It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

But it's not Superman.

It's Jason flying off his bike at 20 miles per hour...  Unfortunately gravity took hold of me and I made a crash landing on the dirt trail.  But I'm ok (mas o menos).  Scraped up forearms, scraped up and bruised knees, and a scraped up stomach. (All good excuses to stay home yesterday and watch movies all day.)

This past weekend about 10 other bikers and I headed to Zapotillo in the far southwestern corner of Ecuador for a mountain bike trip from the town of Pindal to Zapotillo, which unbeknownst to me until about 30 minutes before the start was actually a race.  The map said that the route was 50 km, but using my GPS it actually turned out to be closer to 70 km!  I flew off the bike after hitting a patch of sand on a downhill about 10 km into the journey, and then after walking it off I was able to go about another 30 km before having to be carried to the end in a van.  I wasn't alone though... three others shared the van with me, one of which was a marathon runner that told me he's never had to quit a race before in his life and this was the first one.  It was super tough and the initial ascent of over 1000 ft really tires you out for the rest of the route which consists of lots of little uphill portions which wear you out over and over again as time goes on.  Over the course of the route, the total climb is about 4300 feet! Below is an elevation profile of the route.

The route passes through several tiny towns where kids and parents were out sitting on fences, cheering people on and handing out bananas to passing cyclists.  I have to say, I was definitely the oddball in the group, since as Mr. Fluorescent would pass little kids would be like, "Look mommy, a gringo!".  When I stopped for the medic to wash out my wounds, 'tween' girls were standing around taking pictures of me with their cell phone cameras like I was from another planet!  It was quite the experience, since in the city of Loja there are plenty of other gringos so I'm not that much of a novelty. :)

The race was part of Zapotillo's fiestas (every town in Ecuador has fiestas for between a week and month every year to celebrate the town's foundation) and it's purpose was to raise awareness of the Bosque Seco (Dry Forest) ecosystem that exists in the area and the importance of protecting it.  (There are only two or three other dry forests like this in the world.) There was a big trophy and medal ceremony at the end.  I got third place in the "Master's" Category (even though only 1 of the 4 people in the Master's group actually finished the race), and then the mayor treated us all to a traditional meal of Chivo al Hueco, which was delicious.  Chivos, or goats, are about the only animal that can survive in this super dry region so it's about the only meat that people eat here.  The chivo is seasoned and then placed in a hole in the ground with hot coals, buried and left to sit for a few hours.  Then it's dug out and served.  Super tender and delicious.

The worse part of the whole adventure was not the accident, but the 7 hour midnight to 7am bus ride back to Loja from Zapotillo.  I was still covered in dirt from the race, my leg and arm was throbbing, and the whole bus smelled like rotten feet!  Needless to say, my own shower and bed felt really good after the whole journey.  Hopefully I'll be back on the bike in another week or two.

Arctangents & A Miniature Queen

Growing up, my sister Elyse would often refer to me in not so favorable terms. “Uch… you’re such a nerd Jason,” she’d say in a typical Long Island accent.  Well after this post, I’m sad to say that I think I may have provided enough evidence to support that claim.

For the past several weeks I’ve been building all my own living room furniture since the Peace Corps doesn’t exactly provide a six-figure salary (or even five-figures for that matter).  Just 4 blocks from my apartment there’s a place called Placa Centro, a Chilean company that sells big sheets of particleboard covered with a wood-looking finish just like the furniture you can buy at Ikea.  Hmm.. I thought.  Could I build an entire living room from 2.5 meter by 2 meter particleboard sheets? Of course!  So, like a good nerd I broke out some 3D modeling software and started to design.  I measured the heights of some chairs in my office and a sofa at a friend’s house and even found out that through a lot of research, Herman Miller, the company that designed the famous $700 mesh-backed Aeron office chair, determined that the most comfortable seatback angle is 25 degrees.  After about a week (and after several passionate uses of the arctangent function to determine the best locations to mount the seatbacks), I had models of a chair, a side table, a coffee table, and – most challenging – a working futon, all made from 1.8 centimeter thick particleboard (a tad less than 3/4 inch for those of you still stuck in the Stone Ages).  I then broke apart all the models to create a list of all the pieces I’d need to build all the furniture.  At Placa Centro, you give the list to a woman at a computer, and after entering all the dimensions the computer optimizes the layout of the cuts on the board to minimize the amount of wasted wood.  The computer then prints out a diagram of the board with all the cuts on it, which then gets passed on to the guys that operate a big wall saw.  Here, they cut the board into all the rectangular pieces you need for free.  They’ll even glue a wood-looking border on the sides of the pieces you request so you don’t see the particleboard innards.   Most people get a few big cuts, so I think the guys cutting the boards wanted to kill me when they saw my list of lots of tiny cuts. Usually it takes an hour or two… I was told to come back tomorrow by a guy clenching his jaw and shaking his head back and forth. :)  The next day I headed back there and immediately spotted my order resembling a giant-sized pile of cards during a game of 52-card pickup.  Back at home I began the construction process, and three weeks later after installing well over 300 screws I had my very own living room.  I even used the scrap wood from my order to build a floor lamp complete with a 99-cent paper shade supported by 4 strings.  Coming soon to an Ikea near you… the latest line of flat-pack furniture by Kreiselman Designs.  There may be an ounce or two of dork in me, but for $150 I’ve got a pretty damn cool living room!  Check out the pics at the bottom of this post.

