back in the US(s)A

So, we're back, the experiment that was our lives through most of 2008 has come to a close, and reason would dictate that we should stop blogging. But that's just not how we roll. I imagine that we'll use our new found free time (our eventual free time that hasn't materialized yet) to post longer descriptions of our recent expeditions and the last few weeks of life in Quito. In addition, we should now have the bandwidth and the time to load up a whole slew of pictures that have been stored on various cameras for way too long.
Here's some samples:

Picture of the "lagoon" outside our camp in the Amazon. Note the super long dugout canoes that are used to get around.


Symbiotic Lemon Ant/Tree:
There is a tree in the jungle that creates a poisonous toxin that kills other vegetation around it. In addition, the tree creates a "home" - paths and protusions inside the stems and stalks of the plant - for ants. These ants, in return for the free home, keep other bugs and animals that would harm or eat the plant away. Classic example of a very complex symbiotic relationship. When eaten, the ants taste like lemon. Or lime. Or something slightly acidic. It's best to crush them in your fingers a little before eating them so as to avoid the wriggling around on your tongue that they do.

A sad farewell to the ping pong table

And here's the last use of our ping pong/dining table before it found a new home.

Chiva

The Ecuadorian version of the party bus.

Let the Fiestas Begin

Holy batty street parties! Things are getting tense around here - people are desperate to get their partying on. We're told that the "intense" revelry starts tonight, although people have been living it up for most of the week. It seems that every reasonably aged person under 25 has spent the last week out in the streets, drinking and dancing. There are parades, seemingly spontaneous and unorganized, all over the city, at least one for every high school in the country, it seems. Those, coupled with the fact that half the population is off of work and out shopping, and traffic is ludicrously backed up. Chivas are everywhere, day and night, filling the clogged streets with music, dancing and general chaos. The few people in offices around the city seem to be busy chatting, or playing cards, or sleeping off a hangover.
It's sort of like a third world version of New Orlean's Mardi Gras, but with bull fights.

Luckily, we were able to sell the car yesterday (and just about everything else that we had to sell), because the city basically shuts down from now until the new year. We had a great time hosting a farewell party last night. Figured out that ping pong and Amanda's signature martini drinks are another example of two good things that are not necessarily better when joined together.

Now it's time to pack. Final preparations and errands are being considered.

We would have pictures of the Amazon trip (and some of the festivities outside our windows) but Amanda's gone and hidden the cord that connects the camera to the computer. Maybe more updates soon.

Apart from the many, many mosquito bites (I look like I have the measles), there were a few highlights from the trip including sitings of: 20-25 foot anaconda, fresh water dolphins, glow in the dark mushrooms, poinsonous snakes, macaws, jungle shamans, monkeys, aligators and lemon ants. Lemon ants are called that because of their taste - and yes, we tried them (live) to confirm. Very lemony. Here's a picture of them crawling on a piece of wood:

back - with a correction

We made it back in one piece from the jungle. A mosquito and other insect bite covered piece, slightly charred by the sun and dehydrated from the heat, but a single piece nonetheless. Now we wait through common gestation periods and see if we brought back any unwanted passengers with us.
Details, descriptions and dibujos (pictures) of the trip are forthcoming.
In the meantime, a correction on the earlier post - Lago Agrio and Coca are, in fact, two separate and distinct city/towns, though relatively geographically proximal to one another. Lago Agrio has been renamed Nuevo Loja, and Coca has been renamed Francisco Orellana (and we all know who he was). I don't think the names have stuck - and I'm pretty sure that most people don't care.
That's it for now.

Going to the Jungle

We're off in a few minutes for a trip in the jungle. Should be interesting. We're going to be near the Cuyabeno National Park (I think). Flying into Coca (hee-hee) this morning and taking a dugout canoe ride to the hotel. Naming a town "Coca" in the middle of the jungle in the is like naming a the local dive bar "Booze", so much so that I think they recently changed the name to Lago Agrio (sour lake).
Pictures will be forthcoming.

