This long weekend was Carnival, something like Ecuador’s equivalent to Marti Gras. It has the same principle—you’re supposed to party, be loud, and do crazy things before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, but without beads, breasts, or mountains of food. Here, the way to have innocuous fun is to dump water on your friends or ingenuous strangers, and spray espuma (foam) all over them. Last week one of my classmates sprayed blue espuma in my Andinismo teacher’s face. I wish I could see more of that at U of I.
Everyone flocks to the beaches for the long weekend (no school or work on Monday and Tuesday.) Mostly all of the international students I know partied at the beach this weekend. Going to the beach means going to unwind for me, but it can’t be if everyone in Ecuador is at the coast celebrating until 3 am. I also didn’t like the idea of speaking English with my friends most of the time. Instead, being the studious person I am, I spent all day studying the GRE, avoiding going outside because mis hermanos couldn’t wait to douse me with water. April, another girl in Lumbisí, and I endeavored to go to the party in the park that night, but we were too early for the fun. Instead, we ended up talking and I realized that Matt, my friend from college, lived with her family for two weeks. What a surprise it was seeing his face in one of the pictures in her family’s dining room.
A side-note on the GRE—don’t study it while you’re in an exciting foreign country while trying to learn another language. Studying for a test months away, which theoretically I could get a good score on and not even have to study, feels ridiculous. GRE verbal knowledge feels particularly useless, when the vocabulary words are so esoteric, in Ecuador and the U.S. Only my fear of not getting into physical therapy school is fueling my studying. (Pardon the use of GRE words.)
My GRE study guide writes this: “Too many people think of standardized tests as cruel exercises in futility, as the oppressive instruments of a faceless societal machine. People who think this way usually don’t do very well on these tests.” However, usually the people who think that way do so because they’re not good at them. I may be one of those people.
We ended up leaving around 4, and in Ecuadorian style, mi hermano y hermana rode in the truck bed with pillows and blankets as if it were a real bed. Squished up front, I rode with mi papá, mamá, y hermanito. On the way we stopped for biscocho, which are like crusty, buttery bread sticks, just as the program and I did when we went to Otavalo. The town we stopped in is famous for their biscochos; nearly every restaurant makes them. We then stopped in another town that was like a market and carnival rolled into one (minus the rides) and we visited with la hermana de mi mamá, who works at a clothing store. The clothing was tacky, but it seemed popular. They had models walking up and down a runway modeling their clothes outside their store window. Mi papá filmed that, and a lingerie mini-fashion show with his cell phone, which made me feel slightly uncomfortable. My poor hermanos were told to guard the car, and we ended up leaving them for at least an hour. They faithfully stayed in the car the entire time, but were justifiably angry when we got back. Mi hermanito was particularly ornery (which continued through the next few days). However, sometimes I felt his parents could easily placate him. It was almost as if they were asking for it. For instance, he wanted un globo (balloon) and when he started crying his parents said they’d get one for him, but they never did. It would have cost them five cents for some peace, or they could have told him no outright. He’d have a tantrum for a few minutes, but that would be it. Anyway, he ended up peeing in the middle of the street. He continued throwing tantrums and hitting his mom the rest of the way to Ibarra.
We made it to the finca (farm) where mi abuelo y abuela (grandparents) live. The house they live in, with one or two grandchildren (I think), is the one of the smallest house I’ve seen with only a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, and no common indoor area. Made of sloppy brick and a tin roof, each room had a door that led outside. I thought that living in Lumbisí was different, but this was a shock; I couldn’t imagine my friends and family back home feeling comfortable in such a small, untidy, old house with so many people.
That night I ended up talking with one of the primos (cousins) who is about my age. He was eager to talk with me and practice his English. Wanting to know everything about me, he kept asking, “qué más?” (what more [to talk about]?), which was teetering on irksome and flattering.
I slept in a bedroom accompanied by at least 30 flies. I kept imagining flies feasting on the crust in the corners of my eyes, so I found it hard to close them. As usual, various noises of the human and non-human variety woke me up at 7 am, and ate a fairly typical breakfast of an omelet, bread, pancake (kind of), and a sweet oatmeal drink, but the best food was to come.