Besides my venture into the world of furniture-making, this past week was a BIG one for Loja.  All the offices closed at noon on Wednesday and many people didn’t come to work at all.  Why? Because The Queen was coming.  Not the type of queen you typically think of though.  This one’s less than 3 feet tall, made out of wood and lives in a glass box.  She’s the Queen of Cisne, or La Reina del Cisne. All throughout the province of Loja in southern Ecuador, you see stickers, shrines, pendants, figurines, and business names all dedicated to this Virgin Queen.  (I’d imagine it would be pretty hard for her to have sex trapped in her little glass box.)  Even the stadium here is called Estadio Reina del Cisne. Most of the year she sits in the town of El Cisne about 45 miles from Loja in an enormous, Gothic-style church, but from August 16 – 20 she’s carried from El Cisne to Loja by an enormous procession of 500,000 people (yes, half a million people!) from southern Ecuador and northern Peru.  This is by far the largest religious procession in the country.  According to local lore, the ancestors of the people in this area made the long and difficult journey to Quito in the late 16th century to find a fitting religious statue.  They returned in 1594 with the carving of La Reina del Cisne, and since then she’s been the ‘Queen’ of the people here. (Thank you ‘Lonely Planet’ for filling in the blanks in this story!) When she finally arrives in Loja, there’s a lot of fanfare to say the least.  Dancing troupes, military salutes, marching bands, fireworks, thousands of rose petals released from balconies, doves released from paper mache bells, a concert and a huge outdoor mass on the main plaza in the city.  I didn’t do the whole 3 day walk, but I did walk against “traffic” for an hour or so and then turned around and walked with everyone else back to Loja, which was good enough for me to get a feel for it!  The number of people walking was astounding and there were tons of people selling everything from sunglasses and umbrellas to freshly grilled pork skin and bags of cotton candy, each stuffed with a fake $100 bill.  It was definitely something to see!  On November 1st, the whole process is repeated in reverse and the Reina will rest in El Cisne again until the following August.

 Enjoy the pictures below and as usual click a few times to make them bigger.  Then click “Slideshow” to view them full screen.

Unshackled

For the first three months of service, the Peace Corps wants you to stay in your site (more or less) and become familiar with the town and its people.  So, as soon as we hit the 3-month mark, nearly half of my group converged at Mompiche Beach in the province of Esmeraldas in northern Ecuador for a little break from our sites.  The place is very “tranquilo” as they would say here, consisting of two sand streets and a handful of open-air bars and restaurants serving about 40 different types of batidos, or fresh-squeezed juices mixed with ice and milk, and all kinds of seafood that the local fisherman pull out of the Pacific Ocean early each morning.  The coast of Ecuador in general is a lot more laid back than the Sierra, or mountain areas, where the people tend to be a bit more conservative (and work a lot more!).  It was a nice change from the “big city” life in Loja.  There aren’t many places to stay at the beach, but we lucked out and were able to get a big thatched roof cabana that was able to fit a bunch of us.  There’s not much to do here except relax, which we didn’t have any problem with!  A few of us arrived early and paid some fisherman to take us out to an island that we had heard about.  After about 30 minutes of flying (literally) over some huge swells we arrived at the island which didn’t really have much to offer except an unbelievably wide beach, lots of birds and tons of giant-sized sand dollars covering the sand.  We hung out here and talked with the super-friendly fisherman for an hour or two, and then headed back to Mompiche. On the way back we stopped to watch some surfers do their thing for a while which was pretty impressive.  Mompiche is known to have some of the best/longest surfing waves in the world, and a bunch of international surfing competitions have taken place in the area.  Back at Mompiche, we didn’t do much but swing in the hammock, sit around a campfire, wade in the ocean and sip Caipiriñas at the bar.  Speaking of which, the electricity here isn’t too reliable!  We lost power about 3 times during the weekend and one night at the bar, the blender wasn’t working so well so the bartender proceeded to unscrew the two light bulbs and turn off the CD player so that more juice could flow to the blender!  (and it worked!)  One of the coolest parts about the beach was going into the ocean at night.  There are lots of tiny organisms called bioluminescent dinoflagelettes (say that 10 times fast) in the water here, and whenever you swing your arms through the water they light up like little stars.  Very neat!  There’s also a black sand beach within a 20-minute walk from Mompiche with silky smooth pitch black sand that was pretty cool too.

