The Noisy American

Lucky me

Well, it's the day before my Galapagos trip which I've really been looking forward to so, of course, I'm sick.  Really sick - food poisoning.  I spent the morning vomiting and shitting.  It's been really lovely.  Spent most of the day at the hospital as opposed to doing things that I really needed to do such as buying some shorts and books.  To top it off, it's a national holiday here and I wasn't aware of it so banks are closed and my funds are seriously low.  Other than that everything's great.  Wish me luck. 

Sightseeing

I´m a bit tired of sightseeing today.  Actually I´ve been a bit tired of it for a couple of days.  Charming colonial architecture is no longer doing it for me.  For that reason, I think I´ll have very few pictures of Cuenca, though it, admitedly is a very charming colonial town. 

Guayanquil

Spent two nights in Qguil which is a sprawling city that´s actually hot and humid.  It´s the first heat I´ve felt since leaving Georgia.  I worked up a sweat before 10:00 am and it wasn´t even a sunny day.  It´s an interesting city, but I didn´t love it like I did Lima.  It´s a real city of contrasts, the area around the waterfront is absolutely spotless and shiny with modern architecture mixed in with the restored buildings.  But, a few blocks inland and it´s a completely different atmosphere, noisy chaotic, dirty and congested.  I think that I liked that area better.  There´s a fantastic park in the middle of the city, fantastic because it´s crawling with iguanas, and not just a few, there are hundreds. 

I reckon Gquil is probably one of those cities that you learn to love.  I talked with a few visitors there who had stayed a while and learned their way around and they thought it was a fantastic city.  I think it didn´t help that I chose a really crappy hostel in the suburbs.  I chose it because I was flying in and then (I thought) taking a bus out in only two days.  Thought it might be easier as far as transporting my stuff.  Anyway, if you´re ever in Guayaquil, avoid the Dreamcatcher Hostal.  I know, I know - I should have known by the name.  The rooms are like tombs, the owner is annoying and they have really loud parrots that start squacking at about 7 in the morning. 

I woke up yesterday to find that there was a general strike of some kind or another that was halting traffic through the place where I was supposedly traveling.  My four hour trip was going to take me about  7 hours.  Forget that, I went to the airport and, very luckily, caught a plane and got here in an hour.   Scary plane ride, though, only 36 passengers and I could feel every bump and airpocket we hit.  I never should have read that book by Critchon - Airframe. 

Anyway, I´m now in Cuenca and I think I´ll force myself to do a little sightseeing anyway.

Diet

This is certainly no place for anyone on a low carb diet.  I´ve had meals, and not a few, where I´ve been served rice, bread and potatoes on the same plate.  The food in Ecuador is...well, bland.  We´d celebrate if there was pepper on the table.  But, it is filling and very cheap.  I ate lunch almost everyday at the same restaurant - Cafe Libra - Soup, meat with rice, dessert and juice for 2 USD. 

My best meal by far though was at an Argentenian restaurant in Quito - Mi Viejo Arrabel.  If you´re ever in Quito, you must eat here.  Filet mignon with a grande cerveza for 12 USD. 

In Peru, I´ve been eating at tourist places almost everyday and eating a lot of spaghetti.  Seems to be their national dish. 

The most unusual thing that I´ve eaten would be Quy - Guinea Pig, which actually is the national meal in Ecuador and seems quite popular in Peru, as well.  It´s also quite expensive.  They put it on a spit whole and roast it up.  Can´t say it was the most delicious thing I´ve ever eaten, but it wasn´t too bad.  The only problem was getting to the meat.  There´s lots of bones and very little meat and the skin is as tough as rubber.  I had to toss a coin with my eating partner to see who got the brain and unfortunately I won.  They say the brain is the best part but I wouldn´t agree.  The only way to get the brain out is to hold the head up to your mouth and suck it out.  Yummy! 

