Mark & Jen go to Ecuador

It's been three months since the end of our trip - really, exactly four months to the day since we got back from Mindo. I'm sitting up in a friend's apartment near San Francisco, hiding from grey clouds and enjoying the effects of a fine sourdough roll and some cane sugar soda.

I looked down at the otavalan poncho that I'm wearing as a makeshift blanket/snuggie to keep warm on a cold day (though not nearly as constantly cold as the Andes) and I'm reminded of my time in Ecuador once again.

Interestingly, there are few days that I don't think about it for some reason. it was such an alien experience compared to my middle class life in the United States, so much better in many ways. At lunch, I was lamenting with my friends about how, despite the fact that physically, it was almost like living in the "Fallout" video game universe, there were so many good things about it; the quality of food (prepared or packaged), the quality of the people, the costs of food and lodging, and much more.

I decided that it was time to do a post-mortem post... to try to put some final thoughts in order so that I can close out the adventure and the blog. (though it will stick around for history's sake).

How would I rate my experience altogether? It was life-changing; just going to a "3rd world country" is something that I recommend for anyone. It's fascinating, a little depressing, and emotionally draining, but at the same time helps you to understand other people and other places, and to appreciate them - something that I consider extremely important for anyone. (of course, it WILL make you cringe whenever someone in the US refers to the "third world" through stereotypes - something that happens a LOT.)

Did I enjoy myself? Well, sort of. The thing is, it wasn't a vacation. It was a field school with a LOT of physical needs (I lost about 20 lbs altogether while there) and even some mental/emotional issues. I didn't enjoy it like a vacationer does, but I did enjoy it from an educational and anthropological perspective. I'm glad I went and experienced everything that I did. Not that I wasn't glad to come home - back to my comfort zone.

Possibly the one thing that gave me the biggest issue was the language barrier. Going into town to explore and buy things was something that I desperately wanted to do, but always ran into the inability to properly communicate. It made many experiences extremely isolating. So much so that I signed up for a spanish class as soon as I got back to the states.

There were many things that I loved about Ecuador. Some things that I didn't, though that wasn't through the fault of any particular people, simply a clash of culture.

Well, we're leaving on a jet plane. Don't know when we'll be back again.

Presented without comment.

One of the things I did while wandering around Ecuador was take pictures of the business signs that I saw that amused or interested me in one way or another. Here they are! (just try to remember: enforcing copyright is hard in places like this)

Clothing / Dept store Reba Jas. Something about the style of their sign is very familiar 

A Heladeria is an ice cream shop. There's nothing particularly interesting about the name "SierraNevada", but the logo is mighty familiar, especially to those of us who played adventure games in the 1980's.

The Simpsons is a quite popular TV show here.

No matter how hard I tried, they didn't understand my order for a "Doble-Doble". The fact that this was a schwarma stand didn't help matters.

I found this to be a particularly clever pun.

I don't know if you have ANY idea how uncomfortable I am posting this picture. Menestras del Negro is a very large fast food chain here, and isn't the only business or product using minstrel-show style imagery.

Interestingly there's a significant Afro-ecuadorian population in the country, mostly on the coast. They are part of two groups considered "indigenous" with their own customs, dress, and so on. One group is left over from the slave trade and one group is made up of the descendants of slaves from a shipwreck.

I don't know if these groups frequent Menestras del Negro.

This travel agency is in the heart of the tourist district. The name "Happy Gringo" just cracks me the hell up.

This sign is in the Carolina park arboretum and talks about the use of achiote as a skin pigment. I am highly amused by the image of the colonial priest explaining how red is the color of the devil to the poor confused natives.

This was in a doctors office, and is one of my favorite advertisements ever.

This is the sign outside of a club, and between the clown imagery, the color scheme, the dripping "n" and the demand "YOU'RE ALWAYS HAPPY"... I found it to be among the creepiest signs ever.

There hasn't been a real "what we've been doing" update since the second, and that's mostly because we've been doing stuff. Among the stuff we've been doing is being sick (as Jen posted earlier) but other than that, we've been hanging inside and outside of Quito, enjoying food for the most part and being really homesick.

The third of August was spent doing not a whole lot, though on the 4th we decided to book it out of town to go to Mindo.

