¡me robaron!

Being robbed is no fun.

I was on my way to a soccer game and i got pick-pocketed. The bugger stole my soccer ticket. I was able to buy another one at the door for cheaper than my original ticket.

Lessons learned:
a) people who steal suck
b) bring enough money to a soccer game so that you can buy another ticket (5 of us got pickpocketed on the bus).
c) people who steal suck

Conversation with my dad:
"Dad, I got robbed today."
"What did they take?"
"My soccer ticket."
"And?"
"And nothing."
"Oh, I dont care about your soccer ticket."

Last lesson learned:
d) when you need consoling after you have been robbed...your dad is not going to provide it.
e) people who steal suck

Thanks dad.

And Ecuador won!

religión

sooo....i have been honoured to meet several rastas while i have been here. but i am still confused as to whether it is an honour or not.

For those of you who are not aware, rasta is a religion. A rastafarian is one who practices the rasta religion. And they can sometimes be semi-ridiculous.

My most awkward moment would probably be when i was asked what i think of The Virgins?

First i was confused. Virgins? Do you mean virgins in general? Why was he talking to me about people who don´t know where babies come from? THE virgins? I didnt really get it. His response was "I think they are just good people." I can dig that...but i am sure some virgins are not good people. I think? Still confused. I think this all got cleared up when he then asked, "and what about Jesus."

OHhhhh......The Virgins. Biblical virgins. okay...now i felt i was in a better position to respond to what initially seemed like a very bizarre topic (virgins??). Unfortunately my response was, "i dont really think about virgins." This surprised him. WHat surprised me was that there was more than one virgin in the bible. (Well..."virgin"....how did mary have a baby without sex. i just dont believe it. i am not calling her a lier....but i am insinuating that she might be.)

This brings me back to the days when i went to an all-girls non-denominational private school..which was actually christian: Every year at christmas time there was a carol service. Everyone went to the church and sang hymns and read from the bible and held candels. During this festive event i would always fall asleep.

Every year, about 20 grade 12s would read an excerpt from the bible. Being a school leader i was expected to read as well. I did not want to. When one of the teachers asked me why I wasnt reading i didnt really know how to say what i wanted to say. What i really wanted to say was:

Do you actually want me to stand in front of 2000 people and read from the bible. 2000 people will be looking at me and taking me seriously? i wont be taking myself seriously? My family is muslim...to us, a church is a tourist attraction. you go to a place with lots of history and you check out a church. you go to another country and you check out the church. you take pictures of a church. we forget that it is actually a place of worship. oops....back to rastas.

Anywhoo...after i spoke with that rasta i met another.

Something he told me that resonates in my mind was, "There is nothing wrong with cannabis." Of course there is nothing wrong with cannabis, the onljavascript:void(0)
Publish Posty thing i question is why you are the only person on the coast who talks at about 10 words per minute. i think i had a pet guinea pig that spoke faster than that. Is that mean? or am i allowed to say that because i am from BC?

This rasta also said "my father is a carpenter so i have carpentry in my blood. i made everything in this house, even the house." i was impressed, but i couldn´t help but chuckle because i was sitting at his dinner table. Sonja, who was sitting beside me was also sitting at the dinner table but eating her dinner about 5 cm above me. I feel that there might have been something wrong with the cannabis he was smoking when he built the legs on that table.

That being said, i feel like a lot of rastas are great people and we share a lot of ideas. And to some rastas i just wanna say, "so you´ve got dreads...get over it!"

the best things in life might be free, but you still need to pay for stuff

Getting out dinero is a pain in the butt. I learned early on that I was only able to get money out of one of the banks. With that being said, sometimes when the economy crashes it is difficult to take money out from any bank.

Ugh! What a pain in the butt. All I want to do is eat, but apparently I am having problems doing that. I am a little afraid. Yikes!

Because the US does not know how to control the economic world that it actually does control, innocent people cannot survive.

Sounds familiar….capitalist morons!

White Food: Part 4

This was the most white my meal has ever been, and it was very delicious. But still…the nutritional value of my dinner was definitely jeopardized.

