was feeling a bit lost. I knew that Chris was going to have to go to jail, but I didn’t know if the police would send everyone in the car to jail as well. I went ahead and texted another teacher who lives a half a block from me, and she came down to try to help deal with the mob.

The mob finally let Chris move his car out of the intersection, and Sabrina went with the motorcyclist in the ambulance. The police still hadn’t arrived yet, but we figured that they wouldn’t need to talk to me. So Eric and I left the car and walked up to the other teacher’s apartment (and played Mortal Kombat with his toys. He was not happy to leave his dad, but once we got into the apartment, he was fine).

Well, the police eventually came, took Chris to jail, and impounded his car (and the motorcycle). Sabrina came back from the clinic, reported that the motorcyclist was fine, and took Eric to the police station to try to get Chris out of jail. But of course, it was not going to be simple. Here’s why: no one bribed the police at the scene of the accident. Again, back to my conversation about the accident with people who have lived here for awhile. After they asked why Chris didn’t just drive away, they asked why no one bribed the police when they arrived. Yup, that is what you are supposed to do. When I told my host mom about it, she said that I should have called her so that she could come down and arrange the bribe (apparently, whenever anyone in her family gets into trouble with the police, she is the one who is called to arrange the appropriate bribe).

So, flash forward to Sunday. Chris is still in jail, and Sabrina is still trying to get him out of there. The other teacher is calling her friend whose husband is a retired Colonial in the police so he can put pressure on his friends, who are all Generals, to put pressure on their subordinates to get Chris out of jail. But no dice. Even after the appropriate bribes are paid, there is a problem with the computers so the police can’t print the release paperwork. So Chris stays another night in jail.

Monday rolls around, all of Chris’s classes are being taught by substitutes, all the teachers in the teacher’s room are discussing the events of the weekend, and finally, around 2pm, Chris is released from jail. Of course, both his car and the motorcycle are still in the impound lot, so Chris and Sabrina have to pay the appropriate bribes to get the two vehicles released. They also have to pay to get the motorcycle fixed (and, of course, to get their car fixed, as it was damaged).

Tuesday morning, Chris strolls into the teacher’s room, and instantly starts making jokes about his Spanish immersion experience. Turns out he wasn’t in the main jail (which, apparently, is pretty easy to escape from anyway). The police have another, smaller jail that they use for traffic offenders. Chris “donated” money to the “upkeep” of the jail and, as a result, didn’t have an awful time there. He was even given a nickname and taught a rather impressive number of new words in Spanish (which made our Spanish teacher blush when Chris repeated them to her).

A few days later, when I was telling my mom about the accident, her response was, “Well, I bet you’ll never get into another car while you are in Ecuador.” To be honest, that had never even occurred to me. Which I find a little odd, because usually after accidents the last thing I want to do is get into another moving vehicle. So I don’t know what that says about me and how my attitude has changed (and, more interestingly, at least to me, is how quickly it has changed). But there you have it.

Anything else? Well, I think I related the story of my cheaters. For the final exam, I moved the desks apart in my classroom. When my cheaters came in, they sat down next to each other and moved their desks closer together. When I told them to move their desks back to where they were, they got all pissy. Oh well. I sat in the back of the classroom, perched on a desk, and watched everyone (but especially my cheaters) with eagle eyes. Boring as hell, but one of my cheaters had a 46% and the other had a 51%. So much for them. Now I just hope that they won’t be in my class next cycle. If either one of them is, I think I will suggest that they might learn more with another teacher…

Well, time to go cook dinner. More veggies (leftovers) and chicken, but I’m happy. I’m going to shred the chicken from the bone and use it to make some curry. Wish me luck…

January 18, 2009

Happy New Year! I have now been in Ecuador for (slightly) over four months. We just started a new teaching cycle last Tuesday. I have two Academic 1 classes, which is what I taught last cycle, and one Basic 2 class. It is a little bit tricky going from Academic 1 in the morning to Basic 2, which is right after my Spanish class. The good news is that I finish teaching at 2pm, so I can either go running in the park or go home and work on prepping classes for the next day.

I think I have a good group of students this cycle. The Basic 2 class is pretty easy, so I’m trying not to push my students too hard. My main goal for that class is to get them to speak (English) as much as possible. Oh, and improve their listening comprehension.

Other than that… no news, really. I survived my two weeks in the Jungle. It was a bit different than I was expecting. I figured I’d be able to take walks and hikes in the afternoon, but it wasn’t really like that. I was living with a family, which meant something a bit different. Basically, there was a plot of land right next to a river. There were huts scattered over the plot, and each individual part of an extended family lived there. In total, there were maybe 15 or more people, with each family unit sharing one hut. There was a communal kitchen hut with a table, and then there was another hut with bunk beds which is where my Spanish teacher and I slept. The huts were made of wood and had palm roofs. There were windows, but they were open to the outside. They had what was more or less chicken wire over them to keep the monkeys outside—though the monkeys knew how to work the doors and were constantly slipping into the kitchen to steal food. And before you all start romanticizing it, it was not cute or endearing. Monkeys are extremely annoying, mainly because they are so intelligent. One monkey in particular would hide himself and watch through one of the kitchen windows. When he saw that someone had left the door unlatched—even if just for a moment—he would tear into the kitchen and steal food—or open the jar of jam and start licking inside it. As soon as someone tried to chase him out, he would pee all over everything, then run out screaming. I probably consumed way too many monkey feces (and urine and saliva) while I was living there.

I was in the jungle for two weeks. I had four hours of Spanish classes every morning (one-on-one with my Spanish teacher, so they were pretty intense), then lunch, and then I was supposed to have an activity every afternoon. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. I did get to hike up to a waterfall and go tubing and spend a night in the jungle in a tent. Other than that, I just sat around and read. The compound was right next to a paved road, so sometimes I could walk along the road, but it didn’t really go anywhere. A few kilometers in one direction there was a botanical garden, which I visited (it was a mainly a few short paths through the jungle), and in the other direction was Chichicorumi, which was barely a wide place in the road. The highlight was a paved pavilion with basketball hoops. I did go there once and make a fool out of myself by attempting to play soccer with three guys. But it was something to do.

The town also had a little store, where I could buy a bar of soap to wash my clothes in the river. The river was downstream from a town, so it was not the cleanest. It was also very fast-moving, so it was pretty muddy. Nevertheless, that is where we did out bathing and laundry. Now I can say that I’ve sat by the edge of a river to wash my clothes. I have also developed a system for washing my hair in a fast-moving river with slippery rocks and clay at the bottom. Of course, I must have looked a fool to the family, who had grown up bathing in the river and knew how to do it without resorting to odd contortions, but my method got the job more or less done, and that was the main thing.

The jungle was not nearly as warm as I had imagined it would be, nor was it as humid. Salisbury or the Ozarks in August is way more miserable, as far as heat and humidity are concerned. The mosquitoes were nowhere near as bad as I thought they would be. Those in Maryland (and Jersey) are much, much worse. The fleas, on the other hand… Yes, living in close proximity to so many animals meant that I returned from the Jungle with flea bites covering my legs and lower arms. And when I say covering, I mean that there was not a single square centimeter in those areas that did not have at least three flea bites. Repellant does not seem to work against fleas, and I’ve always found flea bites to be much itchier than mosquito bites (which, at least on me, will go away after about an hour as long as I don’t scratch them). I got to the point where I couldn’t sleep at night because I felt like I had fleas crawling (that is, jumping) all over me (which was probably true, but I preferred to think of it as a hallucination rather than a reality). The first thing I did when I got back to Quito was stip naked, take a scalding hot shower (it is possible to get a scalding hot shower here—you just have to do it with a trickle of water), and wash all of my clothes in hot water. It didn’t even occur to me to look in a mirror until after I’d been back for several hours (there were no mirrors in the jungle, so I had gone two weeks without seeing myself. It’s a very interesting experience, and I would recommend it).

January 24, 2009

Think I’ve managed to come down with a case of food poisoning. That makes two cases in as many years (with several years before that trouble-free). Anyway, right now I feel like my world would be a lot better if someone would just kill me. I’m just trying to wait it out—and trying to avoid the temptation to put anything else in my stomach. My host mom keeps trying to get me to take medicine, but I figure that, unless the medicine will resolve the case of food poisoning (which it won’t), there is no point in taking anything. Of course, she also keeps suggesting I go see a doctor. I figure the Dr would just say, “yup, you have food poisoning. Drink plenty of water and don’t eat anything. By the way, that will be X dollars.” Better to just stay in bed and keep a clear path to the bathroom…

Two weeks of classes down. Having to prep for the Basic 2 class is killing me, though. I still have a lot of refining that I want to do for my Academic 1 classes, so between that and the Basic 2, I’m putting in several hours a day. I don’t even want to think about what my hourly rate works out to be. You know those commercials that talk about how there are many people in the world that live on a dollar a day? I figure I can’t be making much more than a dollar and hour. That’s just too depressing to even think about… so I’ll bemoan my poor stomach instead…

What other news…? I was briefly considering moving out. I even went and looked at an apartment—well, a room in an apartment. It would have been $300 a month. The location was really good, but the apartment itself was tiny—not really an improvement over where I am now. And for $300 a month, I was expecting something a bit more… shall we say, palatial? I would have been sharing the apartment with a roommate, which would have made the overall cost—for the two of us--$600 a month. That is just inconceivable.

There is also the fact that I’ve become somewhat spoiled. Okay, incredibly spoiled. I have someone hand wash my clothes once a week (granted, it sometimes takes about a week to get them back, but I’ve learned how to plan my work wardrobe around that, more or less). I also don’t have to clean anything. (I figure I’m going to completely forget how to clean anything and I will have to relearn everything when I return to the States). I don’t have to buy dish soap or salt or pepper… I would say that I don’t have to cook dinners, but dinner here usually consists of rice, overcooked pasta, or potatoes, so I usually say that I’m not hungry and then I go into my room and sneak food.

Speaking of food… that banana I tried to eat for lunch is still not sitting right. God, I miss familiar food. Meatloaf, quiche, salmon… all food that I prepare in the oven (oh, and the apartment I looked at didn’t even have an oven! For $600 a month! Unbelievable!). This morning, when I told my host mom that I was sick, she suggested that maybe I was not getting enough of a certain food. I almost said “vegetables,” but I was so miserable I didn’t really want to begin a discussion about food at that point. Right now I would love to eat some type of ice. Not ice cream, but some flavored ice—maybe lemon flavored. Yummy. Instead, I’m carefully sipping water. I hope I feel better tomorrow. Maybe I will even be able to eat something Monday. I’m not going to hold my breath, though…

Oh, I do have one odd piece of news (in fact, the main reason I pulled out my computer to type a bit). Last Sunday I went to a park with some friends from school. We had decided to have a picnic, so we all meet in the supermarket and bought some food (bread and cheese, yum!). We walked up to the park, then looked for a place to sit down. We looked at a couple of different spots under trees before we settled on one mostly dry spot next to a basketball game. We spread out, had our picnic, ate way too much, then started to pack up. Suddenly, we heard a crash. When we looked over in the direction of the crash, we saw that the tree we had almost sat under had fallen—right where we would have been sitting. And yet another random act of Ecuador.

January 25, 2009

Still not convinced that I am going to live through this most recent bout of food poisoning… Today is Sunday. The good news is that tomorrow is a test day, so I don’t need to do much of anything (other than grade a stack of tests—ugh). But Tuesday and Wednesday I’m subbing—in addition to my regular classes. So I better feel at least a little better by then.

In my Basic 2 class, we did a unit on describing people. One of the activities I had my students do was write a description of someone in the class that they could read out loud for the rest of the class to guess the person. I was pretty proud of the activity, until my students actually began it and I realized that there was one major factor that I had failed to take into account. The problem? In my class of 14 students, every description was exactly the same: “This person has black hair and brown eyes. This person is medium height. This person is Latino/Latina.” Yeah. I really didn’t think that one through all the way.

One of the things I haven’t done with this blog is talk about culture. Even though I don’t really look French or Czech, I was able to blend in a bit, especially after a few months in the countries. Here, there is absolutely no chance of that happening. I could be fluent in Spanish, with an Ecuadorian accent, and I would still never fit in. Europe doesn’t have as much diversity as the States—I still remember walking through the airport in the States after getting back from France and feeling overwhelmed at the sheer variety of people—but compared to Ecuador, Europe is the paragon of multi-ethnic diversity.

Granted, there is a type of diversity in Ecuador. There are three groups here: indigenous, mestizo, and colonial Spanish. The largest group is the mestizo, which is an ethnic mix of indigenous and colonial Spanish, and which accounts for slightly over 50% of the population. The indigenous group is the next largest, and the colonial Spanish group is pretty small. When I first arrived, I really couldn’t see that much of a difference among the different groups. Now that I’ve been here awhile, I can see the differences right away. One of the other teachers in the school (who, coincidently, is from Scotland) lived deep in the jungle for ten years. She said that when she started working at the school, she went into culture shock being surrounded by so many white people. She said that, for the longest time, she couldn’t tell any white people apart—they all looked the same to her. (That also reminds me of when I went to Otavalo with a girl from Holland and another girl from Germany. The girl from Holland bought something, and while the vender went to get change, the girl from Holland and I changed places without thinking. When the vender returned, she had no idea who to give the change to. She tried to give it to me at first, but then my reaction confused her, and she kept glancing from one of us to the other, trying to tell us apart.)

When I was in the jungle, I did have a similar experience to that of the Scottish teacher’s, though, of course, on a much small scale. The family I was staying with operated as a sort of “indigenous jungle family” living museum, which means that they occasionally had tourists on the compound. I remember the first group of tourists I saw after living on the compound for a few days. I was amazed at how white they looked—I was convinced that they must be Americans or Europeans. Nope. They were Mestizos, from Quito. (I do feel the need to point out that there were no mirrors there, so I hadn’t seen my face in several days at this point).

Ah, and I forgot the last group-which in itself is quite telling. There are Afro-Ecuadorians, though most of them live in a certain province on the coast. Racism against people with black skin is alive and well here—and pretty openly accepted, from what I can tell. I remember a conversation I had with some Ecuadorian friends a while back that was so odd my mind convinced me that I had misinterpreted some Spanish at some point, but which in retrospect makes perfect sense. Basically, they asked me if I would ever consider dating a black person. Their response to my answer seemed, to me at least, so exaggerated that I had no idea how to interpret it—it was more or less out of my realm of cultural understanding. Now, of course, I understand.

Basically, in Quito, you never see a black person with anyone other than another black person. I mean, never. There are gradations in skins color from indigenous to Mestizo to Colonial, but there are never any gradations from coffee to toffee to milk chocolate to cream. There is one shade of black here. One of my Spanish teachers told me the story of the one black girl at her University (one of the main Universities in Ecuador). This poor girl was so harassed that she eventually had to drop out of school. Poof. There went the one black girl at that entire school. I’ve heard stories about African-American exchange students from the States—taxis not only would refuse to pick them up, but the taxi drivers would shake their fingers at the students. And of course, people would cross the street so that they wouldn’t have to walk past them.

That, of course, brings to mind the idea of safety in Quito. Staying safe in Quito… now there is a mentally, physically, and psychologically draining activity. Everything requires so much more thought and planning. Everything involves going against principles which, even though they are not universally followed in the United States, are held up as ideals to which we should all aspire. The main one? The idea that you cannot judge a person based on how they look. That person wearing sweats might be the next Einstein or Bill Gates. That person in a business suit might be an asshole or he might be a philanthropist. You just never know. Here, in Quito, you have to be able—and willing—to make snap judgments on ever single man, woman, and child in your field of vision (and those behind you). Your ability or inability to do so—well, it means your safety. You have to walk down the street aware of every single person around you. You have to keep an eye on which stores are open, just in case you need to go into one quickly. You have to watch traffic, just in case you need to cross the street quickly. You need to watch out for anything unusual, because anything out of the ordinary is usually not good. Ecuadorians have been raised in this environment, so it comes naturally to them. Me? I’m exhausted after a half-hour of this. I’ve spent almost 30 years dead set against the idea of carrying mace or weapons. Now I find myself having discussions with the other teachers about the pros and cons of different weapons, and where to find the best prices. Is it better to have a traditional container of mace, or is it better to have an innocuous-looking pen-shaped mace? And mace is only good against maybe two people are the most. Blackjacks are nice, but you have to get pretty close to use them, and again, they are not useful against a group of people. Knives and guns are pretty much out, especially for foreigners. And how smart is it to run away from a person with a knife? I’ve known several people who have done it, but still…

Getting into taxis with two men in the front—no way in hell. Walking by yourself before 6am or after 6pm—stupid, even if it is just a couple of blocks. The windows have bars, as do the doors. Most small corner stores have a gate that you have to pass money and goods through. Everyone knows that parks are dangerous. A deserted street? Bad idea, even if it is high noon. That person walking down the street with his hand in his pocket? What are his clothes like? What kind of shoes is he wearing? How is he walking? Are there other people around me? Would they help me? Probably not. Cross the street? No, but it is time to buy some bread in this little store. Ah, good, he has walked past and not even looked in my direction.