Oh, and we're missing the kickoff of the Dias de Quito on Sunday. We'll be returning to debauchery, outdoor festivities and general no work getting done around here stuff. It's like mardi gras, but colder, with fewer beads, and bull fights.

car for sale

Today, in some way, marks the beginning of the end of the great Quito experiment. We put the car (technically a 4x4 suv, though small) on the market. The morning was taken up with getting a much needed clean up of the car - 5 people working on cleaning the interior, exterior, undercarriage and even the engine for a half hour for $8 - and "registering" the car at the patio (which, in some weird twist of language, is the ecuadorian spanish word for car dealership).
The little vitara was good to us and always got us where we needed to get to. I hope it finds a good home (and quickly, since we need to close the sale before we leave).
We're leaving in 4 short weeks, with many mixed emotions.

On a tangential note, related but not relevant to the above, the woman running the car wash asked me to help move several of the cars around during the washing of my car. Kind of strange. There wasn't a lot of room in the little garage, and a lot of cars, so they play this weird game with the cars - kind of like that game with the squares that you have to re-arrange to make a picture. I'm not sure why I was pressed into service, but there I was, backing other people's vehicles into tight corners, and trying to squeeze a pick up around other parked cars and up onto a ramp (elevated space with the gap under the tire lanes where someone can walk under the car). All this with a stick shift, and with not a lot of space in the pick up cab for me to fit. What fun.
Oh, yeah, and all the cars had proximity alarms, and alarms that went off when doors were opened, and, basically, alarms that went off all the time. Fun.

map of the trip

Pulled a map of Ecuador off the web and drew in the route of the week long trip we just finished. Covered a lot of miles and a lot of different terrain - high mountains, paramo, petrified forests, big cities, little towns, beach life, banana lands and arid mountain areas.
We traveled on some really bad roads, too. Indescribably bad roads. My lower back is still killing me.


A little hard to see, but the routes in the image below (in yellow). We went clock wise.

In Cuenca

A and I decided to do some traveling this week, so we find ourselves way down south in Cuenca - which means that we aren´t checking our emails, our voicemails, or doing much in the way of interacting with the rest of the world.
Yes, we were able to catch the election results. We caught a couple hours of results on cnn (in English) over dinner, and then went back to our hotel, where we watched cnn (in Spanish). Amazing that Obama won - we were nervous and now happy.
Interesting notes on the difference between english and spanish cnn -- spanish commentators talk about race A LOT, which the PC people in the US tend to not do. Comments like "Iowa went to McCain, but there aren´t any black people there" were common throughout the evening. Very different. They also didn´t have access to all the cool gadgets, gizmos and analysis tools that the "US" version did.
Fun to hear election results in places like Dakota del Norte, Virginia Occidental, and Ciudad de Washington.

Aside from missing football games and major political events in the states, we´re having fun. Lots of driving, lots of amazing views and mountain roads. Most surreal moment to date -- going to a anthropological exhibit at a museum about the various indigenous groups in the country, and watching about a 100 people from some indigenous tribe walking through the exhibit, taking in the sights. I don´t know if there´s a metaphor for that weirdness. I guess it would be like going to an exhibit of strange religious sects across the history of the US, and finding yourself surrounded by Amish people checking out the exhibit. Strange in a good way.

cab ride

strangest cab ride ever (or at least to date).
I got in a cab to go into the Northern part of town the other day - the part of town where I spent my more formative years, and where we don't tend to spend any time at all in the current chapter of our lives.
This was actually my second attempt to cab over to a mall and get a pair of headphones in the same day. Earlier, I had tried to take a cab across town in the middle of the lunch rush, with one of the main arteries through town (6 de Diciembre) shut down for protests (yes, protests and demonstrations are a big art of life here in the capital. It's usually missed, since we either work from home or walk everywhere). That cab attempt lasted about five minutes, when we progressed from on end of the block to the other, and I decided to table th trip until a better time.
so, I tried again a few hours later, when most of the city was back in their offices, or homes, or wherever they go during the workday. I hailed a cab, got in and we were off on our ride. As those that have visited here before know, it's a good idea to check and make sure that the cab has and is using a meter. It ameliorates the haggling, hastle and hurt feelings at the end of the trip. Instead of a meter, though, this cabbie had a little plasma tv, about the size of those handheld DVD players out there, taped to the lower dash board - down by the gear shift. There were wires taped all over the ceiling and running down to the little tv set, pulling the telenovela (latin soups) out of the ether. And the sound was turned all the way up.
Now, I know that there are souped up cabs in various cities across the US, providing commercials or other televised programs for riders in the back. And I know that there are now tvs in the back of all sorts of SUVs and luxury cars. But this wasn't tv for the passenger - this was tv for the driver. At ever light (and there were a lot) he'd stop, pull the emergency break (not sure what that was about, except that he wanted to rest his right foot), and watch the tv. When traffic around would get going again, he'd look up briefly and start driving, looking down periodically, for what I thought was a disconcertingly long time, before glancing up again.
To fully grasp the ludicrousness of this scenario, you have to understand what traffic is like in a developing country. First of all, we're in a tiny vehicle. Think mid-80's Sentra, and this thing is smaller. Second, there are few automatic cars, and this cab wasn't one of them, so the cab driver is shifting through the gears while not paying attention to where he's going. Third, and probably most important, traffic in this city, as in most latin countries, is crazy. There are cars goig through stop lights and red lights. Cars double or triple parked, in the middle of a thoroughfare - cars weaving between lanes, coming out of hiddent driveways, backing up from off of the sidewalk, and generally doing things that require the full attention of a driver and quick defensive tactics. And that's not even considering the hordes of people standing in the road between lanes, playing the part of matador against the car's bull impression.
Anyway, we made it to our final destination, eventually, and it turns out that there was a meter, and it was running, under the TV. Go figure.