The meal: Empanada with Moroccho

The Empanada: A deep fried piece of batter filled with cheese. White white white!

Moroccho: A drink served warm. The drink is made of milk (whole milk) and ground up mote (white corn/maize). The drink is not sweet so you need to add something to sweeten it up…white sugar. If you do not want to add sugar, you can add panela.

Panela is brown. It is the only thing on the table that is not white. That being said, panela is a sweetener and is a substitute for the bowl of white sugar that is placed beside it.

Bon apétite.

i will always be "the intern"

This blog is coming long overdue. I have been working at a rescue centre for birds and have gotten to know a good chunk of the crew with whom I work. They are the stars of the next few posts.

I have met a lot of Ecuadoreans in the past 6 weeks. Ecuadoreans are generally very nice, warm, and welcoming. Those about which I can generalize have not made it into my blog.

José Antonio: It took me a while to warm up to him, but now I totally get a kick out of him and we joke around a lot. And by saying we joke around a lot, I really mean that he makes fun of me a lot. A lot. At first, I thought he just saw me as just the intern. After getting to know him better, I learned that that was not actually the case.

He definitely didn’t take me seriously…I was definitely not wrong about that. In fact, the more we got to know each other, the less seriously he took me. But his not taking me seriously was not because I was just the intern. It was actually for the same reason most people do not take me seriously. I am a lot more comfortable and accustomed to that, so it is really no biggy; however, my main concern right now is figuring out why MOST people do not take me seriously. It is either A) because I don’t take myself seriously, or B) because I don’t others seriously. It very well may be a combination of both, but comments on this post are welcome. Nothing offensive on this page please.

So who is this José Antonio guy? Why do I bother mentioning him? Why does he work at the park? Why does he make fun of me? Lets answer these questions:

Who is this guy? Why does he work at the park?
He was a falconer like the director of the foundation. He trains, flies, and feeds a number of the birds twice a day so that they get their exercise and get fed. He has been working with and studying birds for years. He has worked in zoos in Spain and Quito. Only the director and him are able to do flight exhibitions, and both of them have been falconers for eeons.

He is originally from Madrid and, for missing Spanish cuisine so much, has developed his cooking skills. He has taught me how to make croquettes and Spanish omelette. He also helps me with my Spanish. I am currently reading books in Spanish, and we occasionally sit down and go through the last 50 pages I have read and he acts as my personal dictionary and tells me the definition of all of the words I do not know. He has also taught me almost everything I know about birds.

I have really warmed up to him because he has a lot of confidence in me, and I can tell that he sees potential. He always wants to challenge me and wants me to learn more. While that is nice and all, I am sometimes freaked out because I don’t know where this confidence comes from. Because I often don’t share his sentiments…

Why does he make fun of me?
I think I give him a lot of material to work with.

Firstly, he thinks I eat a lot. The words I hear every day literally translate into “What a beast!” Yesterday he added “she is just a pit” and “You aren’t hungry? Are you sick?”

He makes fun of me because he thinks I am an alcoholic. Every day I bring a water bottle to work and he asked what was in it. Before I could answer he said “whisky?” After that I was known as the alcoholic intern. You would typically think that showing up to work hungover or actually drinking would give someone that sort of reputation. Not with me…apparently I am whatever people tell me to be. In this case that is in alcoholic. I tried convincing everyone that I actually don’t drink that much, but now I have given up and I too make jokes about what an “alcoholic” I am.

He also makes fun of me and the imaginary sex life. This topic of conversation has snowballed much like the alcoholic reputation. It started when one of the girls said “mañanero” and then asked if I knew what that meant. I don’t know how, but I actually guessed correctly that it meant “sex in the morning.” (You know you have a good grasp of the language when you can guess the meaning of words like “mañanero”) That day, I was talking to the taxi driver that I watched a Spanish movie the other day.
“Oh yah? Do you want to borrow some of my Triple X films?” he asked, thinking that I don’t know what Triple X is. I don’t think he realize that Triple X translates into Triple X in English…it doesn´t take a linguist to figure that out.
“No thank you,” I calmly replied, “I think I am satisfied with my mañanero.” José Antonio, everyone in the car (all the people from work returning back to town) was shocked that I knew the meaning of mañaneros and Triple X films. Everyone was laughing. It was funny. But I did not realize that from then on I had a reputation as a sex pot.

