Cuenca Schedule

So we`re back from the field a day early. You`ll have to wait for those stories, but here`s the description of my normal activities, which I promised:

Our schedule varies a bunch, so it is impossible to capture fully what my typical week in Cuenca is, but hopefully this will begin to give you an idea of what we’re up to in town.

First, upon arrival back in town, there is a rush to take showers and do our laundry. We do all of our laundry by hand in a basin in the courtyard. After this decently lengthy process, we hang our clothes up to dry. Thankfully, there are tons of clotheslines to fit everyone’s clothes.

Of course, food is another necessity (one that we worry more about). We have grocery shopping trips for each length in Cuenca or the field. We try to buy everything that we can, mainly fruits and vegetables, from the local markets. We have now ventured far enough to buy a chicken from one of the meat stalls, but typically, we use beans as our source of protein. So far, we have used two markets. The one that we found recently has lunch vendors on the top floor, and we’ve had a couple of delicious lunches there. A fish soup once, and potatoes the other time. Mmmmm…. Most of our bread, including rolls, baguettes and regular loaves, comes from local panderias. Then, other basics like cheese, olives, tea, peanut butter, spices, and dried fruit are bought at Cuenca’s one supermarket, SuperMaxi.

As far as preparing the food, when we’re in town we have a rotation wheel, so that we alternate between chef, sous chef, dishes, counter, and being off at dinner time. Usually everyone makes there own breakfast and lunch, but sometimes someone will make pancakes for all or fry up a couple of plantains. We also occasionally eat out for dinner. This is more likely if we’ve been out all day and haven’t had a chance to start cooking by 6:00 pm. So far, we’ve gone out for Ecuadorian, Colombian, and chifa (Chinese).

We typically cram a number of classes in when we’re in town. Two of our instructors, Katherine and Theresa, live in Cuenca, so it is easiest to have their classes then. Also, we’ll have a number of Con Bio and Natural History lessons, since we have a bit more time. Usually, we’ve had one or two classes every day or two, but it varies a fair amount.

Every couple of days, we either have a morning or afternoon off. Some of these are recommended reading times, in which case, I usually walk down our street to the river and sit in the park to read. Elizabeth and I have also gone into town and bought juice (yay for mora!) and bread from a panderia, and then sat there doing our reading for a couple of hours.

Sometimes, we have free time without pressing readings. Usually, we head into town, check email and spend some time on the internet checking the news, and then find a new area to explore. Elizabeth and I have spent a day wandering craft markets and trying pan de yuca at a number of restaurants.

One other pattern in my schedule is Ecuadorian middle-aged woman workout. Coral discovered this, and Elizabeth and I decided that we had to try it, too. It is in the park down the river from our house and starts at 7:00am M-F and 7:30am on the weekends and lasts an hour. Basically, the workout is a combination of aerobics and salsa set to old Latin American and US pop music (e.g. Volverte a Ver, Toxic, and Thriller). In fact, I think that it would be a great Ebony dance. It isn’t necessarily a great source of exercise, but it is hilarious and a good way to wake up. Plus, it only costs a quarter. After the workout, we stop by a vendor to buy hot aloe drink. We aren’t entirely sure what all is in it, but it includes aloe, black tea, honey and flaxseed. We looked up consuming aloe, and it is supposed to be incredibly healthy and good for the immune system, so we fill really good about waking up to exercise and drink aloe. However, we only go to the class every few days because a) we like our sleep and b) occasionally we have other morning appointments or class before 9.

Speaking of sleep, we go to bed slightly later here than in the field, but I’m still usually asleep by 10:30. I’ve realized that I really do enjoy going to bed somewhere from 10:00 to 10:30 pm and waking up between 6:45 and 7:30 am. It’s quite nice.

We also take some day long adventures as a group from Cuenca. Ingapirca is one example. Also, we will visit Cajas National Park soon.

Futbol

On Saturday, everyone in Cuenca was wearing yellow in preparation for the world cup quals between Ecuador and Uraguay. We decided that we needed to participate, too.

