Language barrier

1. Tiputini was incredible. Pictures to come.
2. I was robbed this morning but only my phone was taken, so whatever.
3. I have no desire to go to school anymore. How is it that I'm burnt out already?!
4. My birthday is coming and Daniél is making me a hoja de cerveza: a list of bars that I should go to for the big day. I'm getting better at bonding with my family! YAY!

"TÚ ERES ARTE!"

¿Que fue, locos?

I'm singing all day tomorrow, for my acto poético. I'm so excited, it's not even funny. Annie is making a tin-can telephone thinger where people can tell anonymous secrets to one another, and if I understood her correctly (and I don't think I did), Lorena is going to have people write down everything they think before they go to sleep and then she's going to put all the thoughts into a big bin and then she's going to sleep in it, or something. I am just singing everything I say for a whole day.

But I think Falco liked my idea the best (shhh, don't tell anyone) and made me sing the presentation of my idea, just as a sample. Haha. He lent me his digital voice recorder so I could record myself singing, and then I'm going to present my recording to the class next Tuesday. I picked tomorrow to do it because I have two classes, plus Annie and I have plans to go to the mall, plus we usually go out to Metal Bar (okay, that's not its name, but it's more helpful to refer to it as "Metal Bar" rather than "Psycho") on Thursdays.

I decided not to tell anyone what I was doing, at least for tomorrow. If anyone asks why I'm singing, I'm just gonna say I feel like singing, or Why not?, or Because it makes me happy. If on another day they want to ask me, I'll tell them it was a poetic act for my art class, but for the time being, it's my secret. It's going to be a challenge, but I think it's going to be fun.

Plus, Tiputini Biodiversity Station the day after tomorrow, and we'll be chillin' in the Amazon for four days. Our plane leaves at 9AM, and it's a half-hour by plane, two hours by canoe, two hours by bus, and another two hours by canoe. There's no malaria threat, except on the river, so Maricarmen (the program director for USFQ) told us to just slather on the bug spray and not even worry about the malaria prophylactic. Apparently--and I probably have mentioned this before--the meds cause crazy nightmares, and people who have taken it have had their trip ruined by them.

In other news, I turn twenty in like a week and some change, and I think that'll be a fun time. Twenty really isn't such a huge deal, but I won't be a teenager anymore and that means something, I guess. I found a place where I can make calls to the United States for 7cents/minute, so maybe I'll start making some phone calls? The worst thing about not having a computer is that I can't listen to any music. Soooo sad.

Anyway, I should do some homework, or something.

Chao,
Gina.

"Me gusta FUNK"

Not having a computer really really sucks. But I´m at the Mall El Jardín using their compus, at the rate of $2/hour. Bleh.

I met Annie´s Ecuadorian friends the other day! They´re in a funk band and we went to see them rehearse, then we went to some bar in Guápulo to hang out. They were all so cool (and cute?!). By the end of the night, I was a Spanish master and I was happy to have made some friends!

Classes are good... we´re learning about the origins of Ecuadorian feminism in my gender class (did you know that abortion is illegal in Ecua? It was legal for a long long time, but the current president, Correa, changed the constitution and made it illegal. Crazy!) and about the financial crisis/dollarization of Ecuador in my social problems class. It´s all really cool.

I think I´ll be able to finish my Spanish major this year (at least, theoretically, if none of the classes I want to take next semester overlap...) save for one lame literature of Spain class that I´ll have to take when I get back to MSU. I could also theoretically graduate a semester early, but because I want to graduate with two degrees, I have to complete 151 credits or something, and that requires me to take about 16 credits per semester for the next three semesters. Wah wah.

What else? Oh, I sound like a jackass every time I talke to José. Every time I open my mouth, something stupid comes out. Bleh. Rosita and I have a heart-to-heart every time I eat almuerzo. I have a stupid sunglasses-nose-tan. Ugh. They play SUPER silly music in the mall. Today I heard a Spanish version of ¨"Tainted Love," a soppy pop version of "The Day the Music Died," some Hall & Oates, and right this exact moment is a reggae version of "Knockin´on Heaven´s Door."

Oh! We´re going to Tiputini Biodiversity Station on Thursday! Yay! Four days in the jungle!
http://www.usfq.edu.ec/tiputini/index.html
I just bought a backpack and some quick-drying pants, but I have to get a flashlight and socks. Excellent.

I really want to go see "Lluvia de Hamberguesas" (AKA "Rain of Hamburgers" AKA "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs). That´s all I have to say right now.

Chao,
Gina.

Sam & Dave

I'm just sitting in the compu lab, all alone, because my stupid computer has killed itself. But here are some things I wanted to write about:

1. My acto poetico is going to be singing everything I say for one whole day. I think that'll be fun, and I think Falco will like it.

