Adventures in San Francisco and Beyond

Space Balloon II

2011-04-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

Friday morning, my kids will be launching our second balloon probe into the stratosphere. Follow our progress live.

Space Balloon

2010-05-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

I just finished up the most awesome project with some students from my school... we sent a weather balloon with a video camera, probes, and tracking equipment into the stratosphere and successfully recovered it. You should check out video, photos, and information about the mission:
ikaros.xrg.us

"Yes on 8" it is.

2008-11-06T07:46:00.000-08:00

After a night of partying in the streets of San Francisco, feeling unbelievable pride in my country, I awoke to see this picture which made me feel ashamed of the state I've adopted as home.

I want to say something to the people cheering in this picture, Bob Knoke, of Mission Viejo, Amanda Stanfield, of Monrovia, Jim Domen, of Yorba Linda, and J.D. Gaddis, of Yorba Linda:

"How can it make you so happy that I will never be able to marry someone I love? It isn't just that it looks like you are laughing at the misfortune of others, because it's beyond that; this is something you did to us. It feels like you've punched me in the stomach and are standing back to cheer about how great punching me is. How can I see the fervid enthusiasm on your face as anything other than hateful and vicious cruelty?"

I have to remind myself that these people probably aren't sadists in their everyday lives. And that makes it even more baffling that they can take such obvious pleasure in hurting others. They obviously think marriage is a really good thing, otherwise what would be the point of gloating 'You can't have it! You can't have it!'

It's like I'm a game of keep-away, where it's great fun not to let us gays have the ball. And what really scares me is that once you're playing keep-away, you might as well let it turn into a game of smear-the-queer.

Spam

2008-04-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

My last post, for some reason, has received a number of spam messages in the comments. If you see a message on a blog that says "please click here," don't click on the 'here." It leads to a nasty site that messes up the size of your windows, pretends to be scanning your computer for viruses, and then presumably installs something evil on your Windows machine. I'm not sure if this started to appear because of the topic of my last post, or if it's just hitting the most recent entry. I guess with this message, we'll see.

Spock.com Review: No, it's just creepy.

2008-03-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a new search and networking site, spock.com, that's getting some buzz. Right off the bat, let me say that the way I discovered it creeped me out. I noticed that my youtube video of the bigwheel race was linked to by a stranger's myspace and was the video of the day on the Boston Fox affiliate. Curious about who else might be mentioning me, I googled myself and found a link to a whole page dedicated to me on spock.com, with a picture, info about my likes and dislikes, pictures of my friends, links to my wikipedia contributions, teaching portfolio, youtube videos etc. I had no idea this page existed. I certainly didn't create it...

The biggest difficulty in starting a social networking site is that for it to be useful, it has to reach a certain critical mass. On one hand it's easier for new sites to reach this point than it was in the days of sixdegrees and friendster, because people understand the concept and see the value. On the other hand, the market is crowded now and you need to be offering something exceptional to generate new registrations.

Spock.com gets around this problem by creating a critical mass of usefulness without needing anybody to sign up. By combing other social networking sites and the internet at large, spock.com has created millions of profiles of people who aren't even aware the site exists. And since their userbase is potential employers and stalkers as much as the people being profiled--they bill themselves as a "people search engine"--it's already useful to at least the first segment of their users, the people who are searching. The question is how the site deals with the second group, the people who are profiled. That's where it gets troubling.

What's powerful about this site is that it figures out that info from multiple sources is all about the same person and puts it in one profile. They are far from perfecting this though, so there are a couple less-complete profiles for me, and my main profile has a link to information about when I was picked by the Detroit Red Wings in the 1983 NHL draft. Even if you don't know me, you can figure out that that isn't the same Craig Butz. But did you know I have a Ph.D. in education and have been the director of a charter school in Las Vegas?

Because a profile isn't just a random list of links like a Google search, it becomes more likely that users will believe inaccurate information they see on spock.com. Grouping the information into profiles inherently makes a claim that it's all about one person, otherwise what would be the point of the service? When most of the information is accurate, it adds to the credibility of the page as a whole. Because the whole page is credible, it's easier to assume that individual facts are--a psychological effect called "credibility by association."

The fact that all of the information they cull is "already out there," stuff that would show up in a google search anyway, is little consolation when you examine the details. While I've published all kinds information about myself, and have always realized that you can piece it together if you want to, I expect some control over its context. If I check a box saying I'm single, I know I'm putting that bit of info on my myspace page, not my teaching portfolio. If an employer or potential client does go snooping on myspace or facebook, they know from the context that they're looking into my personal life, and I expect them to have different expectations about what they find than for my professional actions. When it's all lumped together by spock.com, you lose the ability to make those distinctions for the people you interact with. You no longer get to have a professional life distinct from your personal life. Teenagers figuring out who they are, trying on identities, can no longer have a home-self distinct from their school-self, a version of themselves that they present to friends in person that's different from the one they reveal to people they've met online. Maybe someday such different selves will seem old-fashioned, but I think most people today expect to be able to present themselves differently in different contexts. A tool that undermines that ability isn't good for most people.

When I emailed my concerns, spock.com's answer was for me to register with the site. There are two problems with this solution. First, most of the people profiled don't know their profile exists. Second, even if you register (giving tacit approval to the contents of your profile) you aren't actually allowed to delete inaccurate information, or stuff you just don't want included. You can only "vote down any incorrect information." What's reported about you is determined democratically! How can democracy be bad?

Even if we were to accept that what's public in one context should be public in all, the model assumes that the information about you is still coming from you or from credible and well-intentioned sources. Unfortunately, anything written about you on the Internet by anyone is fair game for inclusion. In fact, if the bots are doing what they're meant to, it's inevitable. There are already horror stories. Wired reports on a blogger covering the Mark Foley scandel being automatically tagged a pedophile. In the comments to another article about the site, a high school teacher complains that an angry student created a spoof myspace profile about him. While he was able to get myspace to remove it, the bogus information had already made it into his spock profile. Imagine the potential for a kid to be bullied relentlessly through this site. Since it's an information popularity contest, they would have little power to stop the terrible things that kids say from being included on their own profile page.

Spock.com isn't the only site that has to deal with vandalism. But it's one thing for wikipedia to grapple with it when their notability rule disallows articles about most of us. The potential consequences aren't much more severe than some kid including the wrong dates for the Civil War in a report. When the entire content of the site is real living people, the company is risking people's reputations in a way that could seriously damage their lives.

If you have an internet presence, they're compiling a profile on you whether you like it or not. In response to my request to have my profile removed, the Spock Team said, "If I were to remove your Spock search result you will eventually be reindexed." The only way to influence your profile is to register. What an incredibly coercive business model! The draw for registered users is to gain some influence over a profile that will exist whether they want it to or not. Unfortunately, this aspect is unlikely to change. For the service to be useful, they need to rope people into registering. While they're doing a better job than most of attaching information to the right person, it's unlikely they will ever be able to automate the process perfectly. Ultimately, I'm the only machine that can tell whether a page is about me or not.

If I don't want there to be a page about me at all, there is an alternative. They told another peeved profilee that she could be permanently deleted by completely removing herself from all social networking sites. They've decided that you don't get to choose whether or not to be a part of spock.com. The only way not to be profiled is not to allow any mention of yourself on the internet.

It is true that other sites, like zoominfo are doing similar things, but none in such an intrusive way. Spock Networks apparently thinks of this as being more successful.

Many people certainly do want tools to check up on those around them, and Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh hope to profit off that craving, whether it's wise to feed it or not. The question, I guess, is whether they'll put their energy into building safeguards against the blatant potential for their site to be abused, something which will be technically difficult and likely to decrease the site's usefulness as a search tool, or whether they'll stay on track to develop it into the best privacy-invading search tool in existence.

Big Wheel Race

2008-03-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

My view of an annual Easter event that pretty well captures the quintessence of contemporary San Francisco.

Easter Fun

2008-03-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

If you didn't come see and taste for yourself, you missed out. Brunch was a fantastic success, with a spread of at least 20 dishes, including white bean garlic polenta with porcini and parmigianno, tomato and fennel pizza, figs stuffed with gorgonzola and walnuts or wrapped in prosciutto, leek and arugala quiche, and coconut cranberry cookies. Yes, you should have been here. Even more important were this years Peeps decorations: a Peep wonderland (me) and a giant Peep rosary (Eileen.) Since our peep wreath a couple years back survived long enough to become our Christmas wreath, I suspect you have a little bit of time to come and appreciate the marshmallowy magic.

Cornucopia

2008-03-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

For those of you in the cold, I thought I'd share a picture of how much produce you can get for $25 in San Francisco in March, if you know where to look. For those of you who live in SF, I can't give this great find away unless you interrogate me in person, which will be easy if you come eat some of this bounty at Easter brunch.

How the St. Patrick's Day fire didn't start

2008-03-18T22:20:00.001-07:00

For those of you who've seen a christmas tree burn, you know that there is almost nothing more flammable than a christmas tree that's still around in March. So I was pretty astonished to see this one, completely uncharred, lying amid the sad mess of burned and smoky stuff that had been thrown from the burning apartments on Valencia Street. Bizarre.

Fire down the hill

2008-03-17T19:07:00.001-07:00

The way we find out about breaking news on the side of Bernal Hill is
by listening for the sound of hovering helicopters. This evening they
are out in force because of a four-alarm fire on Valencia by the Dovre
Club. Our roof provides a good view of the smoke, but the fire is just
behind the hospital.

Deterrence

2008-03-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

I saw this sign on someone's house the other day. I wonder if it's really true. The sign seemed a little permanent and like it had been up for a while. I suspect it's just a ploy to keep people from letting their dogs poop in the yard.

Marshmallowiness

2008-03-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

We bought some peeps this evening. You'll have to come to Easter brunch to find out why.

Approaching Graffiti

2008-03-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

I got scooped by boingboing today, when they posted a picture of the exact same sign in the bathroom of Little Star Pizza, where I had dinner with friends on my birthday Saturday:

As David pointed out, the message, which is still terse, even if it does try to engage the "'artist's'" intellect, does seem to have worked, as the restroom was graffitiless. So, it was all the more amusing to see the restroom at the 500 Club a couple blocks away, where they seem to have taken a different approach to dealing with tagging:

I'm not going to take sides, just say I'm glad both exist.

Roll Sound... Background Action...

2008-02-13T23:11:00.000-08:00

For the past few weeks, San Francisco has been abuzz with movie talk. Gus Van Sant is in town making a biopic about Harvey Milk, the SF supervisor, and probably the first openly gay elected official in history, who was assassinated along with the mayor by another board member in 1978. Part of the history of gay liberation in the City is marches, protests, and celebrations in the streets. Hundreds of volunteers came out last week to recreate some of these mass events for the cameras, a good number of whom had participated in the actual events 30 years ago.

They'd restored the theater marquee, unrenovated store fronts, and parked 60s and 70s cars on the streets. After being introduced to some cast and crew (James Franco--swoon) and watching an earlier documentary about Milk, hundreds of extras filled the intersection of Castro and 17th, where bright lights were shining down from the rooftops on every side. They lit some shots with piercing smokey flares, making it seem dramatic even before the music is added.

There was also a lot of standing around, but it was pretty interesting seeing the movie-making process first-hand. And I got to see Sean Penn in a couple shots.

I found myself standing right next to Emile Hirsch, and saw gay icons Cleve Jones and Gilbert Baker. At one point Carrie Fisher even showed up to promote her one-woman stage show. Overall, a pretty cool thing to be a part of.

Allemande Left and a Right Left Grand

2008-02-12T23:18:00.004-08:00

It's sort of ironic, coming from the rural midwest, that it's only in San Francisco that square dancing has become part of my life. Every year there's a wildly popular dance at the Swedish American Hall in the Castro that we always attend. It's full of midwest-transplant gays, geeks, and hipsters reveling in post-ironic pleasure. It's part of the wintertime bluegrass and old-time festival that balances the summertime Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. This year the band came from North Carolina and the caller did a great job of teaching a bunch of clueless Californians fast and getting us to do some sort of complicated seeming dances.

Payphones

2008-02-08T11:15:00.001-08:00

I noticed this former bank of telephones in an Oakland BART station. I forget that there used to be rows of pay phones in public places. The architects of this "modern" transportation center foresaw six people needing to talk on the phone at the same time, standing next to each other along the wall to do it. Now a single phone remains, with nobody using it. I wonder how they decided that the fifth phone should be the one that stayed. Did the other five get removed all at once, or were they phased out one at a time as demand decreased. Perhaps as they wore out or were vandalized, they just pulled them out instead of repairing them. How much longer till they get rid of the last remnant of the pre-cellular age, leaving just a mysterious row of unneeded metal panels?

Is 'HELO' an election anomaly?

2008-02-07T10:30:00.001-08:00

You see reports of voter fraud even during these single-party primaries. Even though I can't really imagine anything fishy in Bernal Heights, since my polling place is literally on the other side of my block, I thought I'd go make a record of the polls opening at 7am. The last time I voted, I got there just at opening and thought it was a treat to witness everyone raising their right hands and swearing to uphold the constitution, the first voters being asked to verify that the ballot boxes were empty. The election workers were a very old lady, a middle-aged immigrant woman, and a teenaged girl. It was all presided over by an no-nonsense, in-charge dyke who was startlingly official and efficient. This Tuesday it went a little less smoothly, as the woman running things admittedly was doing it for the first time. She was concerned that the ballot reader, which read '0' on the back, was greeting us with a "hello" instead of saying '0' on the front as well. Whoever she called didn't think it was a problem, but who knows. Maybe a friendly election robot is how they lull us into letting our votes not be counted!

Home

2008-01-24T14:11:00.000-08:00

The idea of home is a recurrent theme in my thinking, something I've written about before. Feeling at home isn't something confined to your house. I'm intrigued by what defines the boundaries of home, and I think about it in a couple of different ways.

The first time I drove from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the summer I toured the country in my Geo Metro--which I'd converted into a micro-mobile home by taking out all but the driver's seat and replacing them with a bed, cooler, and all my stuff--I had a startling experience when I got back to Columbus, Ohio. For two months, I'd been continually barraged with the new. Covering 11,000 miles through the Northeast up to the eastern tip of Maine, all the way across the country to the northwest tip of Washington, down the coast to San Francisco, back east across the desert and plains, I was, except for in a few previously visited spots, constantly experiencing sights I'd never seen before. I got used to not being used to anything. Constant newness became normal. So when I started heading up I-71 from downtown Columbus, a road I'd traveled hundreds of times, suddenly, unexpectedly I realized I wasn't exploring anymore. I recognized every exit sign, though I'd never been conscious of them before. For a few minutes familiarity was strange, since strangeness had become familiar. Home, I realized, is where you aren't exploring, where things aren't new.

Home is about familiarity, but familiarity doesn't have to be literally knowing a place, as in the above example. It's true that on that long unfamiliar drive I felt a little bit at home when I passed through places I'd been before, even if it had been only once, like Canon Beach , Oregon. But I also felt at home when I got to new places that only seemed relatively familiar. Without planning, I drove up into Quebec for one night, where the signs weren't just in a different language that needed to be translated at 120 km/h, but were different shapes and colors from the US and even the rest of Canada, where the roads were laid out differently, and everything seemed generally confusing. It wasn't entirely unexpected, but it was disorienting. When I drove across the provincial line into Ontario the next morning, things suddenly seemed normal again and I felt strangely at home, though I wasn't even in my own country. The same feeling hit me when I crossed the border from the roadless desert of Bolivia and suddenly found myself on a perfectly modern, paved, striped, signed, guard-railed highway in Chile. Even driving from the Rockies in Colorado, across Kansas and Missouri into Illinois, at some point near the Mississippi, as the trees get larger, the summer air gets more humid, I've been struck with a feeling that I'm in my own native environment. I remember as a kid driving into Ohio on family vacations, and my parents reminding me that we were not home yet. But Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio all look and feel pretty much the same, so when you've been far away for a long time, the feeling of home starts to creep into you hundreds of miles ahead of the destination, where things become familiar even as they remain unknown.

California, my more recent home, is not the Midwest. Driving back here a few weeks ago on I-8, I crossed the Colorado River into California at Yuma, Arizona. In the confusion of traffic I didn't even notice a sign or realize I was in California for several minutes. Even then I drove for another half an hour before I thought, "Oh, California, that's where I live. I'm home!" Driving the highway between towering sand dunes in warm winter air, I felt like I was still in the midst of adventure. Though I love the variety of landscapes, I don't imagine I will ever be able to think of all of California--deserts, mountains, beaches, fields and forests--as home. It's really only when I pass the wind turbines on the Altamont Pass, standing as sentries at the entrance to the Bay Area, that I start to feel like I'm getting close. It's the view from the Bay bridge, passing the Abercrombie and Coke billboards, zigging by Potrero hill, down the branching Cesar Chavez/Bayshore ramp, around the back of the hill and over Cortland that makes me know I'm finally home.

Southern Radio

2008-01-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

I decided to avoid the mountains and stay warm on my drive to California, so I had to drive through the Deep South. I risked the high blood pressure and listened to some local radio across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas so I wouldn't run out of podcasts on my 1GB iPod Shuffle when I got to the big empty places where there aren't any radio stations at all.

The first thing that disturbed me was Christian political talk radio. In California, people know that religious conservatives exist, but the media maintains some sort separation of Church and State. You just don't talk about God while you're talking politics. Even in the Midwest, people seem to have their beliefs and have their politics, but at least pretend publicly that law is some sort of civil contract not determined by religion. But driving through the South, I heard talk show hosts openly explain that their pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant politics were right because that's what the Bible says. One caller to a Christian political program suggested that we should deal with "illegals" by deporting them and forcing them to sign a "contract" that says that if they are ever caught in America again, they'd be executed. The explicitly Christian host didn't think that was going far enough. He said we should implant them with chips like they put in pets, except explosive, so that if they ever cross the border, the chip will instantly explode and kill them. I took a deep breath, prayed my car wouldn't break down, and switched to a music station.

There apparently is a whole genre of ultra-backwoods country music that's popular way down south that I was completely unaware of, despite living in the hills of Southeastern Ohio for a decade. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The lyrics speak for themselves:
(Song titles linked to Videos on YouTube, which you have to listen to, though the videos sort of ruin the hillbillyness of the songs with their Hollywood slickness.)

A Different World by Bucky Covington
A song of nostalgia for lead-based paint, getting the belt, and prayer in school.

We were born to mothers who smoked and drank
Our cribs were covered in lead-based paint
No childproof lids
No seatbelts in cars
Rode bikes with no helmets
and still here we are
Still here we are

We got daddy's belt when we misbehaved
Had three TV channels you got up to change
No video games and no satellite
All we had were friends and they were outside
Playing outside

School always started the same everyday
the pledge of allegiance, then someone would pray
not every kid made the team when they tried
We got disappointed but that was alright
We turned out alright

No bottled water
We'd drink from a garden hose
And every Sunday,
All the stores were closed.

It was a different life
When we were boys and girls
Not just a different time
It was a different world

International Harvester by Craig Morgan
Kinda catchy, even if he's proud of the 3-mile line of cars behind his combine.

I'm the son of a third generation farmer
I've been married 10 years to the farmer's daughter
I'm a God fearing hardworking combine driver
Hogging up the road on my p-p-p-p-plower
Clug-a-lug-a-lugin 5 miles an hour
On my International Harvester.