This all sounds to paranoid (though my friends here would probably just laugh at it all. We’ve all developed an odd sense of humor about it, our way of trying to balance those ideals of the United States with our need to remain safe in a world where we are all marked as blond, white, ATM machines. (This might not bother me so much if I were actually rich. But, damnit, I work my ass off for the little amount of money that I make. I don’t want to lose a penny of that money to some asshole with a knife.)

Meanwhile, I dream of finding a job in the States where I can afford nice things—a car, an apartment, some nice scented lotion. I’m becoming increasingly materialistic (especially about a car. I really would like to have a car.) Naturally, now is not the best time to be dreaming of a job in the States where I can afford these things. I would pick a slow-down in the economy to start developing a desire to nest. Well, my timing has never been all that great. But if worse comes to worse, at least I can afford food and shelter here in Quito.

Hungry. Do I take a chance and eat, or do I play it safe? I want cinnamon graham crackers. I want spaghetti. I want a large glass or milk. I want crepes with strawberries and yogurt. I would have to be a moron to eat any of these things (well, except for the graham crackers. But there are none of those here, so I can forget about that).

January 28, 2009: The saga of the stomach

So, you last heard from me Sunday. After not eating much Sunday and still having stomach issues, I decided that I probably needed to go see a doctor. I figured I could go after classes on Monday, see a doctor, get some drugs, and hopefully start feeling better by Tuesday (when I would have a substitution, for two straight four hour blacks of teaching with a one hour Spanish class in between. I needed to be able to eat a bit before that, I figured). So I didn’t eat anything Sunday night and Monday morning, hoping that if there was nothing in my stomach, there was a chance I wouldn’t have to excuse myself every fifteen minutes from class. Monday was a test day, so I didn’t need to have much energy to do my usual hyper-run-around-the-class routine.

I managed to get through my classes on Monday, and as soon as I could, I went up to the CruzBlanca clinic, where I have my insurance. The woman at the desk chattered at me in impatient, official Spanish, of which I understood not a word—only that I would not be able to see a doctor. With my eyes wide and starting to dampen, I turned to go. Fortunately, the man next to me ask me, in English, why I didn’t just go to the CruzBlanca Emergency Room. I asked him where it was, he gave me directions, and I was off.

Once I got to the ER, I gave my name, sat down, and pulled out my stack of tests to grade. After about 20 minutes, the Dr called me in to his office. Clutching my Spanish dictionary like it was a bible and I a missionary on a heathen island in the South Pacific, I entered to office and set about describing my symptoms. He listened to my stomach, asked me to appropriate questions, and told me to go to the lab to give a stool sample (this word, by the way, is not in my Spanish-English dictionary, a critical oversight on the part of the dictionary editors, if you ask me. It was only after several questions and, ahem, gestures and pointing, that I understood what the Dr was asking for [you would think it would be obvious, but the receptacle he gave me looked exactly like those used to collect urine samples, so while it did provide context clues, it left me with a 50-50 chance of giving the lab the wrong thing]). As I turned to leave, I mentioned to the Dr that I hadn’t had my period in four months, and was that something that I should see a Dr about in the future. He got a look in his eyes that said “pregnant,” and before he could even say anything, I informed him that I was not pregnant. The look in his eyes remained, and he said, rather too quickly, “of course, I believe you. But we still need to take blood to run some, um, other tests.” Right.

So, over in the lab. Providing the blood sample was not a problem, but the other sample was a bit more challenging. I kept telling the lab techs that I wasn’t able to provide a sample, and they kept insisting that I stay there—to which I replied that I hadn’t eaten anything in over 24 hours and that the chances of food magically appearing in my stomach in the next hour were slim to nil (ok, I didn’t say all that. But I thought it with a vengeance). Finally I convinced the lab techs to let me go and try to return that night with a sample. The lab was to close at 7 and they needed an hour to run the test, so I figured if I could get them a sample at 6, I might be able to get some drugs that night. It was now 4. I had two hours.

I started to think about what I could eat that would give me diarrhea in two hours. Of course. A hamburger and French fries. I must confess, I pulled my punch at the last minute, went to my favorite restaurant in Quito, and ordered a tofu burger with fries. But I did get cheese on the burger AND a milkshake made with soy milk. I figured I needed to gamble big. To top it off, I got a chocolate ice cream cone for desert, as ice cream can have an interesting effect on my stomach, even in the best of times. I went back to my school to wait.

And wait, and wait, and wait. Finally, at 6, it was apparent that nothing substantial was going to come out of my, er, gamble. So I informed the office that I might not be able to teach the next day—to cover my ass, so to speak—gave them copies of my lesson plans, and took a taxi home.

And yes, I was miserable all night.

I faced the morning with dark circles under my eyes but with a nice, steaming sample in my hands. At 6:30am, I started walking to school with my trophy. Once at the school, I placed my prize in my locker in the teacher’s room and headed to class. Four hours later, I returned to the teacher’s room to get my Spanish book from my locker. Now, the past several weeks had been very cold and rainy. Tuesday was the first day that the weather broke that cycle and the sun came out to warm the land. Tuesday also happened to be the day (if you were keeping track) when I had to keep a jar of shit in my locker for more than nine hours. After Spanish class, I taught my third class and my sub class. Then, I had some errands at the school that I had to take care of. By 5pm, I was holding my breath every time I had to open my locker for something. Finally, I set out for the CruzBlanca lab.

Usually, the Ecovia bus line is a haven for thieves and pickpockets, as it is generally so crowded that holding on to anything for support is not even necessary. Oddly enough, however, it seems quite spacious when you ride it with a twelve-hour old stool sample in your hands.

I handed my sample in to the lab, went to the waiting area, and pulled out my stack of tests. A little over an hour later, I had my results. I had to wait another fifteen or so minutes to see a new Dr. The first thing that she informed me was that I was not pregnant (uh, yeah, I kinda knew that one) and that I didn’t have any new pets living in my stomach. Apparently this was just some freakish occurrence and I was fine. I just needed to eat soup for a couple of days.

Honestly, I was more than a little disappointed. I had suffered so much—between the pain and the trips to the bathroom and the trips to the various clinics—that I wanted to have something to show for it. Of course, I suppose I should be thankful because there is no telling what a trip to the pharmacy would have entailed. I might have gotten about two or three pages from that adventure alone.

So my stomach is still hurting, but I feel like I will survive. And the final cost? Well, not including food, cab fares, and public transportation, $2 for the emergency room visit and lab tests. Including everything else? It works out to about $15, which is a heck of a lot of money to have spent in only two days. But at least I survived it all.

Now, to go eat some soup…

New Post

2009-02-01T13:11:00.000-05:00

I´m going to try to post everything that I wrote from November to January. Wish me luck...

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T18:22:00.002-05:00

Merry Christmas everyone! I have been trying to write some things to post on this blog, but my internet access is so spotty, I may never actually post anything until I am back in the States (basically, I have to rely on Internet Cafes, which may or may not be open, and which may or may not have computers with USB ports for my memory stick).

Anyway, things are going well. I´m techincally on vacation, though I´ve been spending three hours a day in Spanish classes, so I´m not sure how much of a vacation this really is. December 28 I head into the jungle (Don´t worry--I won´t be heading in too deep. Basically, I will just be on the edge of the jungle), where I will be spending four hours a day in Spanish classes. Afternoons will be spent involved in various cultural activities. I´m looking forward to the warmth (and the different environment), and hopefully I will come back with some benign stories and nice pictures.

Speaking of stories, well, I´ve recently been learning that you can´t live in South America and not have some stories. After talking to a few folks who have been here a year or longer, well, let´s just say that the stories are pretty interesting. I already have decent story, but I´m going to type that on my laptop at home and post it later. Eventually.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I am thinking about you all and sending you my love and best wishes from the wilds of Latin America...

Howdy Campers!

2008-11-28T17:33:00.002-05:00

Well, I´m sick. My body was amazingly good at holding off for a week--I first felt it comeing on last Monday, but my body knew that it had to stick it out until Friday. Unfortunately, it used about 3:00pm as the cut-off time, while I was halfway through my last class. I didn´t actually feel it until I left the classroom at 4 (is there such a thing as a teacher´s high--you know, like a runner´s high? I think there is). The problem is that I am subbing tonight from 6 to 8 pm. After that I was supposed to go on a Chiva--I´d already bought the ticket--but I really don´t care about that. And you know I´m sick when I'm willing to let $10 go without making an attempt to sell the ticket to someone else. So now I just need to get through two more hours of teaching before I can catch a taxi and crawl into bed (and then spend the weekend sleeping--hopefully. Freakin' two-year-old be damned--I´ll push him under a Chiva, I will...) (Ugh, and now I´m trying to remember who has my ´blog address... just in case...).

The good news is that the class I´m subbing is Academic 1, my normal class. The bad news is that I need to go over a bunch of new expressions and words with them. I have a choice of doing it upfront, with the entire class staring at me trying to think of example sentences with my muddled brain (hell, they´ll think I´m drunk. It is the start of the Quito Festivals after all.), or to give them pair work and walk around and explain each word um-teen zillion times. Choice, choices... But I can´t avoid explaining the words... That´s just not an option.

For those of you wondering why I don´t just opt out, well, it is a little late now to find a sub on a Friday night at the beginning of the festival (plus it looks suspicious--just a little), PLUS, I want to build up good will with other teachers for when I need a sub in the future, PLUS teachers ha ve to pay out of their own pockets to get a sub (and the amount is more than we actually get paid. Incentive right there.).

20 more minutes. Just took my last Tylenol. Hopefully that will get me through at least an hour. Wish me luck.

Posting on Blogger

2008-11-19T16:04:00.003-05:00

Hey guys. I know I haven´t posted in a while (and I certainly haven´t been posting frequently), but don´t worry. A couple of folks mentioned that they were concerned about me--they though I might be miserable down here because I wasn´t posting. The truth is, I´m too busy to be much of anything other than busy. I´m not unhappy, I´m just exhausted. I think if I were a little less tired, I´d probably be happy (or, more likely, content). And things are only going to get crazier before the end of the session. But honestly, I feel like I fit in here. I´ve found a good group offriends who are career teachers and a bit older (like me). I´m really improving my classroom presence this session (it is still not great, but it is getting better), and I feel like things are going well overall. And I´m really, really looking forward to my Christmas vacation. I´m going to focus on learning Spanish--I haven´t had the time to work on it much. (And, of course, I´m meeting with the French teacher today to practice my French--which is just so difficult to do when my brain is trying to sort through Spanish already).

So don´t worry about me.

Week Five

2008-11-14T16:13:00.003-05:00

It is starting to look a little like Survivor in my classes. Most of my students are hanging in there, though. I guess they figure that they paid so much for English classes, they may as well go even though they wil probably fail. I must say that I´m a little impressed with that attitude.

Anyway, just finished up week five. I have three more weeks (and three days) to go before this session ends. Right now we are doing easy stuff in the classes (a nice break for my students), but units seven and eight (especially eight--when we start talking about verbs that are followed by gerunds or infinitives) are going to hit them pretty hard. I´m trying to prepare them a little for the idea of a ¨last push.¨

As for me, nothing exciting. I wake up early, I teach, I have Spanish class, I teach some more, I do some Tai Chi with some friends, I go home, I prep classes, I eat, I do some more prep, I collapse, I get up and do it all over again. Saturdays I meet up with some folks to work on Tai Chi, then we hang out, then on Sundays I prep classes. Hopefully I will have the same class next cycle so I won´t have to do quite as much prep work.

Almost Halfway Through

2008-11-07T17:45:00.003-05:00

As of next Tuesday, I will be halfway through my first session. We just finished learning 12 verb tenses and aspects in six days (well, I taught them and my students reviewed them--they were supposed to have known them all already, but I have my doubts). I can´t even begin to describe how intense that is. (Or how fried my brain is right now).

Other than that, there really isn´t anything too interesting going on in my life. I found some folks to practice Tai Chi with, and one of the guys is teaching us some Filipino stick fighting (cool). He married an Ecuadorian about five years ago, and lives in a fantastic house down in the Valley (the super nice part of town). Another person in this little group lives about half a block from me, and we are all meeting at her house tomorrow for our weekend Tai Chi get together.

Well, time to head out and find a cabina so I can give Shari a call.

Life Abroad

2008-11-04T12:35:00.002-05:00

I've been feeling pretty good here--been making friends and adjusting to life in Ecuador. I spent last Saturday with some Expats who have really made a home down here. Then, today, I got some bad news from back in the States, which really made me feel just how far away I really am. And it sort of brought me back to my reality, which is that, no matter how much I travel or want to travel, I will always go back to the States and my family and my friends. They will always be more important to me than living in a strange new world.

First week of work

2008-10-19T10:56:00.003-05:00

(I tried to post this yesterday, but apparently it did not work. Probably a good thing, since I neglected to run spell check on it. Let us see if I can post it today...)

Well, I survived my first week of work... Let me tell you, six hours of teaching a day is A LOT of teaching. Then, you have to figure in several hours of planning the next day´s lessons, a class full of teenagers, a case of Ecuabelly, and you have one exhausted teacher. But I think things went reasonably well. As I realized pretty early on this past week, the advantage of having had such a crappy teaching job in Prague is that there is not a lot that can faze me now. (Of course, saying that is just inviting some awful event to take place). But my schedule is excellent: 7-9, 9-11, and 2-4. (I have my Spanish class from 11-12.) That means that it is not dark when I get out of my last class, which means that I don´t need to worry about taking a taxi home.
My first two classes are going to be pretty good, I think. The second one will be a bit tricky because my students finish everything so quickly, so they are really going to keep me on my toes. My third class is mostly teenagers. We are in a small, dark room with a low ceiling and tiny windows. 2pm is when the afternoon rain starts, so everything gets really dark and we usually have nasty-sounding thunder. The teacher in the classroom right next to us has a lower-level class, so naturally they don´t have to do as much grammar as we do. They are always laughing and talking, and we can hear every word clearly. Meanwhile, my poor teens are stuck trying to learn the differences between independent and dependent clauses, and what a prepositional phrase or a direct object is. I do feel sorry for them (and, quite honestly, I´m not sure WHY they need to learn these things. But they are going to be on the first test, so I have to teach them...). I´m trying to make the class as lively and interesting as possible, but there comes a point where we need to settle down and learn at least a little bit of grammar.
After I finish my last class, I head back to the main building and spend some time checking the internet and taking care of errands (copies, research, etc). I usually head home about 5 pm, in the rain. Walking in the rain in Quito is a challenge. First, the presence of an umbrella makes it difficult to maneuver around other people with umbrellas, especially when the street narrows slightly. It also restricts your field of vision, making it more difficult to be aware of your surroundings (very important here). Also, remember that, by this time, it has been raining for about three hours--usually pretty heavy rain. Quito doesn´t really have any real drainage system to speak of, so the sidewalks are pretty much submerged. If you really look hard, you can usually find little islands of pavement (I call them islands when they are only about an inch under water, as opposed to three or more inches). Jumping from island to island takes a certain amount of concentration and skill, of course. And let´s not forget that I have a large purse with all my books on my right shoulder, which alters my center of balance slightly.
Not only are the sidewalks more or less submerged, the street is as well, especially around the curbs. That makes finding a place to step off the curb to cross the street without stepping ankle-deep in water an adventure. And, of course, you can´t stand too close to the curb while waiting to cross the street or a car or motorcycle will zip past you, spraying water all over you. While crossing the street, not only do you have to watch for cars, you have to pay attention to where you are stepping. Most of the streets contain a significant number of potholes, all filled with water. Dancing around this potholes is more than a matter of simply keeping your ankles dry--if you trip and fall in the street, you might be struck by the very car you are racing across the street to avoid.
Halfway between the school and my house is a park, which after three hours of rain contains a complex system of swift-moving rivers that I have only begun to chart. The main one, which flows directly across my path right after I cross the street, has no islands. For this particular river, the question is always: Do I bolt across as quickly as possible, or do I step across gingerly? I´ve tried both, and the final answer is that it doesn´t really matter which option you chose, you will get wet.
After a half and hour of this obstacle course, I finally make it home, where I can change out of my wet shoes and take a (occasionally) warm-ish shower (Ah, the shower. I dream of showers past. This particular shower gives me the option of a warm shower with no water pressure, or a frigid shower with okay water pressure. Add that to the fact that my hair has become mysteriously oily since I´ve been here, leading to my need to shower every single day, and you have a wholly different experience fraught with its own perils.), and prepare my lessons for the next day.
Ah, and the other excellent thing about my schedule is that it almost perfectly coincides with the two-year-old´s nap times. That means that, when I´m in the house, the kid is usually asleep. (He occasionally wakes up in the evenings, but I think I went about two or three days last week without seeing him at all).
Well, that is all the news that I have now. I´m still working on planning my classes for next week--I still have to think of some more review and practice activities my students can do. But I feel pretty good about what I´ve got now, so... I can relax a bit.
Oh, wait! I didn´t talk about my case of Ecuabelly! I was talking to a couple of teachers at the school, and they said that, when you live in Ecuador, you spend more time talking about your poop than you would have previously though possible (Thanks to my grandmother, I, of course, know just how much poop talk is possible, but out of politeness I refrained from mentioning this to them). Anyway, about an hour before my third class (remember, this is the class of teenagers), I can down with a swift (and violent) case of what is locally (and less than lovingly) referred to as Ecuabelly (I don´t think I need to explain this one to you guys). I hadn´t eaten anything different, I hadn´t chowed down on a skewer of mystery meat cooked on a filthy grill by a street vender oozing pus from open sores on his face, I hadn´t chugged down a giant glass of tap water (don´t drink the water here! If the locals won´t even touch it, you know it is bad). In fact, the main reason I chose to come to Ecuador a FULL MONTH before I was to start teaching was to give my stomach time to do its thing and then adjust to the local... eh, dietary dangers.
And yet, my stomach had other plans. Instead of giving me problems immediately (which it would have done in the past), it decided to wait until an hour before I was supposed to stand in front of a group of teenagers I had only met the day before. My stomach has an evil sense of humor. Anyway, I found myself racing from person to person in my schoo, asking in a variety of languages if anyone had anything at all for a case of Ecuabelly. Finally, someone gave me directions to a Pharmacy (which, at that point, might or might not actually be open, they said). TEN MINUTES before my class, I find myself in the (open) pharmacy (Oh, and hey--did I mention that it was hailing the entire time I was doing all this?), trying to purchase the medicinal equivalent of a cork. The pharmacist wanted to know if I was pregnant, if I had pain (and where it was). He wanted me to list what I had recently eaten (at this point, nothing. I hadn´t even bothered to eat lunch, knowing that it would have been (literally) sh*tting away my income). Finally, FIVE MINUTES before my class was supposed to start, he sold me something to STOP EVERYTHING (and something to--hopefully--kill the bugs that had started everything in the first place). I gulped it down, thanked him, and ran (through the hail) to my class of teenagers.
The following day I put myself on a diet of bread and gator aid (and you know that, if gator aid doesn´t taste like the worst substance in the world, you are pretty dehydrated). The following day, I branched out into vegetables, rice, more bread, and a bit of tofu. Yesterday, I managed some fruit juice and peanut butter and chicken (in addition to the above mentioned bread and rice). Today I braved the iffy world of cheese (a very small amount on my bread this morning. So far, nothing too dramatic has happened). At some point, I will re-introduce yogurt (which I probably need at this point, having killed off everything in my stomach with whatever it was the good pharmacist gave me in my minutes of need). I can´t wait until pizza is a possibility--I´ve really been craving it lately.
Well, hope everyone had a good week, and I will probably post more next weekend, depending on how crazy everything gets.