Elizabeth, Coral, and I bought Ecuador jerserys, and then all six of us went to a sports bar to watch the game. It was hilarious cheering every time Ecuador had a shot on goal, especially as one of the few gringos and one of the few females in the bar. Also, everyone in the streets were yelling about the game. There was almost no traffic with everyone watching TV. The game was pretty good, but Ecuador ended up losing 1-2 in the second overtime.

Afterwards, we went out to dinner at a chifa (Chinese restaurant). It was a bit hard understand the Chinese waitresses speak Spanish, but then we realized that their Spanish is still probably better than ours. Oh well! The food did taste pretty good and helped us feel better about Ecuador´s lost.

The long awaited description of our house in Cuenca...

The house is beautiful! In fact, I’ve pretty much decided that it is ideal, though larger than I’d ever need.

To begin with, there are three floors. The first opens into a very open living room/dining room area with wooden floors. It isn’t really furnished but we have a table with chairs, a bookshelf, a mattress for sitting, and four poster sized maps. The openness also lends itself to practicing handstands.

The first floor also has the bathroom and kitchen. The kitchen is decently spacious (much better than Goodhue!) with a gas stove but no oven. We also keep bottled water for drinking there. The one thing about the bathroom is that the shower is rather creepy. It´s an electric shower, but the switch to turn on the heater is inside the shower and there are wires all around. It just seems to be the perfect way to be shocked.

The second floor has Jesse and Coral’s rooms and a small outdoors balcony. (Jesse’s room has an awesome mural of dolphins.) We usually watch movies in the open area of this floor. This week, we actually watched three very different movies. (Baraka was my favorite.) This floor also overlooks the first floor, and along the staircase, there are trenches were you are supposed to plant flowers. We all agree that it would be beautiful with filled with plants.

There is only a small, skinny staircase leading to the third floor where the students live. There is one large room, which Elizabeth and I share. Since this is the attic, the ceiling slopes downward, so we both have our mattresses in corners with the ceiling barely above us. It’s cozy. We also have a window looking out over Cuenca. One of the greatest features of our room is hammock hooks! We immediately wanted a hammock and ended up buying a rainbow one in the market downtown. It really brightens up the room.

The rest of the third floor is split into two sections by our room. The guys sleep on one side, and the other has the communal bookshelf and mattresses for hanging out. This floor also looks over the other floors, and right above the staircase is a huge skylight. My favorite part of this house is how well it uses natural light. This skylight floods most of the house with light, and downstairs, a number of the walls are simply windows, so that in the day, we don’t need to turn on the lights. I love it!

The house is also right next to our landowner`s, and there is a courtyard between the two where Luna, our neighbor´s dog, lives. We also do our laundry here. We have a nice backyard which overlooks Cuenca. We´re on the side of a hill, so the view is pretty good.

Also, last night we added a tree climbing rope to the house. We needed to test it before our adventure tomorrow, so we tied it off on the third floor and then practiced climbing inside. Additionally, Elizabeth used to do web in the circus, so she taught us a couple of the basic holds. Yay for circus tricks!

I´ll try to post about my normal schedule in Cuenca next time we´re in town. (Probably about a week.)

Ingapirca

On Wednesday, we visited Ingapirca, the largest Incan ruins in Ecuador. We took a 2 ½ hour bus trip there, which was good for reading and watching the scenery, and arrived shortly before lunch time.

When we arrived, we were asked if we wanted a guided tour in English or Spanish. We decided to be a bit more adventurous and had our tour in Spanish, taking turns translating for Alex, who is less familiar with the language.

Just past the entrance were a number of llamas grazing. Jesse tried to take a picture of them, but ended up getting spit on one from 1 ½ meters away!

The first part of Ingapirca is actually Cañari ruins, where they had a temple to the moon. It also includes a grave which was excavated in the 1960s. They also had a rock with 28 holes, which was used as a lunar calendar.

The Incan part ironically enough was also celestial, a temple to the sun. It was interesting to see how the Incan and Cañari ruins compared. While the Cañari used smooth rocks from the river, the Incan cut their blocks to be amazingly rectangular. In fact, for their temple, they didn’t use mortar because the stones fit together so perfectly.