While this sex pot reputation can be embarrassingly hilarious at times, it has also proved to be just plain hilarious at other times. José Antonio has an intern whose parents were missionaries. The guy is 19 and he himself is a saint. He is from Texas, and consequently speaks perfect English. He happened to walk into the office when I was giving some of the workers an English lesson. I was teaching them useful words for the park, such as eagle, falcon, owl, nest, etc. When I saw him walk in I decided to put mañanero on the board. He naturally asked what it meant, and when I told him he fled the office with a scared look on his face. He told José Antonio what I had just told him. José Antonio decided to go along with it, so he told his intern to be careful because I was an “avion,” the Spanish word for plane and the word we use for someone who is quick to hit on people, someone who goes in for the kill, someone who is having a frequent mañaneros. ;)

That evening, we were taking the taxi back to town as usual and I was talking about how excited I was to sleep in on my day off.
“With who?” asked José Antonio.
“No mañanero?” asked the taxi driver.
“Probably not. It is a Sunday, it is always difficult to find someone on a Sunday.” I replied with a smile. Everyone in the taxi laughed, except for the saintly intern. I turned to him, “What are you doing tonight?”
“I am going to Quito” he said with conviction as he sank into his seat, thinking that the more he sank the further he would be away from me. “DIRECTO!” Everyone laughed at this too…except for the saintly intern himself.

Yepp…so José Antonio and I have definitely warmed up to each other.

white food: part 3

I ate pork fat today. It is white before you cook it. Once you cook it, it is no longer white, but the colour of fried fat.

WHY IS THIS NECESSARY!! I am still getting used to NOT eating vegan food…let alone eating pork, which Muslims do not traditionally eat (i.e. I did not really eat growing up).

Good ol´ José Antonio (few posts ago) knows that I do not like eating neither pork nor fat. Our conversation went a little something like this:

“What is the name of this in Spanish?” he asks me pointing to the pork fat. He wanted to make sure I remembered the name because, like I said, he always wants to make sure I am learning.
“Chicharrón” I reply.
“Very good. And what do you call it in English?”
“Pork fat.”
He gave me a smirk and I knew what my next post was about.

bathroom blogging

There is something very familiar about being in Ecuador. Parts of Ecuador are so similar to Bolivia, where I spent four months a few years ago. I felt very comfortable from the moment I arrived. That being said, there are still some things that I need to get used to because they are very different from Bolivia.

I am still trying to get used to the bathroom situation here. I was expecting to have the same problems as I had in Bolivia, but it is pretty different here…surprisingly so.

What exactly do I mean by the bathroom situation? I mean the bathroom situation.

In Bolivia, people often do not take care of the bathrooms. They can be very very disgusting. And more often than not, you will find that you have neither soap nor toilet paper. Every traveller quickly made it a habit to carry toilet paper with them. Individual toilet paper rolls were sold everywhere because it was just such a necessity. The host family we lived with even charged us for toilet paper.

In Ecuador you can politely tell someone that there is no toilet paper in the bathroom and, instead of getting a bizarre “so what, why are you asking me”-look, people will put more toilet paper in the bathroom. Individual toilet paper rolls are not as abundant as cigarettes, and you don’t always have to stock up on serviettes when you go out for lunch. In the house I was living there are three bathrooms. Once I used the toilet paper in my bathroom, I started taking toilet paper from the other two. After a while, I realized how different bathroom culture in Ecuador is…so I asked the housekeeper for toilet paper. And she gave me a roll of toilet paper.

Toto, we aren´t in Bolivia anymore!

It never occurred to me that someone would give me toilet paper. Talk about culture shock!