Interjection.

2008-10-08T13:07:00.002-05:00

I promised Barry that I would post something on my blog about this (and I will certainly be posting more in the future). Mom's and my neighbor, David, died earlier this year (I hate to use euphemisms, and I figure David would not have minded my not using one here). A perfect neighbor for Mom (he loved gardening and collected dishes. In fact, our Christmas presents from him last year were dishes from his collection). Sharp, witty, clever, and he had lived a fascinating life. Anyway, he left both Mom and me some money in his will--$7,500 each. In true Mom fashion, she is going to spend it on the house and yard (in fact, I think it may be gone already--she just had the house painted. As she says, it is no longer "nipple pink"). And I, in true Deirdre fashion, will be spending it on travel. Where to? Well, I was thinking about doing something that I normally wouldn't do--like a cruise to Antarctica. Or an African safari. Or something. I'll come up with some unique idea. But I'll post more about it in the future.

Nariz del Diablo

2008-10-08T12:33:00.002-05:00

Okay, I recently mentioned something about riding on top of a train, and that made a couple of folks a little nervous (Mom and Auntie Em, to be specific). Well, obviously I survived. The Nariz de l Diablo train is now a tourist attraction, where you can pay $11 (and rent a cushion for another dollar) to ride on top of a train for anywhere from five to seven (or more) hours. (Our trip was seven hours, due to a certain situation I will explain more about in a bit). No worries, though--the train does not zoom through the Ecuadorian countryside--it chugs along at a nice pace. The Devil's Nose itself, with two switch backs, is not as terrifying as certain guidebooks make it sound, Still, the trip was well worth the money, and I'm glad I did it.

We started in the station in Riobamba at, what was it, 8am, I think. I met up with several friends I had made during my trek around the Quilotoa Loop: there was a Dutch couple, a New Zealander (the Kiwi)--though he found a group of Kiwis to drink with on the train (which should not have happened, as the sale of alcohol was prohibited, it being an election day), a fellow American (born in Maryland, I might add!), an Italian couple living in Switzerland, a Dutch girl traveling solo, and an American dude I met while on the train itself (who may or may not know one of my relatives in Oklahoma). We chatted and shared food (fried bananas! Yum!) and took pictures of the scenery and , well, had fun. No danger. (Well, I take that back. There was one time when I did get a little bit nervous, and that was only because one of the conductors riding atop the train looked a bit nervous. We were passing next to a mountain--just plain dirt, no ground cover or anything--and some dirt and rocks started to fall towards the train. But nothing major).We passed several families--children tending sheep and mothers doing laundry in the rivers.

The advantage of being on top of a train is that you can take pictures of people without them knowing it.

The train only derailed once. Just be glad that you can't really see the condition of the bridge it is on in this picture.

Ah, Ecuador. It really is a beautiful country. Here you can see the train tracks where we will be going. Down, down, down...

Parque Cajas.

2008-10-08T11:59:00.004-05:00

Last, what was it, Tuesday, I think, I went to Parque Cajas with Daniela, a traveler from Switzerland. Parque Cajas is about 45 minutes west of Cuenca. We hopped on a bus to Guayaquil and asked the driver to let us of at Tres Croses. As the bus wound up the mountains, the land became more and more barren and cold looking. It was foggy outside, and I stared out the window, wishing I had worn more than a tee-shirt and a fleece.

Finally, the bus pulled over on the side of the road and let us out (and true to Ecuadorian bus fashion, I had one leg still on the bus as it was driving off). Once it turned the corner, we were completely alone, and Daniela and I looked at each other with wide eyes as the wind sliced through us. Our four to six hour hike through Parque Cajas no longer seemed like the smartest idea in the world.

Tres Croses.

Instead, Daniela and I opted to walk down the road a little ways. We were afraid that if we went too far down one of the paths, the fog would descend and we would be, to put it frankly, screwed. So we found a path we could take along which we could still see the road. We walked for about an hour or so, to a high point. Once at the high point, it started to sprinkle a bit, so we turned around. In a few minutes, it was pouring--cold rain that the wind blew everywhere. Not only that, but there was some sleet mixed in as well.

The Parque itself was beautiful--high in the mountains, there were no trees, only a series of lagoons filled with ice cold water. There were small streams of water everywhere--in fact, the past we took doubled as a stream, and we had to step carefully through the water. The barrenness of the park was its beauty, and I would have loved to have spent more time there--had the weather been just a bit nicer.

When we made it back to the road, Daniela and I walked down it a bit further, then stopped to wait for a bus to flag down. After about half and hour or so, a bus came and we were able to board it to return to Cuenca.

Cuenca

2008-10-08T11:33:00.002-05:00

(I'm posting everything backwards). While I was on the Nariz del Diablo train, I met up with some friends I had made while on the Quilotoa Loop, and I also made friends with a young Dutch girl traveling by herself. We were both planning on going to Cuenca next, so we agreed to travel together. At Alusi, the last stop of the train, we found the bus to Cuenca but we couldn't figure out where to buy our tickets, so we would up standing on the bus for the entire 4 1/2 hour ride to Cuenca. Not fun. On the bus, she made friends with a couple of Dutch guys, who were traveling with a Canadian--who had made friends with a Swiss girl. In Cuenca, we all agreed to go to a hostel together. The one was went to was pretty bad, so the next day we all went elsewhere: the Dutch group and the Canadian went to an $11 a night place, and the Swiss girl and I went to a $6 a night place (which was quite nice--it was run by a man out of his family's home, and included breakfast).

Cuenca was quaint--Colonial architecture and cobblestone streets. I spent a day and a half wandering the city, and the Swiss girl and I also went to Parque Cajas. While in Cuenca, I got to see Elizabeth, the daughter of one of the professors at S. University. I also managed to catch a cold (there was a cold that had been making the rounds among the travelers, and I guess my name was up).

What else... oh, I got to see shrunken heads at the Museo de Banco Central in Cuenca. Well worth the $3 entrance fee...

Street in Cuenca.

Incan ruins behind the Museo.

Amazing lacework in another museum I went to.

The new cathedral in Cuenca.

Puerto Lopez, Ecuador

2008-10-06T12:54:00.005-05:00

From Cuenca, I was faced with a choice: head straight back to Quito, go inland to the jungle, or head to the coast. I had meet a Swiss girl who was heading to Puerto Lopez (and had also talked to several other people who were either going there or coming from there) and it seemed to be the place to go, so I tagged along with D., the Swiss girl, and we went west to the ocean.

Puerto Lopez fishing boat.

And--Puerto Lopez fish!

Blue-footed Boobies on Isla de la Plata, also known as the poor man's Galapagos.

Tai Chi on the beach! It was overcast and windy and chilly, but the water was warm. After a bit of time in the water, I needed to warm up and dry off some, so I went through some Tai Chi.

Tortuga Beach. But no Tortugas. Bummer.

Feeding the fish. We had the option to go snorkeling with them, but it was just way too cold (the water was fine, but getting out of the water would have been a little too difficult).

This is just an outline of the tail end of my two-week trek through Ecuador. I will be posting more (much more), but my internet connection is really slow, so please have patience.

Hola!

2008-10-06T12:23:00.000-05:00

Back in Quito!

Still in Cuenca...

2008-10-01T09:53:00.002-05:00

... still freezing my ass off. Tomorrow I head to the beach (Porta Playa or Playa Porta--not too sure on that one).

Going to splurge on a vegetarian almuerzo today--looking forward to some veggies.

Aaaggghhhh....

2008-09-29T10:08:00.002-05:00

Made it to Cuenca... but what a hell of a trip. Yesterday I spent seven hours sitting on top of a train going through mountains (we only derailed once) and four and a half hours standing on a bus surrounded by people from the Netherlands (what the hell is up with that anyway? Everywhere I´ve gone here, I´ve been surrounded by Dutch people. So much for my attempts to learn Spanish).

I´ve inhaled about half the dirt in Ecuador. (The day before yesterday, I spent a few hours riding on the tops and in the backs of some trucks). Didn´t sleep much last night. Haven´t had a real meal in.... uh, who knows how many days (but I did get a deep-friend banana yesterday).

I love traveling!

Anyway, today I´m going to take it easy--maybe take a nap and actually buy myself an almuerzo (luuuunnncccchhhh!!!). I will probably stay in Cuenca a few days, then head either to the coast or to Banos, further inland. I figure I still have a week or so to travel before I need to be back in Quito.

Freezing my ass off in the Andes...

2008-09-24T08:01:00.004-05:00

Aggghhhh, it is so freaking cold here! Why did I think that living in the mountains would be warmer than living in Prague?? Oh, yeah, I remember--I´m on the freaking EQUATOR. Guess an altitude of, what, 9,000 feet or so negates the warming influence of living on the middle of the world. Brrrr.....

On an up note, I was totally expecting to be sick today. So far, so good. And that comment will need to be explained, I guess, but I don´t know that I want to do it now. My fingers are too freaking cold to type.

EDIT: Read this: http://www.igougo.com/story-s1323803-Latacunga-La_Mama_Negra_Fiesta_(Religious).html. It does a prettu good job of describing the festival. And, of course, I will have pictures later on. I promise.

Pichincha

2008-09-21T20:48:00.009-05:00

Yesterday (Sunday), I hiked up Pichincha, which is an active volcano just outside of Quito. I went with a couple other people (two Germans, the nephew of my host mom, and a guide). A driver drove us part of the way up, then dropped us off and we were on our way. Now, Quito is 9,200 feet (2,800 meters) and the main peak of Pichincha (Guagua) is 15,696 feet (4,784 m). We didn´t go all the way to the peak because it was all rock and we would have needed special climbing equipment. We did go most of the way, though, and stood on the rim of the volcanic crater. (There is another peak, called Rucu Pichincha. The Teleferiqo goes to 13,400 feet (over 4,100 m) up Rucu Pichincha).

This is where the driver dropped us off. This picture was taken facing South, in the direction of Cotopaxi. Pichincha is behind us at this point.

Rucu Pichincha. You can really see the vegetation starting to change.

As we climbed, the flora changed drastically. This was in one of the last zones. There were all these beautiful flowers growing close to the ground. There were other flowers: small white ones, larger white ones, ones with a yellow center and white petals.

Guagua Pichincha.

The main peak of Pichincha is just up ahead. The little yellow house is just a resting point. There is a man who stays there during the day but then heads back down in the evenings. We stopped in the house for a rest and to eat some food, which we shared with the man there.

Nearing the end...

This is the very last leg of our trip. As you can see, there are no more plants and we are definitely up in the clouds. The crater is just ahead of us, at the end of this trail. At this point, we were walking very slowly and panting. I had a bit of a headache from the altitude and my heart was pounding, but other than that I was fine. It was really cold at this point, and even with an undershirt, a teeshirt, a fleece jacket, a regular jacket, a banadana over my head, and a scarf over that I was cold. (Next time I go up, I am taking gloves. Alpaca gloves, if I can find some. Which I´m sure I can.)

And here we are, on the rim of the crater. To the left is the crater, to the right is the way back down.

This is on the way back down, again facing South.

Further down--notice how different it looks (ie, there are trees again!).

September 21

2008-09-21T20:48:00.001-05:00

September 21, 2008 5:54 pm

There are certain things that I always put of doing when I move to a new country. One of them involves changing the time and location on my laptop. As far as my laptop is concerned, it is 6:55 pm, East Coast time. I’ll get around to changing it eventually… but right now, it is some basic link to Maryland.

This all makes it sound like I’m homesick or completely miserable here. I’m not. Hell, I’m not even slightly miserable here. Before I left the States, I promised myself that I wouldn’t allow myself to get so stressed—that I would just go with the flow and allow things to either fall into place or not. As a result, I accidentally found a place to stay for the first month. Rather than stressing about finding a cheaper apartment, I just explored the city for a week. Then, last night, I mentioned to my host mom that I would need a new place to live in a few weeks and asked if she knew of anyone. She wanted to know why I couldn’t stay with her and I told her that it was because I needed to find a cheaper place on my income. She asked me how much, I told her, and she said that I could stay with her for that amount. So now I have a place to live—a place that is not in gringolandia or in a dodgy part of town, with a family I can practice my Spanish with. So that all worked out (though we shall see with this 2-year-old. I may not be able to take living with that). I told my host mom I would need to be able to prepare my lunches in the kitchen, and she said that that was not a problem. Anyway, if I need to move I will move. Simple.

I’m also just going with the flow for the next few weeks. Tuesday afternoon, I am going to Latagunga, to the Mama Negra festival with the other folks staying here. It is a really big Ecuadorian festival. The girl from Holland worked in a hostel in Latagunga, so she was able to get us beds. So, no stress there. Then, I am going with the two Americans and the German girl on a special mountain loop to visit some really out-of-the-way towns. It will be really hard-core, I think—it involves catching milk trucks at 3 in the morning (and maybe even a possible chicken truck or two!). So I’m really looking forward to all that. Depending on how all that goes (and when I need to be back in Quito), I might go down to Cuenca after that. We shall see.

The only thing that is sort of stressing me right now is the fact that I won’t receive my teaching schedule until the afternoon before I am scheduled to teach. I really, really don’t like that. I won’t even know what levels I will be teaching. I didn’t sleep too well the night after I found that out. (Instead of sleeping, I tried to come up with different activities I could do with students of different levels). Anyway, I figure now that it will completely suck, but that I will muddle through it.

So, yesterday I went to Otavalo with the two Europeans. Otavalo is the site of the largest market in Ecuador. We took a bus over, and I really do need to explain some things about the transportation here. First, there are the taxis, which are standard yellow with a taxi sign on top. They are the most common vehicle on the street, and anywhere you go you see taxis zipping through intersections. There are also three electric bus lines that follow the three biggest streets through the middle of Quito. They all run north and south. Then, there are the buses. Most of them are blue, but there are also a few green and red ones. I’m not sure if there is any actual physical map of the bus routes, and some bus stops are marked with a basic sign—and some are not. Each bus has a driver and, well, I don’t know what he would be called, maybe an assistant. As the driver speeds through town, the assistant hangs out the door and yells out the bus’s various destinations. When people need to get on to the bus, it may or may not stop (though it does slow down), and the assistant helps yank them aboard. At certain points in time, he goes through the bus and collects the fare. It seems to cost about a dollar per hour or travel, give or take a few cents. (My bus fares so far have ranged from 18 cents to two dollars). Anyway, I’m still in the process of figuring out the bus system—and here is where it really helps living with an Ecuadorian host mom who can explain how to get to the bus. Once on the bus, the assistant (and other riders) are very helpful when it comes to explaining when and where to get off. When I went to Mitad del Mundo with one of the other Americans here, we missed where we were supposed to get off. We were the last two people on the bus when it stopped and the driver started to get out. When he saw us, he asked us where we had wanted to go and we told him. He laughed, said something along the lines of “oh, it’s down there. I’ll be heading back down there in five minutes—just stay on the bus.” Then, on the bus to Pululahua, I told the driver where we needed to get off. About a minute or so before we needed to leave the bus, one of the passengers pointed out our stop AND both the assistant and the driver made sure we got off all right. (Of course, this didn’t mean that the bus stopped, but by then I had figured out how to jump both onto and off of a rolling bus).

