Bowling Alone, Wild Goose Chases, and Some Culture

Gringolandia, Quito

Limpie sus Zapatos!
Ever get your shoes shined? Well, I´m addicted. It costs 25 centavos here and culturally it is an integral part of keeping a respectable look on the streets. Boys with backpacks, permanently stained fingers and small handled boxes of polish and supplies scour the city from the age of about 8 through 65. It´s a more complicated process than expected - usually about 6 steps - involving brushes, polish, hard scrubbing, and shining. Some amateurs are better than others of course. Everyone seems to be asking you if you want a shine, and I´m telling you there´s nothing more satisfying than staring up at the moutains from a city plaza for 5 minutes, and then rising to meet the remainder of the day with a fresh, dazzling luster.

How`s the Spanish Coming Along?
There is something so undeniably simple and humorous about not having the ability to speak the local language; I could walk down the street and break down laughing and crying at once all the same. The truth is I have certainly improved. A lot of locals can`t believe I`ve only been trying for 3 weeks. I explain that I had years of french and a little italian (the truth is that I now know more spanish than french, for sure). On paper I`m a maniac hella cool wicked fuckin awesome superstar. I`ve averaged like a 48 out of 50 on my first three exams. But who cares? To be perfectly honest, I`m at a point where yo entiendo mucho pero hablo solo un poco. For example, I just sat down with a nice girl at a travel agency to discuss Machu Pichu. I could understand the printed 5 day trekking itinerary almost perfectly - I turned down her offer for a translation. I could also basically understand everything she said to me in spanish about the trip. I just can`t speak yet. I don`t have the arsenal of verbs and vocabulary to break through, but I can feel it slowly building. I also need to push harder in terms of speaking with locals. Communication is a two way street.

Flying Solo
I didn´t actually go bowling. The phrase ‘Bowling Alone’ actually refers to the comprehensive book by Robert Putnam, University of Michigan political science professor. His book takes an in-depth look at how the rise of television led to the decline in participation in community activities, like the PTA, community church, or bowling leagues. It´s about the impact on society.

Of course Dr. Putnam wrote this book about ten years ago, before the rise of online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, where people (like Vic) can connect based upon interests or just being really, really, ridiculously good looking, rather than simple geography. This leads to strong associations of people who have a passion for a single subject and connect along those lines. Anyone who has been to an antique shop and had to listen to someone drone on about depression era glass, for example, knows what I mean about single subject passion. The success of a site like eHarmony.com is a perfect example of the internet’s impact on social networking.

Anyway, whenever I travel alone this phrase pops into my head for some reason. It works on other levels I suppose.

Visa Issues
¨Same Same But Different,¨ I guess you could say, to borrow a wonderful phrase from SE Asia. It´s not just that I needed to get my papers and $$$ in order for the 6 month tourist visa to come here - which included several sumptuous rides to northern Baltimore and Potomac for police fingerprinting, as well as a doctor´s clearance of any communicable diseases and an HIV test. No, once you´re in Ecuador the fun starts anew.

I was well aware that I needed to check in or whatever in the first 30 days with some official office, but I figured it was a joke and forgot about it for a while. Well, it´s not a joke mis amigos. In actuality it´s a cruel, inimical game of hide and seek launched against foreigners, a wild goose chase if you will. First, la Direccion General de Extranjeria is not located where it is supposed to be. I taxi´d to some abandoned building with big spray paint on the outside directing foreigners inside. The nice lady at the desk at the building one over handed me a pre-printed scrap of paper with (photo-copied) handwritten directions for where to go next for the real thing. ¨Yes! my next clue!¨ I exclaimed, and the poor woman stared in wonder at the gringo.

So it turns out they move their location all the time. Just to keep things interesting I guess. When I finally found the current location on the other side of town they were closed. The next morning I skipped an hour of class to sit in a waiting room and watch morning talk shows with the groveling masses, only to be rejected for not having my papers in a proper carpeta con viche (folder with metal clip), as well as everything in a large manila envelope. You gotta love the look the guy gives you, as if he can´t process your papers unless they are in a large manila envelope. Bastards. Don´t they know it hurts to walk around town!?