Mamma Mia

We watched the movie Mamma Mia (I think there's an exclamation point in there) over two weeks ago, and I still have ABBA songs running through my head.

Speaking of running, I think the above's a mental shout out to the High Heel Races, taking place tonight (right now) in DC. I hope they aren't having the rain that we're having, or that's been a steady attendee to the event over the last couple of years.

V portal has blown up

It's official. I stopped by the electronics store this morning and they can't get a new processor for the V portal. This sucks even more than usual because I'm in the middle of looking for new work, and it would help to have access to a phone.
I figured out that I can upgrade my account to get a desktop based system that links to my vonage number. This I've done - now I just have to find one of those microphone headset thingamabobs so I can test out the system and see how phone calls sound through the computer.
Keep your fingers crossed.

Laguna Mojanda & Papallacta

Some shots of Laguna Mojanda and Papallacata Hikes.

Yanacocha

Here are some pics of Yanacocha - the trip on the cloud forest trail to nowhere with 5 or 6 Hobbit like tunnels and lots of humming birds.

Snippets from the day

And what a day it's been so far. Not bad. Not good. Just full of strange things happening.

In no particular order:

There was a huge storm this afternoon, as we have discovered is usually the case. Today, however, the storm was full of lightning and thunder. I was sure that we would lose power, which we didn't. Instead, my vonage box got fried at some point during the storm. Nothing happened to our computers, the printer, the modem, the router, or any of the phones (most of which are daisy chained into the same plugs - bad form, I know, but still). Just the Vonage box. Which kind of sucks, since they can't be purchased here (or so I hear). I took it down to an electronics store and they were able to confirm that a processor was fried. They'll look for a replacement tomorrow. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
*Yes, this means we have no phone for now.


In a related note, I saw someone in the building - which I guess would be a neighbor - received a package in the mail from Amazon. A package! In the mail! The mind boggles. I had no idea that the postal system worked in this country, let alone that you could get something that was purchased online from the US. I admit, I checked the package to make sure. It's not a reuse of the Amazon box. It's not sent locally. The sender's address is Amazon, in the US. The ramifications are stupefying.


On the way to get a censo today, I saw a passenger carrier plane (the normal, commercial, get on the plane and go somewhere type of plane) closely followed by two jets. When I say close, I mean it looked like they were sitting on the wings on either side of the larger plane. Probably someone important, like the president, heading off somewhere - but a little jarring when you glance up and see that in the sky. Makes one think all sorts of jack-booted security thoughts, and the way the world is changing. Much like this latest tidbit of changing transportation policy in DC.


And I was able to get a censo today. A censo somewhere between a visa (in one's passport), and the more traditional and more citizenry cedula - which is pretty much citizenship identification, as far as I can tell. The name of the card I sat in long lines to get today would lead one to believe it has something to do with a census, or being counted, or listed, or registered -- or something. All I know is that it is not mandatory, but I need it. It turns out you can't sell expensive things, like cars, without one.


I think I saw an ex-boyfriend of my mother's while I was driving home from the Censo office. Which is a supremely strange thing to say. One, because that's just not a normal statement that comes out of someone's mouth very often - at least not someone with a mother like mine. Two, because my mother isn't really the "dating" type (I think she's dated 2 people in the last 25 years), and it's just weird to possibly have run into him in a random section of this large city. It's like running into your second cousin's college roommate while vacationing in Sidney or something. I know it happens, but it's surreal.


Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but the wifey likes the fires in the evening, and with good reason, given the weather (see above) and the general romantic appeal of speding our evenings fireside. The downside is that, despite the re-engineering advice provided by our in-house engineering expert, which has been duly applied to the fireplace, we're still getting smoke in the house. Which means that I find myself walking around the city, running errands and the like, smelling like I've just come off of a week long camping trip. Sans the BO, of course. It's just a little disconcerting.

mellow and papallacta

This week was as much of an antithesis to the last week or so as one could expect. No guests, no going out, no late nights, no eating out -- just A and I, sans guests, hanging out at home, cooking our own meals, going to the gym, and trying to figure out the next chapter of our lives.
This monotony (or bucolic existence, depending on your point of view) was shaken up on Friday, when we went to Gogi's (my friend Dan's mother) house to watch slides of her various biking adventures -- the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a trip around the Quebec penninsula, and a ride around Moab. I didn't think it would be all that much fun, but it was (and I really want to say neat here, but who says neat these days? or cool?) -- interesting.
Spent Saturday night out with Dan and a "girl" friend of his at a new micro brewery, discovering that the problem with Ecuadorian beer is a dirth of hops - they just don't have any, or all that much, and it's taking away from any kind of micro-brews. I guess you can make a decent, cheap pilsner without that much hops, but that's about it. All the beers were flat.
We grilled Dan on some local or relatively close by hikes that we could do on Sunday. Unfortunately, asking someone who thinks mountain or road biking over 100 km before 9 am is a good start to the day for input into easy hikes in the area is not always the best idea. I mean, there are weekend warriors, and then there are weekend warriors. We consider ourselves to be weekend tourists.
Regardless, we were able to make our way on Sunday (and miss the game, which the Redskins pulled out of the bag against a winless Lions. As I've said before, have they won by more than 7 points this year?) to papallacta - a little town almost directly east of Quito that is on the edge of the mountain range, before it decends down into the jungle. We did a couple hour hike through some spectacular landscape - high ridges, plunging views, waterfalls and high plains lagoons throughout. It was a gorgeous walk.
Pictures that do not do the environment any justice at all will be forthcoming, either from me or from A.
We spent the afternoon in the hot springs for which the town is famous. It was an alright experience - I loved soaking in various hot pools - but I think both of us are not really into crowds, or any other people for that matter. Nor are we those who like to spend hours upon hours in a hot tub, soaking (not that there's anything wrong with that). Still - it was fun, and felt great after a hike, and made everyone incredibly drowsy on the hour long ride home through winding, hilly roads through pouring rain (of course).

superstruct - for those with some free time

Epic Fu (my weekly dose of hip happenings) turned me on to this game:
http://www.superstructgame.org/
It's going to be up and running for a few more weeks. I haven't played it, but it looks interesting.

On the same show, they talked about a choose your own adventure movie available online - how to survive a zombie outbreak. I haven't seen this, either.
http://www.survivetheoutbreak.com/

nass' pictures of the trip

http://picasaweb.google.com/Nasser.Thalji/EcuadorTrip#

Lots of pictures from various activities during his visit. Well annotated, as well.
What's missing (in no particular order):
-The flat tire in Sogichos when we couldn't find the jack. It started to rain as soon as we realized we had a flat.
-Pictures of how bad the roads were later in the Quilatoa loop, or in Mindo.
-Any pictures from wine night (thank god!)
-Pictures of the night playing darts with the cotocollao volunteers (a horde of Americans spending a year working in an extremely poor neighborhood in Quito, out to enjoy themselves in the Mariscal one night).
-Pictures of the drive back from Mindo at night - not the smartest thing that's ever been done. Dark, smog, rain, and fallen rocks strewn across a windy 2 lane blacktop through the mountains. I don't think much of anything would have come out in pictures, anyway.

Random note - I saw a handful of hummingbirds, a toucan and a green parrot during our hike to the waterfalls in Mindo - I don't think that Nasser caught sight of any of those birds. I'm thinking that I'm getting better at the bird spotting, and I'm not sure if that's a skill I want to have, or want to boast about.