To get to Otavalo (and the market), we had to take a bus to Otavalo, then another bus to the actual market. After we got off the first bus, we were told that we could either take a taxi or run across the street and catch a local bus. We, of course, opted for the second. There were some other people waiting at the bus stop and they made sure that we knew which bus to run after. On the bus itself there were no seats, so we had to stand in the front of the bus. After a few second, the German girl nudged me and discreetly pointed to the passengers. They were all indigenous—darker-skinned and rather short. They, in turn, were nudging each other and staring at us. The German girl and I got a good laugh out of the fact that the tables had turned: the tourists were now the attraction.

The market itself was huge, though I didn’t buy anything. At that point I figured that I would have to move again and I didn’t want to have a lot of stuff to move. I also figured that, after I learned a bit of Spanish, I could go back and negotiate better and get some good Christmas presents for everyone. Expect chocolate and necklaces. Even for the guys.

Ahh, then today I went up to Pichincha, an active volcano. It was an amazing hike, about seven or so hours up and down again. My host family is friends with a guide, so we were able to get a discount. The German girl and I went with another girl from Germany who is studying in Quito. I’m not sure what the altitude is, but we were definitely up in the clouds (and the snow). Near the end we had to walk so slowly and stop pretty often (even the guide) because we were so out of breath. But I have to say that there might not be anything better than eating an Ecuadorian banana in the Andes Mountains.

September 19

2008-09-21T20:47:00.000-05:00

September 19, 2008 4:50pm

Okay, everyone is getting chocolate for Christmas. Specifically, Kallari chocolate. I’m doing my best not to eat all of my $2 Kallari chocolate bar in one sitting. It is tough. I’ve already had three more pieces that I intended to… I will make it to tomorrow before I eat any more. Or at least until after dinner.

Speaking of food, I went down to El Mariscal to a vegetarian restaurant today and splurged. First of all, it was called El Maple, so I figure it must be owned by Canadians. Second, before you turn up your noses as the word vegetarian, remember, I hadn’t had a vegetable in almost a week. So I figured any restaurant where the name of the cuisine was derived from the word vegetable was probably going to be a safe bet. Finally, after a week of consuming minimal protein, a soy burger is just about the tastiest looking thing on a menu—right behind eggplant parmesagna (eggplants=vegetable, tomato sauce=vegetables, oregano=grows in the ground and is green, so it’s close enough to a vegetable, and cheese=comes from a cow, which eats grass, which is a form of vegetation). I do think my stomach has shrunk slightly, though, because I was stuffed with five or so bites left. Of course I made myself finish everything, because I, as I saw it, there was no telling when I would next be able to eat vegetables. Anyway, it looks like tonight is pasta. Again. Oh well. I’ll always have eggplant parmesagna (as in, “We’ll always have Paris”, not as in “I can always eat eggplant”).

6:40 pm (After my Spanish lesson).

Bleh. I chatted with Mom some this morning, and now I can’t remember what I told her and what I wrote here. I guess I could always go back and check and read what I wrote, but I don’t feel like going through the motions of scrolling up. Estoy cansada seems to have become my catchphrase here.

So, other guests here: there are two Americans—a couple in their mid-twenties, one girl from Holland (19), and one girl from Germany (21). I like them and get along with them all.

The problem with scrolling up is that I just saw the word chocolate, which reminded me of the chocolate bar within arm’s reach (and which I had managed to forget about). Ugh. Damn, that is some good chocolate. Okay, going to forget about it again. Just as soon as I have one more teeny, tiny piece.

Ah, I remember. Mom was asking me about the people who live here. Well, there is my host mom, L., her 14-year-old daughter, M, and her two-year-old nephew, also known as the brat I would dearly love to throw out of a window. Hmm, I probably shouldn’t post that on the internet for everyone to read, should I? Disclaimer: I have a slight tendency to exaggerate—just ask my grandmother about the clothes I suggested she burn. In this case, I’m not exaggerating the nature of the child, only my desired response. Okay, technically I’m not exaggerating that either. But I would never do it. Never ever. I wouldn’t even discipline the child (even though he smacked my ass earlier today). But that is just because I figure he is a lost cause.

There are also various family members who come and go. The other guests and I are constantly asking each other who people are (and hypothesizing about possible familial relationships). In general, I really like the atmosphere in the house—it feels very comfortable. I wish I were able to speak more Spanish… but that is coming along. I’m currently taking Spanish lessons from L’s nephew, who is a Spanish teacher. An hour/hour and a half every evening (when estoy cansada…). In fact, I should probably be out there, communicating and having fun. But I’m having fun in my room, reporting back on my day and impressions and listening to PJ Harvey...

Tomorrow I am going to Otavalo with the two Europeans. On the weekends there is a giant market there, so that should be really cool. But don’t worry—you will all get the chocolate I promised you. No cheap trinkets.

Then, Sunday I’m going to climb some mountain with the German girl, some other Germans girl I haven’t met yet, and an Ecuadorian guide (who is apparently a friend of the family and is giving us a slight discount). So, we shall see how that goes. It apparently takes six hours to climb the mountain and four hours to descend, and we will be going up to 14,000 feet, I think. Again, we shall see how that goes…

8:43 pm (After dinner)

Today I went back to the old part of Quito and visited another church. I had to pay to go into this one, and I wasn’t allowed to walk around by myself. I had a guide who explained everything to me. I managed to understand the majority of what he said, which made me pretty proud of myself (naturally). The church was gorgeous and any one who comes to visit me is definitely going to get dragged through this church—no arguments accepted.

Outside the church there were groups of students everywhere, carrying signs and waving flags that all said vota si. Next Monday there is going to be a major vote in this country on a new constitution that Correa has proposed. Correa is the current president of Ecuador and a socialist, and his proposed constitution includes things like universal health care. According to my Spanish teacher, most of the people in Ecuador support it (about 80%), except in Guayaquil, where opinion is split 50-50. Anyway, groups of students rallying means increased police presence, which means nervous traveler (still recovering from the Prague tank—I really, really did not like the Prague tank). Of course, when you are about a head taller than most of the police men, it is pretty hard to think of them as anything other than cute. But then, that is the type of thinking that can get a person in trouble, and I always remember all those stories of Latin American jails. I imagine that policemen become a lot more intimidating when you are looking at them through bars—though that is not a hypothesis I really want to test.

I also went by my school today and introduced myself. The director wasn’t there, but I got a tour of the school and got some more information about the whole school. I was not happy to discover than I won’t get my teaching schedule until the day before I start teaching. I was really counting on being able to prep classes over the next few weeks, but there is absolutely nothing I can do until 4pm the day before I start teaching. So that first week is going to be really, really rough. Ugh, ugh, and double ugh. But I will manage. Somehow.

As I left the school, it started pouring. I walked all the way back home in the rain—a good 20 minute walk—and arrived completely soaked. There were some more random family members here (who turned out to be the brat’s older brother and their father. The kids played soccer in the hall and the brat screamed the entire time. I guess that is how children show joy.) Anyway, I made up a batch of Chai (yum, though I am having problems getting my tea strong enough here. I think it is just that the tea I bought was really, really weak. I need to figure something out.)

Last night the other guests and I nearly came to blows over a tomato and cucumber salad. Our host mom set the bowl on the table and we all grabbed for it, taking as much as we could. We were all so excited to get vegetables, and we kept telling her how much we liked it. I think we are all a bit tired of rice—I caught the girl from Holland scooping some of her rice on to one of the American’s plates when he wasn’t looking.

Mitad del Mundo y Pululahua

2008-09-18T16:40:00.008-05:00

Today I went to Mitad del Mundo (the equator) and Pululahua...

Me messing around on the Equator. (Leaping from hemisphere to hemisphere in a single bound.)

One the way to Pululahua (pronounced Poo-lah-wah, I think.)

Pululahua.

Billed as an Incan site, but I had my doubts.

2008-09-17T16:33:00.001-05:00

September 17, 2008 7:04 am

Good morning from Quito! Much to say, but no ability to say it—waiting on some black tea. I think that is the only thing that I don’t like about the homestay—I don’t feel comfortable preparing things like that in the kitchen, especially when my host mom is there preparing breakfast (okay, how spoiled did I sound in that last sentence? Breakfast is being prepared for me—I really and truly cannot complain). Yeah, life is good. Today is laundry day, which I think means that I leave a pile of nasty, stinky clothes in the hands of my host mom and return in the evening to fresh, clean clothes on the clothesline. Believe it or not, this is all kinda hard for me to get used to, as I’ve become accustomed to doing all this on my own. But again, not complaining. Just making a simple observation.

Yesterday I walked around the old part of Quito (the colonial part). It is very different from El Mariscal. The streets and sidewalks are smaller, and there are so many people. Ironically enough, I saw more gringos there than I did in gringolandia. Bunch of backpackers looking for “authentic Ecuador” and smaller groups of middle-aged tourists on arranged tour groups, perhaps given a few hours to explore Old Quito on their own. At one point I just sat in a plaza and observed everyone around me: young boys carrying around kits of black shoe polish, offering shoe shines for a quarter (two approached me and offered a shoe shine. If I didn’t like my hiking boots so much, I would have taken them up on the offer, just to see how they would deal with shoes made of brown mesh instead of black leather), groups of young girls in those stereotypical Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, the aforementioned tourists (one man approached an indigenous couple and asked to take their picture—an interesting interaction to watch), men in suits holding clipboard, stopping passer-bys to talk to them (maybe get their opinion on some topic), the aforementioned backpackers (and every single on of them had a backpack—too funny).

Well, tengo hambre and I think breakfast is ready…

2:30 pm

Just finished lunch… pasta, potatoes, and plantains…. (and fruit juice). All very good (though a little heavy on the starch). The plantains had a peanut butter sauce on them—yum! (Food of the Americas: bananas and peanut butter in any form).

I spent this morning exploring El Parque Carolina (and braving public transportation there and back), so I think I’m going to take the rest of the afternoon off and go through my pictures, write some more for the ‘blog, and digest my starch. (I also inhaled a bit too much of the bus smoke on my way to and from the park, so I’m going to give my lungs a bit of a rest. I need to build my immunity to bus fumes, I guess.)

Back to yesterday: While walking around in the old town, I started to learn some of the rules of traffic. I had previously started to piece together some of the rules in El Mariscal. For example, major roads have crosswalks and signals. A solid green person means that you are probably okay to cross, but you should hurry. A blinking green person means that this is the least crazy this road is ever going to get, so you should put another person between yourself and the on-coming cars and make a run for it. A solid red person means, not surprisingly, don’t even think about crossing here—instead, go up or down a few feet, and cross where there is absolutely no crosswalk.

A lot of the roads here are one way (and, by the way, the roads are all very well marked here. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a place where there was better signage even on smaller side streets. New Jersey could definitely learn some lessons from the Quiteños—ahem). The smaller streets do not have lights or even stop signs. When a car approaches one of these intersections, it speeds up and honks its horn. I will never drive here.

I visited the San Francisco Church and Museum. The museum contained art from the Escuala Quiteña. That was a school of painting in Quito during the 1800s, under Spanish colonialism. In order to promote their brand of Catholocism, the monks and friars and whatnot (I don’t really know what they are all called—I guess I’m going to have to learn all that, huh?) gathered together talented indigenous painters and taught them how to paint in the Baroque and Roccoco styles. Now, generally I don’t like (eh, make that detest) Baroque (think of cherubs barfing fluffy pink vomit) and Roccoco art, but… well, I liked this. The paintings didn’t show the same technical skill found in European art of this time period, but they more than made up for it with a sort of folk naitivite. And, of course, I didn’t get the same sense of barfing cherubs (not a cherub in sight. Plenty of bloody Christos, though…)

Ah, yes, the bloody Christo of Latin America. Actually, the Christos here are no where near as gruesome as those in Mexico. These ones are definitely toned down a lot. But…

Well, I was in the museum by myself, and the lights are on timers. Good for cutting down on energy usage, so I completely approve of that. However, it does make it a little more difficult to enter a dark, empty room when one can only see the barest outlines of a carved, bleeding Christ. I swear I jumped out of my skin every single time the lights clicked on.

The Museo de Banco Central also uses lights on timers. This is not, as one might think, a museum of Ecuadorian banking throughout the ages but rather a museum contain anthropological artifacts and paintings by Ecuadorian artists. The artifacts were all very well arranged and organized chronologically (with dioramas! I love dioramas in museums! Especially when they contain little people!) with information in Spanish and in English (yea, gringolandia! Oh, I know I’m going to cringe when I read that later…). Yeah, so we had pre-Inca, Inca, during-Inca… the usual suspects. Everything ended, of course, in 1534 when the Spanish came.

Now, just last year, I was in Greece and Turkey, staring at pottery fragments. I must confess, I found the pottery here to be much more impressive than the pottery in Greece and Turkey. Not only that, but there was definite forward progress. It made me wonder what would have happened if the Spanish (or, I suppose, European in general) had not ventured to the Americas—at least for a few hundred years. I wonder how the civilization here would have developed. But I guess that is akin to wondering what would have happened if Corsica had not been part of France when Napoleon was born.

There were four room in the Museo: the anthropological room, the Colonial Art room, the Republic/Modern Art room, and the Contemporary Art room. The Republic/Modern Art room showed the progression from the Escuela Quiteña through portraits and landscapes to art inspired by social activism and issues. The Contemporary Art room—well, it was Contemporary Art. Not my thing. The highlight (?) was a statue of a man with his pants down, peeing. Yeah.

I went through the Colonial Art room last. It was on the mezzanine and it took me a while to find the steps (yeah, no holding back on my more embarrassing moments here…) It was more or less the same situation as in the Museo de San Francisco—empty, dark rooms with lights on timers. Only this was just before closing and it was raining really hard outside. A very creepy environment indeed.

This morning I went to the Botanical Garden and the Vivarium (snake house) in El Parque Carolina. The bus there was very crowded, but I managed to not get pick-pocketed (or, if I was, they did an excellent job of not being discovered by leaving everything in my purse). It was nice wandering around the gardens after spending so much time going through the city. One thing I will say about Prague, it had tons and tons of gardens—smaller ones tucked away where one could stumble upon them during walks and larger ones where one could escape the bustle of the city for awhile. I do find that, the older I get, the more I long for the tranquility of green spaces. I do get the impression that, while there might not be that many green spaces in Quito, I can always hop on a bus and venture into the jungle (although, after visiting the snake house today…).

First Pictures of Quito!

2008-09-17T15:31:00.008-05:00

Inside the Museo de San Francisco.

Christo, bloody Christo.
(Part of my creepy Christ series--not to be confused with my baby Jesus with rickets series).

Quito old town.

In the Botanical Garden.

Orchid in the Botanical Garden.

Parque Carolina.

2008-09-17T15:30:00.000-05:00

September 15, 2008 8:15 am

In Quito, Ecuador. I arrived yesterday, after 10 hours of travel and two airplane changes, one in El Salvador, and the other in Costa Rica. I thought for sure I was going to miss the last plane from Costa Rica. When I got on the plane in El Salvador, I instantly fell asleep in my seat. Half an hour later, I woke up, realized we were still on the ground and were now twenty minutes late. Not good when you only have a half an hour to change planes in the next airport. We did finally get up in the air, and I looked around the plane. I was in the back, in a row by myself, and I only saw a few other people in front of me. “Well,” I figured, “at least when the plane lands I should be able to get out of here pretty quickly.” The plane landed and arrived at the gate about fifteen minutes before my next flight was supposed to leave. Then, all of a sudden, the aisle was packed. The plane had been full, but everyone was so short that I hadn’t seen them at all.

SO, instead of being able to exit the plane quickly as I had hoped to do, I had to wait for 24 rows of people to get their bags and slowly meander down the aisle into the Costa Rica airport. But not only did I make it to Quito, my luggage did as well. How is that for luck?

The first plane ride, from Washington DC to El Salvador, I was one of two gringos on the airplane. Yes, there were only two of us. Instantly launched into a world of Spanish, I was. Oddly enough, there were several gringos on the plane from El Salvador to Costa Rica, and the plane was chock full of gringos on the way to Quito. I felt slightly cheated by all that, like I was doing something backwards. Ah well. I guess I’m not exactly off the beaten track here.