Mindo is a town in a cloud forest, eight on the border of the Amazon. It doesn't have a hot spring like Oyacachi, but it does have an orchid garden, a buttefly farm, and a national preserve nearby which is full of exotic tropical birds and things like zip lines and other completely safe and sane things for people to do.

We went to the orchid garden which was beautiful and the butterfly farm, which was amazing, though there were no taxis to bring us back, so we walked about 3 miles back to town. Since we didn't set up a tour or anything, we didn't manage to do any of the jungle things, but next time, and hopefully there will be a next time.

Here are some photos from Mindo And some photos from the Orchid garden And some photos from the butterfly farm

We spent the majority of two days total in Mindo and had a good time, despite having about 40 bucks worth of souvenirs stolen from us. The following day, we decided to go to another local museum, which was closed for some reason, although it was during the posted hours. So instead, we decided to head to Quito's very own Mitad Del Mundo! - the not-quite-on-the-equator monument to the equator. I guess they figured they had this giant monument, so they'd run with it.

It was actually pretty cool. The monument is impressive and the inside of it is a museum of the artifacts, clothing, and information on a number of the indigenous groups of Ecuador. In addition, they had a number of shops, some live music, and an insectarium. Jen loves bugs, and the insectarium had a lot of dead ones pinned up in display cases. But as a special added bonus, they had some local bugs that were not dead. And by bugs I mean beetles, and by beetles, I mean giant monster big-as-my-hand beetles that are the stuff of most people's nightmares. Jen got a picture with them!

See?

  Yeah, they're real, and alive and wriggly.

It was AWESOME!

Here are pictures from Mitad Del Mundo. I wasn't very snap-happy that day. 

        So it’s been about a week since we’ve been on our own after the project, and after talking with some other students that were more used to travel we had decided to try the whole hostel thing, mostly because we were assured that while they did have college-dorm style, room-sharing-with-total-scary-strangers type accommodations, they also had private rooms sometimes for a slightly higher cost.  Still, even the more expensive rooms where you actually get your own bathroom would be cheaper than the hotel we had been staying at when we first arrived in Quito, so we decided to give it a shot.

        Hostels are pretty much a rarity in the states, although I can think of at least two in the Bay Area.  In Quito, however, they’re everywhere.  One of the streets we went up to find our original hostel was basically lined with them.  We originally stayed at a fairly nice one that ran about $15 per person per night for a room with a “matrimonial” bed (this apparently means king or queen sized, depending on how swanky a place you’re at, and in this case meant a queen), a twin bed, and it’s own bathroom.  It was actually surprisingly quiet since our room was tucked back behind the main lobby and central area, although less so when the ENTIRE PAP PROJECT LANDED IN THIS ONE HOSTEL OMG

        Seriously, I think we just shifted everyone from Cangahua to this one tiny hostel in the space of about two days.

        So how was it?  Well, the bathroom was fine – the shower did have hot water although both the heat and the pressure were rather flaky, but that was something we were relatively used to by this point.  There was wireless internet, but it wasn’t strong enough to reach into the rooms and had to be accessed in the common area.  The primary breaking point was the bed, though, since the matrimonial basically was a harder bed than the ones we’d had at the central house in Cangahua, and although the other bed was softer it would only fit one person.  I ended up on the matrimonial for a few nights, and Mark ended up on the other bed for a while until our stay ran out. 

        The second hostel we tried was fairly hidden in comparison, a tiny doorway between a few little hot dog and hamburger stands on one of the main streets of the Mariscal.  It was cheaper accommodations ($11 per person per night) and came with a smaller room with a queen-sized bed that was actually soft and easy to sleep on.  The walls were painted cheery colors, and it had its own bathroom.  Unfortunately this hostel had a noise problem – not their own, but because they were so close to so many of the clubs and bars and the general PARTYPARTYPARTY atmosphere of Quito's Mariscal area – and the bathroom intimidated the hell out of both of us.  Mind you, we’d used showers with the electric-style heating element in the head at the house in Cangahua and lived, but our stay would probably have gone better if we could actually speak enough Spanish to tell the people that ran the place “hey, your sink is leaking and our bathroom is constantly flooded for no reason at 2 in the morning.”