After 3 relaxing days at the beach I decided to check out two other volunteer’s sites in northern Ecuador.  The journey started with a bus from Mompiche to Atacames, a bigger city on the coast a bit north of Mompiche.  The ride is only an hour and a half, but of course the bus driver and his ayudante (or helper that does everything from collecting the fare to hanging outside the bus and washing the windshield with powdered laundry detergent and his hand) had to stop for a sit-down lunch mid-way through.  Why they couldn’t wait the 45 minutes to have lunch in Atacames is beyond me!  From Atacames, we were able to hop on a chartered bus to the city of Ibarra that would get us there in 6 hours instead of 8 on the regular bus.  The only catch was that the five of us heading that direction couldn’t sit in the regular seats with the folks that chartered the bus.  Instead we were relegated to the front compartment with the driver and his ayudante, Pepe, who proved to be quite the character and liked hanging out the door train-conductor-“All Aboard!”-style and informing us of the areas where it was and wasn’t safe for the bus to stop for us to take a leak on the side of the road.  Ari and I sat on the sweltering seats above the engine compartment, while Chris manned the dashboard and Shelley and Gaby sat on the floor on the top step.  And of course the people that chartered the bus had to stop at every roadside stand selling everything from mamacita's coconut candies to strings of grapefruits in yard-long mesh bags. When we finally made it to Ibarra, we ended up spending the night at another volunteer’s house before continuing on our way.  In the morning, Ari and I continued further north to her site in the province of Carchi, adjacent to the Colombian border.  This was another nice 4-hour bus ride, but at least we had seats this time around!  Ari’s site is located at the end of a painfully bumpy dirt road that any bus driver in the States would refuse to drive on.  The Ecuadorian bus driver, however, navigated the hair-pin turns with streams running across the road with ease.  Ari’s village is an Afro-Ecuadorian community of a few hundred people with a nearly perfect climate.  I think my initial reaction to the site was, “Wow this is a real Peace Corps site.”  It couldn’t be more different from Loja.  All that was there were a few houses, a volleyball court, an overgrown soccer field, and a tienda selling a few drinks and snacks that opened a month or two earlier.  Ari’s host family’s house was rustic to say the least, complete with newspaper wallpaper.  There was electricity but the only running water was an outdoor pipe diverted from the river for washing dishes and clothing.  The kitchen looked like something out of colonial times in the US with a wood burning fire inside for cooking and walls coated with black soot.  It was a gathering place, not just for Ari and the family, but for the three dogs, one cat, two ducks, and the plethora of chickens and chicks that roamed the property.  Thankfully the pig had to stay in his pen outside.  Armadillos are pretty common here and outside on the rafters of the porch was the family’s armadillo shell collection from all the ones that they’ve eaten recently.  The difference between this place and my host mom’s “palace” in Loja was shocking.  As rustic as the place was though, it was kind of nice to live the “simple country life” for two days.  All the kids were a ton of fun (and were pleading with me to stay another day… I think I gave them too much attention since they were a novelty and Ari was sick of them already!). 

After two nights in the world’s most uncomfortable bed, I headed 4 hours back to Ibarra, another hour to Cotacachi and then another half hour to Shelley’s site.  Her site is a small farming community in the mountains with neat views of the Imbabura volcano.  Many of the people at her site speak Kichwaa, which was/is the language spoken in the Andes long before the Spaniards arrived.  Most of the women and girls dress in traditional clothing as well.  I only had time for an hour or so here, so I just got a quick tour of the town and her house, which like Ari’s is also pretty rustic compared with my posh Loja life!  

From here, I really wanted to spend some more time on a bus so I headed back to Cotacachi, on to Otavallo (one hour) and then to my old host family’s house in Cayambe (1.5 hours).  It was good to see them and this was the first time I felt that my Spanish had improved tremendously.  When I left there three months ago I could still only understand about 50% of what was going on.  Now I think it was up to 80 or 90%! 