3 miles of cars laying on their horns
Falling on deaf ears of corn
Lined up behind me like a big parade
Of late to work road rage jerks
Shouting obscene words flippin' me the bird

Well you my be on a state paved road
That black top runs through my pay load
Excuse me for trying to do my job
This year ain't been no bumper crop
If you don't like the way I'm driving
Get back on the interstate Otherwise sit tight and be nice
And quit your honking at me that way

Cause I'm the son of a 3rd generation farmer
I've been married 10 years to the farmer's daughter
I got 2 boys in the county 4-H
I'm a lifetime sponsor of the FFA
Hey that's what I make I make a lot of Hay for a little pay
But I'm proud to say
I'm a God fearing hardworking combine driver
Hogging up the road on my p-p-p-p-plower
Clug-a-lug-a-lugin 5 miles an hour
On my International Harvester.

Well I know you got your own deadline
But cussing me won't save you no time Haus
But this big wheel wide load ain't going any faster
So just smile and wave and tip your hat to the man up on the tractor

What do ya think about that by Montgomery Gentry
A true expression of the love-your-neighbor, do-unto-others Southern Christian culture.

Heard it through the grapevine
My new neighbor don’t like my big red barn
’47 Ford, bullet holes in the door
Broke-down motor in the front yard
I've got a mind
To paint a plywood sign
And nail it up on a knotty pine tree
Saying "I was here first,
This is my piece of dirt
And your ramblin’ don’t rattle me"

Some people care about
what other people think
Worry ‘bout what they say
Let a little gossip
Comin’ from a loose lip
Ruin a perfect day
Saying “blah, blah, blah”
Just a-jacking their jaws
Gotta let it roll of my back
I don’t give a durn
What other people think
What do ya think about that?

I wear what I want to
Overalls, work boots
Crank my music up loud
Like to sling a little mud
On my four-wheel drive
Trick on into town
Shoot a little eight ball
Down by the pool hall
Drink a beer with my friends
Don’t judge me and I won’t judge you
‘Cause we all get judged
In the end

You know, I don’t give a damn
What other people think
What do you think about that?

Latin America's got nothing on these politics

2008-01-15T15:11:00.000-08:00

Going through all the mail I missed for the past six months, I found my ballot for the November San Francisco mayoral election. I was amused by the list of candidates, which lists occupation along with name. Besides a profesor, a doctor, a couple of journalists, and some other boring jobs, the following people wanted to run the city:

Michael Powers - Nightclub Owner
Grasshopper Alec Kaplan - Taxicab Driver
John Rinaldi - Showman
Harold Hoogasian - Florist/Coffee Farmer
Gavin Newsom - Mayor of San Francisco

The guy's name is "Grasshopper"? What's the heck is a "showman"? You can grow coffee in California? "Mayor of San Francisco" just fits right in there, doesn't it?

Negative Stars

2008-01-13T15:04:00.000-08:00

I write this from perhaps the crappiest hotel I've ever stayed in (besides that place in Uruguay with thousands of cigarette burns on the floor), the redundant "Budget Inn Motel" in South Tucson, Arizona. (Incidentally, in South America, a motel is a place that "rents rooms by the hour.") I'm 1900 miles into the hard push across the US to get from Asheville to San Diego in two and a half days. The highway roars just outside the window. On the back of the door, there's painter's tape, and someone has scrawled in both sharpie and crayon "Ck out tme 10: AM." A heating vent has been taped over. A thin layer of spackle barely covers boards, nails, and tape patching a 2-foot hole in the wall. Someone thought it wise to paint the tiled shower, which is now peeling, just like the plastic trim along the floor. A hole in the ceiling reveals where there used to be a light fixture. It's not only run-down, but years of repairs have been quarter-assed at best.

But I don't mind. I really just need a place to sleep for a few hours, and the bed is fine. I passed up the $40 chains to save $15 knowing what I'd be getting into. The only thing that disturbs me is that the places I've stayed in South America, usually for $5-15 per night, were almost all nicer than the local budget motels of America, even ones much less crappy than this.

Driving through El Paso, I got one clear view of a residential hillside in Juarez, a slum of border-town hovels that could not exist in the US. As a prosperous nation, that level of housing isn't allowed. (If you can't afford any better, you have to live on the streets.) I would expect that the bottom rung of short-term accommodation in the US would also be held to a higher standard than in Latin America, but apparently not. I know hotel rooms are going to cost more here. What I don't get is that if such run-down dumps can stay in business here, where people expect an elevated standard of living, why do South American hotels owners keep there places so much better maintained in a place where people are used to living much more modestly, and how do they afford the upkeep while charging 80% less?

I'm sure there are answers in labor costs, competition, the relative costs of starting a business, and my own culturally-adjusting expectations, but I just thought I'd point out the paradox before being lulled to sleep by the woosh of cars and trucks on I-10.

Ohio!

2007-12-22T11:32:00.000-08:00

I'd been planning this since mid-November, but hadn't said anything since I wanted to surprise my parents, but I'm back in the States. Flew up Thursday through Houston and entered through the collosal immigration center at George H. W. Bush airport. My entry interview:

Immigration Officer: Good Morning.
Me: Morning.
IO: (Takes passport.) What countries did go to?
Me: Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Peru.
IO: What was the purpose of your trip?
Me: Tourism.
IO: Did you go on a cruise?
Me: Um, no?
IO: What were you, just tooling around all over the place?
Me: yeah.
IO: What's your job?
Me: I'm a teacher.
IO: (Hesitates.) OK. (Returns passport.) Uh, welcome home.

Kerri picked me up at the Columbus Airport and drove me to Mount Vernon. My folks were very surprised. Mom couldn't stop squeeling "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness!" Dad said my she hadn't been so excited since they found out they're going to be grandparents.

The plan is to completely overload myself on America by driving to New York and DC after Christmas and then make my way back to San Francisco. Already noticing funny things, like I got to Mount Vernon, and realized I'd driven the whole way without buckling up--got used to riding in taxis that didn't have seatbelts. And I've already dropped my toilet paper in the waste basket instead of the toilet! Little things to adjust to...

A Day in December

2007-12-19T21:55:00.000-08:00

I went down to the old town the other day to find a couple Christmas presents. It was interesting to see what life is like here the week before Christmas. You do see strings of lights in windows here and there, and in the new town, where people have money and there are tourists, you see some decorated trees. The supermarket up there is selling various prepackaged gift boxes. Down by the La Marin bus station, there's a huge temporary store set up in an alley selling candy candy candy. You can pick your type, or scoop out of an enormous bin of mixed chocolates, lollipops, and animal crackers. The animal crackers seem to be important and are a part of every store's mix. For those in a rush, they have baskets of candy ready to go. It seems more like Easter.

Walking around, it was mostly just a normal day in Quito, but thinking about how different Christmas gets in the States--all the lights, the gaudily decorated malls and streets, the inescapable recorded carols--I started noticing the things I've gotten used to here. Just down from my apartment building, there's a little restaurant that serves meat and corn-on-the-cob (Ecuadorian style: bred for starch, not sugar, and weeks overripe) cooked on a little charcoal grill right in the doorway. The man is often standing there with a blowdryer in hand, getting the coals nice and hot. When Kerri saw this on her visit, she started laughing. It took me a minute to figure out what was so funny.

Down by the bus station, there was a row of three women and a man, sitting at sewing machines under the overpass, in case you needed any alterations or repairs done. The three women's machines were black with gold decoration, the style that was common in the States before World War II, though perhaps still produced here. The man's looked like it was from the 50s. How I'd wished I'd wished a tailor was so easy to find in Chile when my back-pack had a growing hole in the top.

I stopped in a tiny store to get a snack and bought a baggie of chochos, white disk-shaped beans, salted and topped with chulpis, crispy-friend corn kernals, and a tomatoless salsa of onions, lime juice, and cilantro. Later, I got llapingachos, fried mashed potatoes with fried egg, avocado, shredded lettuce, and beets. It wasn't cheesy and lacked peanut sauce, like it often comes with, but it still filled me up for a dollar.

I stopped in the supermarket, where they were playing christmas carols, among them, strangely, "Favorite Things" from the Sound of Music. Outside, a guy was juggling flaming torches in the intersection. I walked over to La Floresta to meet a friend and see one of the few Ecuadorian movies ever made, Qué Tan Lejos. It was a bit surreal, because I'd been in about half the places it was shot in. The characters travel from Quito to Cuenca, a trip that ends up taking a lot longer than expected. It's a really good portrait of the country, and I hope I can find it in the States to show people where I've been living. Unfortunately, the director has been reluctant to put it out on DVD, because in Ecuador, there's no such thing as non-bootleg DVDs. You just go into the corner CD/DVD shop and buy a computer burned copy of whatever for $1. Blockbusters you can get before they even appear in theaters in the US.

A couple beers with Meagan in the theater lobby/cafe, and a $2 taxi ride home. Such are my South American wanderings this week.

Tables and Chairs

2007-12-15T14:17:00.000-08:00

Eleven years ago, shortly after I returned from my first Latin American adventure, six weeks in Guadalajara, Mexico, I remember walking into a Don Pablo's restaurant and being struck by how they'd gotten the decor right. It wasn't just the concrete floor and rough masonry. They'd selected really typical furniture--rectangular formica-topped tables with chrome trim, and chrome-tube chairs with vinyl seats and backs. Something along these lines, except removed from the Pottery Barn catalog ambiance:

(photo from ebay auction)

You have to forget that such furnishings have since become retro-cool. Decades-old, with torn and taped vinyl, stained formica, and rust-dotted chrome, they were definitely down-scale, but along with bare incandescent light bulbs, they created a particular developing-world feel, more modest than you would ever find in a dining establishment in the States, but charming nonetheless. So while I'm sure Don Pablo's seemed a lot less beat-up and a lot more sanitary, I was impressed by its authenticity. I'm pretty sure they've since rethemed in the interest of blending into suburbia, but initially, at least, they got it right.

Here in Ecuador, there are lots of those kinds of modest restaurants, family run joints offering a set menu of something like soup, rice, vegetable, chicken or beef, and a banana for $1.50. But they've switched to oppressively white compact fluorescent bulbs, and you sit in the sort of plastic chairs that have become popular patio furniture in the US. This is a pretty typical looking place, though from the sand/gravel floor, I'd guess it's an outdoor place at the beach:

(photo courtesy of Alt1040)

I don't know when these things were invented, but they've only become widespread in the last decade, so I suspect that they've replaced the kind of tables and chairs I saw in Mexico in the mid-90s. I don't think it's an improvement. I'm sure they're cheap (likely manufactured by an even poorer labor pool in Asia), and that's certainly the main concern of a lot of people setting up businesses here. In a place where the average yearly income is about $1000, and people find it worthwhile to keep a restaurant open that only has a dozen customers a day (paying $1.50 for their meal, remember), the start-up cost for your business has got to be a few hundred dollars at the most. I suppose it's good that cheap plastics make this possible for a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs, but the aesthetic loss is really unfortunate. They're fine on a deck, but they can't match those holdovers from the 50s. They certainly aren't going to last as long. If this is the face of economic development brought about by globalization, it's not making the world a more livable place.

New Fruit (#9)

2007-12-10T10:39:00.001-08:00

(photo courtesy of Cereales Killer)

Another very big fruit, the SAMBO looks a like a mottled watermelon, though it's more closely related to zucchini, pumkin, and squash. I had a heck of time finding any information about it online under that name. It must be an Ecuador thing. Makes me wonder if the term has any relationship to the racist American stereotype of a watermelon-eating African-American of the same name. The scientific name is Cucurbita ficifolia.

I didn't buy a whole one because you can buy slices empacado in a plastic bag. They don't have strict rules about putting health claims on packaging in South America, like they do in the US, so the package has a box that sort of looks like a surgeon general's warning labeled "Health Benefits." It says, "Besides giving you energy..." [Energy (aka calories) is a favorite selling point down here. Cookies are healthy and good for kids because they give them energy.] "...it is used to combat illnesses of the mind because of the phosphorus it contains, and as food for people suffering from high cholesterol." (To put these claims in context, I heard a 15-minute spiel on the bus for a vitamin powder that largely contained radishes, which the guy called "the healthiest food in South America.")

Unlike a watermelon, the flesh is totally white, and it has rows of soft, white, unripe seeds. Fully ripe, it's supposed to be a juicable fruit, but less ripe, as this must be, it's treated like a vegetable. When I opened the bag, a certain tanginess rose to my nose. In texture and flavor, it's more like a cucumber than a squash, but a little juicier. In my mouth, the tang becomes more distinct, though still mild. It reminds me of miracle whip, or the light mustardiness of deviled eggs. It would probably be nice as a salad, salted with tomato and parsley, or the crunchiest parts rolled into sushi instead of cucumber.

The developing world is turning me into a very bad consumer.

2007-12-09T16:56:00.000-08:00

One thing I occasionally see down here is packaging that's designed to be useful even after the product that came in it is gone. While it does disturb me that everyone drinks instant coffee in a coffee-producing country, I like that one company sells it in these glass mugs.

It also comes in smaller glasses. They're what I drink out of every day, and hopefully I'll have room to bring them back to the States with me. Years ago, I brought back dulce de leche that came in nice little Tweetie Bird juice glasses. In Bolivia, our desert guides put small plastic tubs of margarine on the table that had handles so they could later be used as mugs.

You never see this in the United States anymore. I'm pretty sure this was common from the Great Depression through World War II, when it was patriotic to be frugal. Growing up, when my family went camping, we drank out of plastic mugs very similar to the ones I saw in Bolivia. Some of them even had markings inside to show 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 cup so you could use them as measuring cups too.

Of course you can use a peanut butter jar for a drinking glass, but unless it's actually designed to look like a glass, without a screw-cap lip, nobody wants to. I'm sure the demise of this kind of design-for-second-use had to do with the prosperity and upward mobility of the 50s and 60s. As middle-class people started to be able to afford to throw away perfectly good glasses and buy new glasses that had never contained coffee or jam, buying reusable packaging must have become a reminder of hard times, a sign you weren't prospering, an embarrassment. Not reusing became a sign of affluence.

Once reusability quit being a selling point, corporations must have had no reason to make it easy for you to forego buying more stuff. In fact, they could sell you the same item twice by making packaging less reusable. So no more refillable beer bottles (still the norm here), no more dishes that come free with your food, no more flour sacks printed so you can sew them into dresses. The civilized thing is to throw it all away.

By now, we've forgotten it's even possible. Maybe we should try to remember. Why waste the energy and resources to make everything twice? Why buy a glass when a jar of olives is so close to a glass? But why should we buy olives in jars, when they could just as easily be sold in glasses?

Fiesta on Wheels

2007-12-05T19:25:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is 6 de Diciembre, the anniversary of the founding of Quito in 1534. To celebrate, the city has been a giant party for the past 8 days. The central event is the bull-fighting festival. The city is filled with billboards of the faces of the world's best fighters. I went to the fights in Pamplona a number of years ago, which was probably enough for a life-time, so I've skipped that part of the festivities. Every night, the streets are filled with people. There's live music all over the place. And it often seems like I'm living in a war zone from the near-constant sound of fireworks. Mostly I've been missing the party and letting my foot heal, but last night I went out with some friends for a chiva ride.

An essential part of the fiesta is to hire one of these open-sided buses with your friends. There are dozens of them crawling around the city with brass bands on top playing repetitive, out-of-tune, clap-along music. During the day lots are filled with families and old people, but at night, they turn into wild mobile parties. A couple of conductors keep the cubas libres (rum and cokes) flowing, and everyone is issued a plastic whistle to increase the ruckus. People dance on the rear platform and hang off the back, although you're not allowed up top with the band. Quiteños are immensely proud of their city and everyone is constantly yelling "¡Que viva Quito!" Hanging enebriated off the side of a moving vehicle might not be safe, and certainly wouldn't be legal in America, but it sure is fun!

Update: Here's someone's video of a not-very-full chiva at San Francisco Plaza. We stopped here too, and there were women selling "bengalas" (roman candles) for a dollar. Several other chivas had also stopped and everyone was shooting off their fireworks and dancing.

Unsilent Night

2007-12-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

I shot this video last December at the Unsilent Night event in San Francisco. It's sort of post-modern Christmas caroling, a crowd parading through the streets with ambient melodies from boom boxes filling the city. It happens all over the place, and I'd highly highly recommend that you check it out if you are anywhere nearby. It'll be in New York City and Asheville on December 15th, Baltimore on December 21st, and San Francisco on December 22nd. Check out specifics and many more locations on the composer's MySpace.

You should (but don't have to) take a boombox so you can be part of the music. And tell your friends, because the more people, the better. It'll make your holidays happier, I promise!

(update: new unsilent night website)

Culture Shock

2007-12-04T16:01:00.000-08:00

As a somewhat experienced traveler, I try not to be shocked as I pass into new cultures. When I go to a new country, I'm expecting things to be different from what I'm used to. What happens to me though, is that I get jarred by passing into places that are more familiar, which sometimes happens unexpectedly.

After leaving Machu Picchu, heading further and further into Bolivia in October, the Western World got more and more distant. It's not a place where people can jump in in English when your Spanish fails you. While it's certainly a country colonized by the Spanish, the indigenous influence is very strong. Aymara women stroll past businessmen on the streets of central La Paz in their billowing skirts and bowler hats, and soon it quits seeming unusual.

Traffic and high-rise buildings have definitely made it there, but the streets are filled with 30-year-old Dodge mini-buses that were never seen on American streets, and the hillsides are covered with unfinished brick and tiled-roof houses accessed by narrow stairways, rather than spacious suburbs. Most foreign to me was that the city has yet to have been touched by multinational retailers, at least in the day-to-day street-level business.

They may be selling Adidas and Sony (or more likely Adidas and Sony knock-offs), but they're selling them in small shops and street stands, not Footlocker or Best Buy. People still eat at family-run restaurants, and you're more likely to find a "witch" selling dried llama fetuses than a McDonald's.

Leaving the capital and heading into the altiplano desert, I receded further and further from civilization, to the point where it would have taken several days to return to a two-story building or a paved road. I slept in a village where on the edge of town were numerous open graves with mummies that had been sitting undisturbed for 600 years or more.

And then, further on, even the dead were distant. I've never felt so in-the-middle-of-nowhere in my life.

Finally, I was dropped off at the border crossing, no more than a building with a lonely guard. I'd had to get my passport stamped days earlier in the last real town. There wasn't even a road crossing into Chile, really, just some tire tracks in the sand that the bus I boarded followed.

We drove through the absolute desolation of a desert where nothing grows, where no one lives, and then quite suddenly, we pulled onto a perfectly smooth, asphalt-paved highway, with painted stripes, reflectors, guard rails, road signs--indistinguishable from a US highway, something I hadn't seen since my parents had driven me to the Columbus airport more than three months earlier. I'd traveled so far into the 3rd world (though it would be difficult to call that part of Bolivia even developing) that I'd come right out the back side.

There was no real road going from Chile into Bolivia, only this path I'd taken that isn't used for any sort of trade, just passing off a few crazy back-packers a day. The highway I suddenly found myself on, though, was the road from Chile to Argentina, only a few miles the other direction. People driving between those two nearly 1st-world countries probably wouldn't even notice that there was a path to a third country connecting to their highway.

It was jarring, as was having to pay $2.00 instead of $.25 for a glass of orange juice in San Pedro, the little oasis town in the Atacama desert in sight of the high mountains of Bolivia. The 24-hour bus I took from there to Santiago sailed comfortably down smooth roads that didn't break into rubble every few miles, as I'd become accustomed.

When I arrived in Santiago, I almost immediately walked past a supermarket, and I suddenly felt relieved, strangely at home. Foreign as Chile is, in comparison to Bolivia, it seemed completely familiar. Shopping for dinner didn't have to be a learning experience, I could just do it without thinking. This thought-free existence is much of what defines home, I think. I could walk around without feeling like an obvious outsider. I could blend into the crowd and be just another person in the city. While comfortable, that felt more shocking than any of the strangeness I'd encountered making my way through Peru and Bolivia.

