Hello from Ecuador.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, I’m in Ecuador.

At the moment, I’m in the spa town of Baños, in the central Andean region of Ecuador. I came here to relax and recuperate from a rather grueling trip to a remote Kichwa community in the southeastern Amazonian part of the country. So far, I’ve been doing nothing but sleeping late, walking around, and eating various yummy ice creams and turróns.

In any case, I thought I’d share a few tidbits and anecdotes from the Ecuadorian experience with you:

  1. A couple of weeks ago, I became pantsless in a small mountain town called “Cayambe.” (I’d come to Cayambe to visit a nearby bioreserve and ended up dancing in the last of the Inti Raymi/San Pedro celebrations. The San Pedro holiday, as it’s celebrated in the Andes, is a Christianized version of the Incan summer solstice celebration. But I digress…back to my pantslessness.) I
    washed one of my shirts, one of my pairs of nice
    travel pants (a convertible pair of Columbia
    quick-dry-special-for-travelling things), and
    some underwear in my hotel room sink. I then hung them outside of my
    window to dry. I’d used this technique with great success in Quito, and thought it would work well in Cayambe, too.

Well, apparently the wind is stronger in Cayambe
than it is in Quito.
I took a shower and then came back to the window
to get my clothing, only to find that it had
disappeared, carried away by the wind. I managed
to get my shirt back (it fell on a pile of
blouses being sold on the street below and had
thus managed to escape detection by passers-by),
but the underwear and pants had disappeared into
the great Andean unknown. I asked a woman selling
fruit on the street right beneath my window if
she had seen my clothing. She said, “Oh, your
pants. Well, I saw them fall from the window.
Then some man walking by came and carried them
off.” Gee, lady. Thanks.

I can only hope that my pants have gone to a good
home. A home that will care for them, treat them
well, tuck them in at night. I hope my pants’ new
life in Ecuador is full of happiness and
satisfaction. I have no idea where my undies
went. I can only hope that they’ve found a good
tuchus to cling to.

When I told this one woman running the
hotel what happened, she asked why I didn’t give
her the pants to put on the terrace. “Oh,” I
said. “I didn’t know there was a terrace.” She
stared at me for a second. She blinked. Then she
started to laugh. “Well, what do you think?” she
asked, guffawing. “How else would we dry
clothing? Blow on it until all the water’s gone?”
She walked into the back room to go tell her
brother what happened. I heard her talking to
him, and then I heard him laughing, too.
Cayambe’s a small town. I’m sure that, by the end
of the day, everyone in the place had heard of
the stupid gringa who didn’t know that every
building had a terrace.

  1. Giving stores, restaurants, etc. names in
    English is seen as giving those establishments a
    bit of class, a touch of panache. There is, thus,
    in Cayambe, the Rumour’s CD Moving Company. It
    took me a while to figure out that this was a
    business that provides DJs. I want to know if the
    DJs also come with all the latest gossip.

2a. This dress-it-up-with-English approach seems
to apply to graffiti as well. Seen in Quito, on
the upper reaches of the city’s basilica–“I
wanna you!” How the author(s) knew I’d be there,
I have no idea. But it’s always nice to be
wanna-ed.

  1. Seen in the small mountain city of Latacunga, on a wall–“i Have a Day
    Nice.” Well, all i can say is–i’m glad whoever
    wrote this is happy. i hope all of you reading
    this have a Day Nice, too.

  2. There’s Chinese food in Ecuador, but it’s
    different from Chinese food in the US. First of
    all, there’s nothing spicy, even though there’s
    hot sauce stuff on each table. Also, there are no
    egg rolls. And there’s a soup called “Crema de
    wu-chi-wu.” I haven’t ordered it yet, though I’m
    tempted to do so the next time I go for chifa. I
    have no idea what wu-chi-wu is.

  3. The town of Latacunga looks very colonial, but
    the buildings are all very recent. That’s because
    Latacunga keeps being leveled by the local
    volcano. But, somehow, people keep rebuilding the
    city in the exact same place. You’d think,
    after the lava flowed through the streets for the
    umpteen zillionth time, that they’d all think of
    moving to somewhere a little less susceptible to
    exploding mountains.

I’d consider having no exploding mountains nearby
to be a basic requirement when choosing a place
to live. You know–think of buying a house. What
do you look for? Good resale value, good school
system, no exploding mountains. But what do I
know? Perhaps this is a cultural difference I
will just have to learn to accept.

  1. In Quiteño slang, there is the verb “gachar.”
    It means “to get, to understand.” It comes from
    the English “gotcha.”

5a. There’s also the phrase, “el putas.” It means
“very cool.” I’m a little
confused by this, since “putas” is a rather crude
word for “prostitutes,” who, as far as I know,
are not particularly strongly associated with
what’s hip-hop-‘n’-happenin’. Nor do I understand
the singular masculine article “el” with the
feminine plural word “putas.” But, then again, I
also don’t understand people who keep on living
beneath active volcanoes. Just another
inexplicable cultural difference, I suppose.