After a night in Cayambe, I headed back to Quito (2 hours) and then toured around the city for a few hours (the center of which is a United Nations World Heritage Site) before heading back to Loja on the always-enjoyable 13 hour overnight bus ride (which turned into 14 hours because of the landslide we hit along the way that some of the bus/truck drivers collectively shoveled a path through so that vehicles could pass).   It was awesome to see some other parts of the country and a bunch of other volunteers from my group, but I was pretty happy to be back in my own bed after the countless hours of bussing watching dubbed jackie chan and steven segal movies and listening to hours and hours of bachata music about everlasting love and aching "corazoncitos" (little hearts). And just remember, next time your toaster-oven isn’t working too well, all you need to do is unscrew a few light bulbs and all your problems will be solved! 

Enjoy the pics below and as usual click a few times to enlarge.  Then click “slideshow” for the full screen pics.

Jungle Juice and Cheese Doodles

To protect the sort-of-innocent, some information in this blog post has been modified...

Two weekends ago, my host mom invited another Peace Corps volunteer and me to an Inti Raymi ceremony to celebrate the summer solstice. I had no idea what I was getting myself into! Because the Incans were sun worshippers, the summer solstice is a pretty huge affair. I thought it was going to be a big parade/festival type event, but it turned out that there were only 8 of us plus a shaman.  The ceremony started at 9:30PM when all of us crossed a gushing river on the sketchiest suspension bridge I've ever seen and hiked up the side of a mountain to a small cleared area. The shaman had set up a a small circular seating area and in the center was a firepit with hot coals arranged in all sorts of patterns.  North, south, east and west were marked off around the circle and the shaman sat on a ceremonial lion-shaped stool in front of the fire. In front of him was a blanket on top of which he had laid out all kinds of rocks, crystals, herbs, powders, drums, bells, flowers, and bottles of interesting looking liquids, all of which were used at some point during the night.  We got up to the cleared area at about 10:30PM and the ceremony lasted until 10AM!!! Unfortunately pictures were not allowed.  A (very) abridged list of events if as follows:

• 1" diameter tobacco pipes hand rolled in corn husks passed around the circle all night long
  
• Drinking a thick green bitter drink called San Pedro made from a cactus in the area that's supposed to cause hallucinations and allow you to talk to the gods (my friend and I decided to sit out on this one)
  
• Having to listen and watch everyone else in the circle gagging and vomiting from the hallucinogenic drink that apparently affected them quite a bit
  
• The shaman drinking firewater (100 proof) mixed with jungle herbs and then walking around the circle and spraying it out of his mouth all over us
  
• Having to see my mom sit on a ocelot skin in front of the fire, lift up her shirt exposing everything and then watch the shaman encircle her with burning branches. This was followed by more alcohol mouth spraying on her stomach, and body slapping with branches and grasses.... all in an attempt to cure her gastritis.
  
• Watching others pour alcohol mixed with tobacco juice into their nostrils from a conch shell and then gagging and puking some more to 'cleanse' themselves (we politely declined, once again)
  
• Burning corn, fruit, and flowers as an offering to the gods
  
• Being pelted with colored sprinkles in the morning
  
• Laughing uncontrollably after being awake for 28 hours when I saw a white carnation in the back pocket of my friend's jeans and thought she was wearing a bunny costume
  
• Sneaking a banana and cheese doodles out of my backpack at 3AM and trying not to crinkle the bag so the shaman wouldn't scold me
  
• Being asked to return to my "place" in the circle when I went to stand on the other side of the fire to avoid passing out from excessive smoke inhalation
  
• Lots of drum banging, bell ringing, conch horn blowing, and chanting
  
• Freezing my ass off since it was drizzling half the night
  
• Getting 6 mosquito bites on my forehead
  

The guest list only made this event even more interesting:

• One Shaman, age approx 40, fond of hand rolled tobacco
  
• Two Ecuadorians, mid-20's, nearly mute
  
• One host mom, age 60, needs to reduce white rice and cheese intake and increase fiber consumption
  
• One 6'5" skinny German guy, age approx 58, claimed that the Finnish are so drunk that they fall over while pushing their kids in strollers
  
• One English guy, age aprox 50, did way too much acid and shrooms in his life and now speech is permanently slurred. chronic chain smoker coughing up phlegm all night long
  
• Wife of English guy, age approx 50, ex-PeaceCorps volunteer, chain smoker, strong believer in the power of the woman
  
• Two Peace Corps volunteers, age 23 and 28, freaked out
  

The next ceremony is for the fall equinox... not sure if I'll make it to that one!

Aside from this experience I've decided to move out of my host mom's house and get my own place.  After looking at about 10 places I finally came across a good one.  It is by far the strangest building I've ever seen in my life, complete with robot statues in the fence, an observatory on the roof, lighting bolt doors, and hexagon-shaped windows.  I'll probably be moving over there this weekend and I'll let you know if there's an alien dissection room in the basement.  A few pics are below.  Hope everyone is doing well!

The Spaceship

Inside

The View From My Hexa-Window