The World by Bike

2007-12-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

While traveling through Bolivia and Chile by bus, train, and plane, I met a couple people seeing South America by bicycle. It's not the first time I've seen this. When Kristin, Eileen, and I were visiting Iquaçu falls, in Brazil, we met a Kiwi couple who had bicycled from Alaska. As if this weren't impressive enough, they had enjoyed riding down the west coast of the States so much, that they'd flown back to Canada and rode to Mexico a second time down the Rockies. Their dog had also been riding in a trailer with them for much of trip, until it died of old age in Central America. A couple weeks later, the same couple rode into the campground we were staying at in the Brazilian coastal town of Paraty, 830 miles away from where we'd met them.

In Bolivia, I met an even more extreme cyclist. At the beginning of my desert tour with the Polish kids, we drove out onto the salt flats, where the locals were harvesting salt. While we were taking pictures, this guy rode up, wondering which way on the seemingly infinite white plain the salt hotel was located.

He introduced himself as Dean from Slovenia. He too had ridden from Alaska, but not just from Anchorage, or even Fairbanks. He'd ridden from Barrow, the northern-most point in Alaska! There aren't even any towns further north in Canada. He'd tried to cross the roadless Darien Gap in Panama to get to South America, but four days into the jungle, was turned back by the Army. He had to take a boat to Cartagena, but also took a side-trip to ride around Cuba.

It was only a few days later, talking to another traveler who'd had a more extensive conversation with him, that I learned the full extent of his adventure. Eighteen months earlier, he'd started riding a zig-zagging tour all over Europe, starting at home in Slovenia, and had been riding ever since. To get to Alaska, he'd ridden from Europe, all the way across Siberia. I guess he plans to fly to Australia and return home via Southeast Asia and Africa.

This guy had been a cyclist basically his whole life. In some ways I was more impressed by the Japanese kid I met in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Yokito had only ridden from Quito, but had crossed the unbelievably inhospitable Bolivian desert that had taken me four days to cross in a 4WD SUV. He was getting ready to cross the Atacama, the driest desert on Earth--where no rain fell between 1570 and 1971, where some river beds have been dry for 120,000 years--to get to Santiago.

What was astonishing was that before this trip, he had no real experience cycling. He said the longest he'd ever ridden in Japan was 10km. His family knew he was in South America, but he hadn't told them he was touring on bicycle, afraid it would freak them out. He'd bought a cheap used Trek mountain bike in Ecuador and had rigged racks over both wheels to hang backpacks from, no special fancy biking gear. Once he got to Santiago, he planned to fly to Buenos Aires and head up the Atlantic coast into Brazil. While Dean's feat seemed super-human, Yokito's journey was much more inspiring. If he could make it 1700 miles through the Andes with nothing more than a crazy idea for preparation, what could I do? I used to think riding across the US would be cool, but probably too difficult. But maybe not. Perhaps that's my next adventure.

New Fruit (#8)

2007-12-01T14:52:00.000-08:00

I seem to have run out of small fruits that are in-season, although the produce book at SuperMaxi says that many more exist. So I'm forced to move on to the giant fruits, which have their own shelves on the edge of the produce section. I'd hoped to try some of these while Kerri was here, so she could help me eat these monsters, but we were mostly off traveling and didn't get around to it.

(photo by Eric in SF)

I picked the smallest BABACO on the shelf, whiched weighed in at almost exactly a kilo--more than two pounds. It's mottled green and yellow, torepedo-like, and shaped like a star in cross-section. As a sterile natural hybrid of two papaya relatives, it has no seeds, but the seed cavity is filled with the fluffy white fibers that would support seeds if it had them. The peel is edible, but a little tough; however, the star shape makes a veggie peeler unhelpful. The flesh is soft like a juicy pear, except that it resists being scooped with a spoon and is more slippery in the mouth. Its large size and the pale yellow color of the inside made it difficult to recognize that it tastes a bit like a blackberry. Actually, it's quite a lot like a mulberry, if you've ever eaten those off a tree, but more flavorful. The blend of sweet and sour is perhaps perfectly balanced. I wonder if it would survive baking into a pie.

(photo by Philip Bouchard)

The GUANÁBANA (or "soursop") looks a lot like its cousin, the chirimoya, except spiny, and the size of an american football. (Again, I picked the smallest one I could find.) Unfortunately, the seeds aren't nearly so easily dealt with, each encased in a little sack-like membrane. I took a couple bites, then decided it would be easier to eat it as it's always eaten here--as juice. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a complete blender in the shared kitchen, so I had to resort to mushing it through a colander with fork and spoon, which took about half an hour and left my hands sore. Even mushed like this, it's still too stringy to drink, so I have a couple cups of spoonable stringy slime.

But oh what stringy slime it is! It took a minute to recoginze, but it tastes almost exactly like the filling of a rhubarb pie, which is perhaps my favorite kind of pie. It's not like just rhubarb, but the baked filling, already sweetened, smooth and buttery. Except, it hasn't been cooked, so it still tastes like fresh fruit. Unreal. Could there possibly be a fruit that tastes like pecan pie as well?

Equatorial Politics

2007-11-30T08:11:00.000-08:00

If you're already sick of American electoral politics, perhaps you'd like to hear what's going on elsewhere.

Yesterday, Ecuador's Constitutional Assembly convened, and already the instability of South American democracy is being illustrated. A poll shows that 62% of Ecuadorians say they don't know what it means that the Assembly intends to exercise "full powers." Of those who say they do know, they are divided on the answer. Does it mean they're "over everyone," that they can "change everyone from the president on down," or that they can "make decisions and change laws without consulting anyone else?" Not that these definitions are any clearer or particularly distinct. Unfortunately, the article, while lamenting how confused the people are, doesn't tell what the right answer is, perhaps because nobody really knows.

The "full powers" language, as I understand it, was inserted into the ballot language after it had already been approved by the Congress. Congressional leaders clearly say that the Assembly doesn't have the power to dismiss Congress. This, however, is President Correa's majority party's first order of business. While party officials have tried to be careful in their language, some assembly members say that because of the Assembly's "full powers," it is incompatible with "a Congress like we have" and that the Congress has been "delegitimized."

Now I get that when you're rewriting a constitution, the old system system is going to be in conflict with the new system you're writing. So it seems that you have two options: either you let the current system keep operating, faultily, until you have the new constitution finished, or you completely dispense with the old system, set up a temporary, and probably limited, replacement, and establish your new system when the constitution is done. What's troubling is that the Assembly is eager to take over the Congress's legislative and financial functions, but there's no talk of terminating the President while they decide what kind of presidency to have. Of course it's the President's party that's booting the Congress, which makes it clear that this is all just a really involved partisan power grab. It's not really about establishing a better system; it's about eliminating the opposition and codifying the new administration's power. The procedural and structural justifications are totally contrived.

However, going along with the Assembly's wishes without fully complying, Congress voted to take a one-month recess, as the current constitution allows, leaving open the possibility of returning January 5th, as the current constitution requires. They'll let the Assembly go about it's business, although one deputy declared that "the little boys of Chavez's little boy [Correa's assembly members] don't know anything about legislative procedures," that all their laws will be illegitimate, and that "the citizens don't have to obey them."

The problem is, there is no ultimate authority that everyone agrees on. The current constitution doesn't establish a system to finally adjudicate disagreements, and while the plebiscite to establish the assembly should have established an ultimate power, Correa was only able to slip it past Congress by telling them it wasn't going to be all-powerful, then changing it by adding the vague "full power" language before the people voted on it.

Fortunately, there is such popular support for these changes that Congress may not put up much of a fight. Despite having no idea what "full powers" means, 62% of Ecuadorians have confidence in the Acuerdo PAIS-run Assembly. Perhaps when they ratify a new constitution in a year, it will be written tightly enough that it's clear where the final authority lies. The big question is whether the Assembly can do that through a carefully thought-through system of checks and balances, or whether they'll find it easier to give the final say to the President, who has enthralled the people enough to take that power without much objection.

Fighting to Fly

2007-11-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

Kerri and I had worked our way south, almost to Peru, by bus, but decided that in the interest of saving time--getting to the Otavalo Saturday markets--and avoiding frustration, we'd splurge and pay $75 to take a 50-minute flight that, by bus would take 15 hours (and cost $15.) We did end up saving a lot of time, although for a bit it seemed like we wouldn't. But we still ran into plenty of frustration.

It's pretty easy to splurge down here. You can find a hotel room for $5, but when there's a tropical spa that includes organic dinner and breakfast for $20, how can you say no?

Why take a city bus for 25 cents when it's only a dollar to catch a cab? I vacillate between taking full advantage of the low cost of living by living on practically nothing, and, well, taking full advantage of the low cost of living by living it up.

After a very relaxing stay in Vilcabamba, we decided that paying a taxi $25 to drive us straight to the airport an hour-and-a-half away made more sense than switching between two local taxis and a couple of buses to save $15. Manuel would have been horrified.

The Catamayo airport is the smallest commercial airport I've ever been to, and at first I thought it was going to be a relaxing place to fly out of. There was a room with four ticket counters, though only two were in use, since there were only two airlines. Behind them, instead of a conveyer belt to carry away your luggage, a wall of windows and glass doors looked out onto the tarmac, which had room to park maybe three jets. There were no gates, just a security room with a door leading out to the planes.

The laid-back feel ended when we went to check in. The woman at the Icaro Airlines counter told us the flight was canceled due to a mechanical problem. They'd tried to call us to say we'd have to wait at least till the next day, but I had my phone off. She said we could use our ticket for a flight on TAME that left 45 minutes later. We headed over to the TAME line, where half a dozen other passengers from the Icaro flight were already waiting. No one showed up from TAME for another half an hour. When they did, they ignored the ticket line and checked everyone with a ticket in first. As the plane filled, Kerri slipped over to the Icaro counter and got a bit insistent with the clerk, who said there wasn't anything she could do. A couple of people behind us in line were carefully counting the number of people checking in. There were 104 seats on the plane, and by the time they had everyone checked in, more than 90 people were already onboard, with a couple dozen either milling around or in line. We were about 8 people back in line, which momentarily made me think we'd be fine, but earlier a pushy man had told someone in front of us that a suitcase sitting in line was his. When the TAME folks started taking care of those in line, suddenly he was back with half a dozen relatives. The people milling around pushed right up to the counter, ignoring the fact that people had been patiently waiting in line for more than an hour.

Lines aren't sacred here. I've been cut in front of at the drug store and ticket windows. Unless you leave no room between yourself and the person being served, it's like you're not there. If you wait to let people get off a bus before boarding, you'll never get on, because so many people will have crowded in front of you. Perhaps it's about personal space, and they honestly think that one foot of space means you're just standing there for some other reason. I've never been asked, "are you in line?" as you often are in the States. More likely though, everyone just knows that they have to take care of themselves.

So I quickly realized we had to be pushy ourselves, even though I already felt like it was too late. We quickly pushed our bags up to the front and tried to get the clerk's attention. Everyone was yelling. The woman next to us was waving money in the air. Fortunately, the woman from Icaro had made her way behind the TAME counter. Apparently she didn't want to deal with irate Americans who would insist on a free hotel room. She reached over, grabbed our tickets and passports and put them right in front of one of the clerks frantically entering people into the computer.

She told us there was only one seat left. My heart sunk. Kerri started raising her voice, and our clerk said something to the guy working the other station. With them both checking people in, they couldn't tell if there were seats left or not. But then, she put labels on our bags and handed us our passports and two tickets, numbered 104 and 105. We hurried to the security station. When I walked through the metal detector, the alarm went off. This didn't lead to me getting patted down and chemically tested--they just told me to check my pockets, set my phone on the table, and walk through again, the way it was at home in "the old days." We were the last ones to walk out to the plane.

Even as I climbed the stairs, I wasn't confident we'd really made it till I was sitting in my seat, and they closed the cabin door. We rolled down a crazily steep taxi-way to the runway, which, rather than running down the valley, was aimed right at the canyon walls. We took off into the sunset, and an hour later we were collecting our bags and jumping into a car that wasn't a taxi, just a car with the window rolled down and the driver yelling "taxi!" to people like us, waiting on the curb.

New Fruit (#7)

2007-11-28T13:42:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I see these little fruits being sold on the street, and the other day I bought a bag. I asked the guy what they were called, had him repeat it twice, and said it to him myself. I swore it sounded like GRUCILLA, but I am unable to find anything online resembling that name. Not rucilla, brusia, jucilla... nada. So I have no idea what they are. Unfortunately, they were past their prime, so I only tasted a couple. Only about the size of a dime, they're sort of hexagonal when viewed from the top. They contain a large seed doesn't cleanly separate from the fruit. The texture is really apple-like, crunchy and juicy, and they taste a lot like an apple too, except very sour. The guy selling them asked me if I wanted salt, but they definitely would need sugar to be enjoyable.

Who do you trust on the road to paradise?

2007-11-27T14:59:00.000-08:00

Kerri and I got the Cuenca early in the week, so the town wasn't really hopping. One night, we stopped by a bar near our hostal for a couple drinks. The music was good, but there was American football playing on the big-screen TV. There were only a few customers, all up in the loft, but the two bar-tenders, who looked to be about 16, had several friends hanging around. They kept going into the back room. A few nose-rubs as they exited led us to speculate that they were doing coke. I'd earlier commented on how kids in Ecuador, unlike in the US, are given full responsibility for shops, and everything works out fine. But this made me wonder how wise it was to leave a couple of teenage boys in charge of a bar.

Two days later, when we were in the bus station, our bar tender came up to us and started chatting. I recognized him, but Kerri didn't remember him. His name was Manuel. He asked where we were going, and when we told him, he said that's where he was going too--it was his home town. He'd take the same bus. On the bus, he sat across the aisle from us, showed us a picture of his 3-year-old daughter, and said he'd stayed up all night, but he was chipper and awake. I wonder why. He made me a little bit nervous. When we got to Loja four hours later, where we'd need to catch another bus, he stuck with us and told us he knew a faster, cheaper way to get to Vilcabamba. We could go with him. We'd take a local taxi to a different shared taxi company that would take us the rest of the way for about a dollar.

Since getting robbed, I've been a bit jumpier. Someone taps me on the shoulder to ask me a question, and my heart starts racing. I've heard stories about people getting in taxis in Latin America (not Ecuador in particular) and being driven to a dangerous slum or the middle of nowhere to be robbed, beaten, or worse. So I kind of just wanted to follow the guide-book's directions. He motioned to a taxi, and Kerri and I looked at each other and quickly and quietly discussed whether this was one of those things you shouldn't do. Against our better judgment, we got in the taxi, perhaps just to avoid the awkwardness of saying no. I rode nervously, trying to tell myself that it was a real taxi, he'd picked it at random, but then wondering if it was all an elaborate set-up. I had no idea where we were going. It didn't seem right. I quietly slipped my credit cards out of my wallet and snuck them into my underwear.

When we pulled into the taxi depot rather than somewhere dangerously deserted and out-of-the-way, I was relieved, but still wary. We got in the next taxi and waited for more passengers. When they squeezed two young women into the front seat, I started to feel better. We drove through the spectacular hilly countryside listening to a soccer game on the radio.

Manuel told us about Vilcabamba, suggested places to stay. The main theme was that we shouldn't pay too much. There were plenty of businesses overcharging tourists. I partially agreed with him. It's frustrating to know or suspect that you're being charged more for the exact same product or service, just because you're a tourist. But he also didn't seem to see why you would pay more than the average Ecuadorian price for something that was genuinely nicer. He discouraged us from staying at Madre Tierra because of how expensive it was. But we went there anyway, and thought it was completely worth it. From the perspective of an American tourist, the price wasn't a rip-off, it was a deal. The same accommodations would cost ten times as much in the US.

When we arrived in Vilcabamba, he walked down the sidewalk with us, and I wondered if we'd be hanging out with him our whole stay. But he had to go find his girlfriend and catch another bus to go right back to Cuenca. Before leaving, he told us to pay no more than a dollar for a taxi, and told a couple of other locals to help us recognize the right taxi and to send it in the right direction.

It turned out that, sketchy coked-up teenager or not, he wasn't out to get us. It probably did speed up his trip to have us get in the shared taxi with him, so it would fill up and leave sooner, but his real motivation seemed to be that he just wanted to be friendly. He liked talking to us, and, glowingly proud of his native land like most Ecuadorians, wanted us to enjoy his home town and his country. Despite the frustrating aspects of Latino culture--the machismo, corruption, and petty crime--being friendly and helpful is also a big part of South American life, and, along with the natural beauty, it makes traveling and living here a pleasure.

Paraíso

2007-11-22T08:08:00.000-08:00

We have arrived at a lovely resort and spa in the Valley of Longevity, where people supposedly live longer than anywhere else on Earth. The owner, who greeted us with a hug and a "welcome home," tells us we're surrounded by "negative ions," which apparently are a good thing. Everything is "magnified" here, which we have decided applies to the popcorn, which is just about perfect. The owner also loves Dennis Kucinich, though she wishes he were stronger on the UFO issue. We were met at our room by a shamanic cat who, we're told, knows if you need to be healed and curls up on your lap to do so. There's been a gentle rain all morning, making the banana fields shine. I'm going to get a massage this afternoon, and Kerri's getting some other treatments, though we're both skipping the "colonic irrigation," which the shamans of the world come here for. They'll be serving Thanksgiving dinner for the benefit of the Americans tonight. It's an incredibly relaxing, if slightly kooky, place to spend the holiday.

Bus Music

2007-11-19T14:13:00.001-08:00

Kerri and I took a 10-hour bus ride to Cuenca yesterday. Normally, I´m entertained by the always-blasting South American music, at least till I´m ready to sleep. Yesterday, the speaker right across from me was blown and sounded, at best, like a radio not tuned properly to a station. The guy in front of me dealt with this annoyance by pulling out a pocket music player with a tiny speaker instead of headphones, so I had to listen to two unlistenable music selections at the same time. I asked the conductor to turn the music off, and he did, but he turned it back on after an hour. I tried to endure for about half an hour, but then got up, started feeling around, and realized I could unplug the speaker. The music went off, nobody seemed to mind, and the rest of the trip was relatively peaceful, at least for an over-filled bus barreling down curvy roads through the Andes. Happily, we´ve found a hip, tranquilo hostal with a cafe/bar and are going to try to find hot springs tomorrow.

Side Trip

2007-11-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

My friend Kerri arrived Friday for her Thanksgiving Vacation. We're about to head to the bus station to find a bus to Cuenca. Be back by the end of the week.

Miguel's Take: Children, Tourists, and the Peruvian Economy

2007-11-16T20:55:00.000-08:00

Cusco, Peru, is a beautiful old town of tile-roofed buildings. The oldest, narrowest streets are lined with imposing walls of perfectly cut stone, fit together by the Incas without mortar, still serving as the foundations for buildings. It's also a city filled with tourists and locals scurrying to profit off of their rich, western guests.

One afternoon while visiting, I had a rather unpleasant experience that I couldn't get out of my mind.

I was walking down a famous stone-lined street, Hatun Rumyoc, and saw a boy of maybe 12 trying to sell a European woman postcards or something. I had my camera out to take pictures of the impressive Inca stonework a few minutes later, when he came up and asked if I wanted to know which was the most famous stone, the one with 12 corners.

He introduced himself as Miquel, and when he told me he'd show me the rocks arranged like a jaguar around the corner, I knew I'd be obliged to tip him for showing me around.