        We also spent a night in Mindo in an actual hotel that ran us about $15 per person, at which point I think our standards kind of hit a new low.  The matrimonial bed was fine, but the place had no power outlets, the light in the bathroom never worked, the light that was in the room barely worked, and the doors didn’t even have knobs.  That actually wasn’t too bad (at least the shower worked and wasn’t as scary as the one in Quito) until about three or four neighboring roosters decided to get into an e-peen contest at 4 in the goddamn morning and not stop crowing constantly until sometime after we left at noon.  GOD DAMMIT ROOSTERS.  SHUT UP.

        So now we’re staying at an actual hotel not too far away, with wireless internet that reaches into the room, the biggest damn bed I’ve ever seen, and a buffet breakfast included for $77 a night for the both of us.  I remember one of the other students (who I assume travels more) from the project laughed and said we were such tourists, with our pickpocket-proof pouches, staying in hotels, and actually having full luggage and such.  But honestly, I suppose we are.  We’re about ten years older than a lot of the people on the project, and honestly, even when I was their age I hated that sort of communal living and constant party noise shit.  Wrong type of personality for it, I guess. 

        More to the point, I honestly think the whole hostel thing would probably work better without the massive language barrier and if we were actually packed for mobility instead of a stationary location – a lot of the backpackers we’ve seen around Quito use very different bags to carry about the same amount of crap that we have, mostly soft bags that can be slung over a shoulder combined with a huge carry-everything backpacker’s pack on the back with a daypack on the front.  That’s the sort of thing I’d probably look into if we were to do this sort of thing again.

        Well, that and a travel guide that’s not either six years out of date (our original Lonely Planet guide) or three years out of date (the Viva guide we bought locally) because seriously, those did not help matters.

On August third, we decided to head out to Carolina park, one of the three large parks in Quito. This one has a decently sized arboretum, a small natural history museum, and a small vivarium. We opted to visit both. After a 2 mile walk (we had no idea!) we arrived and went to each in turn.

The arboretum was neat with many different plants, all local to various areas of the country (though the orchid and carnivorous plants house was closed. boo), the natural history museum was small but delightfully full of animal skeletons, and the vivarium was cute, but small and most of the reptiles were hiding (as they are want to do.)

The next day we went to Mindo! Details later.

Here are park pictures!

1. Papel higiénico

You can't put toilet paper in the toilets in Ecuador. I mean, it may not be universal throughout the country, but something we learned early on is that you cannot trust the plumbing system in the country to handle toilet paper. poop is fine, but the moment you try to flush TP down the drain, raise the goddamned titanic, because you are ankle deep in sewerjuice. We would like to apologize to anyone that we stay with at home (looking at you, Liz) if we end up putting poopwads in the bathroom trashcans, since 30 years of potty training was beaten out of us real quick in Ecuador.

2. Your change, sir.

This country has some sort of complex about change. By this I mean monetary change for when you buy something, not changing clothes or changing political views (although these may be valid issues too). Just about every place I've gone has some sort of issue making change. Whether you're at an artisenal stall in Otavalo or a Hacienda office or a damned hotel, no one keeps any change for transactions! I even went to a major grocery store, and all they had in the drawer were singles. I've had to wait ten minutes for someone at a stall to try to borrow change from a neighbor. I've been yelled at when I've tried to pay for a $7.00 transaction with a $20. 

And yet, the ATMs primarily dispense money in 20s!

I just don't get it. Unfortunately, it's not like the States where everyone accepts cards. Most of my transactions here have to be in cash. So I live with it as best I can.

3. Bebidas o Agua GASEOSA!

Since you can't drink the water here, you have to get it in bottles. It comes in bottles everywhere. Interestingly, anywhere you go, you have the option of "Agua con gas" or "Agua sin gas" (water with or without carbonation). In the US, mineral water is considered something for snooty people to drink generally. Here, it's a common choice. The question is as ubiquitous as "smoking or non" used to be.

Also, unrelated to water, diet sodas are rare here, and when they're available, they're actually more expensive than the equivalent sugared soda. Carbonated drinks here are called "Bebidas Gaseosa" which essentially translates to "gas beverage".