Eventually I got it right, only to find out that I´m only done with step 1. I had to leave my pasaport with them until this morning and I picked it up stamped, but now round two begins with El Departamento de Imigracion. Among other requirements I need to come up with a landlord-tennant contrato as well as copies of the poor woman´s identificacion. Stay tuned.

Feliz Dia de la Mujer!
Last Thursday was International Women´s Day. It took me a while to figure out what the hell was going on with every woman in town carrying flowers around like they´d just been proposed to (Valentine´s Day has come and gone). People really value their holidays here, in a similar way to how they value family, food and social interaction; even making sure to kiss you on the cheek, say ¨buenos dias,¨ then ¨como estas¨ before even beginning a conversation. This process actually reminds me a lot of South Africa, like the time my friend Anand and I were heading to Coffee Bay in the Transkei along the southeast coast with a girl named Katie. Temporarily lost (and increasingly scared at night) during the final strokes of daylight, we pulled over to ask where the turnoff for Coffee Bay was. But it´s just not that simple, you see. You don´t just pull over and say ¨hey, where is the road for Coffee Bay!?¨ No, that would be rude and unacceptable. First you say hello, ¨sanbona¨which more literally means ¨I see you.¨ Then the respondent sees you - ¨yebo, sanbona.¨ Then you ask them how they are doing ¨unjani?¨, and they respond ¨giyapila¨ ¨I am well¨. Next is the thank you ¨giyabonga¨and it can continue on from there. The bottom line is that it takes minutes to get your primary question asked, such as how the fu%! do I get to my destination! Terribly frustrating, but when you step back, it´s a nice way to treat one another.

For my part, I stopped by las hermanas´ apartamento con flores hoy. What can I say, I was in the neighborhood and wanted to be a part of the action.

Museos y La Casa de la Cultura
I´ve actually visited several museums lately, two of which belong to El Banco Central, as well as some incredible churches in the old town - La Compania was built with seven tons of gold used to decorate the inside.

Quito´s National Museum is housed in la Casa de la Cultura, a central landmark of the city and uniquely designed as a massive circular, glass building with statue gardens on the grounds. (All this across from the McDonalds and KFC of course, on a main artery of the city)

The humanistic vision of the Central Bank was to provide a place for safekeeping for the ¨cultural assets¨sheltered in their vaults. After six decades it is now the most comprehensive cross section of Ecuadorian art; pre-Columbian, pre-Hispanic gold (over 1500 pieces), and colonial and 19th century art. The archaelogy room was a little much for me in the way of ancient pottery, but you´re taken through 15,000 years of tribal history from hunter-gatherers to massive Inca empire. The gold room was my favorite, nice and shiny. Masks, pendants, emblems of power and body ornaments or ritual objects embody the symbology of indiginous culture. The most stunning piece is the massive gold mask that is the emblem of the Banco Central itself. To be honest, I flew through the colonial and republican art rooms, awash with religious portraits and countless renderings of Jesus and Mary. From the melting pot of cultures did emerge the ¨Quito School¨however, known for native blending of ornamentation and polychrome. The contemporary art was my favorite, which is not usually so. Modernization and globalization over the past 50-60 years transformed contemporary artistic styles with outside influences and gave rise to a certain ¨indiginous¨movement in which the hardships of indiginous people´s lives are depicted. My favorite of course is Guayasamin, Ecuador´s most famous contemporary painter. The museum had only three of his paintings, from the early 1940´s when he was my age, but they were stunning. I´ll be heading to his own museum in Balla Vista soon.

The second museum was the history of Ecuador´s money. Interesting but small, and really just a progression from primitive shells and metals used for trade, moving forward all the way to the Sucre and terrible periods of inflation, ultimately ending in the comfort and security of dollarization in 2001.