After the tour, we went on a nearby short hike, where we saw a natural stone formation that looks like a head and is called the face of all Incans.

We then took the bus back to Cuenca, where we decided to go out for Colombian, rather than cooking after a long day.

Post-Its

As many of you know, I like to collect random quotes that people say and put them on post-it notes on my door. Unfortunately, that doesn´t really work when I don´t have a regular door or strong supply of post-its. Thus, here is a collection of the humerous conversations we´ve had so far for your enjoyment.

“It’s the beginning of the dry season.”

“So we might not see any torrential downpours?”

“Oh no, I’m sure we will.”

“Well, Tim’s from Washington.”

“Do you know where the ____ is?”

“Mexico, I think.”

“Close. China.”

“Isn’t that in BC?”

“Close. Phillipines.”

“Do you even know where that is? No! Eastern China!”

“People often call others nonchalant but never chalant.”

“Ecuador is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.”

“Yeah, it is the most in just about everything.”

“But the North Pole is such a hot spot for polar bears.”

“¿Tiene fibre?...No, no, fiber! ¿Tiene fibra?”

“Don’t use drugs, and don’t use white-out.”

“I thought Harry Potter was a girl.”

JFGI- Just F-ing Google It

"What can I do to help?"

“Well, you could mop the kitchen.” (It has a dirt floor.)

“Coral, not everything is rite in the rain.”

“Maybe there will be a street sign up ahead.”

“What language calls fat gordesa? That sounds awful. But lipids, I could go for those.”

“28% iron! I’m vegetarian so I should eat a ton of this chocolate.”

Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?

Jesse is a huge geography nerd, so on the second day of being in Ecuador, we started geography quizzes. He asks us questions, and then we try to trick him. Pretty much anything goes as far as political and physical geography. Some questions have been the capital of Suriname, the driest desert in the world, location of New Caledonia, and to name two rivers on every continent except for Antarctica. Right now, I know more world capitals than I ever have before (and in 7th grade, I knew North America, South America, Europe and Asia).

Anyways, I would like your help in coming up with a question that might stump Jesse. So if you have a good geography fact, comment and let me know.

All Roads Lead to Rumi Loma

Wow, it has been quite a week. I am sure that I’ve forgotten a lot of the good stories, but here goes my attempt to recount the week.

On Saturday, we woke early to finish packing by 9, when Stu and his family were supposed to arrive. Stu is an American who bought a fair amount of paramo and cloud forest land in the 70s and has since expanded. In 2001, he invited Round River to work on conservation there, so our home for the week was on his land. We had been warned that when Stu is with his family, they are never on time, so we weren’t surprised when they didn’t arrive until 9:30.

Stu’s family is so cute! His wife Patricia is Ecuadorian and they have three wonderful children. Peter is the oldest at 6 and is hardcore. He mountain bikes and has gone on zip lines through cloud forest. Jacob is 4 and always wears his batman cape. I have no idea how it is not in shreds. Jacob and he did bike part of the way to camp, so he is following in his brother’s footsteps. They both have so much energy! Nadine is only 2 ½ and loves horses, as in her first word in the morning was “caballo.” Despite her age, she already helps set up tents by staking them. She calls her brothers na-no, Quechua for brother, and they call her na-na.

Part of the adventure of getting to Rumi Loma, our camp, was Big Blue, our Toyota Sienna that doesn’t even have power steering and regularly breaks down. Also, one thing that you quickly learn in Ecuador (or slowly, since it is instinctive) is not to check for seat belts. The driver probably has one, but no one else will. Combine this with a very, very bumpy, curvy road, and we started planning on selling our trip to an amusement park to be a roller coaster. Big Blue started having trouble near the edge of Stu’s land, and eventually the accelerator stopped working at the bottom of a large hill about a mile and a half from Stu’s house, which is about half a mile from our camp. Thankfully, Stu had his truck, so we all piled onto the back. I had to hold onto a very squirmy Peter who really wanted to jump out of the truck. Then, we carried our stuff to Rumi Loma, which we would have had to do no matter what. Thankfully, Raoul, an Ecuadorian who works for Stu, carried most of our food there by horse, so we had less to carry.