After we got around to the other side of the block, where there were a couple of girls dressed up with a lamb to photograph, the tour was up and he pulled out his deck of paintings, little watercolors mounted on white greeting cards that he said he'd painted, though they were clearly not done by a 12 year old. I looked through them and asked how much. "Three for ten dollars," he said. There wasn't anything that interested me, certainly nothing that I'd want to fuss about keeping flat for the next three weeks. I told him I wouldn't be able to keep them safe, but thanked him for the tour and offered him a five-sole coin--about $1.70--for his 10-minute tour. He got persistent and said I needed to pay him by buying three of his paintings. When I declined, he said, "Five soles isn't enough, you should pay ten." When he started to argue, I told him to take it or leave it, that it was good money for ten minutes work. He replied, "It isn't a good tip. The boys in the street have to pay for their school," but he finally let me put the coin in his hand, mumbling, "In your country..." and left me feeling like crap instead of glad I'd met him, as I had just a minute earlier.

Now maybe I was being a stingy American, but from my point of view, there are a number of things wrong with this situation. First, he was working for a tip. He didn't show me that he even had paintings until after the "tour." Why should I suddenly be obliged to buy something when he'd been showing me around? The nature of a tip is that it's a bonus. Yes, it's sort of expected in that situation, though many tourists don't realize it until the hand has been stuck out--they think the locals are just being friendly until they realize it's all about money. If he'd wanted to negotiate a price, he should have done so ahead of time (just as I've learned it's necessary to do with South American taxi drivers.)

Perhaps I should have been more generous and pulled out ten soles to start with. In Ecuador I would have grabbed a one-dollar coin--even less. Considering that my college-educated Spanish tutors get paid $3 for an hour of teaching, that a half-hour taxi ride is $3.50 and that has to cover gas and car maintainance, what I gave him really seemed adequate when I initially pulled it out. So why didn't he think so?

Maybe he was being totally honest in saying that twice as much would be a good tip. Maybe that's what the average American or European traveler (on a bigger budget than me) gives. In which case, if the money's so easy, why not grab the small tip and scramble on to the next "client?" The thing is, I doubt it's so easy. Having "worked the street" in prosperous San Francisco, fund-raising for the Democrats in the 2004 election, I know that most of your time is spent either trying to get people to talk to you, or giving the spiel unsuccessfully. In his mind, Miguel must be thinking about the whole afternoon, the amount he brings in compared with how long he's out trying, while I think about only the ten minutes he spent talking to me. As a business, you do have to bring in enough money to make up for the down time, but if you have a lot of time without customers, you can't just charge the customers you do get extra to make up for what the missing customers would have paid.

My first reaction was that 12-year-old Miguel had a rather entitled attitude. By American standards, he's in no way privileged, but living in the tourist center of western--if not all of--South America, he's got a level of opportunity that few kids on the continent have. Riding the train across Ecuador, I saw little kids fighting viciously for the candies tossed their way by well-intentioned passengers. Hundreds of kids as young as four wander the squares of Quito trying to get you to let them shine your shoes for a quarter or 50 cents.

It raises a moral quandary. I think many Americans see the childhood poverty and feel guilty, or at least self-conscious. They probably do give bigger tips than they would if they were thinking about it as a business transaction. They think of themselves as being generous, not getting a good deal. What they're really paying for is to have their consciences appeased, not just for a good or service. Miguel, apparently, had picked up on this guilt, but the other side of it. He experiences it as entitlement. He doesn't just perceive an injustice, but has discerned that he deserves to be compensated. Maybe that's the case, but if so, the remedy isn't small reparations in the guise of business. A few dollars here and there does nothing to eradicate the poverty that pervades Latin America and much of the rest of the world (despite a few dollars being pretty significant when your family only makes $100 a month.)

The problem is that this "generosity" is supporting child labor. In fact, it probably encourages adults to send their kids into the streets before themselves because the "cute factor" is certainly profitable. If we saw elementary school kids bagging groceries, paid only in tips, in the U.S., we wouldn't tip them day after day; we'd report it to the authorities. Here thousands of kids are being exploited and we, western tourists who wouldn't tolerate it in our own countries, cough up the money that makes the exploitation viable.

Perhaps, though, young workers are inevitable. Miguel may need to be selling cards and giving tours, and, all things considered, it could be much worse. He's not in a sweat shop, and he's practicing his English and people skills. I can't blame him too much for going about business so badly, since the people in this part of South America, and Cusco in particular, don't get how to do business, especially given that their most profitable customers are Americans and Europeans.

One common job is being a tour guide, what Miguel was trying his hand at as a tactic for his real art-dealing job. In the United States, it's pretty unheard of to hire a personal guide to show you around. But here, it's cheap enough that I sometimes do it. Paying $20 each, along with 3 others, to have a couple of local guides take us overnight into the jungle was absolutely worth it. In Cusco though, Miguel's strategy seems pretty common. Men come up to you and just start talking, following you. They're hard to shake without being rude, and expect to be paid if you let them continue. Perhaps it's a profitable strategy for the individual, but I don't think it helps the economy of the town as a whole. I imagine that when people feel continually hassled, they're less likely to open their wallets in general. I certainly was. I appreciated that at the entry to one of the ruins I visited, they asked if I'd like a guide, and then, when I did say, "no thank you" it was no problem.

A similar strategy is employed by restaurants, where someone stands outside trying to get you to come in. I just feel hounded, and it causes me to walk quickly by places I would otherwise want to peek in and check out. This may be more of a cultural difference, but for me, I'd rather check out the menu without feeling pressured. So many stores, restaurants, and bars have tiny entrances and dark interiors that make you commit to entering before you can even find out if they sell anything you'd be interested in. Some big windows or a wide door would be a lot more effective than someone blocking the door and barking at you.

Even once inside an otherwise spacious store, the counter-productive pressure continues. I've gone into several department stores and had women follow me, standing right by or behind me as I tried to figure out what underwear would fit me without sizes in inches. I was inevitably made uncomfortable enough to walk out empty-handed. I suppose if you grow up with it, you see it as service, but in a tourist town, it would be indispensible for business owners, chambers of commerce, and tourist bureaus to understand that Americans are used to going into stores, even upscale department stores, and having to search for someone to serve them. It doesn't take much more than someone standing back, available, to make them feel like they're getting the kind of great service that makes them spread money freely. But it also doesn't take much more than that to make your customers feel uncomfortable, in which case they'll just want to leave.

There certainly are cultural differences, but I wonder if some of these lessons that I know apply to Americans would actually make good business sense anywhere. Isn't a store that you can see into with room to move around freely in going to be more inviting anywhere because of basic human psychology? For customers to come in and spend, they need to feel safe and comfortable. (Maslow's hierarchy of needs?) Very few small-scale businesses in South America seem to have figured out how to do this. I suspect one of the reasons American business is so successful--and American businesses do so well here in South America--is that the buildings are designed and staff trained to be inviting. McDonald's is successful all over the world, and though the menu changes a bit (rice as a side, ciabatta buns,) the walls are always mostly glass. Even if you've never been to McDonald's, you don't have to go inside to know what it's going to be like. Every U.S. chain is like this, open to the street, with staff waiting back or off to the side, encouraging you to come in and browse, no obligation, and as a result, we spend money on things we really don't need at stores that don't seem desperate for our business--the complete opposite of Calle Procurdores, the street full of restaurants I walked down the evening I met Miguel. I was half-looking for dinner, but felt so hassled that I skipped dinner and never walked down the street again.

It's sad, because they're desperate for business--the market over-saturated, but the costs so low that the tiniest profit makes staying open worth it--and they could get more business by working less hard for it, though perhaps it's something everyone would have to agree on. A quiet restaurant with just a menu might not be noticed, and sitting empty, wouldn't attract more customers.

At the same time, there are high-pressure sales people in the US--think car dealers. It must be an effective strategy sometimes. They won't let you leave without a car. But I know that this strategy convinced me not to buy a Hyundai and to pick the Toyota I now own instead. I also bet those places don't get a lot of repeat customers, since many must leave the transaction not feeling good about it. Maybe in a tourist town saturated with indistinguishable vendors, return business isn't very important--it's now or never.

Thus with Miguel. What did he have to lose by pushing me for a couple dollars more, even if it meant making me feel like a jerk whether it worked or not. The only thing was, it wasn't a calculated strategy for him. He was a kid and clearly emotionally invested in every sol. It was obvious that he walked away from me feeling jilted just as much as I did. When you're doing capitalism right, that doesn't happen.

Huevos Escalfados

2007-11-15T17:44:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I just needed a quick dinner, and I had some ramen lying around for just such an emergency. I decided I had enough energy to spice it up a tiny bit, so I threw some sliced onion, soy sauce, and racist hot sauce in the water along with the noodles and "vegetable flavor packet." I also decided an egg floating on top might be nice, like you see in the Asian cookbooks in the soup section, or modeled in plastic in front of a Japanese restaurant. I broke an egg into the cooking noodles, but it sank right to the bottom. Three minutes later, when I gave it a stir, lo and behold, I found a perfectly poached egg right in the middle.

A poached egg...that mythical way of cooking an egg that everyone knows about but no one has ever actually seen. When I was taking spanish lessons, I asked my teacher to teach me the names for all the ways to cook an egg, so I wouldn't be stuck eating the default scrambledhuevos revueltos (revolted? returned?) every time I went out to get breakfast. As it turns out, here they have three levels of boiled eggs, not just hard and soft. Instead of soft, you can get either tibios which means "warm" and is barely cooked and runny, or pasados--"past", which is a little bit more cooked than soft-boiled--the white is solid, along with a little bit of the yolk, but the center is still runny. These are perfect to my taste. But, anyway, my teacher had no idea what a poached egg was. I wondered if perhaps they weren't possible up here where the water boils at 196 degrees. Apparently it's not a problem. I made one by accident--no whirlpool involved. Perhaps now I'll have to try without the noodles.

Phoo phee phoo phee

2007-11-15T05:40:00.000-08:00

Since I was a kid, my immediate family had a little tune of four notes that we whistled to get each other's attention. This "family whistle" was particularly useful in crowds. Mom might be looking around, not seeing me, and I could whistle, letting her know which way to look, without yelling, "Hey MOM!" We could also find each other in the grocery store without looking down every single aisle, and again, without obnoxiously shouting.

In decades, I've never come across anyone else whose family does this. Until I was at Machu Picchu.

I was coming down Wayna Picchu, the big mountain that's always in the background of photos of the ruins, and overheard a guy telling the rest of his group "...'s our family whistle," after which he blew out his family's four notes. A girl commented on how easy it was to hear, then they got too far away to make out. I was so excited to find out that it wasn't just us, it was a phenomenon. If I'd stumbled on one other family whistle, there must be even more. I pulled out my phone and recorded myself whistling the notes so I wouldn't forget. I just found that recording (along with the horrible-quality sounds of street vendors, a kid begging on the bus, and the mating calls of blue-footed boobies) and it reminded me to investigate.

So how many more families are out there with their own family whistles? I just did a Google search, and found almost 2000 references. Many refer to a Holocaust memoir titled "The Family Whistle." Knowing how my family uses its whistle to locate each other, I can only imagine that its role in this book is gut-wrenching.

But there are many happier references too. Someone mentions in a forum about family words that just about every family in Mexico has a whistle. A blogger stumbled upon the concept in Target and isn't sure what to think. A columnist reminisces on the lost tradition. The BBC even has a page with recordings of half a dozen such whistles. (Though I don't have room for Real Player on this old computer, so I haven't listened.)

I'm tempted to speculate, as I find others have, that cell phones have probably replaced this tradition, but haven't you been talking to someone by phone who was in view, but couldn't figure out where you were? Wouldn't a quick whistle be simpler?

New Fruit (#6)

2007-11-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

The little, oblong GUAYABA, known as guava in English, is non-descript green on the outside, but, cut open, it's surprisingly between watermelon-pink and salmon on the inside. It smells of pumpkin and grass, with a fruity tang, very summery, like sitting in a garden or stomping through a cornfield.

(photo courtesy of Wikimedia)

The delight diminishes once I start scooping it into my mouth. The center pulp, with little, tomatoey-looking seeds has a strange smooth feel, slippery and gummy at the same time, textureless, if that's possible. The seeds are incredibly hard. I cannot crush them with my teeth. I scoop this part out--not worth eating. Perhaps it could be blended and strained for juice. This leaves about a third of an inch of fruit inside the thin rind. This part is mealier, a little less sweet, slightly bitter, and dominated by those earthy green aromas. Maybe because of it's happy color, I can imagine it being better in a sorbet, lightened, sweetened, and tanged up with lemon, than fresh.

The peel, I've read, is edible, and it has a totally different flavor, perhaps better than the inside. It's a bit bitter, but dominated by a piney taste, with an aroma of frankincense. Maybe not the best flavors for a fruit, but definitely distinct. Overall, it's in no way a disgusting a food; I'd eat a little of it if it was on my plate, but I don't really understand why this fruit, which wasn't dirt cheap in the supermercado, makes its way into all sorts of "tropical" beverages in the States. There are definitely much better fruits being totally ignored.

Ants in Transit

2007-11-13T11:15:00.000-08:00

There's an ant highway passing through my apartment. Little black ants enter from the light well through a crack on the side of my bedroom window. They cross the window sill, go down the wall and out the door, and follow the bottom of the wall through the living area to the kitchen, where they cross the room along the seam between the wood and tile floor, run along another short wall and go out the door. Outside, they climb up the edge of the door, across the wall and the top of my kitchen window, and through a window into the neighboring apartment.

The traffic goes both ways, and at any given time there must be a thousand ants in my apartment, but they're just passing through and don't seem to have any interest in what's going on here, so I leave them be. There was another route in my bathroom, coming out of a hole in the wall and heading to my wet sink where they'd drink. I tried to wash off their chemical path and even sprayed some insect repellant on the wall, but as soon as it dried, they found their exact same path again, so I gave up. But when I came back from traveling for a month, the water had dried up and they'd gone. Now I'm just left with the one ant highway and the question of where the heck they're all going.

Under Communism...

2007-11-11T21:05:00.000-08:00

I was in the middle of nowhere, Bolivia in a small llama-raising town called San Juan, at least eight hours from the nearest paved road on a three-day 4WD tour of the rural southwest corner of Bolivia, a desolate land of volcanos and desert, mummies in exposed graves, salt lakes full of flamingos, grazing llamas, and, often in places where it seemed there was nothing to graze on, the llama's wild cousin, vicuñas. My traveling companions were five Polish kids in their mid and late 20s, along with our driver and guide, and our cook. The Polish kids all enjoyed traveling and working in the US, apparently on some kind of "study" visa that lets you work as a way to learn. They'd all spent time in Alaska and had visited San Francisco, and three of them had worked in Hatteras, North Carolina, where my family vacations every summer. One of them even knew Asheville, where my brother and sister-in-law live.

I wasn't thrilled at first that I ended up in a group of non-English, non-Spanish speakers, and it was mostly Polish for the first day. But that night, in the dining room of our very modest mud-brick hotel, we had a nice dinner talking, in English, about travel, politics, and language.

What was interesting was that they were just old enough to remember Communism from childhood. I got to hear stories that seemed half horror, half nostalgia, about having money, but nothing to buy, having to wait in line with mom with their siblings so each person could get a ration of coffee, sugar, or butter ("...I don't remember butter," one of them added.)

I already catch myself saying, "when I was a kid..." but these guys' children and grandchildren are going to be in for a lot of "under Communism..." stories. The second night, they shared more memories. They remembered loving cotton candy, which was available from "someone important," someone who had the connections to get his hands on a machine to make it--a rare person who had a business. For each of them it was someone different, but whoever he was, he set up in front of church on Sunday mornings.

This led them to reminiscing about the standard first communion present--a set consisting of a calculator, a watch, and a pen. For those a few years older, it had just been a watch, but one that played tunes--American songs. At school the next day everyone would compare how many songs their watch played--10, 12, 20.

They remembered going to the house of the one person who had a VCR, who charged admission like a theater (another rare business opportunity), to watch the Karate Kid or Rambo.

And they made me try a spoonful of powdered dry milk--a clearly nostalgic treat from when there was no candy available. It was gummy and kind of gross till all that was left was the rich aftertaste. For them, now, this is a treat, because it was back then. They offered me more, but I declined. As they took second and third spoonfuls, I couldn't help but exclaim, "Now I understand Communism!"

Hot Showers

2007-11-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

In South America, they don't usually use the typical American hot water heater that keeps a big tank of water hot and ready-to-go at all times. In fact, when checking into a hotel, it's wise to ask whether they have hot water at all and whether it's available all the time. Sometimes it's only available in the evening. When there is hot water, if it's not heated by the sun, it's usually provided by some type of on-demand device that heats the water immediately before spraying it on you. It's probably more energy efficient, but one disadvantage of this method is that hot water and high pressure are incompatible. The faster the water flowes through the heater, the less it gets heated. You control the temperature by changing the pressure, so if you want a really hot shower, it has to be a trickle.

Sometimes this system is a box with a gas burner in it located somewhere near the shower. You can hear the flames kick on when you turn the water on. But other times it's an electrical device that's integrated into the shower head. Here's the one in my otherwise very ritzy $7 hotel room in Copacabana:

I hate these things. They rarely work as they should, and this one was no exception. Here's what it looked like by the time I actually was able to take a hot shower:

Looks dangerous, doesn't it. Fortunately, I didn't get electrocuted...this time. As often as not, when I use one of these contraptions, it's messed up somehow, and I do. And since they're used where the voltage is 240v, it's even less fun than being electrocuted in America. In Brazil I encountered one with the plastic caps covering the switches missing. The switches themselves were metal, and when I tried to switch it from luke-warm to hot...zap! Another one in Brazil was made entirely of metal, and when I lifted my arm over my head, I inadvertantly touched it and...zap! In La Paz I went into a shower and turned the metal faucet handle on the wall and got zapped. Instead of fixing the faulty grounding, they'd taped the handles, which only lessened the shock.

Fortunately, in my apartment building, there seems to be a real water heater. It must be far away from my bathroom, because it takes a couple minutes for the warm water to arrive, and at least five for all the pipes to warm up and the water to get really hot. But that's a small price to pay not to be electrocuted everyday.

Pictures

2007-11-10T16:57:00.000-08:00

Even without the photos from Chile, I took about 1500 pictures of Peru and Bolivia. After three days, they are finally dealt with. I uploaded about a quarter of them to flickr, but to make it easy, I've picked some of the best and made five flickr sets of the main segments of my trip.

Cusco and Machu Picchu, which were touristy, but spectacular
Lake Titicaca: peaceful, austere, and beautiful
La Paz, the bustling capital of Bolivia, and the most foreign city I've visited
The Word's Most Dangerous Road, which I road down on a bicycle
High Bolivian Desert, where seemingly endless salt flats are surrounded by volcanoes, steam vents, colored lakes, vicuñas, and flamingos

Menus

2007-11-10T10:35:00.000-08:00

Foreign language menus are often entertaining when you travel. When I was in Aguas Calientes, I was talking with a restaurant owner. When he found out I was an English teacher, he offered me a little more wine to go over his menu with him. A frequent problem is that they translate "a la..." literally, so you get "spaghetti to the sailor" which is harder to figure out than the "espegueti a la marinera." His menu had one dish that had a particular local name that couldn't really be translated, and he wanted to describe the dish in English--Pork fried in its own fat. I tried to explain that you couldn't put that on the menu. It might be muy rico, but, while you can talk about fat and grease in the kitchen, it doesn't go on the menu in America.

But my favorite menu item was found in Bolivia, where a spicy dish of beef and hotdogs over fries with onions, peppers, and ketchup called "pique macho" is popular. The English side of the menu listed it as "Male itch (very hot) 30 bs."

New Fruit (#5)

2007-11-09T08:32:00.000-08:00

Tried one new fruit in Santiago that I'd been curious about after seeing them in Ecuadorian markets, but never in the supermarket, where you get to see how the name is spelled. The CHIRIMOYA is a weird scaley-looking green fruit, a little smaller than a grapefruit. Inside are lots of big, unavoidable, but easy-to-deal-with seeds, like giant tan watermelon seeds or fat pumkin seeds. In the interest of science, I counted them. The first chirimoya I ate had 38 seeds, the second had 50!