Now, I had been in Mexico taxis, but I had never been in a Latin American plane. I felt like maybe the flying style was close to the driving style. Granted, than may have been a result of the places we had to take off from, fly over, and land, but it all felt quite a bit more abrupt than I was used to. Lots of sharp turns and quick descents and bouncing and swerving on the tarmac. Flying into Quito, I was quite surprised to look out my window and see the airport right below me. “Hmm,” I thought, “Well, I guess we are going to turn around?” And sure enough, we did—nice sharp turn, one wing dipping low and giving me a very good view of the city below me. On the way down, I got to watch a soccer game—I mean, literally watch the people running after the ball in the stadium. But we made it okay, and I had no problems meeting up with my host mom. And now, time for breakfast…

9:08 pm

So, I spent today walking around and exploring El Mariscal, also known as gringolandia. It is where most of the backpacker hostels are located, as well as the Spanish schools (there are several in Quito). The school where I will be teaching is also located there. I walked past it, but didn’t go in. From the outside, it looks modern and respectable. I also located an Indian restaurant, although I didn’t eat there—maybe in the future.

What do I think of Quito? I like it. It is different—you know, you go to a new place and you don’t know what to expect, but you still form ideas. Like, I’ve been to Mexico and they speak Spanish there, so maybe Quito will be like Mexico City. It is not—thank goodness. For all that it is a major city, it is not intimidating so. It is a major city, but in a small country, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. Even with buses spewing (a cliche, I know, that buses either spew or vomit or belch black smoke, but I’m not sure that there is any other verb that better describes the action. Maybe buses farting black smoke since it comes from the tail end?) black smoke, the city does not feel as oppressively dusty and dirty as Mexico City.

Maybe it was just because I was in gringolandia, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all today. Tomorrow I will venture south to the old part of Quito, which is a UNESCO heritage site, I believe (I feel like I’m just moving from one UNESCO city to another, although I’m not sure where Salisbury fits in with that statement). It might be different down there, so we shall see. Then, Wednesday, I am going to venture north to Parque La Carolina and visit the Botanical Garden. I’m excited about that.

Ahh, and I joined the South American Explorers Club today. There is a “clubhouse” in Quito, in El Mariscal. They have an English language library (which, after looking at the prices on severely used books in one of the two English language bookstores here is just by itself well worth the cost of membership), free internet, a DVD lending library, and information on trips around Ecuador (and South America in general). I also hope to connect with other teachers there and maybe find an apartment.

Which brings me, quite naturally, to my living arrangements here. I am renting a room from an Ecuadorian and her family. The room is small, but the bed is comfortable, and she has promised me a larger room as soon as some other boarders leave. Right now there are five of us here (not including the host and her two children), so it is a full house (well, apartment). When L., my host mom, showed me my room, she looked at my baggage, looked at the room, looked at me, and declared it too small. I felt like a bit of a tool, traveling with as much stuff as I did, but when I explained to her that I was going to be living here for a year, she understood. She is very nice, and very good at communicating clearly. She is also very patient and encouraging—which makes me want to be able to speak Spanish with her. Yea, motivation. In fact, I may go ahead and start taking some Spanish classes before I start teaching. If I go through my new club, I can get private lessons for $5 an hour—well worth it, I think. The food here is good (though I’ve only had a couple of meal here). In fact, the only thing that is less than perfect is the youngest child, a two-year old boy who is treated like a prince and who would probably benefit from a spanking or two. Ah well. I must remember, I spent the day before I flew out here with the world’s best natured baby, so naturally any other kid is going to seem like a handful.

The altitude: okay, I’m aware of it. Today wasn’t too bad, but I did have a small headache most of the day. El Mariscal is pretty flat, but to walk from there to where I’m staying I have to go up a hill. Not a giant hill by any means, but a hill nevertheless. About four blocks up the hill I’m panting, and two more blocks up I’m convinced that the apartment should be right there, that I must have gone too far. Those last two blocks I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be able to make it. Other than that, I’ve been fine. Now, I had figured that today would be as bad as it got and that probably by tomorrow I’d be fine. Then, this evening, I heard that apparently the third day is the worst. So now I have something to look forward to. Yea.

And I believe that that is it. I’ll probably write some more tomorrow.

Quito

2008-09-16T17:34:00.000-05:00

I made it to Quito. Right now I´m in an internet cafe and I don´t have much time here, but I promise that I will post more later.

Today is Tuesday.

2008-09-09T19:19:00.002-05:00

It has been so long since I've posted anything here that the user interface has completely changed. But I'm sure I'll figure it out--I'm a smart cookie. (Mmmm, brownies...)

So, as you might have gathered from the subject line of this particular 'blog, today is Tuesday. I am leaving on Sunday. That means I have some days--you know, those days between today and Sunday--to pack and gather and gather and pack.

Now, most readers will have heard already, but I have found a place to stay for my first month there. I will be doing a homestay, living with an Ecuadorian woman and her two kids. Breakfast and dinner are included in the price. Of course, she doesn't speak any English and I don't speak any Spanish, so... well, I'll be forced to learn, won't I?

Other than that, I don't have any news. I'll update this 'blog as things happen.

Mmmm... food...

2008-08-14T20:57:00.003-05:00

No one is allowed to make fun of me ever again for eating as much as I do in a day. Read what I just read and you will understand:

"Here’s Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t choose among these options. He eats them all, according to the Post.)

Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.

Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.

Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks."

(http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/08/13/the-michael-phelps-diet-dont-try-it-at-home/)

The ideal diet, if I do say so myself.

Culture. Art. Sculpture. Hilarity ensues.

2008-08-10T11:36:00.020-05:00

Just had a culture-packed couple of days. Friday, after work, I went down to the Grounds for Sculpture (yeah, that one is just packed with meaning, isn't it? I kept passing signs for it on the way to and from work, and figured it was some type of sculpture garden--but then again, it could have been simply a reason or reasons to create a sculpture... or even just a bunch of coffee grounds to sculpt with.)

Anyway, here are some of the pictures:

Of course, it wasn't all just re-creations of impressionist paintings (and Matisse). I mean, how kitchy would that be? There were some other things there as well:

(Stoopid willow tree...)

(This one is for all my fantasy-reading friends out there...)

It was on the Grounds for Sculpture, so it must be art, right? Right. Except for when it is not art. I found this out after having to duck quickly for cover in a building when a thunderstorm blew up. It was over in a few minutes, so I left the building and continued on my way. I started down a new path, towards the back of the garden, snapping pictures of sculptures that caught my eye. Across one lawn, slightly behind another, larger metal sculpture, I saw a circle of flat rectangles in bright colors. I thought, "Wow. That's really bright. Look at those cool colors. I have to go check it out." So, I started walking towards it. When I got there, I stood in the middle of the circle and started looking at the ground for a plaque. It took me a couple of second of looking before I looked at the circle again and realized it was really just a bunch of yoga mats that had been abandoned when it started storming.

(Don't you just love how I put my more humiliating moments on this 'blog for people to laugh at?)

---

Saturday I went to New York City to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (going to the Cloisters is almost like going on a pilgrimage, in that it is a painful process to actually get there).

Obligatory New York City skyline as seen from Central Park picture.

Hmm... this looks vaguely familiar...

I've decided that when I finally get a home, I gonna need me some cloisters.

Jesus, S&M style...

Since I'm already going to hell, can I just say that I can never again look at a Madonna and Child without thinking "Baby Jesus with rickets." Thanks a bunch, Hil.

New Musical Obsession:

2008-08-04T14:41:00.000-05:00

Tim Fite.

The discount book bin

2008-07-30T19:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I passed the discount book bin. There was once a time when I was physically unable to go through the discount book bin without walking away with several books, but seeing as how those days have long since passed, I thought it was safe to linger and look. And, as to be expected, something caught my eye. The title contained both the words "Rune" and "Earth," and a Washington Post quote on the dust jacket compared the author to "Tolkien at his best." That sounded promising. I decided that I needed some simple and fun fantasy reading--especially if the reading came in at $6 for about four pounds of book. That's just under two dollars per pound--a reasonable price for a fantasy book.

So, I bought the book and brought it home, and tonight, after I ate my dinner, I settled down to read. This book is the fourth in a series, so the book begins with a quick review of everything that had happened before.

What follows are my thoughts.

Oh goodie! Maps! All fantasy adventure books need maps! Especially if they have place names like Revelstone and the Verge of Wandering.
...
Okay, so the main character is a novelist (natch) named Covenant (wonder why he's called Covenant? Is there any significance in that name? Naw, probably not). He has leprosy and has had some of his fingers amputated (okay, interesting take on the sick-or-deformed-man-in-this-world-but-hero-in-the-fantasy-world theme. This guy is both sick and deformed).
...
Oh hey! We made it all the way to the third paragraph before we got to any mention of a magical ring!
...
So now we're in a magical land with good, honest people who, based on an ancient prophesy, think that our hero is their savior. The bad guy is called Lord Foul the Despiser. Could we just not come up with a better name than Lord Foul? How about Lord Nasty Cloud of Methane Gas? Or maybe Lord Forgot To Brush His Teeth.
...
Our impotent leper novelist is now looking for the Staff of Law.
...
Now his crazy daughter has the Staff of Law. Never a good thing. Those women, they shouldn't be given Important Staffs in fantasy books. It just never ends well.
...
"Using the Illearth Stone, Lord Foul slaughters the Giants of Seareach. Hile Troy is only able to defeat the Despiser's army by giving his soul to Caerroil [Carol, apparently] Wildwood, the Forestral of Garroting Deep." I have nothing to say.
...
And if that wasn't enough, "accompanied only by his old friend, the Giant Saltheart Foamfollower [apparently a nomadic desert dweller], Covenant finally gains his confrontation with Lord Foul and the Illearth Stone."
...
Not only that, but "pretending to resist the Sunbane, the Clave extracts blood from the people of the Land to feed the Banefire, the true source of the Sunbane."
...
To fight the Sunbane, Covenant teams up with a couple of villagers, Merry and Pippin. Okay, their names are really Sunder and Hollian. Let me guess--Sunder is going to chop something off of something else, and Hollian will make it whole again.
...
Hile Troy, our great warrior, is now called Caer-Caveral. Does this author have no creativity in coming up with names?
...
And what would one call the former servants of Lord Foul except the ur-viles?
...
"Covenant's approach to the One [two] Tree and his power begin to rouse the Worm of the World's End; and the Worm's awakening will accomplish Lord Foul's release from Time." I'm sorry, but the Worm of the World's End? The Worm? Can't they just, I don't know, step on it or something?
...
Try reading this one out loud: "There the Sandgorgon and the Seadreamer's brother, Grimmand Honinscrave, succeed at 'rending' the Raver [...]"
...
Covenant is now looking for Lord Foul on (wait for it) Mount Thunder.
...
Annnnnnd--Covenant has just sacrificed himself to defeat Lord Foul and Save the World (well, he couldn't really afford to lose any more fingers, could he now?).

And here our story begins. I'll let you all know how far I make it into the book before I give up and launch it across the room in disgust.

Lack of Tact

2008-07-25T10:05:00.001-05:00

I'm not generally known for my tact--in fact, quite the opposite. I would like to point out, however, that I have never ever recited "Helen Keller" jokes in front of a blind girl.

Thank you.

(And yes, I did just see this happen.)

Update

2008-07-22T20:10:00.003-05:00

Nothing new to mention, really--I just felt that I ought to post some sort of update. I'm almost halfway through my third week in Jersey. After this week, I only have three more weeks to go. I don't feel as though I've been as productive this year as I was last year. Oh well. As long as I produce some good, solid items--well, I guess that is the main thing, right?

Hmmm, saw Grandparents last weekend, going on a camping trip next weekend. The weekend before last I drove back down to give a presentation--it went really well, I felt (and the feedback was positive). So I've been a busy little beaver.

Unfortunately, I seem to have forgotten how to sleep in all this excitement. I'm absolutely exhausted, but when I lie down, my mind continues to race and I can't get to sleep. This has gone on long enough that now I've psyched myself out about the whole thing--I feel like I've forgotten how to fall asleep and I'm trying to over think the whole thing. Ah well. I figure that eventually I'll get tired enough that there will be no way I can't not fall asleep. I just hope it doesn't happen while I'm driving--or worse, while I'm at work.

Yea me!

2008-07-20T19:58:00.002-05:00

Okay, so it really isn't that big a deal, but you should go here and read my very first ESL/EFL article. It's simple, but I'm happy with it.

http://iteslj.org/

(It is the very first article listed).

2008-07-06T18:28:00.002-05:00

I'm not finished posting about the two week Typhoid Mary tour, but I'll get to that later. I just wanted to post and let everyone know that I have made it up to Jersey, where I will remain for the next six weeks, working an honest to goodness 9-5 job (well, 8:30 to 5). Things are just as I remembered them from last year: the need to turn left to make a right, things that Jersonians refer to as traffic circles but which are not, and the oh so strange road that is both 95 North AND 295 South (yes, this is the same direction. For the record, it goes south).

The new roomie is nice, and the cats (three of them) are cool too. I've spent the day chillin' and cooking and eating--my kinda day.

Homecoming

2008-06-23T16:52:00.003-05:00

Trip back to Maryland.

Mom and I left a bit after noon on Wednesday. The plan was to drive to Illinois and stop to have dinner with my Dad's family there. My cousin had arrived there a few days ago, and both my mom and I wanted to see him.

Yes, we made it across the Mississippi. The water hadn't reached 1993 flood levels (and yes, I was back there. I saw it. I have pictures to prove it.) and we had no problems crossing from Missouri into Illinois. Dinner was fine--we went to Applebees. Then Mom and I hopped back into the Prius and started East.

We made it as far as Terre Haute, Indiana, before we had to stop. The next day Mom was tired, so I drove most of the way. I managed to average 56.6 miles per gallon, a new personal record. We stayed that evening with Rowan, Cecilia, and Matt, in Pennsylvania. The next day Mom and I lingered a bit, then set off for Salisbury, stopping at Wegman's Grocery Store.

About fifteen minutes after we arrived in Salisbury, Mom's cell rang. We were both occupied, so neither of us answered. I went outside to tell her that she had missed a call and found her talking to someone. It was one of David's friends (remember David, our neighbor, who Mom had spent a Saturday with at the Emergency room). Well, his friend told us that David was dying. So, back in the car, this time to the nursing home where David was. We stopped in to say hello, but he wanted to be alone, so we went into the hallway to speak with his niece, who was there from California. She was feeling a bit lost, so we invited her over for tea (always tea. Tea is a good thing. I had a friend once tell me that she had been diagnosed with a disease. I offered her tea. She accepted.).

Anyway... well, David died this morning. And things are finally winding down from our trip. I had planned on going camping before heading up to Jersey, but I'm still too exhausted to even contemplate crawling back into that car. Maybe tomorrow.

Missouri Weather

2008-06-23T16:25:00.003-05:00

Someone, I believe it was a former schoolmate of Mom's who stumbled upon a family picnic, said that he loved everything about Missouri--except for the humidity and the chiggars. He pronounced this statement a mere hour before a giant cloud formed in the distance, looking like it was heading straight for us. We all nervously watched the cloud as it moved closer and closer. Finally someone suggested that we move the food indoors and check the radio and television for weather information, specifially Tornado Warnings/Watches. We were all downnaholler (In a dip between two hills for those of you who don't speak Ozark), miles from anything, with only two trailers, several trucks, and a Prius for potential shelter. Thus, a Tornado was not on the list of things we wanted to encounter at that particular moment.

The storm clouds never did hit us, staying just South of us as they moved toward the East. We did hear on the radio, though, that Ozark, Missouri, was experiencing golf ball sized hail. Ozark happened to be where my grandparents' house was, so when my grandparents, my mom, and I packed up to leave the family picnic, we drove back to Ozark not knowing what to expect.

Thankfully, there wasn't too much damage. A lot of leaves gone from trees, of course, and some branches down. But the house was fine and both of my grandparents' cars were in the garage. We did get a call later from Gene, a friend of the family who also lives in Ozark. Turns out the hail had completely distroyed his garden and he would have to start over.

And welcome to Missouri. But that wasn't our first weather experience this trip. The day after we arrived, fresh from Illinois and all the trauma there, I woke up early to drive down to the park and go for a run. Even though it was humid, the sky was light, and I made a few laps around the park, all the while blaming my wheezing on the altitude (I figure I live at sea level, so when I run at any altitude above, say, 10 feet, I can blame shoddy performance on the altitude. It's a convenient excuse and one that I invoke frequently.) After my run, though, as I was driving back to my grandparents' house, the sky darkened almost instantly. Some of the fastest moving clouds I had ever seen were moving across the sky. In the house, my grandfather and mother were nervously checking the television and the NOAA transmitter that my mother had recently bought for my grandparents. This was, my grandparents and my mother announced, tornado weather.