2. There are many nicknames for places I live. You already know that Detroit is slang for anal sex, but Michigan is sometimes referred to as Tuchigan. In Spanish mi means my and tu means your. So my-chigan becomes your-chigan. Also, someone referring to the Estados Unidos (United States) under the Bush regime called it Estados Jodidos. Joder means fuck, in the verbal sense, so United States becomes Fucked States. Cool, right?

3. I bonded with Jose and Daniel last night over slang ways to say hello. It was funny.

4. On the bus there was an emergency lever that said, Hale la palanca, or, the formal (usted) command, Pull the lever. However, the English translation below the Spanish instructions said Has him the lever. Whoever typed "Hale" into some crap translation website must have separated the usted-imperative-form of the verb halar (to pull) into ha and le. Ha is the present form of haber, which is used to say things in the preterite perfect (Has he eaten? would translate to ¿Ha comido?). Le is the indirect object used for him/her/usted (As in, I gave him a gift translated to Le di un regalo). So yes, ha le would translate to has him, though only if the two words were separated. Languages are fun!

5. There are other things I had to write, but my Spanish grammar lesson took a lot of brain power, and I have class in fifteen minutes.

['xa.pe.ning]

Hola a todos,

Nothing really happened today except for the following:

1. I watched Star Wars in Spanish. Even better than "Luke, soy tu padre" was the "Te amo" "Lo sé" exchange. Brilliant.

2. We learned this rhyme to help with pronunciation of the "rr" sound in Spanish (note the "r" at the beginning of "Rápido" is pronounced as "rr"): "Erre con erre cigarro / Erre con erre carril / Rápido corren los carros / Por la linea del ferrocarril."

3. I have a huge crush on my Medios Mixtos profe, Falco. He has long curly black hair and seemed genuinely interested in my collage (which kicks ass, by the way. Think Sgt. Pepper meets soundtrack to my life). He even wanted to know to which Native American tribemy ancestors belonged. Way cool. There are only four people in the class, all girls. Two gringas (Annie and I) and two Ecuatorianas. Our next project is a "poetic act."

That's all, I think.

Chao chao,

Gina.

But it wasn't a rock... it was a ROCK LOBSTER

Friday 11 September 2009:

After class, went and bought pants with Bess and Annie. Then Annie and I came back to my house so I could change and we could drop off our new pants, ate some delicious guacamole, then went to Parque Ichimbía for Quitofest. When we got there, we met up with (e)Scott and listened to the last few songs of Walls of Jericho's set.

Okay, Ecuador is a super tiny country, and I was not aware that so many metalheads lived in such a place. The Parque was full of Iron Maiden t-shirts, creative hair, and vendors selling bootleg cigarettes and boxed wine. We saw Metamorfosis--an Ecuadorian heavy metal band--and Angra--a Brazillian progressive-metal band, ate pizza, jumped on the oddly spongy grass, and headed home pretty early.

Walking from Ichimbía to La Mariscal (where it would be cheaper to catch a taxi), we met Carlos, a student at the Universidad Católica, who told us we were in a bad area and then talked to us about newspapers. I got home, watched some of The Hangover with José, then went to bed.

Saturday 12 September 2009:

Woke up at 8AM to a nearly-empty house. José was leaving to go climb a mountain, and Rita was somewhere else, and Rosita hadn't come over yet. I took a shower, packed a bag, and left for Río Coca at 10AM to meet Annie so we could find Bess and embark on our journey to Papallacta--the hot springs. Once we were all together, we had to figure out how exactly we were going to get to Papallacta. After meeting at Estación Norte, we took a bus to El Recreo, which took us to Quitumbe, which then took us on the route Lago Agria, on which was our stop on Papallacta.

We watched some movie about people getting eaten by lions (all the bus movies are super violent and super lame), and after more than two hours on the bus, we decided to ask the driver--again--where we were supposed to get off. He said five minutes, and we were excited.

He kicks us off the bus in the middle of nowhere, along a stretch of road in the middle of the Andes Mountains. A few kilometers back, we had passed the center for the special narcotics police and a billboard warning of the apparently abundant number of drug traffickers in the region. Great. The three Gringas pull out our guidebooks but have no idea where we are. A family comes up to us and asks where we're headed. When we tell them, "Vamos a Papallacta," they look at each other, look at us, and look down the road; "It's about two hours back," they tell us. Impossible!, we think, but then we realize that our bus driver was a complete idiota, and start to walk.