Today, by the way, was a gorgeous, sunny and balmy day. It figures that the weather would be this way as soon as our guests left. There was more rain, in more copious amounts, with more hail during their stay than I have ever seen here before.

redskins scavenger hunt

So, just to set the stage for the current state of affairs around here - Nasser left this morning (Monday) to go back to a city basking in a pretty good season so far. Amanda came back from Boston and beyond on Sunday night and is taking her time dealing with the post-convention disorders that beset normal people after standing up for several days in a row and dealing with countless introspective conversations. If there's such a thing as a chocolate information binge, I think she's been on one.

But I digress - Sunday football is the subject of this post. Nass and I got up on Sunday, in Quito, ready to watch the game. With previous experiences under my belt, I was quick to do as much research as possible on game channels and times and such before the game, and to look into where the game might be played. The one thing that I'm missing at this point is an actual tv guide, or the cable equivalent for this area, to be able to actually check to see on what channel the game (might) be aired.

We opted for trying out a local Irish pub called Mulligans to see the game, and went ridiculously early to prepare for the event. We caught most of the early game that was aired on CBS - the Ravens/Dolphins game, and drank way too many of the large glasses of beer that were offered. Once the second game started (at around 3 pm here) we realized that CBS airs three different afternoon games, and the game that is aired on the local cable network is somehow related to some random area of the country (the mother land, not this country). I've noticed some scheduling weight given to Miami (which makes sense for a latin american broadcast company), with a secondary emphasis on Dallas, neither of which help us. In the case of Sunday afternoon, the CBS channel that was shown was the Indianapolis game -- quite possibly the least latin oriented team in the NFL. Go figure.

Realizing that our hopes had been dashed, we hobbled out of the bar as quickly as we could. We stopped, briefly, at the uber-US bar down the street, where we had been told Redskins fans were wont to gather to watch the game. Unfortunately, in some many more ways than one, the owner had died on Thursday, and we had previously assummed the place would be closed, and yet hope spring eternal. Turns out that the place was by then completely smothered in flower arrangements, wreaths, and other votive/commemorations of the owner who had died, and an impromptu (or completely scheduled) irish wake was in full swing at the bar. No football there (and more on this death in the future - it's an interesting story with some really pointed lessons).

On to another irish bar we traveled, where we had met a whole host of young US people volunteering at a school in cotocollao ( a very poor neighborhood in Quito) on Friday night. Unfortunately, the bar management turned out to be more Catholic than Irish, and the place was closed for the day.

So we punted and headed home to listen to the game on espn radio. I was able to get the internet radio running when I stumbled, with the help of google, into something called justin.tv. This site has a whole swarm of "channels" which, as far as I can tell, are random people all across the US that are streaming US tv over the internet. We were able to find a "channel" from someone in the DC area that was broadcasting the Redskins game, while he was actually at the game. This was an awesome discovery, and one which I will have to take full advantage of in the near future.
I have to say that watching a football game, or any "what is happening right now" activity on the internet is a novel experience, with the potential of making the game more interesting than actually watching it live, or on tv. Much like listening to baseball on the radio, there are new elements of streaming that one must take into account to appreciate what's going on. The image is fuzzy -- fuzzy enough that you have to listen for the fan's reaction to a play to figure out if the receiver caught the ball, or if something interesting, like a fumble, occurred on the play. And don't even get me started on the "buffering" message - what a special addition to the experience this brings. There's nothing like watching your team on third and long and having the screen stop refreshing, and getting that "buffering" stop motion message. Another added benefit of watching the game online is being able to peruse the comments section on the side of the screen. It's like having supporters of either team on either side of you while you're at the game, and getting to be partisan to their trash talking throughout the intermission, and during every play.
Despite all the added bonuses, we were doing just fine watching the game, in a stilted and jarred fashion, right up until the last minute or two of play. Then the internet feed got disconnected. Note earlier that the "channel" was being hosted by a guy who was at the game - so no possibility of reset.
We ended up listening to the last few minutes (and, if you're familiar with this Sunday, you know how tense it was) on ESPN radio - thank god that didn't go out as well - while playing ping pong between plays and during commercial breaks.
So, there you have it - that's what it's like to try and watch a simple football game down here. Might be more effort than changing the channel on your HD flat screen dish network tivo machine, but the effort makes the experience that much sweeter.
And can anyone recall a team with a record this good with such a shaky and uneven team, a team that hasn't won by a touchdown yet this season? Talk about exciting.