Tornados concern me. Well, it might be a slightly stronger emotion than that. Let's just say that my feeling for tornados is somewhere between "they concern me" and "they scare the sh*t right out of me." And tornados are a reality of life in the midwest. Just this year, my cousin's house was destroyed by a tornado. And yes, he was in it when it happened. When I was younger, I was staying with some other cousins. We were home alone, drinking a concoction of Tang and Marshmallows, when the sky turned green. My cousins (one from Missouri, the other from Oklahoma) took it in stride. I tried to act cool, but in my mind I saw the rescue team finding my broken, limp body under a pile of rubble. We didn't get hit, but I carry a mental image of that sky in my mind, and I pull it out occasionally to compare it with any sky that had darkened just a bit too much, too quickly.

Fortunately, my grandparents, my mom, and I were not struck by a tornado (I might have been a bit more nervous than usual, given the trip so far). Later that day, Mom, my grandfather, and I decided to go into town, to the Best Buy, to buy a new computer for my grandfather. It was raining outside, and my grandfather, who was driving, let my mom and me off at the store's door. Once we were all in the store, my grandfather and mother left to go look at computers while I looked at MP3 players. I had perused all the players and was on my way to meet up with my family when the lights went out. Outside it was dark and pouring. Like, Noah's flood pouring. Like, end of the world pouring. The lights did eventually go back on, but not until after several minutes--and after I insisted that we call my grandmother, to make sure she was all right.

We made it back okay (after taking my grandfather purse shopping for my grandmother. But that's another story for another day). But the entire time my Mom and I were in the Ozarks, I swear it rained every other day. Or maybe every day. Or maybe every third day.

Phone

2008-06-16T07:43:00.004-05:00

Every year, when Mom comes back to visit her parents, one of her jobs is to remove all the dead people from the speed dial.

Mom: So, who do you want on your speed dial?

Granny (looking at the phone): Well, we want Andy, and Andy's cell, and you, of course, and, well, Deirdre doesn't have a phone, not really, and...

Mom: Why don't you just make a list of all the people you want removed?

Granny: Well, okay. Good idear.

Granny (to Grandpa): So, who do we want to take off, now? Here, let me get this paper and write down the names. Now, we want Andy's phone. That's his cell, and that's... do we have his home phone?--yeah, there it is. Now, Pat, we have you on here, but the number doesn't work, I guess it's your old number.

Mom: I can change that for you.

Granny: Do you reckon we ought to add Gus?

Grandpa: Yeah, we should add him, if we can get a hold of his cell number.

Granny: Okay, I'll add that to the list. I'll just put another list on here, so, let's see, that's Andy, and Gus...

Mom: Mom, why don't you just have one list of the names you want off and another list of names you want me to add.

Granny: Well, okay, that's a good idear. I'll do that.

Granny: Well, here's Rowan's number.

Grandpa: Yeah, we want that.

Mom: Is it her house phone or her cell phone?

Granny: I don't know. We try this number and no one answers, then we try her cell number and there's an answer.

Mom: So you have her house number there.

Granny: Well, I guess. Yeah, that's her house number.

Mom: So I should probably change that to her cell number.

Granny: We have Mabel's number here.

Grandpa: She don't use that number--she has a new number now.

Granny: So we can take her off. Now, who do we want to replace her... let's see...

Granny (looking back at the phone): Oh, we have GJ's number--want to keep her on there, of course. Guess we should give her a call here, see how the Arizona bunch is doing.

Grandpa: Yeah, haven't talked to her in a while.

Granny: And Gene, we want to keep his number. He was so happy to see you the other night, Pat. He kept asking about you and Deirdre. He says it DEER-dra, you know like real hard on the DEER. And Matt is like Dee-Dru, real fast, it just sounds almost like Dee-Dee. I didn't know who he was talking about, and he said, "your granddaughter."

Granny: So, who else, Brownie. We need to take Brownie off. Brownie died.

Grandpa: Died of cancer.

Granny: Yeah, she fought that for years. She was scared to death about it, so she fought it hard. I talked to Belinda about Marge and they haven't got the final results yet. But they have this area in the lung, you see, it spread to the lung, but I don't think it's in the liver yet, so she's got a fighting chance.

Granny: We have Mark and Melinda here too...

Mom: Melinda?

Granny: Yeah.

Mom: Is it Melinda or Belinda?

Granny: Belinda.

Mom: Well, I never can tell when you say it. You slur it.

Mom: Guess we have to get that changed on your phone too.

Granny: Yeah, I reckon so.

Granny: Now, who do we want on here. Should we add our dentist? We could add your friend Margaret, Pat.

Mom: Do you cal her that often?

Granny: Well, no, not really.

And so on. You all get the picture.

Illinois

2008-06-16T06:51:00.006-05:00

After we left Indiana, Mom and I continued our swath of destruction. We arrived at my Aunt's house Monday evening. The next morning, we decided to take her and my Grandfather out to breakfast. After we picked up my Grandfather, whom I call Paw, I noticed that my Aunt R.'s speech was very slurred. She had had three strokes, so her left side was still a bit weak. Her speech had been a little slurred the night before and she had not slept well, so I just assumed that she was having problems speaking because she was tired.

When we arrived at Denny's, I helped Paw in, then looked back to check on Mom and my Aunt's progress. They were still struggling to get out of the car, so I went back to help them. With Mom and me on either side of my Aunt, we all managed to get into Denny's. The hostess at Denny's took one look at the group of us and decided to seat us in the very back of the restaurant. When we finally reached the table (after having passed several empty tables that would have held the four of us quite comfortably). At this point, Mom decided to run back to my Aunt's house and get her walker. She took off, and my Aunt, Paw, and I perused the menu.

After the waitress took our order, my Aunt looked like she was fading a bit--kinda shutting down. She is diabetic and hadn't had much to eat after she took her insulin, so she added some sugar to her orange juice. That didn't help and she looked like she was falling asleep, so I decided to dial 911.

Just as soon as I dialed, the waitress came out with our food.

"I'm gonna need those in boxes," I said, trying to keep an eye on my Aunt and hold a conversation with the 911 dispatcher.

"Okay," she smiled simply, "I'll bring out some boxes for you."

"No," I said slowly and clearly, "You're gonna need to put them in boxes for us."

A few seconds after that, my Aunt threw up. During this whole thing, no one in Denny's came over to see how we were or offer assistance. My Aunt was in obvious distress, and I was having what I'm sure was a rather loud conversation on a cell phone. But I'll tell you all, that waitress made sure she brought out the bill to the only person who wasn't occupied: my Paw.

When the ambulance finally arrived, about five EMTs crowded into Denny's. I backed off and let them do their job. I was pretty impressed with them--they zeroed in on the two things that might have happened, and focused on her blood sugar and her history of strokes. (But heck, after the folks at Denny's completely ignored us, anyone would have impressed me if they had shown the slightest bit of concern for my Aunt's welfare).

As they were wheeling my Aunt out in the stretcher, my Mom came back.

"I knew, just as soon as I saw the ambulance, something had happened to your Aunt," she said.

We just had a few seconds, so Mom and I decided that she would spend the day with Paw (who was understandably quite worried about his daughter), and that I would go in the ambulance with my Aunt (because she had spent all day Saturday in the ER with our neighbor, we figured I was up on the roster).

So I hopped into the ambulance (and was told by the EMT driving that while they were in Denny's, someone had hit the ambulance), and started making phone calls.

Anyway, I spent the day in the ER with my Aunt. The doctors finally decided that she had had a minor stroke, and that they were going to keep her for a few days, then send her to rehabilitation for a few weeks.

Wednesday Mom spent the entire day cleaning my Aunt's house. I helped during the morning, then visited my Aunt and Paw during the afternoon.

Thursday, Mom and I left for Missouri, to spread our traveling curse to a whole new area.

Honest to God Real Exchange

2008-06-13T21:06:00.003-05:00

This was just too funny--and completely unplanned. Mr. G, who is practically family, stopped by to visit with my Grandparents, my Mom, and me. During the course of the conversation he mentioned that a friend of his, E. Yurik, had had triple bypass surgery:

Grandpa: Wow, that's a shame. She's D. Yurik's daughter, right? They all lived over yonder in --.

Mr. G: Yeah, that's right. She married and moved to --. Had a couple of kids.

Granny: Yeah, D. Yurik, I remember him. I knew him well. He--

And, of course, I burst into hysterical laughter at this point. Mom was the first to catch on and she explained it to everyone else present, but they still looked at me like I was a complete loon. Which I am.

(The details of the conversation have been imaginatively recreated, but the main lines are recorded exactly as they were said. I swear, I can't make this stuff up.)

Indiana

2008-06-13T16:44:00.005-05:00

Me: I better call Rachel and tell her we're gonna be late.

Mom: Here, you can use my phone.

Me: Thanks.

Me: Rachel? Hi there. How are you? Well, the reason I'm calling is to let you know that we're going to be late. Really late. We're sitting on 70 right now and we've gone about a half a mile in the last hour. Yeah, right. Right. Well, they have 70 completely closed due to flooding, so I think they are routing us off. Uh huh. Yeah, we're just sitting here. Yeah, watching the snails do laps around us. Swimming laps, that is. There's water everywhere. Yup. Well, I think we have about six miles to go before they kick us off 70, then we head north to 40. I don't know how long we're going to be on 40, but we're not moving quickly at all. Right, right. Yeah. Well, I'll give you a call later when we know what time we're going to make it in. Heck, we might have to stay in Indiana tonight. We might not make it out. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I'll talk to you later. Love ya too.

(Three hours later)

Mom: Finally! There's the exit.

Me: Yeah, now we just need to sit in more traffic to go three miles north to 40, and then who knows how many miles west to get back on 70.

Mom: Well, is there any other way to go?

Me: Well, we could try going south. We might be able to cut west and north and pick up 70.

Mom: Now, there's a lake down there, isn't there?

Me: Yup. And we would have to cross a river.

Mom: Do we cross the lake?

Me: No, we don't. We can cut across just north of the lake.

Mom: Hmm. Well, let's try that. Beats sitting in traffic with these trucks.

(ten minutes later, as the roads are getting progressively narrower)

Mom: Well, it must go somewhere, or else where would all these cars and trucks be coming from?

Me: Yeah, but they can't be avoiding 70 because the east-bound side was open to traffic.

Mom: Well, they're coming from somewhere.

(ten minutes later)

Mom: Hmm, there's a barrier here. But there's a car, so obviously people can get through.

Me: Watch out!

(Mom stops the car and we sit there, staring at the several feet of water running over the road).

Me: Guess that car came down here and had to turn around... like we're gonna have to.

Mom: Can we go further south?

Me (looking at the map): Well, we can try to go further south and catch 64.

Mom: How far are we from that?

Me: Hmm, maybe an hour and a half, two hours.

Mom: But then it's quicker.

Me: Well, it only cuts about 30 miles off our trip across Illinois.

Mom: Still, it beats sitting in traffic.

Me: No argument there. So, we gonna try it?

Mom: What do you think?

Me: Uhhh... Might as well. I mean, it's not like there's massive flooding in the state of Indiana or anything.

Ten minutes later, heading south. I'm still glancing at the map, but we're both eying the water around us nervously. Most of the fields we pass are completely under water. The water hasn't made it on to the road yet, but it is really close in places. We've crossed over a couple of creeks that have breached their banks. The water is muddy and rushing. It is also raining pretty hard, and every time we go over a slight rise, I'm expecting to find the road covered in water. I'm also watching all the water around us, just in case it rises to cover the road. But Mom and I have just spent three hours to go four miles, so we're both more than a little punchy. We're cracking jokes about being swept away.

Me: Mom?

Mom: Yeah?

Me: Remember that county that the radio said had been declared a national disaster area?

Mom: ?

Me: Greene county.

Mom: Yeah.

Me: Well, I feel I ought to mention that this road that we're taking...

Mom: Yeah?

Me: Well, not only does it go through Greene county...

Mom: Uh huh.

Me: But it cuts a diagonal across it.

Mom: Uh huh.

Me: Yeah, and I also feel that I ought to mention that this road that we're gonna take...

Mom: Yeah?

Me: Well, it goes along a river.

Mom: Oh great.

Me: Yeah. I think we're f*cked.

Mom: Probably.

Me: Oh well.

Mom: But there are trucks coming from the other direction. Of course, we all know that that is not the most reliable source of information....

Me: Yeah, they've probably all turned around.

Mom: Yeah.

Me: You know what's going to happen, right? We gonna hit some water, and we gonna turn around and head back north, and the road will be covered. We'll be stuck in Indiana. We're never going to make it out of Indiana.

Mom: Aren't we Miss Suzie Sunshine.

Me: Just trying to keep our spirits up.

At this point we decided that we were both a little bit hungry. We agreed to stop at the first food place we saw, which just happened to be a McDonald's. When we went inside, there were a couple of old-timers talking about the current weather situation. Mom went over to talk to them to ask them about the roads.

Mom: So, can I go south along this road to get to 64?

Old timers: Nope, can't do that. Whole road is closed. Runs along a river, burst it's banks. Everthings closed up down there.

Me: What about heading west then north to pick up 70?

Old timers: Nope, that won't work. Everthing over in the direction's closed too. Roads are under water.

Mom: Well, what would you recommend?

Old timers: Go north to 70, take that west.

Mom: But 70 is closed.

Old timers: Well, go a bit north of that and you can take 40 west.

We wound up taking the Old Timers' advice and heading back north. As we got to 70, a road worker was in the process of moving the cones from the entrance ramp, so we were able to get on 70 west-bound. I couldn't really tell what part of it had been under water because everything was so wet. Just beyond the highway, water stretched out over fields. I might have thought they were just all lakes, were it not for the telephone poles and trees sticking up. There were houses on slight rises, looking like little islands. There were roads that disappeared under muddy, fast-moving water. The water was too close for comfort, and I half expected to see a giant wall of water rushing towards us.

It all sounds pretty tame, and I guess it was. But for awhile there I think both of us doubted that we would be able to make it out of Indiana. And let's face it--Indiana is not really a place you want to get stuck.

More later. I went sailing today and came back with a couple of ticks and some chiggers. I'd say I was doing something wrong had the trees not been in the water. : )

Visiting family

2008-06-13T15:36:00.008-05:00

Granny: I hate to tell ya sweetie, you're gonna be so mad at me, but I bleached one of your pink tops.

Me: one of my pink tops...?

Granny: yeah, you said they were nasty and that I ought to disinfect them. So I bleached your pink top and now it's tie-died.

Me: My pink top? What did it look like?

Granny: Well, it was pink.

Me: Was it a tank top?

Granny: Well, I don't quite remember. You can go in the dryer and check.

Mom: Well, kiddo, it is your fault. You told her that the clothes were nasty.

Granny: Yeah, you told me I should wear gloves to handle them.

Me: Uh, you do know that I was exaggerating, right?

Mom: And she takes everything literally.

Me: Well, I was obviously exaggerating.

Granny: Well, I didn't know that.

Me (checking the dryer): I don't see any pink tops.

Granny: Here, it's this one.

Me: That's not mine. That's Mom's.

Mom: You bleached my shirt?

Granny: Oh, I'm sorry, honey.

Me: Uh, Granny? Why did you decide to bleach a pink top?

Granny: You said it was nasty. I wanted to disinfect it. You said I should wear gloves to handle it.

Mom: And she took you literally. It's all your fault.

Me: It's not my fault! I'm not the one with bleach on my hands!

Mom: But you know she takes everything literally.

Me: Yes, but why would she bleach a pink top?

Mom: Mom, you can't bleach anything other than white cotton.

Granny: I know that...

Mom: So why'd you bleach a pink top?

Granny: Because she said it was disgusting.

Mom: And you took her literally. So it's her fault.

Me: So you picked up a big bottle of bleach that had--

Mom: --whites only--

Me: --whites only written in big letters on the front, and decided that it would be a good idea to use it on Mom's pink top.

Granny: Well, I thought it might be a bad idea when I picked up the bottle...

Me: So why'd you do it?

Mom: It's all your fault.

Me: It is so not my fault! She's almost eighty! She should know better!

Mom: And you're almost thirty. You should know by now that your Grandmother takes everything literally.

Me: Yes. but...

Mom: So you owe me a tank top.

Me: !

Me: Granny, I'm going to say something and I want you to take me absolutely literally.

Granny: Ok.

Me: Don't take anything I say after this sentence literally.

Granny: Well, okay.

Me (to Mom): See?

Mom: I'm gonna go stay in a hotel.

Me: Well, you can probably get a good rate in that burnt out hotel down the street.

Granny: This is the durndest family...

Mom: You ever grew up in?

Granny: Yeah. No.

Me: Mom, next time we visit family, can we pick a different family?

Granny: You guys...

Mom: You have no idea what we've been through this past week.

Me: Mom, can I stay with you in the hotel?

I had started to write a different 'blog when this exchange happened between my Mom, my Grandmother, and me. It so perfectly fit the mood of the past week that I decided to use it instead of what I had written. You know, like "this is your brain, this is your brain visiting family." Mom and I only just arrived yesterday afternoon, so we have about another week of exchanges like this one.
To fully illustrate the levels of punchiness that my mother and I have reached. I really need to explain everything that has happened in the past week. It's so traumatic, though, that I'm not sure I'm ready to write about it all yet. I may have to write about it all in a series of installments. That would give me plenty of time to write a bit, consume some brownies as therapy, and then write a bit more. (The brownies are running a bit low, though, so I might need to take a longer break at some point to make up a new batch).

