CARNAVAL!

It’s been a week, and a lot of really important stuff has happened. At least, I think it has. I don’t know exactly what these things were, though, because I’ve been completely cut off from everything else in the world since Saturday morning. Since it’s really hard to comb the archives of MSNBC, the Plain Dealer or the Akron Beacon Journal (or ESPN, Sports Illustrated or MLB.com) for news that’s 4 or 5 days old, here’s the deal: you tell me what I missed since Friday evening, and I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing since last Wednesday. Deal?

For the record, I have less than a month left here in la Republica del Ecuador.

Salsa lessons last Thursday were a blast. Lisa and I were partners, and I feel it’s safe to say we quickly mastered the salsa… or at least what we were taught, which wasn’t much. But we can do the same moves over and over like PROFESSIONALS, baby. After the lesson was over, the instructor said that if anyone was interested in taking some more salsa lessons, she would love to try to work us into her schedule. About twelve of us (including Lisa and me—you can’t break up such good dance partners) took her up on her offer and signed up for a Tuesday slot. Not gonna lie, I’m pretty excited.

Last Friday, I received my grade for my final presentation in Spanish 302 and my final grade in the class. Despite my worrying about whether I even had close to 15 minutes of material (that was the minimum), I was able to talk for 20... and to my surprise, I got a perfect score! Of course, this feat was matched by—who else?—Lisa Brown, but that’s only fitting. We’ve been in tight competition for Spanish grades since our junior year of high school, so why would we stop now? Spanish 395 started Thursday, but due to the trip to the Amazon, I’ve only had three days of classes so far, so I’m still trying to get a feel for the class. It will be interesting; we will get to take some trips as a class to talk to people about current Ecuadorian issues (we took a trip to a rose plantation today), and we’ll get to watch some movies that also deal with issues affecting Latin America today (we already watched Maria Full of Grace, about drug trafficking and migration). It may get hard with writing assignments, but it shouldn’t be too bad.

Now for the Amazon. To be honest, it was not quite what I was expecting--there were no incredibly huge trees, no canopy, no diverse ecosystem of all sorts of exotic animals (at least, not that we could see). We were in the Amazon, but towards the edge; the “rainforest” as we think of it (or at least as I think of it) does not extend as far west into Ecuador as where we were staying. Regardless, the Amazon Rainforest is the Amazon Rainforest, and I’ll always be able to say I was there, even if I wasn’t as far in as I would have liked.

From Saturday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon, we were staying in a resort called La Casa del Suizo, built on the banks of the Napo River, surrounded by our part of the Amazon. It was a nice resort, but the activities they led for us were better. Sunday afternoon we took large motorized canoes about 25 minutes downriver (and up another one) to get to the nature preserve/animal sanctuary, where we saw all sorts of beautiful birds, small jungle cats, reptiles.... and, most importantly, monkeys. Cooler than the monkeys in the cages, though, was the one truly wild monkey we saw from the boat going to the preserve, and the two loose formerly domestic monkeys that live at the preserve. Once we finished our tour of the animal sanctuary, these two monkeys slowly came down from the trees towards our group, until they were both clowning around on the ground amongst us, and one started climbing on one of the guys in our group and hanging from his arm. Since they’re not allowed to touch humans, he got pulled off and scolded by one of the staff members, and then promptly proceeded to curl up on a bench and pout. There’s no doubt in my mind that this monkey was actually pouting. His friend, meanwhile, was acting up for the camera. Hundreds of close range monkey pictures later (twenty-five of which are mine)...

We left for the boats, which took us even further upriver, to a small beach where we got out and unloaded innertubes. We got to tube down this river, which was about half calm, half “rapids” (meaning slightly faster and choppy), and it was SWEET. Monday we boated up the river to an isolated little shore, which was the access point to a long trail through the woods.... No, rainforest sounds cooler. It was the access point to a trail through the rainforest. This trail was everything you could ask for in a rainforest trail except for the exotic animals; it had weird plants, ants that tasted like like sugar, a zip line across a 50-foot deep gorge, a vine swing with a 50-foot drop, shaky rope bridges, good views, and mosquitoes. When we were done with the trail, our guides had built three rafts out of balsa tree trunks, and our group split up and (without too much effort) raced back to the resort. My raft dominated, but that may have had something to do with the fact that no one else had two oars. Hey, whatever. Also, I figure that since the Napo is one of the largest tributaries to the Amazon River, for all practical purposes, we actually tubed and raft-raced on the Amazon. How many people can say that? We also got to sample an indigenous alcohol called chicha, made out of some sort of root (I didnt like it, it had an aftertaste of smoked sausage), and we got to try shooting poison darts out of a blowgun, after getting our faces painted with berries like hunters. But possibly the coolest, most important thing that happened at la Casa del Suizo is that I learned two awesome card games, Spades and Six-Card Euchre. Give a man a rainforest and he'll take pictures for a day, but teach a man some card games and he'll be entertained for a lifetime.


La Casa del Suizo


View from our porch


WILD MONKEY!




Hanging on Josh.


Pouting after getting scolded.


Loving the camera


Zip lining across the 50 foot gorge. Notice the white knuckles.


Classic shot of Mario (my teacher) and Sarah (one of our directors).

We stayed at la Casa del Suizo until early Tuesday afternoon, when we left for a small town called Papallacta with oodles of hot springs. We were there for well under 24 hours, but the hot springs were incredible, and so were some of the bikinis... or rather, one bikini. No, I wasn't checking out the chicas--but there may or may not have been an OSU student cross-dressing at the pool, and the reactions from the other guests may or may not have been priceless. Also, for the first time since I've been in Ecuador, I got to see STARS, and I got to see them like I've never seen them before. There was virtually zero light pollution in Papallacta, so from 9:30 to 11:30 we were laying out in the hot springs in front of our cabins looking up at the Milky Way. There were at least 6 large shooting stars... awesome.








One of these things is not like the other....

This weekend also was Carnaval in the Catholic world, and in Latin America, that means launching water, water balloons, fruit and flour bombs at women and tourists, especially women and especially tourists. Traveling to Papallacta, we were warned to close all of our windows, because there was danger in the road ahead.... but some people were sleeping or didn't hear, and as a result, water and fruit hit several targets inside the rear of our bus. Also at la Casa del Suizo, some of our girls experienced Carnaval firsthand:



The best (or worst) thing is, all of this is not only excused, but encouraged, and all you need to say is "CARNAVAL!"

While this coming weekend is officially a free weekend, most of our group is traveling to different parts of the country, either Guayaquil (the largest city in Ecuador), Cuenca (ancient colonial city with some Incan ruins), or beaches in the south of the country. As for me, Abuela Joven is planning on taking me and my Ecua-siblings trout fishing sometime Saturday, and I plan on attending a soccer game between Liga and Deportiva Quito on Sunday afternoon. Liga is not only based in Quito and the most popular team in Ecuador, but they finished as the second best club team in the world last year, behind Manchester United. The fans are the epitome of passion. I'm pretty pumped.

Cultural Note of the Day: The flowers here are BEAUTIFUL. They have flowers here that I've never seen before, and they're all exotic and vibrant and really cool. Instead of talking more about it, I figure I'll just include pictures.





SHOUT-OUTS GO TO: Sara Beth (I hope you can settle for pictures of monkeys, I couldn’t get the real thing), and, of course, Horse.

From Ecuador,
Andy