This is at about 4PM (and for those of you keeping track, I had been travelling for six hours). If Papallacta really was two hours away, then we could probably make it there before sunset. Probably. What would our mothers think right now?, we asked ourselves, We're three white girls in the middle of the Andes Mountains' narco-trafficking zone, walking to who know's where, and we have about two hours of sunlight to get to this Papallacta--if it actually exists. Excellent.

After a while, we flag down a bus and hop on. After about an hour (an hour! Our busdriver, who told us numerous times that he would let us know when we were supposed to get off, dumped us in the middle of nowhere, an hour past our destination! Jackass.), we arrive in Papallacta. It's nearly dark, so the first thing we try to do is find a hostel. We can easily find the one that the guidebook suggests--Hostel Coturpa--but it doesn't have a roof. Hmm. Once we get in there, though, it's fine, and after haggling over prices, we can finally relax.

The next order of business is food. After wandering around a bit, we find a place that serves trucha (trout) and get settled. The food is delicious, but the beer is Pilsener, which means it's kind of shitty. But for 600mL, it's cheap, and why be picky when you can drink 600mL of beer? Haha. We ate, drank, played with our trucha heads, and bought yogurt, and at about 7PM, we headed for our basement room in Hostel Coturpa.

This is when silly-time began. High-waisted jeans, yogurt faces, funny text messages... it was a special moment for all of us. Bedtime was at 9PM because we had to get up early for the Termos--Papallacta's famous hot springs--in the morning.

Sunday 13 September 2009:

Annie's alarm went off at about 530AM, and after donning swimsuits and all the clothes that we could wear at once (it was suuuper cold up there), we headed for the Termos. The sun hadn't yet risen, and the streets were empty. Occasionally a rooster would crow, but for most of the 3km walk, it was just the sounds of us huffing and puffing up some pretty wicked hills.

We got to the Termos at about 7AM. The steaming water felt great after our frozen hike, and because it was so early, the pools were almost empty. The best part about being in the hot hot water was when we decided we had to jump in the freezing cold pools in order to really have the cleansing experience. We ended up doing that three or four times, and it never got any easier, haha.

Around 8AM the sun rose, and at about 9AM more people started to show up. We tried out most of the pools, got some sun (I think all three of us got sunburnt despite slathering on sunscreen fairly often), and left at like 10AM. The walk back was easy-peasy: it was all downhill and the air had warmed up a little. We went back to the hostel, packed up our stuff, and left. Before leaving town, we stopped at an impossibly tiny market and got a big hunk of queso fresco and three rolls of bread to eat while we waited for our bus. It was the most beautiful snack of all time.

We boarded a bus (a really shady one, actually) and peaced out of Papallacta. The bus ride home took less than two hours, and we didn't have to change buses at all from our first stop all the way to Río Coca. And this time, it only cost $2 instead of about $10. Hahaha. We parted ways at Río Coca and I rode the Ecovía line to Bellavista and walked the few blocks from the Bellavista stop to home. I got back just in time for almuerzo (gnocci!!) and a nap.

Now it's totally homework time. I have to read some Género y Sociedad, write two response thingers and make a collage for my brand-new art class, and do a hundred workbook pages for Grámatica Avanzada. I shall post pictures when my computer decides to cooperate (which might not be until I get a new one).

Love,

Gina

Do you like Bob Dylan?

Things that happened on Wednesday:

- Watched my first-ever soccer game (and Tri won!!)

- Kind of went on a bar crawl with Annie

- Met Mystery, the guy from the Pickup Artist (well, kind of)

- Opened the door to my house (serious accomplishment)

Things that happened last night:

- Wandered around La Mariscal with Annie and eScott

- Met people that didn´t like Bob Dylan

- Went to a metal bar called Psycho

- Met some friends at said metal bar: Menche, Fernando, Fernando´s girlfriend, and some dude with long blonde hair

- Was asked by said friends if they could borrow ten bucks

- Wound up back at the Gringo bar and danced danced danced

- Got home so late

Things that are happening right now:

- Wicked Quiteño hangover

Things that are going to happen soon:

- Going to eat some yuca chips and peanut butter sandwich

- Going to buy pants with Annie and Bess

- Going back to metal bar to listen to some metal and hang with metal friends

Things that are going to happen kind of soonish:

- First art class with Falco

- New computer?!!!

That´s it, love you all,

Gina.

Aladdin and the Exhausted Bitch

Hola, all.

My computer has died (right when I was about to upload so many photos...) so I'll be MIA for a while.

That's all,
Gina.

Ful Bestia!

I'm just gonna update super fast because we're leaving for Otavalo in like... ten minutes! We're staying there tonight, then shopping and sight-seeing tomorrow.