The white flesh has a pear-like texture, only more fibrous, and softer, especially as they get riper. It smells of drying bread dough, but tastes sort of like a pear, sort of like a mango. The fruit is sweet and creamy, very summery, with a hint bubble gum. In your mouth, it feels satiny, like it could be the filling of a hostess pie, only fresh and unprocessed. Once swallowed, you're left with a light spicy clove aftertaste.

In English, apparently, it's called a "custard apple" (whatever it means for something to have a name where it doesn't exist), because the flesh, especially when very ripe, supposedly is like custard.

Shoot

2007-11-08T10:06:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from Chile, and won't be able to share any more of my own pictures, since I lost my camera when I was robbed at gunpoint in Valparaíso, Chile. I've always sort of wondered how I would react in such a situation. Of course, I hoped I wouldn't get robbed, much less at gunpoint, but I knew it wasn't impossible. Even before traveling in South America, just living in San Francisco, or visiting other cities, I'd thought about what I'd do. I'd always imagined I'd be cooperative and concilliatory, anything not to get shot, but thinking about such hypothetical situations, which are about gut reaction, not logic, doesn't necessarily tell you much about what you'll really do. Now I know what I really do when I have a gun pointed at me.

(Photo by Alejandra Liode Luces)
The coastal city of Valparaíso is known for the counter-balanced cable cars, or ascensors, that have carried people up and down its steep hills for over 100 years. I went to find the Ascensor Polanco, recommended by my guide book, but it was closed.

(Photo by Francisco Martins)
So I decided to just walk up to the top, see the view, and from there to descend down a different nearby street. There weren't many people around, and I stopped to take a picture of a house with a girl sitting in front of it. Two guys a ways up the hill must have seen me, but I didn't really pay attention to them, I was more concerned with the girl not noticing me. I put my camera back in my backpack and continued down the steps. The two guys must have moved quickly, because I didn't realize they were right behind me. Suddenly, there was something poking me lightly in the side, and my backpack was yanked and literally ripped off my back. I knew without thinking what was happening, spun around, and grabbed my bag. The guy who had my bag in his left hand, pointed a very small hand gun at me with his right. I paused; maybe I loosened my grip. I kind of felt like the gun wasn't real, or that they weren't likely to use it. He'd barely touched my back with it initially, had relied on snatching my bag, not scaring me into giving it up. But I still froze, and having a better grip, he yanked it away from me, and started running up the steps with his accomplice. I realized it wasn't just my backpack, but my camera, and I started running after them, which is when I must have stomped on my heel.

I'd imagined getting robbed in a busy public place. Other travelers have described how one person distracted them in a crowd, and a second person grabbed their stuff. I'd scripted this part, and chased them around a corner screaming, "¡Socorro! ¡Me robó! ¡Ayudame!" They turned around, and pointed the gun at me again, which made me stall, but as soon as they started running again, I ran up the steps behind them. By the time I got to the next corner, though, my foot injury was slowing me down. They were nearly a block ahead of me, about to round the next corner. There was nobody ahead to hear me and stop them and I realized they'd have disappeared by the time I ran another block.

I'm surprised by the way I reacted. I was determined not to give up my bag without a fight. It's not that the gun didn't scare me. I was momentarily paralyzed when it was pointed right at me, and that was decisive. If they hadn't had a gun, they would have had to start beating me to make me give up the bag. With it, even if my foot hadn't been injured, it would have taken a good bit of luck and some other people reacting very quickly and fearlessly for them not to have gotten away. But when the gun wasn't directly threatening me, I wasn't inclined to give up. I've never thought of myself as a fighter, but I can be pretty determined, and I guess those two characteristics aren't so far apart. Still, I'd prefer not to find out how I react when fists start flying.

Once they were gone, I turned around and walked back and told the girl I'd been robbed. She'd certainly seen and heard it. She was locked out of her house and told me it was a dangerous neighborhood to be walking around in alone. Good to know. She gave me her name and the street name, but had no idea who the thieves were or where the police station was, so I started limping down the hill, not realizing how hurt I was. I made it to where there were people, and immediately a woman asked what was wrong. She later said I flinched when she tried to get me to lean on her. She helped me find a pay phone, called the police for me, and waited half an hour for them to arrive.

By that point I couldn't put any weight on my foot and they took me to the hospital, which was a dismal place. Since I was brought by the police, I managed to skip the waiting room and paper work, but it still took several hours to get an x-ray. My foot wasn't swollen--it wasn't a sprain, but the bottom of my heel hurt terribly. I was remembering my friend Diane, who broke her foot by stepping too hard on it and was laid up for months. I was pretty certain I'd be leaving Chile with a cast. When it was finally time for a doctor to look at the x-rays, they just wheeled me into the doorway of an eight-bed examining room. Standing 10 feet away, he held them up to the light, surrounded by other patients, and said there was no fracture, so I could go. No explanation of what the problem was, no pain killers, no crutches. With dozens of other people trying to get help--one guy with blood soaked pants dripping onto the floor and no one acting like his problem was urgent, others in handcuffs--I couldn't really demand more time, especially in Spanish. They gave me my x-ray and wheeled me to the police desk to make a statement.

Eventually I was taken to a police station, waited a while, and was given a slip that I was supposed to take to another office, who knows where, the next day, to pick up the official report. Knowing I had to get back to Santiago and be on a plane in less than 36 hours, I pushed and got someone to type it all up that night. Then I was on my own to get back to my hotel on the other side of town. I had to hobble a few blocks down to deserted main road, which seemed far sketchier than where I'd been robbed. I flagged down a taxi, but it was a 'colectivo,' a car that has a fixed route. Fortunately, the guy was willing to illegally put down his route sign and take me to my hostal, where I stayed up talking with some other travelers, finishing the bottle of Chilean wine I'd started the night before and drinking a couple more beers to ease the stress and pain.

The next day I had to get back to Santiago. I took a taxi to the bus terminal, but then had to limp through that station and the one in Santiago, as well as the Metro, with my big backpack. I quickly threw out my back, which was already out of whack from the previous day, and at one point had to lie down on the subway platform because my muscles were spasming. But on my own, I had no other choice really. I made it to the hostal, downed a bunch of ibuprofen, and drank another bottle of wine, which helped. The next morning, I hobbled through the Santiago, Lima, and Quito airports, where my friend Rebecca was nice enough to meet me. By the time I made it to my apartment, I'd pulled a muscle in my leg, and the problems had cascaded all the way up from the bottom of my foot to a nasty kink in my neck. But I'm home, and I have enough food around to stay put for a couple of days. Already my foot is feeling noticeably better. Hopefully by tomorrow, I'll be able to walk enough to go out and get some bread and eggs for breakfast. And while I'm resting, there are more tales to write about.

Peru and Bolivia

2007-10-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

A real quick update for those who are checking. I made it to relaxed Copacabana, Bolivia (on Lake Tticaca) this morning after almost a week in hectic, touristy Peru. Got to see Machu Picchu in the early morning mist, which was spectacular, and rightly on life's must-do list. I'll have pictures to share eventually. For now, I'm going to take it easy for a couple days, head to Lima, then into the driest deserts on earth.

Hasta Luego

2007-10-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'm flying to Cusco this afternoon to take a little "vacation" in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Hoping to see Macchu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and the Atacama Desert--which is the driest place on Earth, apparently a Mars-like landscape where, in some spots, no rain has been recorded in hundreds of years. I doubt I'll get a chance to post much before I return to Quito in early November, but I'm sure I'll have lots of tales to tell when I get back.

The Jungle

2007-10-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

Went down to the upper reaches of the Amazon rainforest--what they call the selva here--for the weekend with three other travelers who live in my apartment building. It was a bit funny when people asked where we were from because Thomas is German, Emma French, Emily Scottish, and me American. We spoke Spanish the whole weekend.

Getting to the jungle town of Tena was a not terribly pleasant overnight bus ride. The roads in Ecuador are terrible. Much of the road, which is a major route used by buses and semis, was unpaved, sometimes extremely rough, with one-lane bridges curving down the precipitous eastern side of the Andes. They've put some resources into improvement: there were some half-completed bridges, and some isolated sections of pavement--one no more than a quarter-mile long in the middle of nowhere. But the driver didn't tear down the mountains like a maniac and it was only five hours, so not too bad.

Tena was a cool town with a lively weekend nightlife. We stayed at a beautiful hostal with friendly owners and great showers for $10 a person. (I think people would spend a lot more time traveling in the States if the cheapest crappy hotel room didn't cost $50.) We went to what the guidebooks said was by far the nicest restaurant in town and were surprised to realize half-way through brunch that there was a live sloth hanging out in the top of the doorway by our table.

While we didn't end up seeing that much wildlife on our expedition into the jungle, there was a little zoo on the island in the middle of town. The parrots and cats were sadly in pretty small cages, but most of the monkeys and an ostrich were just running around free. Several different species of monkeys were all playing together and one ran right up and sat on my knee to get away from his friends.

Even though a sign in the park told about how bad the trade in wild animals is, I really want a monkey as a pet now.

We went to the Caverns of Jumandy, a pretty extensive network of caves with a river flowing through them. Caves here are warm enough to hike in wearing a swimsuit, which is good because you needed to swim to make your way through parts of the cave. There were pools to jump in, and perhaps coolest, an underground waterfall that you could bathe under.

Our guide in the caves, Luis, offered to take us camping overnight the next day. He and his cousin, Miguel, led us down a country road where you could look out over the rainforest with Sumaco Volcano looming in the distance.

They took us down steep paths into the jungle to a campspot under rock overhangs similar to Old Man's Cave in Ohio, but completely covered in green tropical vegetation.

We went on a night hike, then spent two hours diligently feeding and blowing on our campfire before the wood was dry enough to sustain itself. In the morning, we followed the stream to the point where it poured out of a cave, continued into the cave, and climbed a ladder next to the waterfall where the water entered the cave.

From there we swam up a small slot canyon to see another waterfall.

Several in the group jumped off a 35-foot cliff into a lagoon, but after slipping and landing on my tailbone the night before, I decided to skip that part of the adventure. Finally, we hiked up out of the canyon in a warm drizzle which became a downpour. Luis showed us various edible and medicinal plants and got us to eat some "sweet-n-sour" ants before we stopped and visited the Quichua family that maintains the trails. (They had a pet monkey, as well as a dog and cat.) At last, exhausted and a bit sore, we headed for chilly, polluted, civilization back in Quito.

(More Photos)

America from Outside

2007-10-04T09:42:00.000-07:00

I was having dinner with a bunch of travelers one night--Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders, a couple of Americans. Somehow the Americans were talking about where they were "from." I'm from Germany, England, Ireland etc. One girl was really from Ireland, and we were talking about immigrants fleeing the potato famine and coming to America. "Do you know what really happened during the famine?" she asked. "There was plenty of food. The people were growing plenty of wheat, but it was to pay the British." (Similarly, I'm told, at one time plantation owners would not allow Ecuadorians to eat any of the bananas the country produced--they were all exported.) She explained that when people were starving, besides taking in immigrants, the US sent food. "American ships bringing food in would pass the British ships that were taking food out." She finished with a line that made my heart sink: "America has always been our friend until George Bush."

Election Results

2007-10-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

As far as I can tell from here, Ecuador's election last Sunday has been pretty much ignored in the American press, which surprises me and doesn't surprise me. Of course US media outlets don't cover every little third-world election. But Ecuador was electing a constitutional assembly to rewrite the constitution, with candidates promising to oust the capitalists in congress and more. Where do you think your bananas and tilapia for fish tacos and sushi come from?

Last year, Rafael Correa was elected president from a new party, Alianza PAIS, that refused to run any candidates for Congress. The President, who is quite close with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, ran on a platform of reforming the government through a rewrite of the constitution. Before the election, he wasn't expecting to win an all-out majority, but that he did. With 70-plus seats out of 130, he can set up the government however he pleases (subject to a popular referendum.) The first order of business when the assembly meets at the end of the month will be to dissolve Congress--though Correa is careful to call it a recess--and appoint a temporary legislative body. There are proposals to change to a two-house legislature, to popularly elect supreme court judges (this is supposed to depoliticize the courts!), and generally give more power to the executive. Those on the right fear Correa becoming a socialist dictator. Correa himself seems warm to the idea of reuniting Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia as a single country. And while he says that keeping the dollar as the national currency is the only prudent option at the moment, he dreams of a single South American currency like the Euro.

Interestingly though, the campaigns barely mentioned these major issues, except when asked directly by journalists. The propaganda of every party just talked about how they were going to provide better education, better health-care, better environmental protection, a better economy. People went to the polls (voting is mandatory) with no idea what the specific proposals were, largely voting for Correa's personality and against entrenched, corrupt powers that haven't made anything better, I think.

Even though change is pretty frequent here--there have been 19 constitutions since 1830, and 9 presidents since this constitution was written in 1997--it seems like potentially momentous and--importantly--peaceful change taking place here right now. Change that could actually affect the US. So I thought I'd give you a little hint of what's going on.

(It turns out TIME does have an article on the topic this week. It covers the failure of democracy across South America. Interesting, short, and sweet. Read it, or just look at the picture of Correa.

Spray Paint

2007-09-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

While all the Ecuadorians were at the polls, I took the afternoon to do something I'd been intending to do for a while--walk around and photograph graffiti. It seemed fitting, since most of the graffiti is political, much of it pertaining directly to the Constitutional Assembly election today or the Presidential election last fall.

Quito is a very graffitied city, thus the saying "There are no blank walls in Quito." But the first thing I noticed was how crude it all is, scrawled in ordinary sloppy handwriting. I first wondered if the graffiti culture just wasn't developed, but clearly the culture is huge and well-established. It does seem to be less of an art form and more of a medium for expressing particular messages, often political, often amorous (though these tend to be in marker and often in more hidden places, like stairwells.) I suspect being in a country where the police are corrupt and where you won't be given a slap on the wrist if you're caught spending hours defacing someone's property leads people to get their message on the wall as quickly as possible, maybe using two colors as a flourish. Thinking about what I've seen, I'd classify the works into three groups.

First, of course, there are lots of tags, cryptic signatures saying, "I was here."

Second are the many messages meant to be read, rhetorical statements about politics, love, and other topics: "Out Yankees!" "Stop Wars," "We fight for Socialism." Sometimes the message is clever or a little obtuse: "Bald heads should roll" with a hammer and sickle, or, in reference to President Correa's election and move to rewrite the constitution, "The final Correazo comes. Chau Businessocracy" where 'Correazo' refers to the President, but also means something like 'whipping,' a play on the president's name meaning 'belt.' It's also interesting to see which issues are pressing, but marginalized, pushing their advocates to graffiti as a medium.

This one says, "My being a woman isn't for men. It's for being Free!" To which, someone has added "Yes." There are also walls demanding that abortion be legalized, and that lesbians unite. Despite the promises of the Constitution, women's equality is a long way off.

Finally, there's a small amount of stencil art. Interestingly, I've seen it only on walls, never on the sidewalk as is common in California (where, perhaps, it's done by people who are uneasy about defacing a building that clearly belongs to someone, but feel that a public sidewalk is fair game.) Although some are political, these pieces tend to be more artistic, conveying some sort of meaning beyond what a tag does, but without the clear agenda of political slogans. While applying the stencil is still quick, time and craft can go into making the stencil, although here too they aren't nearly as elaborate as I've seen in California.

Even if you don't speak Spanish, you can probably make out that it says "Violators of Verse."

I'm sure you'd like to see more of what I found on my walk, so take a look at my Graffiti Flickr set which contains about 75 photos. (I've translated those that need translation and provided some notes on acronyms and local references.)

New Fruit (#4)

2007-09-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

Only one fruit today, since the remaining new fruit at SuperMaxi this week were big enough to feed a large family. So this morning I'm just eating a PITAHAYA, which is apparently called a "dragon fruit" in English.

It's a weird-looking, yellow, pear-shaped fruit with wrinkly green succulent leaves all over and comes from a cactus that grows on trees.

Inside is a translucent pulp with squiggly white filaments leading to small black seeds. It smells distinctly of sweet corn being husked, scoops like a very soft melon and has a pleasant and sweet, if not particularly strong or distinct, flavor. It's especially nice with a bit of lime juice squeezed on top. I'm beginning to wonder if I should start an exotic fruit plantation back in the States. Would these things grow in a greenhouse?

A Latin-American Constitution

2007-09-28T16:33:00.001-07:00

While researching the Constitutional Assembly election, I ended up reading a good chunk of the current (1998) Ecuadorian constitution. Almost the first half lists and explains rights, "shoulds" (deberes), and obligations of the people and the government. It's a far cry from the US constitution, which, aside from setting up the structure of the government, puts in writing only a handful of key rights, mostly things the government can't do, not things it should. It's a really interesting list they've got, although as a poor country, they have no way of living up to a lot of these aspirations. I like to imagine what the US would be like if its constitution included these things. We have the resources to make them happen, and perhaps if they were part of our constitution, we'd have to work on making our country really great, instead of wasting our resources stirring up hornet's nests around the world.

What are these rights and obligations I'm talking about? I'll try to translate a few that I found interesting for you.

One of the first things it says is that it is a "primordial obligation of the state to erradicate poverty and promote the economic, social, and cultural progress of its inhabitants."

It guarantees "the right to freely develop your personality," "the right to live in a healthy environment, ecologically balanced, and free of pollution," "the right to a quality of life that assures health, nutrition, drinkable water, sanitation, education, work, recreation, clothing, and other socially necessary services," and "the right to freely and responsibly make decisions about your sexual life."

The right to "habeus corpus" is clearly spelled out.

It promises to "equally support women as heads of households."

"Free and stable unions of men and women outside of marriage will enjoy the same rights and obligations as families created through matrimony."

"Public health programs will be free for all.... The State will organize a national system of health."

"The State will promote and stimulate culture, creativity, artistic work, and scientific investigation."

"Journalists' rights to professional secrets will be guaranteed."

"Publicity in any medium, which promotes violence, racism, sexism, religious or political intolerance, or that affects human dignity is prohibited."

"The government will promote and guarantee the equitable participation of men and women as candidates in the popular election process."

All of these are enough of a given here in this conservative, traditional country, for there to be sufficient consensus for them to be in the constitution, while in much more advanced America, we fight over many of these things, year after year. Interesting.

New Fruit (#3)

2007-09-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

The GRANADILLA is yet another relative of the passion fruit, but like peaches, apricots, and plums, these are all absolutely distinct. The outside isn't so much a peel as a shell, thin and hard, but the fruit is incredibly light, like a whiffle ball, and inside is a thick layer of spongy white padding protecting the now-familiar gel-covered seeds.

These taste light too. It's sort of like eating a cloud. There are many types of clouds, yes. These are somewhere between fluffy white clouds and the San Francisco fog. Despite the crunch of the seeds, it tastes soft, sweet, and slightly creamy, with the faintest hints of melon and cucumber.

These tiny orange berries, called UVILLAS, are slimy, which makes sense, since it turns out they are close relatives of tomatillos, which also have a (slightly stickier) slime on them once you remove the lantern-like husk. These uvillas came packaged with the husks already removed. Although the name means "little grapes," their tang is much more citrusy, but they also have an unusual flavor which is reminiscent of a tomatillo, but much fruitier. I'm hoping they can be grown in the States. I'm imagining a bright orange version of salsa verde.