  1. I know that “alteia” means “marshmallow” in Portuguese. This piece of information might not strike you as useful or interesting, but it will be to one Doper. I’ll leave it to him to identify himself.
2

Is Ecuador near Vertigo?

I notice they seem to speak Spanish, or Portugese in Vertigo.
Is Ecuador close enough to Vertigo that you… give me something…
I CAN FEEL!

3
  1. Bathrooms rarely have toilet paper in them. Sometimes there’s a roll of paper outside the stalls. Thus, you have to estimate your toilet paper needs before you actually hit the potty. This leads to people taking tons of toilet paper before attending to the business at hand. Which, in turn, leads the toilet owners to further restrict toilet paper access. Which only leads to people taking more toilet paper, because they’re afraid of not having enough when they really need it. And thus a vicious cycle of toilet paper shortage and paper hoarding continues in the
    country.

1a) Then again, many times there’s no paper at all. Toilet owners feel no sense of
responsibility whatsoever for providing this precious substance. If you ask someone in a restaurant, etc. if they have paper for the bathroom that lacks even the remainders of a cardboard tube, the response is often a “no” accompanied by an unconcerned shrug.

1b) If we in the US are going to paternalistically interfere in the affairs of other countries, at least we could pick our emergencies appropriately. Ecuador is ripe for US intervention. The US should come and save Ecuador’s butt with emergency toilet paper drops. We could provide an American plenty of squeezably soft Charmin for all.

1c) The sink often doesn’t work, and there’s never anything to dry your hands on afterwards, either. Somehow this is much more annoying in Ecuador than it is in other places. I’m not sure why.

  1. Pizza in Ecuador is weird. It can be yummy, but it’s weird. It comes with some rather unconventional toppings, including slabs of roast pork, and is eaten with a fork and knife. The usual spices we expect in pizza sauce are usually abset. However, Ecuadorian pizza places have the standard spicy ahi sauce on the table. (Every restaurant and corner food stand has ahi, which is different from one person to the next, because it’s all locally made. Ahi has hot peppers, onions, cilantro, and other yummy things in it.) I’ve seen Ecuadorians casually ladle ahi on their pizza and spread it around before cutting into their pork-covered pizzas with a fork and knife.

  2. There are lots of eucalyptus trees and various European pines growing in the Andes. Lots of them. Incidentally–if you crush eucalyptus leaves in your hands, your fingers burn and tingle a little from the oil. Or, at least, mine do.

4

So, if I understand you correctly, you are currently running around Ecuador, without any pants on, looking for toilet paper and telling everyone you are el Puta?

I am sure I speak for all Dopers when I say, “you are doing us proud, Scribble.”

5

What DMark said.

Also, keep the stories coming. Very enlightening. And much different from the parts of Mexico and Guatemala I’m acquainted with.

GT

6

  1. There are a few active volcanoes in the country, including Tungurahua. At night, Tungurahua sparks and glows, spitting out little fragments of super-hot lava. People go up to the surrounding hills to see the nightly natural fireworks. Unfortunately, I have no photos, since I didn’t get to see the thing for myself. The nights have all been cloudy and kind of drizzly since I arrived, which blocks the view.

  2. Everyone hears about the incredible biodiversity in rainforest, but people tend not to realize that there’s also a ton of different species in the Andes. Mountaintop craters, with huge walls of rock surrounding each one, make barriers that prevent interbreeding of species on the inside of the crater with those on the outside. And often one group of mountains will act as a barrier to another mountain or group of mountains. So there are a zillion different assemblages of critters in a zillion different places. Each mountain crater is different–some are wet and forested and others are dry and scrubby. And, of course, one forested crater can be markedly different from another forested crater as close as a few hours by bus on a potholed dirt road away.

  3. The official currency of Ecuador is the US dollar. In Ecuador, it’s common to come across a mix of American currency and coins minted in Ecuador that, within the country, at least, have equivalent values to US coins. There’s a shortage of currency within the country, so it’s really hard to get change. Walking around on the street with a US$20 bill in your pocket is, in most places, like walking around with no money at all–nobody will take your $20 because they can’t give you change. If you go to a bank to get change for a $20, the bank might refuse you because it doesn’t have enough change and smaller bills. This can get extremely frustrating, as the ATMs tend to dole out 20s.

3a. ATMs go down with disconcerting frequency. When this happens, you’ll have to try to draw money as a cash advance on a credit or debit card at the teller window. Most banks will refuse to do this. And if you want to draw money on a credit card that has no PIN, forget it–I went to several banks in several different cities, all of whom refused to deal with me. They’ve never heard of a credit card with no PIN and think I’m up to some kind of fraud, I think. If the bank has a big VISA sign in the window, don’t assume that that bank will actually honor your card. Arguing that the bank should, in fact, give you cash from your card gets you thrown out by heavily armed security guards.