it's been a while

pictures are of the crew on the train, 2 views from and of the train and 2 pictures of cuenca. and they are ellie's.




i love walking through the rain and seeing my breath without actually feeling cold and i get to do this almost every day. the weather here is unpredictably predictable yet i still never bring an umbrella with me when i go out. when i come back to the states it will be a disaster for me when it reaches the 80s or 90s. oh and i'm just barely starting to get used to the metric system and celsius. a healthy person has a temperature of 37 degrees celsius.

this weekend i ate like a queen and as usual, for less than 5 bucks for a royal meal. at many restaurants, ask for el almuerzo, lunch and they give you their lunch for the day, usually a soup, rice and some kind of meat, fresh juice and maybe some dessert. ecuatorianos know how to make pizza, too. i went to cuenca, the third biggest city in this country and ate their traditional dish, mote pillo, which is some delicious corn cooked with eggs. i could eat that every day. and the ice cream, oh the ice cream i would breathe it if possible.

i took a train on saturday at 7 in the morning. i sat on it's roof and watched ecuador for 7 hours. i saw many variations of the color green and some brown everywhere and all across the hillsides which looked like quilts sown into the ground, just as beautiful as useful. we saw snowcapped mountains in the distance which looked like white camoflouge hidden in the openings of the clouds. i forget how big space is until i do something like descend the nariz del diablo, nose of the devil, and see a panoramic view of what looks like an entire world of canyons and rivers and delapidated buildings and railroad tracks that go farther than the actual train goes.

cuenca is magical. that is all there is to it.

the life is good and it keeps on going that way.

here i will briefly outline the rest of my semester for your reading pleasure:

in three weeks, halloween to be exact, i will fly away to peru to see what is machu picchu with my own eyes until the 7th of november, exactly a week later. then on the 9th, a sunday, i go a couple hours north of quito to san clemente, an indigenous town where i will live with an indigenous family for 10 days, waking up early and farming and experiencing something truly new in my life. then, a couple days later, a friday, i am off to the jungle, the amazon to be exact from the 2st to the 24th. then i begin my 3.5 weeks of intensive research which will hopefully conclude in a 25-page paper on sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, or good living, which comes from quichua. this phrase appears in the preamble to the new constitution and is similar to the idea of the pursuit of happiness except for that they are using an indigenous word. my very large (hatun) paper will focus on what that phrase means to indigenous people, what the constitution says it will do for them, and what they think will, if anything, actually happen for them as a result of the constitution.