Rumi Loma, our camp, has four main buildings and a small bathroom. The first is the kitchen and dining/communal area where we spent much of our time inside. Then, the other three had beds and desks for all of us. All of the buildings were made out of pines and bunch grass.

On Sunday, we went on a hike with Stu, Peter and Jacob. We started in the paramo next to Rumi Loma. Paramo is an interesting landscape. As Alex said, it looks dry despite being incredibly damp. Bunch grass, the dominant species in the paramo, is always about 60-70% dead to facilitate fire, so it looks dry although it isn’t. Puya is another of the dominant species and is harder to describe, but it flowers once in its life, at the very end. It is also one of the Andean bears’ primary food sources. The huge stalk in the middle of the photo is a puya in flower and is just to the left of a puya yet to bloom, which is to the left of a dead puya. Lots and lots of puya!

From the paramo, we hiked down to a pine forest. In the 80s, the Ecuadorian government gave away a lot of pines, although they aren’t native. Stu planted some but spaced them far enough a part to allow native species to grow in the undergrowth. Now, he wants to get rid of the pines let the other forest take over.

Then, we hiked down through the cloud forest. This part was an adventure. It involved bushwhacking our way through nachran (a grass that is twice as tall as me) and duda (a type of bamboo, and bamboo is difficult to push your way through). At other points, we had to crawl through animal trails. It completely fit my vision of a jungle, except for the temperature, which was only in the high 60s. There were tall trees that harbored other plants, including orchids.

It was quite a long day before we returned to camp. That night, we began our pattern of doing our homework and readings at the dinner table using candles for light, while Jesse and Coral read as well. We also fell into the habit of playing with the wax and watching the poor moths fly into the flames. It was quite ironic that we were using candles in a building made of grass but can’t have candles in most college dorms, which are resistant to fire.

The next morning, it was pouring rain, so we spent the majority of it indoors having class, except for an hour hike up the mountain to practice taking notes for our Grinnell journals. It continued to pour for the next couple of days, and we became quite good friends with our rain boots and rain gear.

On Tuesday afternoon, to practice our GPS and compass skills, we had a treasure hunt. I found the prize first! Chocolate and a geography question! (more about the geography later…) But the real fun began when we got back to camp because we had to draw pirate maps of our path to the treasure. We got pretty creative adding in monsters, alliterative names, and burning the edges of our maps.

Also on Tuesday, Coral hiked back to Big Blue and got help from Patricio, a local who used to be a mechanic, and they got Big Blue back running, but it was still too muddy to get Big Blue back up the hill.

We had hoped to go on a full day hike on Thursday, but it was still misting and visibility was way down when we woke up. Thankfully, it cleared up by lunch, and in the afternoon, we explored the pines and the cloud forest some more, collecting the mushrooms that we knew weren’t poisonous for dinner. We saw a number of frogs, mainly Pristimantis riveti. Also, the rain had brought out more growth, and we saw three wild orchids in blossom.


On Friday, we were able to go on a 6 mile hike to see a Canari burial ground. In fact, about half the hike followed an ancient Canari road across the ridges. At one point in the hike, we saw a Great Horned Owl, a Shining Sunbeam hummingbird and six parrots within 25 m of each other. They were beautiful!

On the way back, Jesse, Coral, Tim and Elizabeth went to try to get Big Blue up the hill while Alex and I prepared dinner. They had to use chains, plywood, a shovel, and lots of pushing to get Big Blue up. Unfortunately, it meant that we had even farther to carry all of our stuff on Saturday, since Stu and his truck had already left. And although we had packed lightly, we hadn´t packed for backpacking.

Thankfully, the way home involved no breaking down, just a number of wrong turns and once ending up the wrong way on a one way street. Oops!

Since getting back, we´ve mainly been occupied with laundry and doing the readings for our class at 4 today. What a difference it is to have clean clothes! We haven´t done our grocery shopping for the week yet, but we picked up the three necessities we go through the fastest: guava jam, green olives, and chocolate. Elizabeth and I are now tackling our huge numbers of emails before heading to class.