Neither Brief Nor Frequent!

Ok. So the brief and frequent idea didn’t work so well : ) My oh my. The trouble is when I have free time to write it usually means that not much of interest is going on... and when cool and exciting things are happening it usually means that I’m not sitting around typing on my blog. So I have to wait for things to collect a little bit so I can catch up when I have downtime. But sometimes I wait too long as we have seen (Q.E.D.)
SO I left off after Manta. It turns out Kathy and Rachel are great. They are both very interesting and fun to talk to. Very different. But I like them both. Kathy is a high school biology teacher from British Columbia who is on sabbatical. She enjoys scuba diving (like Paul) and was in the Galapagos on a different volunteer program just earlier this year. Rachel is from Maryland. She graduated from a small college there last year with a bachelor’s in English. She has traveled a lot. Dominican Republic, China, all over Europe, but this is her first time in Ecuador. She doesn’t particularly care for the food here which is a major bummer for her but she’s a good sport about it. I like having four people in the house.
The week after Manta was a tough one. My third grade class were being little monkeys and we hardly got any work done and halfway through the week I came down with stomach troubles. It’s not very uncommon when traveling in a foreign country, especially a developing one, and getting used to the food. But I was surprised it came on so late. Well I opted not to take my medicine because the MOST COMMON side effects include nausea, headache, diarrhea, vomiting, yeast infection, changes in liver function, and pain or discomfort in the abdomen. The instructions also mention that the drug causes increased skin sensibility and exposure to the sun should be minimized or avoided. Well I’m on the equator so the latter wasn’t really an option and the side effects sounded approximately one bajillion times worse than what I already had, and Kathy told me she took the same medicine once while travelling and had really bad side effects that didn’t go away for a month. So I skipped the Cipro and took some Pepto Bismol and dealt with the stomach pain. Also everyone advised me to drink lots of water to keep hydrated. So I did. Even though it tasted awful because the sickness had changed my taste perception... I thought. Nope. I realized last Saturday morning that my water tasted awful because my water bottle was contaminated. Wahwahwahhh. So that was a shitty piece of news. But I got a new water bottle and drank some chamomile tea with oregano in it (it sounds weird but it was actually really good. Try it. It’s magic.) and I immediately started to feel better.
Saturday morning was Día de la Familia. It was a really cool event and I really enjoyed watching the performances, but I still felt fairly lousy and was unable to eat any of the hundreds of cakes that the mamas brought for everyone. That’s ok. I contented myself with some rice and pan de yucca. And I had other things to worry about. My stressful sick week was also my last chance to get the swing/tap dance put together. It was a struggle, just like everything else that week. I had to threaten to cancel it a few times just to keep their attention. But when it came down to the performance the dancers did very well. I was soooo proud of them. I have a video of the dance that I’ll try to post. We’ll see if it works. Speaking of that, I know I haven’t put up any pictures in a while but they take even longer than writing so I haven’t found the time. I have bajillions though so maybe when I get home I’ll get them organized and uploaded.
After Día de la Familia festivities I went to Canoa with the other three volunteers, Vladir and his wife Sandra. It’s the classic picture of a South American beach town... lots of thatched roofs, bamboo, palm trees and hammocks. And of course lots of tourists. On Saturday there were probably more gringos there than Ecuadorians. This makes the town seem really out of place and almost artificial. It’s a great place to go for the weekend though, because the beach is big and beautiful and the malecón (seaside) is literally lined with 15 or 20 little salsoteca/bar places that are great for drinking and dancing and hanging out all night. Bahía conversely has the one club that we went to two weeks ago and NO other night life. So in that way it is nice to have Canoa nearby. I could never stand to live there though. While Bahía’s tourist industry is really depressed, Canoa’s tourist industry is really its only industry. Most of the city is bars, hostels, hostels with bars, and shops for buying souvenirs and trinkets made out of shells. If you are in Canoa and you want a bank, a supermarket, or anything else practical you need to come to Bahía. Many of the people who live there are foreigners who have bought up the hostels and bars and hostels with bars. Actually the guy who served us breakfast on Sunday is from Colorado. He came down to Canoa nine months ago for his honeymoon. Liked it. Bought a bar. And now lives there with his wife. I can’t imagine doing that. I think I would get bored pretty quickly in that town. I like to relax but I can only take it for so long before it stops being relaxing and I need a sense of purpose again.
