Setting up Shop

Thanks to Craig Smith and John Newman, MPI Ecuador at last signed on a house lease yesterday. The place is a pretty great deal - six bedrooms, two atriums, two living rooms, three baths and a terrace from which you can see both mountains Pasochoa and Cotopaxi - all for less than a third of what I paid for one room at Vanderbilt University.

At the risk of overloading my any Luddite readers out there, I'd like to share a Google Maps image of our house as well as the areas in which we'll be working - the house is the northernmost blue dot. And if you scroll way out, you'll find Gringolandia, where I'm currently surviving.


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If you're reading in facebook, go to my blog to see the embedded image.

Also, if you'd like to see photos of us climbing Pichincha, the mountain overlooking Qiuto, check out Zak's Photos.

Crawfishing

Moving from Louisiana to Ecuador, I resigned myself to giving up good seafood - crawfish especially. Last week, however, I was happy to find that during the months with an r in them,* coastal Ecuadorians eat the dirty little things with gusto.

From what I could gather during a conversation with one of my costeño friends named Byron, Ecuadorians fry crawfish tails inside of mashed plantains, making a sort of crawfish cake. They spice the masa (the Spanish word for mashed stuff) with oregano, parsley, garlic, sour orange juice, and something that may or may not be spelled paetaña. The cakes are topped with a kind of tomato paste, lime, and more paetaña.

I explained to Bryon in turn how we do things in Louisiana. He liked the idea of three-hour meals over folding tables covered with newspaper, beer cans and potatoes, but was less impressed with the thought of "sucking the heads."

I also explained to Byron the meaning of the "crawfishing" for which we had to invent a new Spanish word: cangrejeando. The idea seemed to translate somewhat more easily than did the thought of boiling the bottom-dwellers alive without cleaning them first. Whatever - fried, boiled, steamed, grilled - I'm looking forward to Ecuador's cangrejo season however they decide to serve them.

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*September through April.

Underpants

Ecuador doesn´t have a lot of washing machines. Even pretty decent houses typically have a place to hand-wash clothes rather than put them through a machine.

The discovery I made, as I attempted for the 15th time to wash the remnants of soap out of my jeans, was that underpants do in fact have a purpose - they keep you from having to wash your jeans so often.

But for those of you back in the States with laundry machines, who can wash your jeans every time you wear them, I continue to maintain that underpants are silly.

(unless they´re the lucky rocketship kind)

Moving on up to Gringoland

In the northern half of Quito, there is an area which maps call "The Mariscal," but which locals and everybody else knows as "Gringolandia."

Gringolandia is a three or four-block chunk of bars, fusion food restaurants, internet cafes, laundromats, hostels and Spanish schools. Beers cost about four times what they do two blocks in any direction, and lunch about eight times.

For the month of September, my Spanish school has placed me with a wonderful family whose apartment overlooks Plaza del Quinde, the heart of this mess. Mornings will be filled with Spanish classes, afternoons planning the next few months with UBECI, and evenings cooking, dancing, planning, and getting to know the rest of Team Ecuador (what´s that called, HOD folks? Storming or something?). In October, we hit the ground running.

One member of that team, Craig Smith, arrived last night. We´re busting out of the Mariscal shortly to get back to the valley.

!