Concierto Brasilia
So I went to see Gabbi and Carlos play again Friday night at Casa Humbolt, the German cultural association in Quito. Don´t ask me why they´re sponsoring Brasilian music. I came alone for the show, which is always weird, like going to the movies by yourself. But of course Gabbi spotted me from the ticket line and introduced me to another friend of hers, and helped us both get in because it was sold out. Then I ended up sitting next to a really nice couple, Patricia and Lanco (sp?) who were big fans and Lanco even takes Portuguese language lessons from Carlos. I spoke with the guitarist before the show for a bit as well. I told him I used to play drums, and he suggested we jam some time as I cowered in nervousness.

The show was amazing. It was basically the same line-up of songs, but this time in a hall with perfect acoustics. You could hear the volcals more clearly, the individual guitar riffs, etc. By far the coolest part of the evening for me was about halfway through the show. Carlos is a comedian, and often talks a bit between songs or tells jokes. Well, he actually thanked his new friend ¨Peter from Washington, D.C.¨ for coming that night, a shout-out to the gringo among a sold out crowd of maybe 200 locals. I came alone and couldn´t communicate with any of the people around me, but somehow I got in pretty intimate with the band. Is that irony?

Actually I noticed that night that my spanish is indeed improving, at least my comprehension. I spoke with the cab driver for the duration of the ride over, very successfully. I´m basically competent enough now to have the same conversation over and over about where I´m from, what I´m doing here, and then to ask a few average questions about the person I´m speaking to, the city of Quito, etc. Plus I could understand a lot of Carlos´comments to the crowd. So it is starting to happen.

Mulligans in Gringolandia
I slept in saturday and spent the majority of the afternoon roaming the old city and plazas. Beautiful, it never gets old. I also met some elderly Americans on the Ecovia tram heading back into the new town - they had just arrived and were prime targets for pick pockets. I love it.

So I decided to treat myself to some Thai food for a change of pace. It required a trip to a restaurant called Siam in Gringolandia, the heart of La Mariscal. Who cares, it was great, except that I was a little worried about funds while chowing down. I walked in with $9.10 (the average meal lately has been about $2) and the red chicken curry was $5.60 plus rice for $1.29 plus una cerveza pilsner of course for about $1.50. I thought I was just barely cool until the bill came...$11.07 with VAT tax and tip already factored in. Welcome to Gringolandia.

What do you do if you don´t have enough money to cover your bill? Peter Fox apologized profusely at 7pm, paid all the $9.10 he could produce from his recently re-invigorated, smooth Mavi jeans (thank you Teresa!) and promised to return with the missing $2 that night. Therefore I walked out with absolutely zero dollars in my pocket. ¨Shit,¨I thought, ¨how the hell do I get home!?¨ Of course I wasn´t carrying an atm card or even an ID. Never mind the foot problem, I had to walk right? It was my first time walking all the way home from that far downtown - not so bad actually. It reminded me a lot of Rome at age 20, when my roomates and I walked home along the tram tracks for a couple of hours drunk as all hell. Except here it only took 45 minutes (straight up the hillsides), and that was while limping, not drunk, and yet with a superb pit-stop!: there is this fabulous gothic-looking cathedral called Inglesia de Santa Terisita about halfway home but still downtown where I found a wedding underway. Folks in their finest gathered round the entrance around 7:30, and I stopped to watch with some street locals. Within minutes a Rolls Royce pulled up with flower girls and the bride, and I took a couple photos before getting sidetracked...