Anyway, Vladir and Sandra came back to Bahía Saturday night. The four of us volunteers stayed in one of the many hostels. THEY HAVE HOT SHOWERS THERE!!!!! I really wanted to go out dancing Saturday night but I was just exhausted even though my stomach was feeling better. I went to bed around 10:30 but the next day Rachel and I decided to stay an extra night so we could go out dancing. Well. It was unbelievable the change that came over Canoa from Saturday to Sunday. Saturday night we had trouble finding a place to stay, the hostels were full and the streets were crowded. Bars with no walls were flashing with colored lights. They were blasting all different kinds of music trying to compete with other wall-less huts just a few feet away and creating a really cacophonous if lively atmosphere.
Sunday the streets were empty. Absolutely empty except for a few stray dogs and even fewer stray drunks. All of the bars along the malecón were closed. Completely silent and dark. All of the bars off the malecón were closed as well. All the hostels with bars were now just hostels with vacancies and the town was bizarrely quiet. Much quieter than Bahía at night. There was ONE open bar that we found. The Coloradan guy’s bar. There was no dancing there but Rachel and I went in to just hang out for a while and to avoid a drunk guy who was trying to follow us home. It was strange being so completely surrounded by Americans, American music, the English language. It was actually kind of comforting as I had gotten pretty homesick during my tough week. And it was nice for a day to see pancakes, omelettes, and french toast on a breakfast menu. But pretty soon I just felt like, “Wait. I want to go back to Ecuador now. I miss Ecuador.” So we did. Monday morning. We didn’t have classes at Genesis that day because everyone had come in on Saturday for the morning’s events. That is why Rachel and I were able to stay that extra night in Canoa. Alas, we didn’t spend it dancing, but it was fun to hang out on the beach all day and really not to have any obligations or plans for a while. And Rachel is good company.
This week has just flown by. I can’t believe it is already Friday. Monday will be my last day at Genesis. Tuesday I’m going up to Primero de Octubre again to help paint the new classroom, and Wednesday I leave for Guayaquil pretty early in the morning. Dude.
This week has been going much better than the last one though, despite the speed. I feel much better now, my third graders have been well-behaved... relatively, and with the dance performance over my classloads have been a bit lighter everyday. I’m back in my evening dance classes which I missed a lot last week and the other night I actually went down to the beach for a walk and tap danced around the light house for about an hour before bed.
Yesterday I went with Rachel and Kathy and all of our Spanish teachers to the Bahía de Caraquez museum. It was actually really awesome. It’s quite small but very nicely put together and Yajaira was just full of historical information on every single piece in the museum. There is one floor of Ecuadorian art, but there was another power outage just before we got there (the third since I’ve been here) so the art was very difficult to see and therefore not very engaging. Upstairs, on the floor with lots of windows and natural light is an exhibit on the making of the Panama hat. Many people don’t realize that Panama hats are actually very specifically Ecuadorian hats. They are made in a city here in Manabí province called Montecristi. They are called Panama hats because Ecuadorians found that the workers and later the tourists on the canal represented an excellent market and so they went up there to sell the hats. Therefore, for a long time, most Northerners and Europeans who had these hats obtained them in Panama. Anyway the making of the hats is incredibly difficult and laborious work and requires the maker of the hat to be stooped uncomfortably over a stone mold for the majority of the process. One hat can easily take three months to weave. But the result is really beautiful, and the extra fine ones you can fold up and stick in your pocket and when you pull them out again they’ll spring right back into shape.
The other part of the museum I really liked were the rooms and rooms of artifacts from various indigenous tribes of the Manabí area. As I mentioned above, Yajaira’s knowledge of the pottery, weaponry, art and history of all of these different tribes is pretty much encyclopedic. And also the power came back on by the time we got to this part of the museum. For those two reasons, the historical exhibits were really fascinating. Pictures to follow eventually.
Today we were planning to go to Palma Morena again (the club we went to two weeks ago) but I think it’s going to be closed because there is an election this Sunday which means that starting at 12AM tomorrow (midnight tonight) it is illegal for Ecuadorians to consume alcohol. So it looks like we may be hosting a party at the volunteer house instead.
OH YEAH the football game! Or soccer rather. Ecuador beat Argentina this week. I went with the volunteers up to Cerro Seco, an ecological reserve up on the big hill in Bahía, to watch the game with the volunteers there. The head of Cerro Seco is good friends with Vladir so we were all invited. We weren’t told what kind of footwear would be optimal for the trip so we all went in flip-flops and regretted it as we neared the very steep piece of dirt road at the top of the hill. The TV was set up outdoors in a little gazebo-like area with chairs, couch and hammock. Ecuador won 2-0. Fun was had by all. And afterwards we had a little cumbia dance party on the hill. It was a lovely night and we met three of the Cerro Seco volunteers: a very nice couple from Holland and a sweet British girl who was celebrating her birthday that day. We also met a few Ecuadorian university students studying ecology and marine biology who work at the reserve as well.

Gotta go. Spanish class begins. My last one! : (