I think I'd like it if the argument of "pop" vs "coke" vs "soda" in the states just became "GAS BEVERAGE" :)

4. You thought I was done talking about toilet paper.

Of course not. Toilet paper is the subjet that keeps on wiping... back into the conversation or something. This time it's actually about public toilets and their associated toilet paper.

Jen keeps a roll of toilet paper on her at all times (or at least a packet of kleenex) Why the devil would she do that, I hear you ask? Well, because public toilets don't actually have TP. So your options when you go out are:

1. bring your own TP 2. Pay for TP from a TP dispenser machine near the toilet (generally 15 cents for a few precious squares)

Additionally, when a public toilet is in a place where you might expect it to be horrifying (like a gas station or public park) it is worse than you could possibly imagine in your worst nightmares. And I mean nightmares involving Assthulhu rising from Toil'eht to envelop your nightmares in bloodpukepoops. However, when a toilet is in a place that you have to pay to get in to (or a restaurant or something), they're have the potential to actually be quite nice (and have TP).

Additionally additionally, public toilets in many areas (especially areas with a lot of potential tourist traffic) require payment to get into. Most often, there's a person "manning the station" so to speak. 10 cents to poop, 15 cents to wipe it.

        Ecuador is a beautiful place to look at but not so much to listen to, considering that most of what I’ve heard the last four weeks goes something like this:

HAKKKK

KOFF KOFF

SNORT SNIFF SNORF

HURGLE - *BARF*

(Insert sounds of severe rectal disturbance here)

The primary impression I’ve gotten of travel so far is that it may broaden your horizons, but mostly in between spending a whole lot of time miserably ill. 

        Mark’s on his second cold in a month, I (rather unsurprisingly) caught a bad cold after coming back soaked to the bone from Sisig, and both of us have gotten a severe bout of Montezuma’s Revenge (although I guess down this far south it should be Atahualpa’s Revenge instead).  We can’t drink the water down here anywhere without  getting severely ill, so although we generally avoided using plastics back home we’ve been burning through water bottles in Ecuador like they’re going out of style.  Hell, we can barely even use reusable bottles down here like Nalgenes because we a) can’t wash with the water without getting sick and b) can’t refill on anything but disposable water bottles.  We managed with some cheap knockoffs throughout the project, but that’s only because they kept a reliable source of purified water in the kitchen.

        Before anyone starts thinking that this has something to do with Ecuador’s third-world status or water infrastructure – don’t.  It really doesn’t except in very far highland areas such as Pucara.  We had some Ecuadorian students also working on the project, and although most of them couldn’t speak any English and thus did not interact with us, one of them did.  She’d been able to go study abroad in faraway, exotic Iowa, and had also spent most of the time there completely sick and unable to drink our water.

        While we were on the project, one of my staff duties involved looking after the health of other students, since they were just as prone to get sick as Mark and I were (if not more so, since several of them were frustratingly unwilling to take care of themselves, know their own limits when it came to alcohol, and generally tended to be the kind of college students that drove me nuts when I had to live with them as an undergrad).  At least two of our students were sick or injured the entire project, one with persistent bacterial infections interspersing with flu and vomiting, another bleeding sporadically out an ear after a mishap in a soccer game with local kids where she got kicked in the head.  A third got what I assume to be a cold or gripe  (flu) somewhere around the second week and then kept going out to do fieldwork with us, which we suspect is how Mark got sick again.

        And then there’s me.  I guess I can’t really complain about the other students not taking care of themselves considering that I spent most of my time down here in complete agony and didn’t tell anyone for two weeks.

        I’m not entirely sure what it was in hindsight - I guess a combination of the stresses of travel abroad for the first time, being stuck somewhere I can’t speak or comprehend the language even well enough for very simple transactions, or just the general OMG RUSH HURRY DIG FASTR kind of atmosphere around the first half of the project when we were doing archaeology – but somewhere in the middle of the first week I developed what felt like an itch in my left lower canine that refused to go away and I couldn’t figure out where it came from.