Decisions...Decisions

2007-09-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, Ecuador goes to the polls. After winning the presidency on a overhaul-the-system platform last November (I saw that campaign too, leaving the country the day before the election), Rafael Correa called a referendum on revising the constitution. As a result, they are now electing members to a Constitutional Assembly. I've spent the last week researching the subject night and day so I could give a presentation yesterday as my final project at school (thus the lack of blogging), so I'll give you more details later. For now, let me just show you the ballot. The first cool modern thing is that it has pictures of all the candidates.

That's just a small section of the ballot. In Pichincha, there are 34 parties running candidates--lists of 14 for provincial seats and 24 for national seats, adding up to 476 candidates to choose from. Nationwide, there are more than 4,000 people running for the 130-member Asamblea Constituyente.

Even with the pictures, there's no way you can keep all the names straight. Each party is assigned its own unchanging number, used in all their propaganda, and all the parties suggest you vote down the line for one "lista" by drawing a single line straight down an entire column. But you are also allowed to pick and choose candidates or half-lists.

Perhaps because voting is obligatory, with a few exceptions to make it a reasonable requirement, people are much more involved in the election than you'd see in the States. Or maybe it's because they're writing a new constitution, which seems particularly important. On the other hand, maybe that's not such a huge deal, given that it will be the country's 20th constitution since becoming a country in 1830. Regardless, there are bands of flag-waving party loyalists walking the streets, riding around in the backs of pick-up trucks, and handing out fliers on street corners. It's quite exciting, and knowing a bit about what's at stake--perhaps, sadly, more than most Ecuadorians--it's quite exciting. Having no particular opinion, it will just be interesting to see how it all turns out.

End of Summer

2007-09-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

Today is the autumnal equinox, which has a somewhat different meaning here in Ecuador. Because we're on the equator, the length of day and night doesn't vary, so it's not the day when night and day are the same length, as it's thought of in the US. On the equinox, the Earth moves in its orbit so that the northern hemisphere tips away from the Sun, and the southern towards the Sun. Thus, the sun crosses the equator, and passes directly overhead, so a vertical pole casts no shadow. It's "the day the Sun kisses the Earth."

Quito has a large pole at the center of the Plaza del Intiwatana in Parque Itchimbía, which is laid out with lines pointing to the sunrises and sunsets of the solstices, as well as north, south, east, and west. I scoped it out yesterday, when it was mostly cloudy, and took some pictures of the sun nearly overhead:

Unfortunately, the Sun was completely obscured by clouds at noon today. Even hidden from sight, I could feel its heat radiating straight down. I knew I had the day right, because there was a gathering of fifty or so people celebrating the Sun's passage overhead and learning about the indigenous beliefs.

Bolivar Romero gave a talk and led some traditional rituals to mark the equinox.

Pre-colombian Ecuador was sun-worshiping, and their understanding or Earth and Sun was apparently rife with male and female coding. The pole pointing to the Sun is male; the circle on the Earth is female. The basin is female, the water that fills it is male. Men shoot arrows and give orders. Women are open receptacles. His explanation was a little more nuanced than that, but still pretty disturbing, especially after staying up late last night debating just these issues. Fortunately he did throw in a few lines about this not meaning that women couldn't also be direct, or that men couldn't be receivers.

About 20 minutes later, while reporters were talking Mr. Romero, the sun did peak out letting you see how short people's shadows were.

I also tried to get a shot of sun directly above me, reflected in the water, despite the cloudiness. Since water is a horizontal mirror, the only time the sun can be obscured by your head is when it's directly overhead.

New Fruit (#2)

2007-09-22T17:24:00.000-07:00

I picked these two fruit out of the produce section because they were next to each other, and it turns out they are related.

TAXO:

Sort of looks like a comfortable little cucumber on the outside, but inside, it's full of pulp covered seeds sort of like a pomegranate, but less explosive and more mushy. Kind of fun to scoop out, becuase the pulp is totally separate from the skin, attached by three lines of little cords. When you scoop, all the seedy pulp comes out cleanly and easily. It tastes pretty sour, kind of like blackberries, maybe a hint of mulberry, but definitely no raspberryness to it. I think, seeds strained, it would go well with banana in a smoothie.

MARACUYÁ:

It turns out that this baseball-sized yellow fruit is passion fruit. Essentially the same arrangement of encapsulated seeds inside as the taxo, but a lot more of them. Much juicier and incredibly fragrant. Sweeter than the taxo, but still with a nice tartness that comes from pulp. The juice that pools in the bottom isn't sour at all. It has the familiar taste from fruit drinks that have passion fruit in them, but it's much more vivid in person. As I eat it, the aroma seems to move around between multiple notes. Absolutely tropical. I think I'll be eating a lot more of these.

Incompatible Humor

2007-09-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

Most of the Americans I meet are from California, and a lot of them are from the Bay Area. While I was hanging out on the school trip to Mindo, I was joking around with a couple fellow San Franciscans, and was telling them the quintessential Northern California moment witnessed by Kristin.

In a San Francisco ice-cream shop, there was a little girl waiting in line with her mother, and also a police officer. Being a friendly neighborhood police man, the cop asked the girl what kind of ice cream she was going to get. She replied, "Green tea," and asked, "what kind are your getting?" "Vanilla soy," the cop responded.

They thought this was pretty humorous, and the quadralingual French guy sitting nearby wanted to know what was so funny. I knew it wouldn't make sense without knowing America and California pretty well, but he insisted, and of course he didn't understand. His question: "But what is 'soy'?" I tried to explain, thinking it was just a translation problem, but after about five minutes, it became absolutely clear that he had no idea what soy was, had never heard of a soy bean. Pretty unfathomable to me, having grown up in Ohio where they grow soy beans, and having lived in San Francisco, where they eat the tofu, soy milk, and edamame that comes from them. But I guess that's the difference between France and the USA.

New Fruit (#1)

2007-09-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Ohio, we had four kinds of juice: orange, grape, apple, and pineapple-grapefruit, in descending order of frequency. Add a banana, a strawberry, and a peach, and it's pretty much everything you were likely to find in the dish of plastic fruit or the chiquita girl's hat, representing the complete bounty of nature's sweet side. Yes, at some point kiwis arrived, and mangos are no longer bell peppers, but when you walk into an Ecuadorian grocery store or encounter the menu at a jugo and batido stand, you are met with an intimidating level of variety. There are so many fruits here that I've simply never seen before.

So, the mission, which I've decided to accept, is to try as many of these exotic fruits (which are vegan, unless you blend them with milk in a batido) as possible. And, I'm going to document the effort, for the sake of posterity, and all of you who will soon be freezing and drinking cocoa instead of smoothies. (Have I mentioned that it's common to have cocoa AND juice for breakfast? That along with bread, cheese or jelly, and eggs, is desayuno simple. Desayuno completo, I gather, consists of chicken and rice.)

So, let's begin:

First, and probably most important in Ecuador, after ordinary things like strawberries, blackberries, pineapples, and oranges, is the TOMATE DE ARBOL:

It's not a tomato, but is slightly tomato-like in color, form, and flavor. It's a fruit that grows in a tree. When talking about juice you drop the arbol part and call it jugo de tomate, because nobody would be crazy enough to make juice out of actual tomatoes here. (I'm with 'em on that.) Here's what it looks like inside:

My first teacher here wrote me up some directions on eating all kinds of fruit, but I lost them. I remember that for most, you were supposed to peel them, and turn them into juice. I bought a basic vegetable peeler, but it isn't so helpful. While getting to know them, I'm skipping the juicing, and I'm assuming that, unless they're really easy to extract, you eat the seeds. So what's it like to eat a tomate de arbol?

It's soft but not mushy, plenty of sweetness but with tartness in equal measure, though not super-sweet or excessively sour. The flesh has a hint of tomato, definitely a bit vegetably, but the seeds have their own soft sweet flavor. Definitely could host vodka, perhaps as the base of a less hearty, happier version of a bloody mary.

OK, on to the NARANJILLA:

The name means little orange, but it's not a citrus fruit, and doesn't peel like one. Jugo de naranjilla is also really common.

It has a tart, slightly citrusy taste, but with a strong savory bite, like basil, which goes well with the firm flesh and slimy seeds reminiscent of a roma tomato.

Finally for tonight, PEPINO:

Small and firm, they're nothing like a pepper. Apparently some people find a similarity with melons and call them tree melons. The seeds are centrally located and easily removed.

It does have the texture of canteloupe, and a sweet, melony flavor, but with something that reminds me of sitting in the back yard late on a summer afternoon--the smell of snapping green beans next to a freshly mown lawn. It's pleasant, if a little odd coming from a fruit.

More after my next trip to the market.

Uniforms

2007-09-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Across the street from the small language school I attend, there's a large high school. Actually, it's two schools: one meets in the morning, the other in the afternoon. The thing that struck me when I first saw the morning classes dismissed as the afternoon classes arrived, was that everyone was wearing either blue or red uniforms, something unfathomable in the culture of California where these are the colors of rival gangs. Many California schools prohibit the colors. Our school last year discussed, with big protests from me, having uniforms to prevent kids from wearing blue or red. It vividly demonstrates how arbitrary cultural symbols like color are. The meaning of uniforms, in general, however, seem more universal: unity, exclusion, conformity, uniformity, subordination.

Wildlife

2007-09-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

I've got a bunch of stuff I want to write about, but before I get to that, you probably want to see my pictures from "the poor man's Galapagos"--Isla de la Plata, one-and-a-half hours and $50 off the coast of Ecuador. I took a long bus ride (which I'll tell you more about in another post) out to Puerto Lopez, a small fishing town, now full of motorcycle taxis, as it tries to figure out how to be a tourist town. (How about a little less motorcycle noise at night?) I spent one day hiking around the "Tropical Dry Forest" of Machililla National Park. Who knew there was such a thing! It's a now scarce ecosystem at low elevation along the ecuatorial coast. This time of year, the deciduous trees have lost all their leaves for the dry season, while the water off shore is coming up from Antarctica. Large tree-like cacti poke above the low trees overlooking the Pacific. In the wet season, when warm waters push down from Mexico, it turns green. But this time of year is when seabirds--and humpback whales--are here to breed. To see the whales, boobies, and frigate birds, I took a really bouncy hour-and-a-half boat ride out to Isla de la Plata to hike around its hills and cliffs with a guide. As you hear about the Galapagos Islands, the animals weren't afraid of people, meaning I got some really great photos. If a pair of boobies decided to build a nest in the path, the people had to walk around. We also got to snorkel for about 10 minutes before heading back, making me really think I need to learn to scuba dive. So, another really cool weekend!

New Digs

2007-09-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've been in my new place, located at 0˚12'55.9"S, 78˚29'47.8"W, 9350' above sea level, for a week. It's an actual one-bedroom apartment, not just a studio, though it's pretty modest compared to what you'd find in the U.S. Four bare lightbulbs light the place. The sinks only have cold water--but the shower is hot. There's no fridge and the counter-top stove hooks up to a gas tank that sits on the floor. And the full-size mattress is resting on a single-size frame, so the mattress flares up a bit on the sides. There's the noise of families and people climbing stairs, definitely a busy city apartment building. But at $120 a month, I couldn't be happier. There are some pictures on flickr for you to look at.

Out of Town

2007-09-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

So besides moving from Hostel Revolution to an apartment last week, I've spent the last two weekend out of town on some pretty crazy, if entirely planned, adventures.

First, some other students at my Spanish school arranged a day tour to Cotopaxi, the 2nd highest volcano in Ecuador--19,347 ft. The great thing was that it was a bicycle tour. They drove us up higher than 15,000 feet, where there were snow drifts and it was extremely windy and just above freezing, and we rode down the mountain and across miles of national park. As we approached the mountain, the weather looked terrible. I didn't think we'd be able to see 20 feet in front of us, much less the peak of the volcano, but as we got around the west side, it cleared up, and though I needed every layer of clothing I'd brought with me to South America, it was a spectacular and fun ride. We saw wild horses, wide open "páramo" (sort of a cross between desert and tundra), and even a condor.

Then this weekend, the school led a trip to Mindo, on the other side of Volcan Pichincha, which is at lower elevation in the cloud forest. We took a hike to a waterfall where the idea was to jump off a 40-foot cliff, but it was drizzling by the time we got there, so I skipped that thrill. The next day, some of us went on the "canopy tour," which consisted of riding 10 zip lines through the forest, and over the tree tops. On some, you could go with one of the guides so you could do it upsidedown, or belly-down like Superman. I flew like Superman 150 feet above the ground on the last and longest line which was a quarter mile long from one side of the valley to the other. As if that weren't enough, we also went white water tubing before lunch, and of course, since this is South America, we had to ride standing in the railed back of a pickup truck. There wasn't quite enough room, so I stood on the bumper. On top of all that, the town was having its festival, so there was night-time dancing in the streets, and afternoon horse races through the center of town.

Click the photos to see some of the best images from each trip. Of course, there are even more pics on my flickr.

Closet

2007-09-10T17:34:00.000-07:00

In contrast to my closet back home, which always seemed to contain scores of shirts, so matter how many times I weeded them out, this is my wardrobe here in South America. I carefully picked everything so whatever combination I wore, I would match. After a week in my new apartment, I've got everything unpacked from the backpack. Now that I have some more space, I must resist buying new clothes. Really though, I'm enjoying the simplicity, and the weather seems to cooperate with a simple wardrobe. Still, this doesn't look like it could be my closet.

More Stereotypes

2007-09-10T17:17:00.000-07:00

Ají is the ubiquitous hot stuff here in Ecuador. Sometimes it comes with more vinegar, making it Asian style, thus requiring the use of a racist caricature on the label.

Status Update

2007-09-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

Hey all, I´m still here and doing well. I´m waiting for internet to get hooked up in my new apartment, so I haven´t taken time to write about and post pictures of my recent adventures, which include earthquakes, volcanos, and flying like Superman. Soon, very soon.

UPDATE: My internet is connected! I'm in the process of uploading tons of cool pictures while ODing on web surfing.

Lacking Maps

2007-09-01T18:16:00.000-07:00

In the past 39 days, I haven't gotten around to actually leaving the city of Quito. This seems a bit odd to the rest of the travelers I've met in the hostel. Some of them have spent a couple weeks worth of time here, but almost everyone comes and goes. Either they're using this place as a base of operations, or they're just passing through--and quite a few people think they're passing through, but end up coming back repeatedly. For instance, the British couple I've been sharing a room with, Becky and Dirk, thought they'd only spend a week in Ecuador before heading down to Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, but they've ended up staying three weeks with no definite plans of when they'll leave.

With more time (and less money per day), I've decided to get to know this place well. I want to know my way around, to be able to get places without thinking. After living in San Francisco for three years, I feel like I know my way around there pretty well, but of course there are lots of streets I've never been on. Quito is a lot bigger than San Francisco proper, so while I'm getting pretty comfortable with a core area near the center, I've only taken a couple of forays by bus into the sprawling North and South.

Finding your way around Quito is especially challenging because there is a lack of decent maps. The ones you find in guide books only cover limited areas, leave off street names--making them useless when you're lost--, and only mark the locations of selected tourist-friendly restaurants and hotels. Although every third vehicle on the road is a bus, there is no such thing as a bus map. You have to look at the name cards mounted in the front window to know where a bus goes, but this, of course, presupposes you know the names of all the neighborhoods, which aren't shown on tourist maps. There are good diagrams of the three Bus Rapid Transit lines in the stations, but no map seems to be available that shows all their stops with names, certainly not one up-to-date enough to show more than just the one original line. I have seen a pretty comprehensive map that shows the name of every street, important buildings, neighborhoods, even every location of several retail chains, but it's at least six feet long, a bit big to fold up and put in your pocket. (When I move next week and have my own wall to hang it on, I'll probably get one.) There's even less online. Although Google Earth has good aerial photography of Quito, they have no streets or place names. Searching for "Quito map", "map of Quito", or "mapa de Quito" turns up nothing but overly simple, narrow, and low-resolution graphics.

This is in sharp contrast with San Francisco, where each individual building is shown in Google Maps, where you can see the current location of every street car and bus, where every apartment for rent has its own pin, where, as the iPhone ad demonstrates, you can type in "seafood" and your zipcode, and every restaurant within walking distance that serves fish, from The Old Clam House to Moki Sushi pops up with address, telephone number, and website. It took time to learn San Francisco, but I was never at a loss for where to buy kitty litter, see a movie, or take a yoga lesson. And if you forget where something is, as I often did, you just look it up again.

On one hand, I crave that access to total information about a place. When I worked in West Portal, I'd get on the streetcar and, just before it went into the tunnel, I'd use my phone to see whether I'd be able to catch 24-Divisadero bus or a J-Church streetcar sooner so I could decide which stop to get off at. The biggest fault I see in the iPhone is that it doesn't have a GPS. Maybe by the time I get back to the US...

On the other hand there's something enjoyable about the challenge of doing without all that easy access. I'm enjoying wandering around, xeroxed map in my pocket, seeing how one place connects to another. When I first got here, I was quite annoyed that I couldn't find the Mercado Central for days. How could the central city's main public food market not be on any map? But now that I've found it, there's no way I could forget where it was. When I really need to find something, I have to ask for directions, something even taxi drivers do here. And my little notebook is full of notes on places I've stumbled upon, that I didn't need at the time, but imagined I'd want to remember the location of later:

Hotel San Francisco de Quito: Sucre Oe3-17 y Guayaquil
English Book Center: 12 de Oct. y Caamaño
Cafe Libro: Leonidas Plaza N23-56 y Wilson
La TrasTienda Concert Cafe: Av Toledo y Lerida
Cheap Backpacks: Flores y Mejia
Huge Belt Store: Chile Oe1-26
Fybeca Drug Store that lets you browse through basic "over-the-counter" drugs: 12 de Dic. y Colon.

With the help of the not-entirely-adequate paper maps as well as pen and paper, I'm constructing, in my head, a map of this city. While I sort of wish Google were paying me to put this place on their maps, the mental map I'm constructing suits my own peculiar needs. I'm learning where the hills are, how to avoid breathing too much bus exhaust, and where to find little old indigenous ladies sitting on the street selling strawberries and blackberries. Already I know Quito better than the dozens of other cities I've visited. Only Mount Vernon, Athens, Columbus, and San Francisco take up more room in my brain.

Sometimes getting around is a real challenge. When I went to a meeting in the far north of the city, I really had to wing it. The woman I'd spoken with wasn't good with directions. I managed to find the neighborhood, Carcelén, on a really crude map online, and waited at one street, then another, till I saw a bus headed to it. Unlike San Francisco, Quito has a strict new house-numbering system that tells you how many blocks you are from the center of town. I rode the bus for an hour and half till I reached block N80, then wandered around for half an hour asking people where the high school was. In a country where the average person only makes it through sixth grade, nobody had ever heard of the place. I finally went in the post office, and she called the phone number that I couldn't get to work on my mobile. She told me directions, but advised me that it'd be simplest to hail a taxi. The cab made it quick, but he needed my help to find the place.

How much easier it would have been with a printout from MapQuest! But then again, how much more boring. More importantly, I know I can get where I need to go. I can find my way around. I suspect that this will is a dying skill. Already I hear about people who don't know how to get around without their car navigation systems. How much different will our understanding of places be when we know them only through on-demand three-dimensional interactive maps? And what will we do when there's a natural disaster, the power goes out, and there aren't even any paper maps to be found?

Even though, as a computer and map geek, I love the advances in computerized mapping, and even though I'm in no way exploring uncharted lands, I'm enjoying stepping back for a while and finding my way around a place that Google hasn't found yet.

(While we´re talking about maps, you might enjoy listening to an episode of This American Life: "You Are Here", especially act one, about a guy who hitchhiked across the Sahara!)