In Peru

Well the educatin´ part of my trip is over and I´m sitting in the Lima airport at 12:00 am waiting for my flight to Cuzco in 5 hours - ugh.  I truely hate airports and this one is really not pleasant.  There aren´t even any seats in which to relax.  Anyway, ´the air here is quite easy to breathe (at sea level again).  Not sure about Cuzco as the altitude there is about 600 meters higher than Quito so it should be fun (might be time to stop smoking).  Hopefully I´ll love the gasping enough to venture to Lake Titicaca where the altitude is a pleasant 3800.  Taxi, taxi...

Two weekends ago, I visited the Devil´s nose on a class trip.  It is the only train in Ecuador and passes thru some really beautiful and varied scenery, from fantastically green mountain passes (of at least 325 shades of green) to desert and scrub.  The end of the trip is a 1000 meter descent on Devil´s nose.  Quite a trip though it was not the most comfortable ride I´ve ever taken.  The only seats are on top of the car on a cushion.  The tops are jammed with photo snapping tourists, (but lucky me my camera ran out of batteries the night before the ride and I neglected to bring a charger, so I harrased the woman riding with me to snap pictures of everything.  She was pleased.)  The ride starts at 7 am but in order to get a ´good´ seat, you need to be there at 6.  It was frigging cold and it didn´t help when the train started because then we got the wind as well.  At the first stop (after about 2 hours), there were tons of people selling warm clothes.  I figured it could only get warmer so didn´t buy any, but they were doing a booming business.  I was glad not to have bought anything as the next half of the ride was blistering hot.  I felt like produce by the end of the ride - frozen in the morning, thawed and then fried in the afternoon.  While riding, children in the villages and farms run beside the train and wave.  Unfortunately many people on the trains throw candy to them which I don´t really like.   Yeah, I know I`m a spoilsport but doesn´t seem right to get them addicted to sugar and, even worse, to train them to beg for it.  If you wanna throw something, I´d suggest colgate or floss to help stem their teeth, rotten from all the sugar, from falling out.

My final week of lessons weren´t exactly fantastic as my attention had started to waver and I was going out much more than studying.  If I was doing it again, I think I´d do two weeks on, two weeks off, then two weeks on, again.  I went up the teleferiqa on the last day of class with my teacher and a fellow student.  The teleferica is the newest attaction in Quito.  It´s a trolley car that takes you about halfway up a volcano (to about 4100 meters).  From there, it´s possible to climb to the summit.  I didn´t quite make it all the way, but I didn´t do too bad.  I did much better than my fellow climber, a young healthy woman who almost fainted because of the altitude. 

Last weekend I went to Oltava with some friends.  It{s about 2 hours from Quito and has a huge Saturday market full of handicrafts.  Ho hum for the market as I didn´t carry enough cash to buy anything and anyway wasn´t sure that I wanted to cart stuff all over Peru.  I really liked Oltava though.  It´s a beautiful little city in the mountains with great clubs and a nice atmosphere.  On Saturday, a friend and I went to see the cockfights.  Wow!  Very strange.  Strap some razors on the cocks and let them go at it.  It wasn´t to the death, though there was a bit of blood spilt (and sucked - the owners kept sucking the blood off the birds - never heard of bird flu apparently).  It was definitly a different experience, though probably not for everyone.  Quess what?  Again, I didn´t have my camera.  As I had no idea I´d end up there, I didn´t carry it.  Hopefully my friend will be sending me her pics and I can post some.  So far, I have tons of pics of mountains and waterfalls, but little else. 

For all of you who forgot to ask, yes I had a fantastic birthday.  Ate at an Argentinian restaurant - filet mignon, mashed potatoes, veggies, bread and a grande bear for $12 USD (eat your heart out).  Afterwards went out drinking with some friends.  And I even remembered my camera! 

Well, that took all of 15 minutes to write so now I only have 4 hours and 45 minutes to troll around the Lima airport.  Wheeee!

Ecuador

I hate Spanish grammar. 

Other than that (and a nasty throat thing that's going around), I´m having a great time here in Ecuador.  I´ve been doing the studying thing for about three weeks and have actually been a good student (most of the time).  I´ve got one more week of class and then ... well, I´m not quite sure.  My original plan was to go to Peru for three weeks, but the tickets are expensive and sold out.  Tickets are as much from Quito to Cuzco as they are from Atlanta to Quito.  So, I´ll try and decide something this weekend.  The only thing certain at the moment is that I´m going to spend far too much money to visit the Galapagos Islands.  I won´t even say how much it is, only that it´s close to a full months salary.

