Hmm, haven´t quite decided how I feel about this blogging thing, afterall my thoughts aren´t that fascinating but I´ll try to mix it up and keep my dear friends and family entertained.
So let´s chat about the glory of traveling. After a season of jetting around the country, well not that much jetting, I´ve become accustomed to aiports, that crook in your neck when you pass out on a plane and the screaming child three seats back. They don´t bother me much anymore. Really the 28 hours it took to get to Ecuador wasn´t so bad either. What was annoying? That bag of textbooks I brought to donate that I dragged up and down the Miami airport through what I´m convinced are the world`s longest cooridors. It´s for a great cause but oy vey was it comical to picture my self through the eyes of onlookers as I gave up and dragged the duffle across the floor. Fortunately a wondeful Ecuadorian man helped lift that deceptively heavy equipaje into the overhead bin. The actual ´traveling´part of traveling isn´t the fun part, it´s the fabulous adventure that awaits you at the end of you final runway.
Anne, Linds and I are staying with the most wonderful woman, Gloria, tenemos una mama en Ecua and she calls us her hijas. Honestly, she´s fantastic, sweet, bubbly and full of fire if some men yell at her hijas on the street. We are safe. We awoke the last two morning to the crowing of un gallo below our windows, fairly commonplace here in quito. While I´ve lived in the big city, DC, Boston, London and I grew up in a barn, liteally, I can´t quite wrap my head around the rooster in the city, hmm I´m having a sex and the city episode flashback. Yep, that´s right I´m just like Carrie, no love for that rooster despite being an avid animal lover.
So far luck is on my side as I haven´t had the nausea, vomiting, headache, numbness or crazy-talk that can happen when you go from sea level to 9,300 feet. Big shout out to that carbonic anhydrase inhibitor tricking my body into early acid-base compensation. Although, I´ll admit after I walk up to my fourth story room on the roof I´m certainly huffing and puffing enough to blow down a straw house, an odd sensation for a girl who runs around on hills for fun. Sometimes when we are wandering around quito and we start rushing Anne, Linds and I will get a bit winded, oops, mas despacio por favor.
In gringolandia, where our school is, there are a lot of places to eat but it´s far too American for my taste, I came to Ecua to be live ecua, breath ecua, eat ecua. Really, I was in desperate need of a flee-the-country trip. Despite this we had a four course lunch at a vegetarian restaurant yesterday that was muy delicioso and 4.50. Ecua is cheap. Our daily activities haven´t been overly thrilling to this point since we are mostly orienting but spanish class is quite commical. Our abilities range from only ohla y adios to fluency, I´m somewhere in the middle working on moving right. The rather ostentatious gestures that occur with our speech are quite entertaining and actually rather effective.
Today Anne and I are venturing across town to get yellow fever vaccines - not because we need them for the areas where we will be but because they are $20 vs. $120 in the US, darn Americans overcharging for everything. Also, because I plan on traveling to more epic places in the next 10 years and some are bound to require such a vaccine. More to come about this adventure - could be interesting since neither Anne nor I with our pale skin and wild curly hair really blend here.
Tomorrow we are traveling as a group to the Otovalo region. This is a much more rural area and will be a bit more of a true Ecua experience. Afterall, a city is a city is a city. We will be ther during Carnival. In many parts of the worl Carnival is associated with Catholicism. However, in Ecuador it dates back to the time of the Huarangas Indians who were known to celebrate the second moon of the year with a festival. Here a very commonplace act are those who play with and throw water on everyone, the diablitos. We´ve been warned to bring an extra change of clothes everywhere you go and keep your eyes open for people throwing buckets of water off balconies. We might get very cold but it´s all in good fun and will most likely give me the chance to act like a rowdy child catapulting water balloons out of special made, strategically placed water cannons. Muahahaha, let the games begin.
Otovalo is also home to one of the most famous mercados and I plan to accumulate a decent amount of gifts and souvenirs. We will be working in a few different clinics in this area where western medicine and traditional healers work in unison. I´m thrilled to experience medicine without all the bells, whistles and wasted expenses.
More on Otovalo, Carnival and our clinic work to come!
Ciao!
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