All of a sudden this dude comes stumbling up to me drunk in front of the cathedral. ¨Do you speak english mi amigo?¨ This idiot was from Johannesburg and looked like shit. Absolutely terrible, and drunk at 7:30pm. It was his birthday apparently, but the woman he had been travelling with for the last five days decided to steal everything he had from their hotel room and disappear (go figure). He literally had the shirt on his back. The priest at the church wouldn´t pay him any attention until the wedding festivities were over. I really felt for this guy. We spent a good ten minutes on the street watching the happy crowd (juxtaposed with the penniless gringos) talking about South Africa and Durban and surfing and how where the two oceans meet it is way too damn cold to get in the water. ¨My friend,¨I was sorry to say as he pleaded for money for safe passage to Guayacil, ¨you simply caught me at the wrong time tonight! I´m actually on my way home myself, injured and trying to come up with some money to pay a beautiful waitress I just screwed over.¨ And so I went on my merry way, no hard feelings.

I returned to Gringolandia with a $20 bill and a mind to cut into it with some cervezas before paying my tab. I parked my tuchus at Mulligans, the most ridiculously touristy Irish pub on the strip that I could find, near the Thai place for good measure. There I met Swedish Eric from Stockholm, 29, and I almost drank the night away talking about our respective car industries, airlines (he works for Scandinavian), and how incredible Columbia is and how I should go (the stories about Columbia just won´t end lately. I sort of feel like I did with Bosnia - I´m scared because everyone in America tells me to be scared, but then everyone abroad says the total opposite). This Eric guy also had some incredibly pathetic sob stories about women, mostly latin. He sets himself up for failure because he works for an airline and his ¨move¨ is to take women on international vacations, but of course they don´t show at the airport half the time. The bright spot of hanging out in tourist bars is meeting local bartenders; the girl was very cute, it was her first day, and she poured beers so wrong that their was mucha espuma (foam). At least I got to celebrate my Iowa news (I got in to law school!) by getting drunk over massive Pilsner beers and discussions of ethanol 85 with Eric. Kind of mirrors the level of excitement about returning to life in the midwest in August...(can you sense the sarcasm?? No offense to anyone)

Barely recalling my original purpose, I staggered up the strip to Siam and made my way to the cashier. I apologized effusively to Marta my waitress and gave her an extra dollar for the 4-hour delay as they closed shop. The staff of ladies insisted that they believed I would return, but I could see it in their eyes that everyone had serious doubts. I was the man of the hour. And so an otherwise uneventful night came to a close.

Mitad El Mundo
You can´t travel to Ecuador and skip the center of the world. That said, it is a veritable disneyland, and a bit run down but a nice break from the city. Sunday is the best day to go because of the music and cultural dance performances. I couldn´t retain everything in the ethnography museum housed in the centerpiece rectangular tower (with globe on top) of the ¨village,¨so it was a pleasure to watch the afternoon performances tailored in dress and choreography to the various tribes from each of Ecuador´s regions: coastal, andean, amazon, and insular; that is, beaches and Galapogos, Sierra and Oriente.

The busride (both ways) reminded me of the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, but not quite that extreme, where Scott and I sat squashed between families of gypsies and their babies, drooling and screaming and flailing about all over our laps. Thank god this ride was only an hour and a half. They pack these buses so tight sometimes that your aisle seat armrest, if by miracle you got a seat which I did one way, becomes a sought-after recliner for two, or a child hops into your lap smiling like he´s yours, or an old woman with a bag of vegetables that stink! leans so far over that her weight and baggage is now your weight and baggage. Trying to breathe is like wrapping a wet towel around your face, and of course the next old man to get on the bus is cold so he promptly closes all sliding windows within reach. An adorable little girl behind me sneezed on the back of my neck and her mother didn´t bat an eye.




So Here´s Where I Go to School - Not Bad, Eh??
It`s not a huge campus, but we have beautiful weather each day and the students lounge in the quad outside the language building where I go each day.

One last thing. Because Ecuador does not yet support the triple band mobile (my chocolate has stopped functioning completely - no servicio!), I purchased a new mobile. I`m no longer a Movistar - my new allegiance is to the ever-popular PORTA! Here are the digits:

085639386



¨We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.¨
- Kerouac