The school that I´m going to is alright.  My teacher loves grammar a bit too much and I´d actually prefer to have a class instead of one-on-one, but all the schools that I looked at here don´t offer classes unless you come in a group.  After far too much grammar (from estar/ser (is), future and past tense verbs) I put my foot down on Tuesday and said no more grammar for the rest of the week.  My teacher spent quite a while explaining (en español) why I needed to study even more, but finally relented and we spent the rest of the week practicing speaking, listening and reading.  The school offers free extracurricular classes everyday, such as salsa, cooking and cocktail making.  So far, I went to one salsa class (I suck and had some brute of a Ecuadorian woman tell me that I was muchos chicas - a big girl, as she was doing most of the leading), two cooking and one cocktail class.  They also offer weekly tours of the old city at night and weekend trips.  (Simon Bolivar Spanish schools - I´ll put in a link later, I´m on a crap computer)

Last weekend I went to Baños with a bunch of students.  It was a blast - muchos divertido.  We rode bicycles for about 3 hours (mostly downhill, thank god) and then hiked up to several waterfalls.  One in particular was spectacular.  I don´t remember the actual name of the waterfall but the bottom of it was called the cauldron of the devil.  Once you got there, it was easy to understand why.  The water was so powerful, it was like looking at a hurricane.  Fantastico!  At night, we went to the top of one of the mountains in the area and tried to spot the volcano.  There´s an active volcano in Baños that has caused the town to be on alert and was even responsible for a mass evacuation a few years ago.  Unfortunately it was quite cloudy and we could only spot a few sparks here and there.  I was able to see it during the day (actually you can´t miss it) and got a few photos.  Must be a bit ominous living there with such a threat leaning over you each day.  (a bit like Taiwan?, but much more unpredictable)  Anyway, after the volcano, a few of us went out for drinks and dancing (not salsa).  The bar was quite fun and while there, an Ecuadorian chico gave me his girlfriend.  A bit weird, but fun.  I gave her back later. 

I quite like Quito, or the small corner of it that I´ve come to know.  The weather is close to perfect with warm days and (I think) cold nights.  Perfect, of course, would be warm nights, as well.  It´s actually nice to experience something akin to weather as opposed to the perpetually sunny days in Al Ain.  I can get to most places I need to go on foot, but if not taxis and buses are very cheap, though (unlike what the Lonely Planet suggests) you must negotiate with taxis before getting in.  The food here is extremely cheap.  You can get a full meal for 2 USD.  Unfortunately, it´s a little less than spectacular.  They don´t think much of spices, so much of it is rather bland.  I´ve only seen pepper on the table once since I´ve been here, though most restaurants do have salsa. 

There´s a bit of a nightlife here and many of the kids in the school go out practically every night.  I haven´t really found anywhere that knocks my socks off so don´t go out so much.  One thing that I really don´t like about Quito is that it´s quite unsafe to walk around at night, even in a group.  Since I´ve been here, a couple of people have been robbed, one group at knife point.  It´s a shame as I think the atmosphere would be completely different if strolling the sidewalks at night were an option. 

Last week I was really taking it easy as I got a nasty throat infection that affected serveral of the other students.  I felt really crappy for a few days and still am not a hundred percent, but think I´ll recover enough to be a bit more active this week. 

Tomorrow I´ll be traveling on volcano row on the way to another devil´s something or other.  It´s the only train line in Ecuador and is way up there.  Should be a fun trip, I´ll let you know. 

I´ll try to post some pictures and write more a bit later, but for now I want to go and enjoy the day before it gets dark and the boogeymen come out. 

Next time...

Congratulations to Ecuador.  One of the surprises of the 2006 World Cup whose chance ended today, losing against England 1 - 0.  It was a great run, though and today´s game was one of the most exciting.