What the house was lacking was made up by the impressive variety of vegetables and fruit on the farm. Avocados, potatoes, limes, lemons, white carrots, orange-limes (invention of la abuela), blackberries, raspberries, mandarin oranges, oranges, and several interesting fruits that aren’t grown in the U.S. were available for any hungry guest. Mi hermana y primo showed me the grounds in the morning. As we walked, we ate whichever delightful fruit was nearby. Picked straight from the trees, I ate almost a dozen types of fruit. However, as I was reveling in being a vegetarian, the family smoked a whole chancho hanging from a tree. I saw a family member cut the pig head and mi mamá pull apart the bloody meat from the bones. For most the day, mi familia munched on dark brown bits of chancho. When the family members slowly discovered I’m vegetarian, I got incredulous expressions and “Why? But this is so tasty” and “What do you eat?” and “I’m sorry” the entire day.
That night we drank the national beer, Pilsner, which is pretty good for beer and danced outside to traditional songs on the guitar played by an old man with leathery skin (not sure of his relation). It was nice dancing with everyone and not having to fend off unwanted advances. They thought it was funny that it was unlawful for me to drink in the states. One of the uncles said that he heard that Obama is worse than Bush because Obama isn’t following through with what he’s been saying. I told him, yeah, he hasn’t, but I don’t think that deems him worse than Bush, and I don’t think we could get worse than Bush. Maybe the uncle has been watching FOX en español.
The ride there was the most entertainment of the trip. About 10 people rode in the truck bed, moving targets for the people on the streets to throw bombas de agua (water balloons) and buckets of water on them. The occupants’ armor was a plastic sheet and their ammunition were bombas de agua y espuma. I couldn’t stop laughing whenever the kids would gleefully scream when kids and adults alike attacked them with water. I, again, rode in the front and kept rolling my window up whenever we saw suspicious groups of kids on the side of the street. The hot springs were surprisingly touristy, crowded, and similar to a water park, but I seemed to be the only estadounidense.
The pools were a lifeguard’s worst nightmare. Naked babies, people swimming in their underwear, and adults diving into 5 ft. deep water were just some of the things that would never fly at the water park I worked as a lifeguard a couple summers ago. No lifeguards were present, and I saw an ambulance leaving as we were entering, which caused me to wonder how many accidents occur. The only “rule” people followed was bathing before and after swimming. Everyone lathered on soap and shampoo, whereas at the pools in the states most people don’t bother to bathe or simply stand under the showerhead for a moment.
After a few hours we headed home, but stopped to get some sugar cane juice that was pressed by a donkey. The juice tasted too sweet, but I enjoyed watching my family members ride the donkey. At that point, I knew my efforts to get home in time to get my homework done before my class the next day were in vain. I kept hinting to mis padres that I needed to get home to do my homework, and they seemed as if they understood, but we still ended up getting home at 10 pm. I also had no idea we were staying for three days (neither did mi familia) or else I would’ve gotten my homework done before we left.
Packed full of avocadoes, lemons, limes, my family, and some live chickens, we drove up and down the mountains in drizzle and fog, passing cars like it was nothing on our way home. Mi padre told me that when he was younger he used to make the drive in an hour, half the time it takes him now. Thank goodness he drives slower now, but we still passed dozens of cars on the one lane highway. He was the only one wearing a seatbelt, and everyone except me y mi hermano were in the back of the truck, with nothing stopping them from flying out of the back.
I rescheduled my work with the physical therapist to do my homework in the morning, but when I got to school my teacher sent me an email saying that it was canceled. So much for all that worrying. As I was walking home from the bus, a little girl ask me to spell Barack Obama, which is another piece of evidence of my incontrovertible estadounidense appearance. Despite the infestation of flies and not getting back home to do my homework, I am glad I didn’t go to the beach like all of my friends did. I spoke all Spanish for 4 days straight, explored an edible paradise, learned a little bit what life looks like as a poor farmer, celebrated Carnival, and saw what an Ecuadorian vacation spot is like.
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