Mom and I, at least one a year, generally make a trip to visit family, either together or separately. Last year we traveled separately, but the year before that we drove out together. The first leg of the trip is a drive from Maryland to Dayton, Ohio. The second leg is a drive to Belleville, IL, to visit my paternal relatives. After that, we continue to the Ozarks, where we visit everyone who lives out here in the space of a few days. Finally, we load produce, cookies, and wood-worked projects in the car and drive back to Maryland. Every trip generally produces some stories (the red bridge story, Granny's diabetic coma, crazy relatives), but some trips are a bit more eventful that others. This trip has left them all behind.
Here are some of the lessons I've learned in the past week: First, never travel through an area that has been declared a major disaster area by FEMA. Second, never, ever have a stroke in Denny's. Third, tornadoes are scary things. Finally--and the most important on the list--is never let the disaster twins (previously known as Deirdre and Pat but currently being referred to as "Typhoid Marys" and "Pox-Spreaders") come and visit you.

It all began last Saturday, when the phone rang at 5am. Our neighbor David had fallen out of bed and was unable to get up. He had hit his medic alert bracelet for assistance. Mom and I went over to pick him up and put him back in bed, and Mom was worried about him so she stayed with him to keep an eye on him. I returned to the house to make tea and prepare for the day.
My day wasn't too bad. I had a picnic to go to and then a presentation to give. The presentation went fine (although there are several things I would have done differently had I known more about the attendees). After the presentation I went to Mom's office and, instead of seeing her, I saw my Auntie Em. Auntie Em explained that she had gotten a frantic call from my Mom, who was now in the ER with David. Auntie Em had been watching Hillary's concession speech on two tvs, and had barely heard the phone ringing. When she finally picked it up, Mom asked her to come and meet me because she was going to go in the ambulance with David. So, I headed home, grabbed some food for mom, and headed in to the ER.
I found Mom and David, passed the food to Mom, visited a while, then left to head home. I probably ought to have stayed at the hospital. It was over 100 degrees and the house had no AC. I spent the afternoon on the couch, sucking down ice cream and trying to keep the cats from touching me. When Mom arrived home, Auntie Em and one of our neighbors came over and we tried to piece together the events of the day. (Which I may or may not post later). Then, I packed for the trip to the mid-west and went to sleep.

New Camera

2008-05-27T07:11:00.002-05:00

I went out last Friday and spent waaaayyyy too much money on a new camera. In my defense, I needed a new(er) model... and I guess it wasn't too bad, cost wise. Let's just say that I have done my part to stimulate the American Economy. Well, sort of. I bought a Nikon.

Anyway, here are a couple of test shots. Nothing too insanely interesting--I just wanted to experiment with the close-up option on the camera (which my previous camera lacked).

The Polish Easter Bunny versus Russian Father Christmas.

One of Mom's ten zillion Cosmos.

Author.

2008-05-06T20:23:00.002-05:00

So, I just printed out everything that I wrote on this 'blog about the Czech Republic--over 100 pages, single spaced. Wa-Hoo. 'Course, it is all self-indulgent (nature of a blog, after all) and not particularly interesting. Still, I wrote "Czechs in the City" on a blank piece of paper and attached the whole thing together with a binder clip. I then put it in the back of my file cabinet drawer. I may celebrate by taking allergy medicine (okay, the humor there is that most people might be inclined to celebrate by having a drink. Allergy medicine has the potential to mess me up pretty bad--and it shouldn't be mixed with alcohol. So, allergy meds it is. Oh, and there is the fact that my allergies are absolutely driving me nuts right now.)

The other book--which actually will be read by other human beings (I hope) is my teacher's handbook that I am writing. Well, I've actually finished the writing (Wa-Hoo! 50 pages, space and a half!) but now I have massive amounts of re-writing to do. Ugh. My excuse for my writing style in it is that it is going to be read by non-native English speakers, so I have to keep my tone simple. Of course, these non-native speakers are all English teachers, so they actually know the language... still, as an excuse for a depressingly unsophisticated voice, I think it works.

New addiction: high-waisted pencil skirts. I don't know if they are actually in style right now or not, and I don't care. They look good on me. (I went shopping today after work. I needed another skirt like I needed a hole in the head, so I grabbed a skirt to try on. It looked so good, I bought it.) What I do need is some type of sweater that will keep me warm but won't be too warm to wear this Spring. Bleh. But that skirt is A-freakin-mazing.

Okay, time to go doctor my sinus headache with some seriously powerful Benadryl. I may even go for the adult's dose tonight, instead of my usual child dose. I miss Dimetapp.

Speechless

2008-04-18T20:38:00.002-05:00

I have yet another little gem to add to my collection.

For one of my French classes, I am required to write two papers. I wrote my second paper on Debussy, Mallarme, and the Impressionists. (I actually wanted to write about Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, but that idea was nixed by the prof.) Anyway, a couple of days ago, we had to bring our papers in for peer reviews. I passed my paper off to a couple of different folks and didn't look at their comments until I got home. But as I was going through the paper, I noticed that one of them had, next to a picture by Monet that I had included in the paper, written, "can you find a clearer picture?"

Yeah. Time to stop taking classes with undergrads.

No pics to post

2008-04-17T12:37:00.002-05:00

Got another reminder that I have yet to post pictures of me in my super cool new dress. I have taken pictures, but yet again, I have proven myself completely unphotogenic. See:

http://dj47kali.blogspot.com/2008/01/yet-another-one.html#comments

http://dj47kali.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-wall-of-shame.html#comments

From my "in the mist" series

2008-04-17T06:40:00.002-05:00

From the blogger who brought you pithy observations on Marylanders, Missourians, Canadians, the French, and the Czechs, I now present notes from my latest anthropology project:

The world of XY.

As the only female in my Tai Chi class, I am privy to the conversations of eight representitives of the male species. After class, we all usually hang out a bit longer and chat. Anyway, here is the list of conversation topics from last night:

Pipe bombs --> bulldogs --> prison sex --> juicers

I kid you not.

Pipe bombs: This conversation is cross-referenced with "small-town observations" (see stories of Mom's house). Apparently, ten years ago, there was a kid in Salisbury who tried to make a pipe bomb and blew his thumb off. At least three people in the Tai Chi class, not including the guy who told the story, knew this kid or had gone to school with him. (Actually, one of the guys was unable to confirm that the kid he was thinking of was the one the others were talking about, which naturally causes one to wonder if there was two kids who blew their thumbs off while making pipe bombs about ten years ago. Distressing.)

Bulldogs: Standard conversation on bulldogs about inbreeding and danger. Included story of mutilated kid and also commentary on existing pit bull laws in Salisbury.

Prison Sex: This started with a conversation on baggy pants and ended with an exploration of the origins of said fashion statement. The explanation given was that, back in the day, men in prison would wear baggy pants to attract a mate.

Juicers: Commentary on which brands of juicers were the best, what you could put or not put in certain juicers, the possible disadvantages of buying a juicer that removes citrus fruit peels.

But I jest. Sort of. The thing is that guys are interesting observation subjects and groups of guys are (duh moment coming) very different from groups of females. I could really feel a difference back when I had a yoga class right before my Tai Chi class. Everyone in the yoga class was female, and the atmosphere was much more competitive. You could see women looking around the classroom, comparing themselves with each other. Who could stretch the furthest, who could balance in a pose the longest, etc. In Tai Chi, there is none of that--at least, none that I've picked up on. There is more a sense of cooperation, though perhaps this is because some of the forms and activities require the cooperation of two people, whereas in yoga everything was solo.

This is not the first time I've been the only (or one of the only) females in a group of males. When I was in high school I joined the all-male drum line in the marching band my junior year. I got grief from the guys until I pounded on one of them with my bass drum mallets. After that, things were fine.

Then there was the Army, where I was one of a few females in my unit. I was never accepted into the group, and at social functions I was never really sure if I belonged with the Army wives, preparing food in the kitchen, or the Army guys, slurping beer on the couch. (I usually wound up playing with the kids and/or dogs). The women who were accepted by the guys were generally the ones who had proven themselves exceptional in the more physical aspects of Army life. The rest of us? Well, we were subjected to the rumor-of-the-month mill, which always involved speculation about our sex life. As one of my female drill sergeants put it, "If you are a women in the Army, you are either a dyke or a slut." And she was absolutely right.

Depending on who I did or didn't spend time with, I had both labels applied to me. If I hung out with guys, the first sergeant would call me into his office and tell me that rumors were circulating about me and that I should be more careful. If I tried to hang out with the few other women in the unit, thinking that to be the safer option, I was a dyke. Sometimes I wonder if my complete failure in the Army was due to their inability to put me into a neat category. This inability extended far beyond the realm of sex, though that may have been the most basic failure at categorization.

So, there you have it. Yet another one of my morphing 'blogs that ends abruptly.

Updates and stuff

2008-03-26T15:20:00.003-05:00

Baby Jessica? (Am I dating myself here?) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7314792.stm

In other, more important news (i.e., new about me), here is the latest info. I received job offers from a school in Santiago and a school in Quito. After much deliberation, I have tentatively accepted the job in Quito. There are a lot of aspects of the move/job which will, overall, make it more challenging than teaching in Santiago, but in the long run I believe that it will move me forward professionally. Anyway, I invite your comments--as long as you don't tell me that I am 1. stupid or 2. crazy. Okay, you can tell me I'm crazy, but a good crazy, not an insane, irresponsible crazy.

and Other than that... still not much news. I don't know yet when I'll be leaving, but I will be heading back to the Midwest before I leave for Quito. The Spanish class is going well. I feel like I'm finally reaching the point where things... not make sense, because they have always made some sort of sense, but where the language and my brain are starting to click. Vocabulary and grammar are becoming easier to learn and remember, and I'm starting to feel like I can string more than two words together. I always think this is kind of an exciting place in the language learning process. Everything before is so frustrating: I feel like I can spend an hour studying ten words and not remember anything the next day. I was just hitting this point with Czech when I left Prague. Of course, in the Spanish class, it really helps knowing French. Especially when we got to Conocer and Saber, the two "to know" verbs. They work pretty much the same as Savoir/Connaitre in French, so today during jeopardy I was totally kicking ass in the Saber vs. Conocer category. Everyone was like, "how do you do that so fast...?" And once again, I led my team to a victory. (And not just any kind of victory. One of those wipe-the-floor-with-the-other-team victories.) Not that I should brag, because the French class is, for some reason, touch and go. I think the problems are that 1. It has been so long since I've taken a French class/spoken French and 2. The teacher just does not know what to make of me. I'm not disrespectful, but I... I don't know. I guess I'm just in a completely different place than the other students in the class (who are all 20 or younger). I'm really, really, really trying, though, to keep my more, ahem, familiar French out of the classroom--which is a challenge because although I may have studied French in a formal classroom environment some at University, I acquired my French through conversation. Informal conversation. Very informal conversation. Ahem.

Sheesh, and hold your horses on the pictures of my super awesome fabuloso dress. First, it needs to get just a little warmer. Second, can we just take a minute to talk about how much adult acne sucks? Like, really, really, really? I did shave my legs yesterday, though, so that is a step towards pictures. I promise.

TTFN, and enjoy Spring. Unless you live near Ottawa. If that is the case, you may want to consider hopping in a car and driving south to enjoy Spring in, say, Maryland.

How exciting my life has become...

2008-03-20T16:45:00.001-05:00

I've just bought the best dress in the world. It is so great, I'm going to have to post pictures.

Yeah. This is what I have to post about when I'm taking some time off from traveling.

And then we have this...

2008-02-10T19:42:00.000-05:00

Across the Universe, as done by Brunhilda and the Hitler Youth. And some creepy masonic terrorist.

Things that sort of concern me

2008-01-29T19:21:00.000-05:00

So, every Croatian music video I've seen involves footage of soldiers with guns.

Stoked

2008-01-28T14:54:00.000-05:00

So, I just got off the phone with a women from a school in Santiago (that's in Chile, for all you geographically challenged out there). Anyway, the school sounds pretty nice (better than the one I was working at in Prague). There are a couple of things about it that I'm not crazy about, but the school does some good stuff to make up for it.

Anyway, I'm going to try to talk to a few more schools. I have a bit more time now so I can be a bit pickier.

Also, I had my first Spanish class today (I decided on 101). The course started a few weeks ago, so when I walked into class, the first thing we did was take a chapter test. I took the test too, and I think I did ok--maybe a B.

Also, I had a French class today as well. There are no French classes here at my actual level (upper-intermediate/low advanced), so I'm going with a more grammar oriented intermediate class. My speaking and comprehension is a little advanced for the class (after 40 minutes of class, the teacher switched to English and informed the class that we had just functioned in French for 40 minutes without anyone dying. I was like, "that's it?" But I figure I've survived a 90 minutes Czech conversation, so I can afford to be a little uppity.) But my grammar is not great and my spelling is atrocious (basically, when I write, I think in French but my hand guides the pencil in English).

What else... not much. Saw this lil' sis this past weekend--helped paint the future baby room (purple and yellow, if anyone was interested). She is gianormously preggers (and still has, what, two or so more months to go). I also proved that I have (barely) more energy than a puppy (I have to admit that while cats are superior as pets, dogs are a bit more fun to play with. Until they start humping the toys.)

Gonna do some Spanish and French homework before I head off to Yoga and Tai Chi.

New news.

2008-01-24T19:09:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I've got it all figured out (as in, I put off making a decision and bought myself more time): I'm going to hang in Salisbury this spring and take a couple of French classes and a Spanish class. I've got some other things lined up too (grading essays, getting involved with teacher training for a charity in Morocco, cleaning house and scooping cat poop...). Basically this buys me some down time (yes, taking classes is my way of relaxing and storing up energy for the next big push). It will also give me some time to work on acquiring some Spanish (which would be sooooo helpful if I want to move to SA--will hopefully lessen the culture shock just a teensy bit).

Now the big question is what level of Spanish I should take. I took a placement test and got a 192. That should put me in Span 101, BUT the cut off score for Span 102 is 200. I'm soooo close, and I'm an over-achiever (albeit a lazy one), so I'm thinking I could (maybe) hack it in Span 102. Votes? (I ask for opinions then I generally ignore them. But I like to hear them. Naw, I shouldn't say I ignore them. I ask for them, I consider them, then I do whatever I was gonna do anyway).

Anyway, the main thing is that I'm feeling a lot less stressed now.

Not much to post about

2008-01-21T10:05:00.000-05:00

Well, nothing much going on, but I figured I'd post anyway. No longer working at the giant department store... Doing a bit of grading for ETS... Mainly cleaning house and looking for a job.

And the job search? Frustrating. As usual, I've only been at it for a few weeks now and I'm freaking out that I haven't found anything yet. I had a heck of a time hunting down people to write letters of rec for me (and when I say hunting, I actually mean stalking. Like, hey, you passed me in the hallway at UMBC once--wanna write a letter for me? Please? Please?) But I've got one (luke-warm) letter and one promise of a letter, so... yeah.

And, again, as usual, my frustration at not being able to find a job in a week has turned my attention back to...

You guessed it, more school. I'm not ready to make the final leap to a PhD, but I have considered getting another Master's. (This time at a real school. Which is what I said about my first MA. Before I realized that SU was gonna be a lot cheaper.)

But another MA is pretty much out of the question for now--it is too late to apply for the Fall '08 semester.

Ugh. What a whiny, depressing (and self-indulgent) post. Note to self: never blog when hungry.

Thoughts on Grammar

2008-01-03T19:34:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, at the well-known department store where I worked as a Christmas retail whore, one of the customers, upon hearing that I work as an English teacher, began questioning my grammar. In particular, he brought up the fact that I had used "have got" instead of his preferred version, "have". To him, "have got" was redundant. There was a crowd, so I only gave him a brief overview of my philosophy of English grammar, beginning with my role as a teacher of English the way it is actually used, my consideration of myself as a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist, and ending with the somewhat arbitrary nature of several English grammar rules (my oft-used example being the rule that one should never split infinitives). But of course, as soon as I finished work and got home, I cracked open the Strunk and White to check the rule for "Have got" versus "have". The rule was simple: use "have" instead of the more colloquial "have got" in writing. Which I do. Generally.

But that all leads me to my first point: people are funny about grammar. When I tell people that I am an English teacher, they either treat me as a confessor or a Grand Grammar Inquisitor. People seem to imagine that I am either inwardly wincing at their grammar (I'm usually not, but more on that later) or that I am part of a secret us versus them Grammar brotherhood. Once I explain to the first group that teaching English is my career and I'm only going to correct their grammar if they pay me, they laugh and relax. The second group is slightly trickier to handle. I usually give the same descriptivist versus prescriptivist and arbitrary nature of several English grammar rules speech, but I don't think most buy it (I think they walk away from the conversation with the belief that I don't actually know any grammar rules). As annoying as these Grammar brotherhood folks can be, they are also very fascinating. Each one has latched on to a relatively obscure grammar rule, and when they hear people around them breaking the rule, they suffer from fingernails-on-a-blackboard pain. I would love to be able to design an experiment that trys to find a correlation between something (Personality? Religion? Myers-Briggs type?) and Grammar nitpickery (ie, are people with the INFJ personailty type driven to distraction when they hear teenagers use the word "like" as a conversation filler?).