        By the second week it had developed into a solid knot of pain in my lower jaw and I had finally figured out what it was.  I was grinding my teeth at night again, a condition known as bruxism that I’ve had for a long time, has occasionally given me issues and I’ve been recommended a mouth guard for before.  But I had never had anything near as bad as I did right then.  Two pills of Advil every four hours around the clock became four, and even that barely dented the constant, drilling pain that had me ready to put a fist through a cinderblock wall.  For a long while I didn’t tell anyone except Mark, since it was such a specialized problem and I was so used to being unable to access medical care that the last place I figured I could ever get help was here.  Fortunately for me, after an evening of me crying on his shoulder because I had been in constant pain for over a week straight, Mark talked to one of the other students we were grouped with for our applied anthropology classes (the Spanish speaker) and thus the ethnographic interview we were supposed to be doing that day at a medical clinic turned into me sitting in a dental chair, getting fitted for a mouth guard by a local orthodontist.

        Let me just say that medical care is uncomfortable enough when you can actually talk to the doctor, and far more so when you have absolutely no idea what he is saying half the time.  But on the other hand, the cool putty he put on my lower jaw to fit me was the best feeling I’d had in weeks, and he told us that the fitting and the guard would cost thirty dollars and would take at most two or three days.  I hadn’t even had to wait to see him, either.

        To make a long story short, after a few more days of aching, followed by a few days of itching (again!) and then a bout of facial swelling that made me feel like I should be swinging off a bell tower at the Hacienda shouting for sanctuary, I mostly recovered.  I’m still probably on a bit more Advil than I should be since that one point of pain in my jaw is still there, itching and aching when I forget, but I’m due for another (much more expensive, this time) visit to a dentist when I get back to the States.

        Ecuador isn’t a country with the most spectacular record of caring for its people’s health, as Mark’s flower plantation posts will probably tell you; even with the clinics in the outer rural parishes being state-run and free, they are very limited in their services and often do not have the drugs that their patients need, requiring them to pay out of pocket for medication.  Many of the rural people we spoke to said that they simply would not go to the doctor if they did not also have the spare money for medicine.   But for the Quiteño – the urbanized Ecuadorian student who spoke English – and for me and the other students on the project, the availability of medical care was never in question, and even for many of the people in the rural cantons it wasn't either, since at least the basic care was free.  Sometimes it could be questionable (for some reason, possibly the gauge of most of their needles, just about every student that went to the clinic ended up with multiple shots in the butt) but at least it was there.

Computer nerd speak ahead....

Today we're moving to another hostel. The people still don't speak English, but they're certainly friendlier. But unfortunately, there's no wi-fi at our new location. Allow me to explain why.

For the purposes of this post, the hostel we were staying at will remain anonymous. Let's call it "Hostel Insecurity".

There was no wi-fi in our room, but there was in a common area. So I would take my laptop out and go there, and set up. The first day, I kept getting web browser redirects for no apparent reason. They would go to one of two particular URLs (which I can't remember, but it doesn't matter). Upon doing a little research, I discovered that a lot of people were yelling "VIRUS" but it wasn't really a virus, or even malware. It wasn't something on my computer, but instead someone had managed to hijack the hostels wireless router and put in a DNS server address that redirects people to the malicious websites.

"How could this happen?" I asked. I decided to investigate. In my web browser I entered the DEFAULT ip address for most routers (192.168.0.1) and I got to the router. This isn't a problem, and anyone can get to a router, but that doesn't mean they can easily get INTO the routers settings, unless the person who set it up had for some reason not created a password for the router.

Guess what? Yeah. They never set up security for their router. I was able to get right in. That's how the bad guys got in. Easy peasy.

I checked their DNS addresses. Sure enough, it wasn't anything resembling a default one. I googled the DNS and it went somewhere in Russia. Problem discovered. So I did the only thing a good guy could do... No, I didn't tell them. I can't speak spanish. Also, what do I say? "I went into your internet router. No I'm totally not a hacker. Why are you calling the police?"

No, I fixed their problem by changing the DNS to Google's public DNS (which I use and highly recommend. Just google "google public DNS").

It stopped the redirects, and made their wireless about ten times faster.

Unfortunately, since I can't really communicate to them "please make a router password", and even if I could, I don't really want to try to respond to the question "How do you know it doesn't have one?" I decided it would be best for me to go to another hostel. I don't want to use one with such a massive Internet security hole.