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Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Howdy to all-

I trust this email finds you all happy and healthy… and all that good stuff.

So here I am… “the wayfaring hero at latitude zero,” as my guide to Ecuador so cleverly puts it; and I’m having a great time so far.

(in retrospect: wow… now that’s a really looong letter… ok… well there’s a prize for those who read it all the way through… ok forget it… no prize… but whatever… I hope you enjoy it… and definitely don’t feel bad if you wanna skip over the first 3 or 4 pages.)

Well… here it goes.

I’m living with the lovely Secaira family as an exchange student for the whole year. The father, Raul, is a medical doctor currently working as a consultant for the restructuring of Ecuador’s health care system and the mother, Maria, is an executive secretary. They’ve got two handsome sons, Pablo (17) and Martin (18) who are in school (or about to be) in Quito as well. We live on the north side of Quito about 10 minutes walk from the bar district, aka Gringolandia; right next to the mall “el Jardin” where you can purchase American goods to your heart’s content; and directly in front of the huge city park “la Carolina” which is beautiful but preferable not to cross at night unless you’re a little short on narcotics or figure life’s just not worth living anymore. So, anywho… we’re in a great part of town… no… seriously. We are.

So it’s kind of strange living in a big city for the first time in my life. I have to take a total of 4 buses to get to and from school everyday for the nice even price of $1.01… don’t ask me what the heck that 1 cent is for. It takes roughly an hour to get to school and an hour back… which is convenient for last minute homework. The school is great, although ritzy does not even begin to describe it. There are about 215 exchange students and a total of about 4000 students, who basically represent the upper-upper class of Quito. It’s not that such differences in wealth don’t exist in the US, but rather that it’s not quite as obvious. It’s difficult making the transition between seeing 5 year olds doing cartwheels in at stop lights for money and 2 year olds toddling down a vacant street at midnight, to 18 year olds checking their cell phones for text messages every 5 minutes. So yeah… it makes you think a little.

My classes are lots of fun. I have an amazing Quichua class (the Incan language still spoken by a few of the indigenous people… which is indeed different from the Quechua in Peru). The professor is great and pretty much all class is spent doing oral exercises in the language. I also have a Spanish literature class call the Latin-American “Boom” (an emergence of writers in the 60’s after the Cuban revolution). The material is great but the teacher stinks, so I’m thinking of dropping the class and reading the stuff on my own. My “advanced Spanish” class is alright I suppose… but Vulcanology is awesome. The teacher is an insane Greek guy and we have some 7 weekend trips planned in order to go check out real volcanoes in the field. Lastly, the class ecology and conservation of the Galapagos is really neat, and it includes a 7 or 8 day trip to the islands to observe and learn (tentatively December 14-22, for Mom). So I’m really excited about that. Along with those we can take sports classes (no credits of course), so I’m currently in soccer, tennis, and mountaineering. The latter looks like it will be awesome… including 2 real overnight climbs with crampons, ice axes, ropes and the whole works. AAAAAHHH… this place rocks!

            So as you may have noted… I’m probably not gonna get a whole lot of credits for this year abroad, except in Spanish and biology; but seeing as I was planning on 5 years for this biochemistry major anyway it really shouldn’t matter (and I definitely think it’s worth it).

            Thanks to my host brother Martin, I’ve already managed to make quite a few Ecuadorian friends, and on weekends we either hang out at someone’s house or go out for a bit of dancing and merriment. To my surprise, I found that salsa and merengue are relatively easy to master with a simple swaying of the hips, shuffling of the feet and about 8 tequilas (…just kidding of course).

            I still haven’t had the chance to get out of the city that much and explore the countryside. This past weekend, in fact, was the my first real adventure into the unknown. I went with a group of about 15 gringos (= not Latin) to a town about 2 hours north of Quito, called Otavalo. The town is famous for its ancient market put on by the indigenous people selling handcrafted goods, food and animals. So we wandered around the market for a few hours on Saturday perusing through the piles of alpaca wool blankets, handmade pottery, water bongs, and brand-less jeans on to which a toothless Indian woman would sew the brand name of your choice (ie- GAP, tommy hilfiger, etc) for a small fee.

Later we all paid $1 to go watch the bullfight, which ended up being what they called “town bulls”. They didn’t actually kill the bull, but the townsfolk (once sufficiently liquored up…) would jump in the ring, grab a cape, and try to show their superiority (read: superior stupidity) without weapons. And of course… I suppose it was inevitable… a kid from our group decided he would give it a try. …He actually did amazingly well (especially since most everyone else thought he was a goner for sure), and only had one close call. When he exited the ring we noticed that he had been awarded a gaping hole in his jeans right below the right butt cheek, but fortunately nothing more. Soo… bravery or stupidity?… I leave the choice up to you.

Later on we attended a “meeting” of the cockfighting club of Otavalo, and got to watch the roosters being weighed in and primed for fighting. However, I left before the carnage began seeing as they were charging money to watch and I didn’t feel like contributing money to the sport. So we got dinner, went out dancing for a while, and then came back to the hostel to crash. The next morning… somehow… I have no clue how… but our Caucasian bullfighter friend ran into someone who remembered him from his attempted suicide. The man explained that his daughter was studying English and needed to practice and he offered to take all of us to see a bit of the countryside. So all 15 of us piled into the back of his van and off we went. He took us to an amazing spot at the base of the surrounding mountains where we hiked up to about a 30 foot waterfall. The braver among us stripped down to the bare minimum to bathe in the glacier cold water, and then we hiked up a bit more. After a few hours of frolicking and what-not, we headed on back the van. We went back into town where we expected to be dropped off at the bus station to head on back to Quito… but alas… instead the family took us back to their place and insisted we stay for lunch… It would have been rude to refuse of course (as we were all starving…), so we sat down in their huge house and had a 2 course meal placed in front of us… prepared courtesy of the mother, grandmother and what appeared to be aunts, nieces, daughters, and more. Finally after another 2 hours of relaxing and chatting with the family we finally headed out to catch the bus to Quito. And thus ended my first long and almost unbelievable weekend adventure in Ecuador. Amazing… how can one be pessimistic about the nature of man when such people exist… but then again, I’ve already seen the other extreme.

Ok… well I suppose I’ll let you go for now. I hope that you enjoyed a little bit of chapter one from David’s life in Ecuador, and if you skimmed until here… just know that I’m alive and well and having a great time.

I miss you all. Come visit me! Take care.

Love, David May