Now, on to my second point. I claim to be a descriptivist, but that is not completely true. There are certain grammar points that cause me acute pain. For example, if I hear someone use fewer instead of less (or vice versa), I have to exercise superhuman strength to keep from muttering the correct word under my breath. And, this being the holiday season, I have (got) to rant (slightly) about something I absolutely detest. Now, generally, I don't mind when people verb nouns or adjectives to create new words. After all, this is one of the ways in which the English language evolves. I even wrote a paper about the backformation of "enthused" from "enthusiastic". But (and this is a very big but) I hatehatehate when people use "gift" as a verb. As in, "He gifted the card." Agh. Disgusting. First of all, English already has several perfectly acceptable ways to express that thought. Secondly, is gift a transitive verb? Intransitive? Who can tell me? No one. But anyway, I was griping about this to my friend S's husband, R, and he mentioned that he used "gift" as a verb when the act of giving was aggressive (as in "regifting" or giving a person a present that the giver knows the recipient doesn't need/want/like). I find this usage completely acceptable as it gives us a way to express a well-known phenomenon (do doooo da do da do). About an hour later, R used the word "food" as a verb to express the act of unloading extra food on unsuspecting friends and relatives. And yet another well-known holiday phenomenon was expressed in a succinct manner).

So, what brought all this on? Just the fact that I made 24 chocolate cupcakes this morning and have spent all day trying to think of people to food.

Note: I know I should proof-read a post about grammar, but I'm sick and my laptop battery is about to die. So I'm just going to go ahead and post this with the knowledge that I'm leaving myself open to having my grammar edited. Politely and with the best of intentions, of course.

My wall of shame...

2008-01-03T16:30:00.001-05:00

Well, as my last picture has given folks some small measure of amusement, I figured I'd continue with my tour of "animated and expressive" photos (Animated and expressive is how my good ol' Mom describes them. I use slightly different terms, which I shall not post here).

The bummer of it all is that I don't own copies of all the doozies out there. I wish I had a copy of my high school percussion picture. Or my military ID picture (that one was an absolute winner). Or the picture that someone took of my in France (where my chin managed to completely disappear). Still, I have plenty to keep this amusing.

Anyway, here I am with my double second cousin once removed, Marcus.

Yet another one...

2008-01-02T21:44:00.001-05:00

So I have no idea how I manage it, but I look either retarded, autistic, deformed, or psychotic in just about every picture taken of me (the classic shots usually combine at least two of the above). I've always chalked this up to having an "animated" and "expressive" face. But it has happened so often I may have to consider the more likely alternative: I just look funny.

So feel free to weigh in on this latest classic. Just don't tell me that it "is not that bad." Or I will post my infamous passport picture.

100% American. For now.

2007-12-31T08:26:00.000-05:00

Well, I've finally completed my transition to being a complete American. Yesterday I drove to the supermarket (no, the facts that it was raining and that I'm fighting a cold and that I had to buy a 10 lb bag of flour do not count. I drove. Period). I realized as I was driving to the store that that I am now back to being an American.

Time to start traveling again.

Why Brits don't travel...

2007-12-22T08:58:00.002-05:00

Wrong country' sat-nav blunder

The driver programmed the wrong Lille into the navigation system

Shoppers on a Christmas trip to France were taken to the wrong country after a satellite navigation blunder diverted their coach seven hours off course.

Instead of arriving in Lille, France, 50 members of Cheltenham and Gloucester (C&G) Social Club were taken 98 miles (157km) away to Lille, Belgium.

When they finally arrived, they had two hours to shop before the stores closed.

The detour happened during a weekend coach trip from Gloucester to Ostend, Belgium, costing staff £150.

Tim Knight, manager of Travelscope, the company which arranged the trip, said: "Part of the weekend trip was an afternoon shopping in Lille.

"Unfortunately the driver from the coach company we commissioned made a blunder on his satellite navigation."

On the trip back to their hotel, the coach driver unplugged the navigation system and, with the help of a passenger and an atlas, made it back to Ostend.

C&G spokeswoman Melinda Russell, said: "We're very sorry that our staff and their families have been let down, especially as we have enjoyed so many successful trips through the course of the year.

"Unfortunately, even the best laid plans can go awry, especially when relying on sat-nav."

(From BBC news)

2007-12-22T08:58:00.001-05:00

Seasonal Retail

2007-12-11T21:52:00.000-05:00

My friend, Auntie Em, asked me a while back what my co-workers at the well-known department store where I am conducting my holiday work/observations were like. My response was to recount something which had happened to me at work. She enjoyed the story so much that she suggested I post it on my 'blog.

Last week, I went to the break room to eat my lunch. There were three other employees there, eating their lunches and watching the local news on TV. I was starving (as usual), so most of my attention was focused on my food, but I was still aware of what was being reported on the news. One of the stories was of a dog that had, apparently, started a fire. A woman had been frying fish on her stove when she stepped out of her house to take the trash out. The dog had shut the door behind her, locking her out, and the unattended frying fish had started a grease fire. One of the department store employees wondered aloud if the insurance company would cover the fire. I, recognizing a set-up that a hundred comedians locked in a hundred comedy clubs for a hundred years would never be so lucky to get, made the obvious comment. I turned to the other women and said (come on now, say it with me. You know you want to), "I don't think insurance companies cover acts of dog." Instead of getting at least a groan, the other women turned to look at me like I had grown a third head.

Tough audience, apparently.

My other story illustrates perfectly the Christmas spirit. Well, the Christmas spirit as interpreted by Jerry Springer. A woman was shopping with her husband and mother-in-law, and she stopped to look at the expensive purse section (purses over $200). She spent quite a bit of time admiring one particular purse (perhaps with the hope that her husband would return to buy it for her). Anyway, the shopping party moved on. A while later, the mother-in-law returned and requested to see the same exact purse that her daughter-in-law was looking at. The woman looked the purse over for a few seconds, then decided to purchase it. Not for her daughter-in-law, but for herself. I bet holidays with that family are a laugh a minute.

My final story is actually kinda sweet and fits under the good men might actually exist category. I was working yesterday when I man came in to return a purse that he had bought for his wife. He said that he had thought he managed to fit all her specifications, but that the purse was still not quite right. He told me about how he had searched for the right purse for two weeks--and did I know how hard it was to find the right purse? (Uh, that's pretty much the same conversation I have with every woman who wanders into the purse department.) Anyway, he said, he had gotten to the point where he was looking at ladies handbags. I told him that if he saw one he liked, he ought to ask the woman where she had found it. He looked at me, eyes wide, and said, "Oh no. I'm never doing that again." Turns out he had seen a woman with the perfect purse and had asked her where she had bought it. The woman turned up her nose and looked down at him to huff that it was a Coach. Anyway, it is kinda gratifying to know that at least one man in the world has had a glimpse of the perils of purse shopping.

Seasonal Work

2007-12-02T08:51:00.001-05:00

Well, I made it through the group interview (heaven only knows how. They must have been really desperate for seasonal workers) and I start my new job in a well-known department store today. I will be selling purses (and anyone who knows me and purses has to be raising their eyebrows in disbelief at this piece of news. See, I HATE shopping for purses. I put it off and put it off, waiting until my current purse has completely disintegrated, and then I slouch toward the store and, ill-tempered, I sift through racks of over-priced, poorly-made, and ugly as sin purses. In fact, it wasn't until about three years ago that I learned 1. Other women LOVE purses and 2. It is completely normal for most women to own more than one purse at a time. Odd, I know).

Yeah. The good news is that I won't be tempted to buy anything.

Sighisoara, Romania

2007-12-02T08:43:00.001-05:00

Sighisoara, Romania--birthplace of Vlad the impaler (Dracula). Actually, Vlad's birthplace was rather modest (I had been expecting a dark castle isolated atop a mountain somewhere). Instead, he was born in a house in the centre of the village (and catty-corner to a church, coincidently). Anyway, as cliched as it all is, the birthplace of Vlad the impaler was the perfect first stop for me. Having just come from Istanbul, I could more than relate to the desire to impale Turkish men...

Why do you want to work for our company? (A rant)

2007-11-27T12:17:00.001-05:00

Well, it is that time of year again: time to look for seasonal employment. Ugh. I can get a teaching job in Eastern Europe (several, actually), but I can't get a temporary job selling clothes at the mall. And why is that? Because--quite frankly--I suck at filling out applications and answering employee test questions. And the clue to my utter inability to do so is buried (though not exactly hidden) in that last sentence: quite frankly, I'm just too damn frank.

Let's start with the obvious Q&A. Why do you want to work for our company? Well, quite frankly, I don't give a damn about your company. I just want to earn some extra money to fund my next adventure to a country where your company owns sweatshops that take advantage of the economically disadvantaged. Hopefully, while in this country, I can find a job teaching English in an effort to give my students more opportunities to improve their lives--and not have to work for you guys any more.

Yeah. I know.

Next question: What do you have to offer our company? I have an ability to look customers in the eye and smile, then make snide comments once they have left the store. I can fold clothes like a sonuvabitch. I don't smell funny. Usually.

And then there are the on-line questionnaires, where after a series of multiple choice questions, I am judged unfit to even be interviewed. These questions are usually the obvious ones (I like people, I would report a thieving co-worker, I relish the challenge of dealing with a difficult customer). But I do not live in a world of multiple-choice boxes. If a question asks me how a feel about dealing with a difficult customer at the end of a long day, I'm going to respond that I feel utterly exhausted. That is the honest truth. But the question was how I would FEEL, not how I would REACT. If the question asked me how I would REACT, I would respond that I would do my damnedest to smile and help the customer. But this is not fill-in-the-blank; this is multiple choice. And chances are pretty good that my response is not even an option. Or how about the agree/disagree statements? My favorite: In the past year, I have been stressed so much that it has affected my sleeping/eating habits. Strongly agree--of course! But where is the option to explain that in the past year I have lived in a different country, started two new challenging jobs, traveled through 19 countries (mostly by myself), and almost been homeless. Twice. If I hadn't lost a little bit of sleep during any part of all that, it would probably be a pretty clear sign there is something seriously wrong with me.

Anyway, time to go to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. A much more pleasant experience than trying to find seasonal employment.

Test your vocabulary (and do some good)

2007-11-22T10:06:00.000-05:00

Just in case the music test was not your cup of tea, here is a vocabulary test:

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Istanbul, Turkey

2007-11-20T18:22:00.000-05:00

After my rough night on the train (see Turkish toilet story) and obtaining my visa (which occured when the train crossed the Turkish border at about 3 in the morning. All the Americans had to get off the train and go into a little office and buy visas. I hadn't been sure how much the visa was going to cost--the price went all the way up to $100 when the Iraq war started-and I wasn't sure which currencies the Turkish border guards were going to accept--so I made sure that I was carrying enough to cover visa costs in either Euros or US Dollars (or even Canadian dollars). Anyway, I only had to pay $20 (and endure a couple of less than positive comments on my passport photo--which really is the worst picture in the world. I hope I don't look near as bad as I do in pictures...).

The Aya Sofia. It was an Orthodox Cathedral which was later converted into a Mosque. Now it is a historical building with a hefty entrance fee.

Inside the Basilica Cistern, under the old part of Istanbul. Again from the time of Constantinople.

Across the mighty Bosporus.

Inside the Aya Sofia (yeah, my pictures are a little out of order. Tough luck).

A street of shops right behind the Blue Mosque.

The Blue Mosque.

COOLEST SITE EVER!!!!!

2007-11-18T13:48:00.000-05:00

Take this test.

http://jakemandell.com/tonedeaf/

Kalambaka

2007-11-18T12:11:00.000-05:00

Kalambaka is in Central Greece. It is nestled in amongst giant rocks that jut straight up into the sky (trying to be creative and descriptive with my writing here. Don't make fun of me--I'm starving). A long time ago, some religious dudes looked at the rocks, looked at each other, and decided that on top of the rocks would be an excellent place to build a bunch of monasteries (ok, it didn't exactly start like that. It started with a bunch of hermits curled up in the little pod-like indentations in the rocks. But I'm going for creative license here, you know). Anyway, the end result is a bunch of monasteries on rocks (and bus loads of tourists).

Me in my monk skirt--ain't I cute? (I had to wear a skirt to visit the monasteries).

The monastery that, according to the Dutch couple I met up with, featured rather prominently in a James Bond film.

Another monastery. I didn't go into the one. Unlike every other tourist there, I did the whole tour on foot. That meant that, from about 10am to 7pm, I was walking. It was hot and dusty--with lots of stairs (as you can imagine, given that each monastery had its own giant rock).

Delphi, Greece

2007-11-15T17:17:00.001-05:00

Aegina, Greece

2007-11-15T17:11:00.000-05:00

Aegina is one of the Greek islands. I didn't actually have enough time to go to any of the more famous islands (Santorini), so I decided to take a day a jet over to the nearest island, Aegina. (Hydrofoils jet, right?)

Athens, Greece

2007-11-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

So, we reach Athens, Greece. Enjoy the pictures!

Ohrid, Macedonia

2007-11-14T19:41:00.000-05:00

Redeeming the nasty mess that is Skopje is Ohrid, right next to the Albanian border. (I know I should be telling you stories too, but I just don't feel like writing them all out. I do have some Ohrid stories, which I may or may not tell at some point in the future. Feel free to guilt me about it like you guys did with the toilet story.) Anyway, Ohrid was beautiful. I had actually planned on crossing over into Albania, but that right there is its own little story.

Orthodox Church. I don't remember the name of it and I don't have my guide book with me (sorry). The man inside the church was nice and gave me a tour of the frescos that began in English and cycled through Macedonian, French, and German and ended in Spanish. The crazy thing was that I could follow the entire thing (granted, I had pictures to help. And it was all about saints.)

Another Orthodox Church. The grounds around the church were being excavated by University students.

Lake Ohrid.

Lake Ohrid in the sunset.

Skopje, Macedonia

2007-11-14T19:39:00.001-05:00

Skopje now joins ranks with El Paso, Texas and Buffalo, New York fin competition for the honor of ugliest city I've ever been to. Congratulations.

The Dalmatian Coast

2007-11-14T19:20:00.002-05:00

Here are some pictures of the Dalmatian Coast (Croatia and Montenegro).

Budva, Montenegro. A resort city that had pretty much been taken over by the Russians (the owner of the youth hostel where I stayed was even Russian). The old city had been completely rebuilt, giving it a little-too-perfect Disney World feel--but it was still a neat place to wander. Sv. Stefan was completely closed (the first thing my Mom asked me when I told her that I had been to Budva), so I didn't get to see it. Sv. Stefan is an island/casino/resort/hotel near Budva.

Dubrovnik, Croatia. When we went to Dubrovnik back in the 80s, there we no ruins at all. Instead, there was an old town with multi-colored roofs. But when Yugoslavia imploded, the Serbians bombed Dubrovnik (not to make the Serbs the absolute bad guys on this. From what I can figure, the Croatians were not exactly blameless through the whole thing). Anyway, what you now see are all new roofs. There were only a couple of places in the city that were still in ruins.

Overview of Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Kotor, Montenegro. The largest fjords in the Balkans. Only these aren't technically fjords
(apparently the Scandanavian and English use of the word "fjord" have slightly different geological meanings. Who'd a thunk it?)

Embarrassing Suburban Confessions #1

2007-11-14T13:51:00.000-05:00

I have forgotten how to use a mailbox.

Yes. I know. You can stop laughing now. Please.

Bit of background here. I'm currently house-sitting for my friends S&R. They just bought a nice, new house pretty close to where I grew up in Maryland, and they asked me to house-sit while they went on a much-needed vacation. One of my house-sitting duties (okay, my main house-sitting duty is basically to turn the lights on and off at intervals to keep the house from looking deserted) is to get the mail, sift through it, and send back the stuff that was mailed to the previous inhabitants. Easy, right? Sure. If you can use a mailbox. Which I apparently can't do.

So, today I went to get the mail. Brought in a huge stack of it too, ans started sorting. At the bottom were all the things I had tried to send back. What was this? Was the postman on strike? Did he figure that this mail had the correct address (even if the name was wrong) and so it was no longer his problem? There must be some way of notifying him that this mail needed to be taken away. I mean, how would he know which stack of mail was in the mailbox because it needed to be taken away and posted and which stack was left there by a lazy house-sitter who just hadn't picked it up the day before (ahem). So, how to notify the postman?

It did eventually come back to me. There is a flag on the postbox. It just took me a bit of head scratching... But when I think about it, when is the last time I lived in a house? Hmmmm? (Commence finger counting.) Almost nine years ago. Yeah, it has been nine years since I've used a suburban mailbox.

Wow.