Night View

2007-08-31T15:16:00.000-07:00

The school did a night-time tour of the old town last night. With a large group, I decided it was safe enough to take the camera along, so I´ve got a flickr set of pretty pictures of Quito at night. Also made a set for the pictures I took when I climbed the closest mountain.

Not in America

2007-08-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

You´d never see a logo like this in the United States these days, but racist media representations are alive and well in Ecuador. (Have I mentioned that everyone on TV is white, even though more than three-fourths of the population is non-white?) Menestras del Negro is a big fast food chain down here. Reminds me of the chocolate covered peanuts they sell in Spain called Conguitos, meaning something like "little people from the Congo."

About Now

2007-08-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

As I walk around Quito, from time to time, I say 'buenos dias,' or 'buenas tardes,' or 'buenas noches' to people. If greeting strangers is your measure of friendliness in a country, Ecuador isn't as friendly as the other Latin-American countries I've been to. But it is customary to greet people like shop-workers or bus station attendants.

(When you ride on one of the limited-stop bus lines, a machine collects your 25-cent fare, but, it doesn't give change. So there's a girl in a booth whose job is to make change. Give her a 50-cent piece and you get 2 quarters. In the evening there's also a guard, who sometimes will swing the gate on the pay-station open for you. It's interesting how machines don't eliminate jobs here.)

Anyway, I say 'good day' to these people, but I'm still working out when the afternoon ends and the night begins. Here on the equator, night-fall only varies about half an hour during the year (and dawn moves in synch, so days and nights don't vary in length.) So you'd think dusk would be a natural switch-over time, but I've been told 'buenas tardes' after dark. It's a little awkward when you disagree with a stranger about what part of the day you're in. In the States, I have a habit of saying 'good morning' well into the afternoon, and my students are quick to tell me, "It's not morning anymore!" Lots of times people just say 'buenas' by itself, avoiding the problem all together, so it's a little hard to figure out what part of the day people think it is.

The distinctions also apply to describing times of day. Even though they write times as though they use a 24-hour clock here--9 p.m. is 21h00--they don't talk about times higher than 12. So do you tell someone to meet for dinner at 7 de la tarde or 7 de la noche? I haven't actually needed to make such a distinction yet, but it got me thinking about how we do it in English.

Even though we think of 1 or 2 a.m. as night, as far as the English language goes, the day starts at midnight, so it's 12:01 in the morning. Lots of times it's morning from before you go to bed until the sun is straight overhead the next day: 12 whole hours. For me afternoon runs up till 6 p.m. 5:30 in the afternoon is is fine, but it seems a little weird to say 6 in the afternoon. English is a little more complicated than Spanish because we've got evening in between afternoon and night, and it only lasts a couple of hours: between 6 and 7 in the evening. It wouldn't seem completely out of place to say 7 at night, but on the other hand, 9 in the evening sounds rather cosmopolitan, like you might not be able to make it to a show that starts that early because you probably haven't gotten around to eating dinner by 9, in which case your night has barely begun by the time it's really already morning.

Maybe it's not just the language. Maybe the terms varies from place to place. Does afternoon stretch till 7 or 8 in Manhattan, while it's already night by then in rural Utah? Up north where there are seasons, do the words adjust their meanings as the days grow longer and shorter?

English gets even more confusing when you return to the greetings. At 10 or 11 at night, you don't say 'good night' to greet someone. You still say 'good evening.' 'Good night' is a farewell. To me, 'good afternoon' can work either way, but I'd never say 'good morning' on my way out the door on my way to work, but I could say 'good day.'

It's 10:30 at night, and I'm sitting on the roof, looking out over Quito's street lights as they crawl up the side of the mountain. It sounds like everyone else has already gone to bed--a half-filled hostel of weary travelers makes for a quiet night. It's probably time for me to head to bed as well, so I'll wish you good night!

We Are Transit

2007-08-26T14:46:00.001-07:00

You really don´t see many bikes at all, except when they close the streets to traffic in the old town, but this (rather sloppy) stencil graffiti on the parque lineal bike path suggests that there´s the beginning of a bike movement here. Compared to all the other political graffiti, though, it must be pretty small. I´ve seen things like "lesbians of the world unite!" spraypainted across several walls, just about all of which have some political message written on them.

The Metric System

2007-08-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

Every so often, a link pops up on reddit to a map of the world showing the three countries that don't use the metric system. I'm all for switching to metric. It's about a century overdue, but it's worth pointing out that these maps are misleading. While the rest of the world has officially switched to this easy-to-use, 10-based system, the customary measurements haven't really disappeared from every country but the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. I've been hanging out with a lot of Brits, and they tell me that in England, while small measurements are done in meters, distances on the highways are still marked in miles, and speed limits are still in miles per hour. And they swear they will never stop drinking pints of beer.

Here in Ecuador, you do travel kilometers and drink milliliters, but you buy gas by the gallon ($1.48 for regular). When I get my laundry "lavado, secado, and doblado," I pay $.40/pound. If I buy produce outside of a fancy supermarket, it's also usually sold by the pound, not the kilogram. I suspect there are a couple of psychological factors contributing to the persistence of the pound. (And I´d bet the gasoline thing is political.)

First, people don't love using fractions, and the kilogram is a big unit, so you can't just use whole kilos. People are going to want to buy half a kilo of raspberries, or a kilo and a half of tomatoes. Pounds are just small enough that are lots of times, in the scaleless commerce of the Ecuadorian streets, at least, when a pound or two pounds or three are useful choices.

Second, since pounds are smaller, prices seem lower. A laundry would rather advertise $.40/lb than $.88/kg, even though it's really the same. If American gas stations can't give up ending gasoline prices in 9/10 of a cent to make it seem a penny cheaper, stores in a country familiar with hyper-inflation aren't likely to switch to metric when it would make it appear that their prices have suddenly more than doubled.

So even if multiplying by 10 is way easier than multiplying by 2 or 3 or 8 or 12, I doubt the world will ever be as free of inches and miles, pints and pounds, as those infographics make it seem.

(Searching for the map, I stumbled on this entertaining essay on how the metric system is and isn´t used in Belgium. The writer concludes that it´s really useful to be able to divide your measurement units by 3 and 4, and thus you get things like the standard size of wood being 120cm long and 2.4cm thick. Pretty interesting.)

¡Fútbol!

2007-08-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

The other night, my Spanish school took a group of a couple dozen students to the Ecuador vs. Bolivia soccer game. It was fun, but I'm afraid every professional sporting event I ever go to will be judged against the Flamengo vs. Vasco game Kerri, Eileen, Kristin, and I went to at the world's largest stadium in Rio, where the fans stood on their seats from the beginning of the game to the end, police continually battled with fans in the standing-room-only front section, and a bonfire was set in the seats of the upper deck. This was not that crazy.

Quito's "Estadio Olimpico" is pretty small for a city of more than a million people. It seemed to be a little bigger that OU's football stadium, and it was only about two-thirds full. The crowd stayed seated, except to do the wave. They don't boo here, but instead whistle, although they whistle a lot more than Americans boo, at every mistake their team makes as well as the opponents' good fortune.

The half-time entertainment consisted of a giant 40-foot Pilsener bottle being inflated and erected in the middle of the field. It stood for about 10 minutes, then they deflated it so the game could continue. I'm not exactly sure why they advertise Pilsener, since it's the only beer available most places. Pilsener is cerveza.

When they sold it in the stands, they'd pour it from the over-sized bottles into big plastic cups. The technique was interesting: they turned the bottle upside down and stuck it all the way down in the bottom of the cup, raising it so it stayed in the foam just above the top of the beer. There's no pouring a beer here without it getting really foamy--a symptom of the elevation maybe--so the foam was sucked up into the bottle as it drained of beer glug by glug.

I was sort of disappointed in the first half that nobody was shooting off fireworks, as we'd seen in Rio, but as the second half got underway, somebody lit a bright-as-a-welder sparkler, and soon roman candles started shooting from the crowd. As it turned out, there were people walking through the stands selling the roman candles, so there was a non-stop rain of fireballs throughout the rest of the game.

There were at least 50 police in grey camouflage and bullet-proof vests around the field, with four in full riot gear positioned at each corner of the field. The stands are separated from the field by a deep moat and a high barbed wire fence, so I wasn't really sure what their purpose was. There were another several dozen cops in the stands. In the last minutes of the game, however, they did get some action. What appeared to be a minor fight broke out between players, and soon everyone on the benches was running over to join in or break it up, I couldn't tell. The nearby cops took their time getting involved, but the ones from the other end of the stadium sprinted over to get in on the action. Soon there was a mob of more than a hundred people, half of them police. By the time it broke up, time had run out and the game was over.

When we left the stadium, we were actually able to catch a bus after waiting in line only a couple of minutes--unbelievable efficiency compared to the mess you find after a sporting event in the US.

Oh, and in the end, Ecuador won 1-0. They got a direct penalty kick in the first half, and Bolivia never managed score, despite having much better control of the ball, and making several more shots. So Quito went to bed happy.

Under the Weather

2007-08-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

I came down with a bit of a cold this weekend. I thought it was really mild, just a touch of sore throat and congestion until last night when I got achy and my sinuses started throbbing. I don't think the bus exhaust is helping. Right after getting out of bed, I walked down to the pharmacy to get some medicine. Just like the English drug store in Sicko, it's only a place to buy medical supplies. No candy, no magazines, no makeup. And you can't buy medicine at the grocery store or gas station. You have to go to a proper drug store. In fact, I'm told, if you're in the hospital, you still have to find someone to go get your drugs from the pharmacy, since hospitals don´t dispense drugs.

If you've ever seen an old-fashioned, historical store, like the general store in the ghost town I visited on my way back across the US, you're aware that they used to keep the merchandise behind the counter. It's still like that in most shops here. You have to ask for what you want and they get it for you. I don't love this, because of my limited vocabulary, but I suppose in general it's faster. You don't have to wander around looking for what you want; someone who knows where everything is does it for you. I'm not sure what the advantage is for the stores. It takes more labor, but that's cheap, and I suppose it cuts down on shoplifting (as does the guy with the big gun at the door.) I'd bet the big reason that American stores let you wander is to increase impulse buying. With the products controlled by the clerk behind the counter, there's no "hmm, maybe I'll buy some chips and a bottle of Coke, while I'm getting my medicine, oh and how about a a candy bar and a copy of Us Weekly."

I made it up to the counter, after several people tried to squeeze in front of me in "line" and asked for something for congestion and sinuses. I was expecting a look of "oh, I know the perfect thing, but instead she stared blankly and typed something into the computer, said they cost $.48 a piece, and asked how many I wanted. I was hoping for something that wouldn't make me drowsy, and preferably with something other than pseudephedrine, which makes me feel funny, but I really wasn't up for sorting that out in Spanish, especially when the girl seemed to need to look up in the computer what congestion was, so I just decided to trust whatever the computer had said. Of course you have to trust it, because they take the appropriate number of pills--I'd chosen 6--from the box and give them to you without any sort of documentation, except what it says on the back of the blister pack.

The capsules are transparent and filled with little white and pink mini-pills. I was always fascinated with commercials for these kinds of drugs when I was a kid. They seem so fun, like a gumball machine, and I don't think I'd ever actually taken one--at least not one that was clear so I could see the contents. They do contain pseudephedrine (which you have to show ID to get in the US these days), but it hasn't made me feel as out of sorts as it usually does, and the cetrizene dihydrochloride, whatever it is, doesn't seem to make me sleepy.

I hope I feel better tomorrow, because the Spanish school is taking people to the Ecuador vs. Bolivia fútbol game tomorrow, and a Latin-American soccer game is something you really don't want to miss.

Church Climbing

2007-08-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

Went back to the neogothic basilica his afternoon with a guy from England.
Already described the adventure here, but now I've got some pictures.
This is the catwalk above the vaulting that takes you out to the center spire:

Climbing the ladder up the flying buttress is pretty crazy, but not as dizzying now that I´m used to living at 9000 feet.

From there we got a view of the main towers, the left of which we climbed, all the way up into the roof just under the cross:

Here's the spiral stairs through the clock. No giant gears like in Back to the Future or The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Paul, the English bloke, standing up in the top of the tower.

These kids climbed up to the absolute highest point possible:

At this level, you could crawl out to the outside of the tower to get a really great view. Here's the church with the central spire we climbed and the city to the north:

Pictures Help

2007-08-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

This is what a date looks like when there's a language barrier. Been hanging out with this Ecuadorian guy, Braulio, and last night I was telling him about rafting down the Hocking River and trying to walk to my parents' house from Athens. The place-mat was indispensable.

Comparing Lemons to Limes

2007-08-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

When I first went to Mexico, I was surprised to find that they didn't have lemons, only limes. However, they used both the word limón and lima, to refer to big limes and little key limes respectively. I thought it was kind of weird.

When I went to Brazil, I was curious to find out what they called these fruits. It turns out they only have one word: limão, which mostly just refers to limes, though they knew what a lemon was--a limão forte (strong), a yellow fruit too sour to eat.

In Spain, it was limes that didn't seem to exist, just yellow limónes. I've always thought the whole thing weird, so of course I had to ask when I got to Ecuador.

Here, they only really eat limes, and call them limónes. But the yellow fruit that's really sour? It's a LIMA, completely backwards of English! Why is this so complicated? Nobody seems to confuse naranjas (oranges) and toranjas (grapefruit.) It's baffling!

Kick the Bottle

2007-08-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

Just uploaded some pictures of kids playing in the lot next to the hostal. Remember parents, all your kids need to have fun is a little bit of trash.

Bad Reputation

2007-08-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

A bit ago, I was talking with an Australian guy and I asked him why you don't run into many Australians visiting the US. Outside of the US, there are tons of Australians traveling, along with the usual Europeans (especially Germans.) I've found that lots of Australian kids take a year to travel after high school. So why isn't the US a top destination, as it is for many other world travelers?

He said people weren't very eager to deal with the TSA.

I told him that, yeah, the airport security is a pain, but it's not like it's the gestapo, disappearing people.

"Well, you hear stories," was his reply. He couldn't remember any specifics, and we moved on to other topics, but this is how America is now viewed! This is not OK. It is not productive to protect ourselves by making people (a college kid who's thinking of becoming a missionary, no less) believe that traveling through an American airport could lead to... what? detention? imprisonment? torture?

Our reputation has been destroyed. The majority of the world's population thinks the US is the greatest threat on the planet, but it's as if the people running the country never learned that your reputation concretely affects how others treat you. We're making it harder for people to come visit, to study in the US, to see what it's really like, and we're scaring away the people who could come.

It doesn't matter whether tyranny is actually happening, once everyone believes the US is a police state, there's nothing to prevent it from becoming one. Whether their ultimate intention is an autocratic state or not, for six years, the Republicans in power have been laying the groundwork for the complete suspension of civil liberties, and military and economic world domination, all in the name of freedom, of course. The Democrats, elected to stand up to this out-of-control administration, have rolled over. The world thinks we're already lost. Is there anything to prevent it from really happening?

If the US doesn't want to head toward autocracy, if we want the rest of the world to know that this is not, in fact, what America stands for, then we need to show the rest of the world through action. We have a reputation to restore, something that can't be done through spin, only by behaving the way you want people to think you are.

Groceries

2007-08-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

An account of my after-school shopping at SUPERMAXI (which is not a feminine hygiene product, but rather a large, clean, well-lit, American-style supermercado), told by the receipt

Brocoli (small head) .350kg @ .40/kg
.15
Reyogurt Guanaba 1.1liter
1.19
Manzana (an apple) .175kg @1.53/kg
.28
Pan Ingerto (4 sandwich rolls) .295kg @ 2.15/kg
.66
Supermaxi Queso Fresco 500g
2.19
Banana (3) .79kg @ .60/kg
.49
Kennet Hongos (small carton of mushrooms)
1.46
Indaves Huevo (1 dozen med eggs)
1.24
Crunch Tableta (Nestle Crunch bar)
.80

Total USD 8.46

My only commentary: it's amazing how cheap broccoli is, and I'm surprised bananas cost as much as in the US.

My world... delivered

2007-08-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

After a bit of runaround, I now have an Ecuadorian phone number, though I'm not sure if it can be called from the US. Pretty sure it can make calls to the US, though this is a lot more expensive than going to a corner phone cabina shop. I ought to be able to send and receive texts. I'll try it out and send the number along in an email if it works. I don't expect to use it much for calls since they cost about $.25 a minute. The best is that the phone company is called "Movistar."

It would have been a lot easier if it hadn't been for AT&T nee Cingular nee AT&T. When I first got here, the phone showed the Movistar network, so I knew the phone was capable of working. After my American service ended, it just said, "Inactive SIM." Last Friday, at the beginning of the holiday weekend, I went into a Movistar store at the mall to reactivate it with a new SIM. They tried one out first, and it said, "Incorrect SIM."

It wasn't enough that they locked me into a 2-year contract (without which I still wouldn't have bothered to switch companies) to get the phone for only $160. They also locked the phone so it couldn't work with another carrier. I think I was under the impression that it wasn't locked, because I remember being pleased that it was GSM and worked on bands that are used around the world. Maybe it's ok to prevent your customers from switching to the competition, but I wanted to use it where AT&T doesn't exist. It's my phone. I gave them my business for three years while I was in the US and will probably keep giving them money for iPhone service when I get back. I should be able to keep using it rather than sending it to the landfill and buying a new one I don't need.

The guy at the shop said it could probably be unlocked, but I'd need to go to the main Movistar building, which, fortunately, was just down the street from the mall. Unfortunately, it was closed when I got there. I went back today, only to be told that this wasn't the right place, I should go to the Movistar store right across the street. I went over there and the girl, who was pained by my Spanish and insisted on switching to English, said, no, they couldn't unlock it there, but a block away was a telephone service shop that probably could. I was beginning to suspect I was trapped in a third-world buck-passing loop, but I found the shop, and yes, they could unlock the phone. It took 10 minutes, cost $10 plus $5 for a new "chip," as SIM cards are called here, that came with $3 credit. Cheap! Easy! What more could I ask? So lawless Latin America, where many laws that enable corporations to exploit their customers are just ignored (I've seen scores of video stores, but I've yet to see a non-bootleg DVD), prevails.

My Kingdom for a...

2007-08-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

When you pack to travel overseas, it's always a guessing game figuring out what you need and what will be easier to just buy when you get there. I've already become frustrated by a few things that just don't seem to exist in Ecuador.

To start with, there are no tightie whiteys. I left most of my underwear supply in the washing machine and it has turned out to be irreplaceable. I hate boxers and bikini briefs don't have a fly. I've tried a couple of pairs of boxer briefs, but they roll up my leg. I've been to a dozen stores. I even went to a fancy underwear store in the upscale mall, where underwear was at least $15 a pair. The closest thing looked more like a jock strap. And figuring out the appropriate size is impossible. Everything's full of lycra, so it looks tiny, even if it isn't. Sizes aren't in inches, and the one time I saw waist measurements, medium was 32 inches and large was 34, but I have a hard time believing this is standard. (Does an extra-large Ecuadorian really have a 36 inch waist?) The guide books suggest you only need two pairs of underwear: one to wear and one to wash. I guess I'll be living by that advice for the next few months.

I've also had a hard time getting school supplies. There are many papelerías, where everything is behind the counter, so you can't just look around; you have to ask for what you want. I went into a pretty big store to get your basic folder with pockets. No such thing. The girls brought me binders, report covers, notebooks, and I didn't see anything resembling a simple folder behind the counter. I settled on something like a giant plastic envelope.