1. Ecuador's national bird in the condor.

2. I'm used to the altitude now, so I'm not tired all the time, but I am thirsty all the time. Bess applied the term "pregaming" to drinking a ton of water right before school so you don't dry out during the day. Good one.

3. We went out last night to the same dancin' place we went last weekend and it was gringo central but still a ton of fun.

All of us. (LOL @ Martin)

Martin n' Bess

MSU table?

Bess y yo.

Chao chao,

Gina.

Men men men men mennnnny mennn....

I told myself that I wasn't going to update today because I didn't want to update every day, but too bad.

1. Ecuadorians love the show Two and a Half Men. I don't know why.

2. Question: How many people can fit on a Ecovía bus? Answer: Fifteen more.

3. Seeing mountains is always exciting. I don't think I'll ever get over it.

4. Going to the mall alone when you don't speak the language and you don't know the stores is nerve-wracking, though I think I found the Ecuadorian equivalents of Kohl's and Sears.

5. We're going to the Tiputini Biodiversity Station at the end of the month! Amazon basin! Woo hoo! Apparently, anti-malarial medication gives people wicked bad night terrors, so it's going to be three days in a jungle full of paralyzed, screaming gringos. Which reminds me...

6. I have had several dreams that my Ecuadorian life had just been a dream, and that really I had missed my plane. Horrifying. Last night I had a triple anxiety sundae of bad dreams: I had a baby, missed my plane, and some of my teeth fell out. Geeze.

"That's all (don't write 'that's all!'),"

Gina.

Ha sido un dia imposible...

Today was a freaking ridiculous day.

First of all, I don't have any clothes, so I'm pretty much wearing the same things every week. I have to go shopping, but I just can't find the time. And then for breakfast we had fruit and yogurt like we always have, but there was some kind of fruit in there that I did not like. It had a yucky texture, but I made myself eat it anyway. Blechk.

It took me a full hour to get to school, when it usually takes me half that time. Then I had to go right to Problemas Sociales en Ecuador, in which we learned the definitions of estado (state), capitalismo, and socialismo, which are exactly the same in Spanish as in English, and it was kind of a waste of time. But whatever.

Then I had Lengua y Literatura which was fine. We ended early because today was USFQ's 21st birthday! Yay! Happy birthday, school! Actually, it is everyone and their mothers' birthdays this week. So happy birthday to school, you, and your mother!

Happy 20+1st!

Feliz cumpleaños, USFQ!

For anyone out there complaining about how hard it is to get textbooks, you are wrong. Just straight-up wrong. There is no worse system in the entire world than the bookstore at la USFQ. You come in, abandon your bag right by the door, and fight for a numbered ticket. Once you have a ticket, you cna go look for your books. They are organized by subject, but the subjects themselves are not in any order. Plus, if you're looking for the book for Gramatica Avanzada (like I was), you have to check educación, socráticos, literatura, and lenguas. Plus, all the books are actually coursepacks, so they all look the same and are only distinguishable by thickness--not helpful.

So you get in line, look at your number (D21, maybe) and look at the sign which has the current number. Say it's on 66. You're like, damn, I have to wait like 60 numbers! So after 40 minutes or so, your number is called and you can approach the designated cashier. When you present her your number, she shakes her head, and says, no, you're number D21, and we're on the B. B?! BS!! So you wait through the rest of the Bs, then the Cs, and finally, after standing around literally for hours, your number gets called and you can check out. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can scavenge for crumpled-up numbers on the floor that were discarded by people who just gave up, but it's not likely. So from 1230PM to about 3PM, I sat around in the bookstore and suffered.

I took this picture of the mountains while I was waiting to buy books.

And then! It took forever to get to Río Coca (the terminal where I change buses) and I still had to go to get my passport back from the visa place. The stop by my house, Bellavista, is seven away from Río Coca, and the one where the visa place is, Orellana, is three or four from Bellavista. So I get off at Orellana, hike up a hill to the place, only to find that it has moved. Moved! To 6 de Deciembre and... something that starts with a G! The woman who told me this also offered me a taxi, which I gladly took (taxímetros are $1,50 to anywhere) to 6 de Deciembre and something with a G, which was so close to Río Coca that I could have walked from there in the first place, instead of paying $,25 for a bus and $1,50 for a taxi. In the visa place, I sat for a good long while (I was too distraught to look at the time) while they searched for my passport, and finally I got to go home on the bus from Colegio 24 de Mayo to Bellavista. I got off the bus, said hi to Enrique who works at the gas station, and bought a 2Litro bottle of water, which I drank in about five seconds. I think I got home at like 5PM.

And now I'm home and I have a gazillion homeworks. Ughhhh.