After that unexpected confusion, I forgot to get the note cards I wanted for making vocab flashcards. After class, I stopped in another papelería and asked for "cartas de nota." The girl asked if I wanted lined or blank. I went for blank. She came back with a packet of blank notebook paper. I refined my description and got several possible sizes of envelopes. Then a little notebook. I tried a second store and they were equally baffled by my request. They got out a dictionary, and "note card" wasn't in it. It was clear that the problem wasn't that they didn't have note cards, but that they had never seen such a thing. What kind of schools never have their students use note cards? The terrible thing is, last year, note cards were ridiculously cheap at Big Lots, and I bought all they had. I have thousands of them back home, enough for every word in the dictionary. Now, I don't have a single one to take in and show as an example.

Medicine

2007-08-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

I've finished my first week of Spanish lessons, and it's gone pretty well. It's been entirely in Spanish, and my ability to just hear Spanish and comprehend without translating is already greatly improved. One thing that's been good is that the content, aside from the grammar instruction (which is great for me, though I question its usefulness for the average person who doesn't have a background as a language teacher,) has been lots of information about Ecuadorian history and culture.

We watched a video about the widespread practice of traditional medicine here. I was imagining them prescribing herbal remedies, which I can imagine having some effectiveness. Instead, I saw healers rubbing guinea pigs over the sick person's body, to absorb the illness, all the while shaking it violently until it died. They then cut it open to diagnose the person's problem. Remedies involved lots of rubbing of eggs and stones over the body, shaking of herbs, and spitting of liquids. All the while, the healer intently smokes a cigarette to prevent the bad energy from invading his or her body.

My tutor and I talked about this, and she admitted that it might strain credibility, but most people can't afford western medicine. Although educated people might not believe that disease is caused by "bad energy", she said most people, including many doctors, do believe in one illness not recognized by modern medicine: "espanto."

Ecuadorians believe that when a child--or sometimes a woman--is particularly startled, it can scare their spirit right out of them. (It doesn't happen to men because they have stronger personalities.) Children lose their energy, don't eat, and cry, even though there's nothing physically wrong with them. A healer has to call their spirit back into them or they will die. It sounds a bit to me like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, making me wonder what horrible things are really happening in the lives of kids here. And like the Spanish belief that your heart will stop if you take a shower after eating, I wonder why no one bothers to question how it doesn't happen to anybody in other parts of the world.

Even if something about whipping around the earth so fast here on the equator spins the souls right out of people, at least I can rest easy, since I'm a man, and don't have to worry about being affected!

Weather Wimps

2007-08-07T17:36:00.001-07:00

Midwesterners who move to the coast of California quickly notice how the slightest weather change elicits a big reaction from the natives, and soon, we too develop an intolerance for big variations in the weather. In San Francisco, 80 degrees in really hot and 50 is really cold. The weather in Quito is even milder. It's about the same as in San Francisco, temperature-wise, but without summer or winter and without the chilly wind. Yesterday was partly sunny and 68. My Spanish tutor came in saying it was quite hot. Today, it was partly cloudy and 68. She came in complaining that it was awfully cold. Oh what a perfect climate will do to you!

Catching the Bus

2007-08-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

I got my first experience catching one of the regular "especial" buses last night. I went to the Mariscal to meet up with my one Ecuadorean friend for a bit and tried to leave in time to catch the Ecovía, which stops running at 10. It was five till, but the last south-bound bus had left. This is one of the three bus rapid transit lines, with platforms and doors like a subway station, that I'd managed to ride exclusively so far.

It's not supposed to be safe walking back to my part of town at night, but it's amazing how fast your perception of the value of money adjusts. I really didn't like the idea of paying a cab two or three dollars to get home when the bus only costs a quarter. I walked up to another busy street that I knew would have plenty of taxis, (there are thousands) thinking I'd perhaps walk a little ways, then hail a cab a little closer to the shady Parque El Ejido. I put my wallet in my underwear for a minute, but realized that regular buses were still running on 12 de Octubre.

Buses will stop anywhere. Actually, "slow" is a better word. If you needed them to stop completely, they would, but I stuck out my arm, and a bus pulled over, its door open, so I could jump on without it ever stopping. It appeared to be a longer distance bus, since it had soft seats, but once you hit the city, your long distance bus becomes local, pulling in as many $.25 rides as it can. I asked if it was going by my neighborhood and it was. As can be expected, there was some fringe in the decoration around the ceiling, though not on the windows. The best were the crocheted borders of the visors, with a little hammock hanging between them to hold papers.

We got to Parque Alameda, and I told them I wanted to get off at the light. They slowed and I jumped and landed with a bounce and a spin, which probably looked completely idiotic, but I'd kept my balance and completed my first in-motion boarding and exit, travel in true South American style.

Cultural Volume

2007-08-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

It became really obvious the other night that few of the people in the hostal have been Americans when a group of Americans showed up at one in the morning. Part of the group might have been European, because I could barely make out enough of what they were saying to discern an accent, but several of them excitedly, innocently blabbed, filling their room and the adjoining rooms with their clear midwestern voices. I had to put my earplugs in. By morning, I'd taken them out, and was awoken by the same voices excitedly chattering about how cool the hostel was, oblivious that other people were trying to sleep.

They left their room, and I fell back asleep, but a few minutes later, I awoke to a terrible crash, like someone dropping a television down the stairs. The loudest of the American guys had been up on the terrace, and had stepped over the wall onto the roof where he tried to stand on the corrugated plastic of a skylight. It cracked under his weight, sending the brick weights flying. Fortunately, I guess, he didn't fall all the way through. I found out what happened without leaving my warm bed because he came downstairs loudly embarrassed, recounting his stupidity in the half-ashamed, half-proud all-loud way that only Americans do.

More on Threatened Embassies

2007-08-06T15:29:00.001-07:00

Just after posting about embassy security, CNN posted an article titled "Al Qaeda member: U.S. embassies prime targets." So I can't get away from the topic. (If you aren't in need of a political rant right now, feel free to skip this post, or maybe just read the second paragraph, which is mostly about architecture, not war.) The article gets right at why American interests are at such high risk. American Al Qaeda member, Adam Yahiye Gadahn says, "We shall continue to target you at home and abroad just as you target us at home and abroad," labeling American actions as the cause of attacks against America. Of course, responsibility for atrocities fall on the people who commit them, but can you imagine a world where America isn't threatened with attack but still has a domineering economic and military presence all over the world?

He calls our embassies "spy dens and military command and control centers -- from which you plotted your aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and which still provide vital moral, military, material and logistical support to the crusade." Looking at the American and Egytian embassies back in my original embassy post, you can see how the architecture might support that idea. When the government hires architects to design such buildings, do they think about what the style says, the message it conveys? Certainly there's talk of "the rhetoric of architecture" or something similar in architecture school. It seems that the US government builds for function alone (that function being defense), oblivious that buildings say anything at all. Or maybe we do intend to look like we have "command and control centers" in every corner of the globe, in which case, why would we expect to be treated as anything but an occupying imperial power?

Gadahn makes a list of "legitimate" demands that are, of course, not going to happen. They remind me of Bush's speech to the Taliban before our invasion of Afghanistan. Gadahn says, that failure to take any one of the steps would be "considered sufficient justification" for continuing the fighting and killing, just as Bush said that the Taliban had to meet every one of our demands immediately, with no negotiation, or face war. The goal of these kinds of statements isn't to get the demands met. The goal is to continue or start attacking the other side, but to create an excuse: "see, we gave them a chance, but they gave us no choice."

Our reaction to these threats isn't to step back and meet terrorist demands. The US takes them as an indication of the need to keep fighting. Their threats aren't an effective deterrent, so why does Representive Tom Tancredo think that threatening to bomb Mecca and Medina will deter rather than provoke Muslim extremists? The answer, of course, is the inability to, if not empathize, at least understand that, despite cultural differences, if you take the labels off the sides, you can reverse the situation and see that the other side responds in the same ways we do, not as crazed evil lunatics. They are wrong, but in exactly the same way that we are wrong. Guns and bombs don't create peace or stability, and they don't get other people to do what you want in any but the most short term of ways.

The Economics of Security

2007-08-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

I walked back past the embassies and judicial building and did snap a few pictures to add to the entry I posted yesterday. In the meanwhile, I've been thinking more about security. Clearly in Ecuador, the fears are different than in America. They obviously aren't terribly concerned about government buildings being attacked. It's a breeze getting on an airplane compared to the US. But on the other hand, as I said, many more businesses have armed guards here. I've started to wonder what portion of the population is employed as police, security guards, and on-the-street military, certainly many times as many as back home. Seemingly, there's a lot more fear of crime, something that, despite gated communities and avoiding "bad neighborhoods," isn't foremost in people's minds in the US.

The question I have, is what effect does "security," either against terrorists or robbers, have on a country's economy. On one hand, it employs a lot of people here. Does the money they spend stimulate the economy? Even if it doesn't generate any wealth, it at least spreads it out among more people. But the problem is that sitting around holding a gun doesn't produce anything. It's a service, but unlike most services you pay for, you don't have anything to show for it. It might prevent a loss, but there are a LOT of people sitting around protecting stuff that doesn't seem to need to be protected in wealthier countries that have more stuff to protect. Is there some other way to protect these interests more efficiently?

You always hear about "productivity" and the necesity of increasing it to strengthen the economy. Security by its very nature is not productive. Would an economy like Ecuador's benefit from somehow reducing crime without paying tens of thousands of young men to sit around creating nothing? Is the American economy threatened by increasing numbers of people being employed to guard obscure places that terrorists have probably never heard of?

I don't have any background in economics, so if you do, please share your insights. I'm curious to read your comments.

Fortified Streets

2007-08-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

By chance, I walked past the US Embassy Friday. Like all American Embassies, it was very institutional, a walled fortress.

Most other countries have very inviting embassies, usually more like mansions, like the Egyptian embassy, across the park from the American:

One thing was particularly weird. It is located at a major intersection that has evolved into a multi-level roundabout. The main road goes underneath. If you need to turn from the bigger road onto the smaller, you take an exit and go around the roundabout. The embassy is located right on this exit, which is now closed to traffic with a guard house and gate, so no one can make this turn anymore. At some point, (after 9/11?) the US government must have told Ecuador that they had close the road for "security." Of course you comply with the Americans, even if it's a permanent inconvenience. I kind of doubt the US would allow Ecuador to close the DC streets around its embassy.

Two blocks later I walked past the "Tribunal Constitucional," a big office tower and noted its level of security.

You could drive right by it. No wall, no barricades. There were half a dozen guards standing around in front of the building, but in a country where every apartment building and fancy clothing store has its own armed guard, that isn't so much. While hospitals are behind fences, and the nicer houses are walled with broken glass protruding from the top, the government buildings I've seen are pretty "exposed."

What do we, America, have to do not to have our interests in danger of being bombed in every country on earth? Maybe we should look to the many countries that don't worry about security the way we do. What are they doing differently?

Astronomy

2007-08-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

Down in the park below the hostel is an old observatory. You can probably make it out easily in Google Earth with its five round turrets. I went and visited it the other night and looked through the telescope, which was, when it was installed 130 years ago, one of the best in the world. We've come a long way! A couple dozen people looked at Jupiter and the M4 star cluster, but the coolest was looking at Alpha Centauri. I've always been a little bummed that, living in the northern hemisphere, I couldn't see the closest star to earth. I was really excited when the astronomer first took us out on the balcony and pointed his laser at it. He also pointed out the Southern Cross and Scorpio, which has a curling tail that is below the horizon in the US. Granted there weren't many stars to see in the middle of the city, you kept getting blinded by street lights shining through the doors, and the optics seemed a little out of whack, but pretty neat all the same.

Mountain Climbing

2007-08-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I climbed Rucu Pichincha, the peak of the volcano just east of the city. This peak is on the close side of the extinct, crumbling crater. Just on the other side is the slightly higher Guagua Pichincha which last erupted in 1999. I forgot to take my GPS, but the peak is 15,338 feet above sea level, 833 feet higher than Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental US. What made it possible was the cable car that flies you up 4000 feet in 8 minutes from the city which is already at 9000 feet. But it was still close to four hours hiking and climbing the last 2000 in really thin air.

I took a taxi to the base of the Teleferiqo. The driver didn't know the way and the signage only told you you were on the right path after you took the correct turn--no way of knowing if you went the wrong way. He kept asking for directions. The bottom is pretty far up, and I got some of the best views of the three surrounding snow-capped volcanos from there, before the clouds started forming around them.

This is Cotopaxi, the second highest mountain in Ecuador, and climbable by an in-shape novice with equipment and a guide.

That's my neighborhood from the top of the ride. If you click through to bigger version on flickr, you can see the basilica I climbed to the right. The hostel is almost in the center, a little above the right tip of the park. It's a tallish building whose brick wall on this side has no windows. There are a bunch of red buses parked to the left of it.

This is the way up to the peak. It would have been no more than a pleasant stroll, except that slowly walking up each hill felt like running at a full sprint. Once I made it over the hills, I had to climb around the right side and up the more treacherous rocky part. It was hand-and-foot climbing, but nothing that required ropes at all. By the time I was to the last 100 feet or so, the air was so thin that I'd get faint with each move. I just had to pause and breathe and it was fine. The refuge where you start the Cotopaxi climb is higher than this peak. If I want to do that, I have some more acclimatizing to do!

The view from the top was, obviously, spectacular. Everything in the lowlands to the west was covered in clouds, which were beginning to spill over the western cordillera into the depression that Quito is in.

The city lay far below. I looked down on all the planes flying into and out of the airport. Even planes flying over weren't that far away. You can see just how high up the Teleferiqo takes you. Despite a couple layers of sunblock on my face, I came back with a bit of a pink nose and cheeks. Nice oneday adventure.

Cool

2007-07-31T10:37:00.000-07:00

Last night, I talked with one of the most extraordinary kids I've met in a long time. Alex grew up in Russia, but moved to the US five years ago after his mom married an American. He lives in Bozeman, and showed me his Yellowstone Grand Teton park pass. He invited me downstairs to have a cup of tea while he had a little something to eat with the malaria meds he needed for volunteering on the coast. What was so great about this kid was the way he seemed excited just to be alive in the world. Everything he described that he'd seen was "so cool." The cebiche restaurant he'd found: "so cool." Taxi drivers and their stories: "so cool." He's 20 and just wants to have lots of "life experiences." He seemed a little envious of all the places I've been, reminding me of how lucky I am. He was describing his mom as a "humanitarian" and said he guessed he was a humanitarian too. How many 20 year olds describe themselves that way?! Unfortunately, he can't go back to Russia for another seven years because he'd be drafted, and the way he described the demoralized Russian military, the beatings and suicides, was pretty grim. He didn't suggest not having a draft, just that they should allow people to work in hospitals or build trails, something productive. With his eyes wide open, taking everything in, and his constant smile, he's clearly going to do great things.

Hosteling

2007-07-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm staying in a hostel. In Spanish "un hostal" isn't usually a youth hostel; rather they're cheaper places to stay than hotels. This one, however, is a place where backpackers crash, make food, and hang out. What's particularly great about this one, Hostal Revolución, is that it's owned by a backpacker, an Australian guy named Matt, so it really meets the needs of backpackers.

Traveling in Europe, hostels don't try to meet your expectations; you have to meet the expectations of the hostel. Many of them have rules like "you can't be in the hostal between 10am and 5pm," which is a particular drag when it's rainy or you need to sleep in. At one place in Lisbon, I didn't have a reservation and I wanted to stay a week. I got in the first night, but you had to make reservations three days in advance, so the next two days, I had to remove my things from my room, put them in a storage room, and be put on a waiting list. I also couldn't make a reservation for the second half of the week at the hostel but had to walk to an office several blocks away to make the reservation. I can't figure out what kind of person sets up such systems: clearly no one who has ever traveled and stayed in a hostel.

Anyway, this is a small laid back place. There are two rooms that each have six bunks, a couple of rooms for people who work here, a big kitchen, and a little bar with a foosball table where Matt will put $1.50 on your tab for a big bottle of Cerveja Brahma from Brazil. It's mostly Europeans, especially Germans, and also Americans, Canadians, and Australians, mostly people in the 20s, a few older. It's great for meeting people, except most are here only a couple days.

I don't mean to perpetuate stereotypes, but these are the facts: last night, the people playing drinking games were three German girls (who I've heard speak nothing but English) and an Irish guy. One game consisted of dancing to the song "Roxanne," beer in hand. Whenever they sing "Roxanne" the guys have to take a drink; whenever they sing "red light" the girls have to drink. I do not suggest trying this at home, but you might download the song and imagine it.

Later they were playing some game where you draw cards and that tells you who drinks. It was one of those games where people make rules. What was funny was that the first rule was every time you drink, you first have to stand up and say, "God save the Queen." Conor, the Irish guy, refused to do it, owing to, well, history. He made a big fuss, but finally relented. However, he insisted that he was saluting the Queen of Denmark.

A walk around old town

2007-07-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

After staying out till dawn on Friday, I didn't do much yesterday. There was a birthday party for Carlos, who works at the hostel, but I went to bed and didn't go out and got crap for it this morning from Carlos, who had not yet been to bed when I went downstairs around 10:30.

So no new stories really. On Sundays they close the streets of the old town to pedestrian traffic, so I did walk around with my camera this afternoon. Here's a photo tour.

This is a guy walking around the fountain preaching in the Plaza de la Independencia. The building in the background is the Palacio del Gobierno, the capitol of Ecuador.

I sat in on a little of mass at the Basílica de la Merced (I think). Listening to the readings and homily were a good Spanish lesson.

I finally found some really big markets. The Centro Comercial Granada had a huge shoe section, bigger than any shoe store I've been to in the States, but packed with scores of vendors. This is just one of several passages full of footwear. Some of the shops, like one selling watches, are as small as four feet by four feet. There are several more photos on flickr.

It's a poor country, and the streets are swarming with shoe shine boys. Sometimes you can barely walk without stepping on little boys offering to limpia zapatos for a quarter. My shoes have tan stitching that I like the look of, so I've had to shew them away. But I did give this kid a dollar coin for his photo.

A couple of old men keeping each other steady as they walked down the street. You can see the houses going up the side of the mountain.

Although was no food on display at the place I described eating at the other day, it was definitely grittier than this "food court."

You gotta love the knock-off brands. Apparently they were looking for male workers when the help-wanted sign was made, but they've decided to switch to females.

Finally, here's a night-time view from the roof of the hostal. Pretty hard to see stars in the city, but I did notice that Scorpio is straight overhead. In Ohio and California, the tail is too low to see.

Yeah, baby.

2007-07-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Back to the States for a moment. My college roommate, Elliot, just sent me a photo, taken by his wonderful wife, Betsy, of him and me with their one-year-old son, Evan, and I thought I'd share it. It really was cool hanging out with the little one. It gave me a new outlook on babies. When I was a lot younger, in high school and college, I was around little kids quite a lot. I babysat. I worked with elementary school kids at summer camp and loved it enough to want to be a teacher. Somehow I ended up working with a lot older kids. For a while I really imagined myself being a father, but since I couldn't imagine myself being a husband, that dream pretty much got abandoned. None of my good friends have been the marry-young-and-start-having-kids type, so circumstance has kept me from being around many babies. The only time I really notice them is when they are throwing a tantrum on the street or in the store, kicking the back of my seat on the plane, or when a student brings their baby to school, when I have real qualms about providing even more positive attention that might make other girls think it's great to have a baby. So babies haven't really been part of my world in a long time.

It was a little weird suddenly realizing that I was supposed to really play with Evan, not just stand back and say "oh, he's so cute." But he was fun and agreeable and curious. It was a wonder to see him progress even in the few days I was there, seeing him trying to shuffle sideways to get to something nearby without having to turn and walk forward. I guess I fell for the little guy! I hope I can be around enough that he remembers me and looks forward to my North Carolina visits. And if some more babies pop into my life, that would be pretty cool too.

My View

2007-07-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

I had to stick my neck out the window to take this pic, but this is where I´m staying: