a letter?

ecuador,

you amuse me sometimes. you frustrate me sometimes. for all your beauty, inside and out, you certainly have your flaws and these flaws make me into a pretentious estadounidense who thinks she knows exactly what's right for you. i can't make you change your ways. any change of yours has to come from the inside, it can't be a superficial or a half-hearted attempt. your flaws are a part of your character, they help make you who you are. so maybe i'm just not right for you but maybe we both could make compromises to make a better relationship.

for instance, what was up with yesterday?

i went to parque carolina to play basketball with my friends jed and ellie who watched from the sidelines and agreed. your people were acting a bit unnaturally unfriendly towards me. i promise it wasn't me, your people were different today. my teammates, your people, didn't play fair with me even though i scored the team first possession at the beginning of the game by making the first shot. they wouldn't pass to me even though i was wide open. one of them in particular would look at me, smile, and pass to someone else or shoot. the old guy on my team was the coolest of them but still, they weren't making shots and when i would steal possession of the ball or on the offhand chance someone would pass to me, i would score more often than not.

jed's team won, which honestly i was glad so that my teammates wouldn't be rewarded with a victory after excluding me even though i was the fourth, very necessary, wheel. for the next game, jed, two of our ecuadorian friends, and i played against the same people who were on my team in the last match. just a second into this game, i had the ball underneath the hoop when one guy, the guy who guarded me in the last game, tried to grab the ball from behind me. i decided to call a foul and when he disputed i said that no hugging was allowed in the game. he replied by saying, that wasn't hugging and then tried to grab me with his gross sweaty body saying he would show me a hug but i quickly stepped out of his grasp and went to the top of the court to start afresh.

the same guy, who was not much taller than me but definitely heavier, drove to the basket and ran into me on the way. i called a charge and he said i fouled him. i tried to explain to him that a charge happens when someone on the offense runs into someone on the defense who is standing still, not moving. that is a charge. you just ran into me when i was standing in one place. that is the definition of a charge. but he and the other one on his team that i disliked simply laughed at the little girl yelling at them and took the ball, starting to play, laughing, before i had finished telling them they were wrong. they completely didn't listen to what i was saying and had a good time at it too.

now i know we all have our bad sides, the sides we try and not let show too often but that little exercise in disrespect really showed your true colors to me. that kind of attitude either comes from a society that doesn’t care enough or one that is not in control of its people. neither is a good characteristic to have.

usually i consider you to be well -behaved, friendly and humorous but today, that was not the case. i went to fybeca, the chain pharmacy store, a lot like rite-aid to pick up pictures i had dropped off to be developed. well on saturday your fybeca employees said to come back on monday afternoon. so i did. and without much friendliness, they told me to come back in an hour, that the pictures were not done yet.

so with ellie in my arsenal, i return, pretty excited for the pictures i was about to have from before and after coming to you, beautiful yet far away land. but the same person who rang me up when i bought the pictures, and who i paid $9.10 to, said that i must pay the rest of the price. 'no' i say, 'you didn't tell me i was going to have to pay more, i didn't bring any money!' and there we began the battle between fybeca manager and ellie and i. apparently it is logical to pay when you turn in photos and when you pick them up. half at the beginning and the rest, which is variable, when you come back. apparently i was supposed to know that from reading the fine print that even he couldn't find. he couldn't even find the sheet where they list prices for developing photos, which weren't on the wall or anywhere visible either. they were willing to give me the photos up to the price i paid, and let me come back and pick up the rest when i had the money.

after a very long winded, circular argument that lasted about 20 minutes, the big time manager came by and said, 'i have heard what this argument is about, we will let you take them without paying the rest of the bill', which, apparently, is an uncommon practice with your businesses but certainly isn't in my country's businesses. it is also uncommon that you pay for developed photos twice.

now maybe this is common practice in fybeca but it certainly isn't common practice everywhere else and i don't know how they think they can get away with charging someone at the beginning and not tell them they will be charged again at pick up time. that seems really inefficient, among other, more vulgar terms.

more generally, you can definitely be really inefficient. the inefficiency in that incident really wasn't an isolated incident. many times your stores don't want to break a 10 dollar bill or even a 5 sometimes. how is that good business if you have to refuse customers because you can't or won't break their marginally large bill?

and also, what's up with your road rage? you have no respect for pedestrians and that is pretty self destructive behavior. you're really only hurting yourself and your reputation.

and speaking of your reputation, it's a good one. you are different, multi-faceted and proud, rightfully so. keep it up, with all the good things you do. i really think you are going in the right direction and i am really happy for you.

but soon i will be going in my own direction, and i think our paths will probably go far away from each other. at least for a while. how about we call it a healthy break? i'm sure when it feels right again that i will come back. but i say we take advantage of the time we have left together. yeah. i'll take your annoying facets and embrace them as quirks and how about you do the same.

well, if i don't hear back from you soon, then i think that's what i am going to do, do everything i can to enjoy you for the time i have left and remember the good times once we split ways. and i hope you can forgive me for my flaws too. i think our time together has been worth it, i wouldn't have done it any other way.

con cariño y un abrazo,

maya.

numbers

this, i maybe should not be thinking about, but since i am i might as well put the info out there:

in 18 days the final draft of my directed independent study project is due.
in 20 days the program is completely and totally over.
in 22 days i will go to mexico and see my parents.
in 25 days it's christmas.
in 27 days i fly home and sleep in my own santa monica bed.

for the last few weeks my feelings on coming home have been swinging back and forth like a pendulum or a bipolar person or i don't know what else. some times i just want to be home now and see my parents and friends and family and i think that i don't need to be here anymore, that i'm not going to learn any more about ecuador or in spanish in the next few weeks so why can't i go home yet? but then other times i realize how unexciting life will be when i get home, and yeah it will be nice to see people but i will sooner or later anyways so i might as well be in a place i have no idea if i will ever come back to. and i think, now, that is the right place for my mind to be in. three weeks and a day till i see my parents. that amount of time is completely graspable for me. three weeks and a day i can tell will go by quick.

this final project is turning out to not be so bad either. it has to be 20-25 pages, including the cover page, the index, any appendices and the bibliography and i already wrote 5 pages this weekend. back to writing now.

dia de accion de gracias

thanksgiving has always been up there as my favorite holiday. when i decided to go abroad this semester i specifically thought about how i would miss going to idyllwild to see family i usually only see once or twice a year. well thanksgiving found its way over to ecuador and resulted in a really pleasant, loving day for me and i'm guessing for all of the people who took part with us.

a friend had all 18 of us pitzer in ecuador students over and we all brought some traditional and non traditional food to share. i brought a fruit pie (for all the good fruit and juices in ecuador, this place doesn't really know how to do a pie) as my entrance ticket while other people brought stuffing, cranberry jello, mashed potatoes, chickens and drinks. the chickens were our mini turkeys and everything was absolutely delicious.

through drunken toasts, everyone said how thankful they were for the food on our plate, the people we are sharing it with, and our families who helped us get here and we all, spoken or not, felt like a strange collective representing something like a family.

after the food we all felt like we had to hold our bellies in so they wouldn't explode, and so a few of us went on a nice evening walk around the block a couple times and stretched on a street corner.

then, a few of us decided it was poker time, so seven of us sat around the now cleared dinner table and with a $1 buy in, started playing. a couple of the people who joined didn't really know how to play and that manifested in one of them making a strategy of betting really high when she had something, anything that wasn't nothing. well, i lost quick because i always seemed to have a decent hand but someone else always could beat it, and the only way any of us could play was with betting a lot of chips so a friend and i ran out and lost first. it was tragic. but i stuck around the table and the person who was bidding so high eventually decided she didn't want to play, so i played for her. well, the people's republic of maya won the game, and we redistributed the dollars back out to everyone so nobody lost.

at this point most people had left and so a couple friends and i hopped a cab and went home. it was so nice to talk to my family in idyllwild and even though i did wish i could have been there, i felt the love enough to make me happy just from talking to them for a few minutes. i hope everybody had a fantastic thanksgiving and thank you guys for everything.

some fotos

by the end of our stay, our guide had branded us with all natural jungle tattoos from a random fruit he picked on one of our hikes. find which one is my hand!

somehow this blob of nocturnal bugs is actually well camouflaged from further away.

cool people about to climb really high and see cool views.

where we were climbing to, as you can see, the bridge on the left has a broken wood plank.

our guide for our stay, meyer, showing us some inside out and spiky mushrooms.

me, lianna and ellie on a boat on the river we floated down, notice my cool new hat.

junglerainforestadventure!

how to get to the rainforest:

1. take a taxi to the airport at 530 in the morning.
2. take a really small airplane over the andes for 45 minutes.
3. take a bus to a hotel with illegal wild monkeys, parrots and peacocks.
4. take a canoe with a motor for an hour and 40 minutes.
5. take a chiva bus for 2 hours, meaning a wooden bus, without any glass windows so the air blows your hat, food and anything else not firmly held down into the abyss.
6. take another motor canoe for 2 hours, this time in the rainforest rain so that anyone without a poncho immediately accessible got soaked.

the slightly soggy journey was well worth where we found ourselves after the last canoe ride, the tiputini biodiversity station, which is a research station affiliated with the university of san francisco, quito and boston university.

after a surprisingly delicious dinner of spaghetti and tomato sauce and garlic bread, we split into groups of 6 students with a guide, making three groups, and left on a night hike through the jungle.

my group of 6 slightly scared but really excited fellow journeywomen ventured into the darkness with not enough flashlights and no cameras and found something of everything. we encountered frogs (ranas), toads (sapos), lots and lots of different kinds of ants (hormigas and congas), mushrooms and fungi (hongos), spiders (arañas), and of course, trees (arboles).

the frogs were mainly transparent and the size of a quarter, the toads were bigger and brown or green, the ants called congas were probably as long as a quarter, in one spot our guide told us to turn off the flashlights and slowly, glow in the dark mushrooms became speckles of light in the ground, my guide called them stars from the ground and they really did look like a mirror image of the sky. we also found tarantulas hanging out in their holes.

the next morning my same group found ourselves on a 120 foot platform overlooking the jungle. it was beautiful. later we crossed a few bridges, all connected by platforms at the top of the jungle trees. terrifying but beautiful.

on our last full day we took the motor canoe down the river and jumped into the river. in our oversized lifevests we floated with the current followed by the boat. even though the river was brown and caymans are known to live in it, the river floating adventure might have been my favorite.

the next day we took a couple boats and buses and an airplane to get home. and it is nice to be here, with bug bites constantly reminding me of the good times had a few days ago. now i am on my final stretch, with only a 25 page essay between me and the end of my semester in ecuador.

oh and i don't have any pictures, but as soon as i find some i will put them up.

life on a farm with some indigenous folk

this is the result of 10 days in a rural indigenous town where all the women where this getup, with variations only in the color of the embroidery and skirt.

not ecuador

dead women's pass

this is day two. day two is the hardest. day two is the hurdle, the mountain. two mountains, actually, for day two. day two gets you to day three, though, so i have to do day two. day three gets you to machu picchu so i have to just get through day two.

knowing the hardest part of the hardest day is called dead women's pass is a bit disheartening when you know you have a couple thousand meters of elevation to gain left (which takes an average of 5 hours) to get there and and couple thousand meters to descend afterward (which takes 1.5 hours) before lunchtime.

our group of 18 quickly changes from a group of excited kids joking around together into solitary soldiers dedicated to the mountain. it actually doesn't seem so bad at first, there is uphill and flat, more uphill and flat and that isn't too bad. after an hour and fifteen minutes where the first break is, i know if it's more of the same than this dead women's pass will have been overrated but i know that this isn't the case. starting again is another uphill, some downhill, some uphill and this is the point where the uphill doesn't stop. the uphill obviously becomes upmountain.

from the shrubbery and trees and cool nice temperature i ascend to a more tropical zone, with a stream and some butterflies and large trees with moss growing on the sides. here the stairs begin. here you round a corner and see more stairs, probably about a hundred in sight until you round another corner or get through the trees blocking the view and see another hundred stairs. this pattern got old very quickly. two hours later i reach the next official break.

so i hear, this last part was the hardest and it only gets easier. the next part is less steep, then it's the top. alright. i start walking up and there are no stairs, score! i keep going up, though, and when i round the corner the reality of dead women's pass hits me. i see the 20 minute walk i just took continue in front of me and then make a right hand turn and continue and make a left around the mountain into the abyss.

here we begin to enter another type of climate. this uphill, which is starting to add the occassional stair, starts to be inside of the clouds far above where i began this day. i can see the people ahead of me become the size of toy soldiers turning the corner a ways in front of me and a ways above me. this is where there isn't really enough air and i have to stop every minute or so to catch my breath even though i wished i could just keep going. eventually i round the corner and leave the group of people i was silently walking besides. the end is in sight and i can see the dark profile of people's heads moving around the top, mistakable for a tree if someone was standing without moving.

this part gets a bit more steep. i keep going. i see ellie but can't spend any energy on yelling a hello to her at the top already though i hear my name being cheered by the ellie. i keep going. i pass a friend who won't respond to anyone speaking to her. i start the last tier of stairs. i'm in a cloud. i keep going and i get there with some good friends to greet me and congratulate me.

we came from the lowest part. we ended at the highest part. you can see people just about to finish on the right and how the trail led us there.

reaching dead women's pass is an accomplishment and we all did it.

saksay waman

i'm in peru. cusco to be exact. after waking up at three thirty in the morning (morning is a debatable word to describe three thirty) and taking an airplane to this place, we explore the very old very high town of cusco. eventually, finally lunch time comes and it seems as though everyone is dropping like flies. after lunch we have the option of going to an archaeological site called saksay waman (not sexy woman, everyone's favorite joke) but only five of us students make it, along with the two program leaders.

saksay waman is something like a fortress. somehow the pre-colombian people got a bunch of rocks, some probably ten to fifteen feet tall and the same width, and put them side by side and stacked to make a really beautiful wall. behind the wall were other rock groupings of similar styles.

a lot of rocks made their way up here.

across the field on the other side was a playground of sorts. a humongous rock bulges out of the ground and is so smooth that it looks in some ways like it could be a petrified wave out of the ocean. the rock becomes a slide at one part, so smooth you can ride down it from probably thirty feet above the ground and your butt only becomes slightly sore afterwards.

the rock slides.

saksay waman is quite a place and also quite a song. which we learned in my quichua class and has been stuck in my head ever since then (saksay waman pi/pukuy pukuycha/imashamanta/kanpash wakanki...).

day one

this is the real beginning of the real purpose of my trip to peru. going off the impression cusco gave me, i had no real problem waking up at 430 the next day because of the excitement of the even bigger things to come.

so after some diddle daddling, we are finally on the trail and on the trail we continue, for about four hours until we hit the campsite where we are supposed to eat lunch.

only problem, this is november second, dia de los difuntos in many parts of latin america, including peru. for this reason, the agency that sent us our guides and porters for the trip made a deal that some of the porters could start this first day halfway through the day because they refused to go earlier.

one of the many ruins, this one was actually on the third day.

i'm very glad that the porters who requested to celebrate this day got some time off but really, they should have given us packed lunches or warned us ahead of time because i don't think i'm being too picky when i say that it is not acceptable to let people hike for four hours after having breakfast at five in the morning and not give them lunch at a decent hour. because we were missing the essential porters who made us every meal, we hiked for another two hours after reaching the lunch campsite, where we were told we would eat lunch, and ate over twelve hours after our last meal and after six hours of backpacking.

inti punku

day three is the last real day of backpacking. day three is the most beautiful. i thought of it as the reward we all deserved after day two. we passed many things beautiful and kept doing so for many hours. we went through cave tunnels and past a big river at the bottom of whatever mountain we were on top of that day. a butterfly attached itself to me and let me carry itself for several minutes.

the view we woke up to on the third day, the day we reached inti punku.

this was the day where we would finally be formally introduced to machu picchu. after lunchtime we began the last big stretch and we hiked flat and uphill terrain for a couple hours. after a good amount of time and when the trail really began to get steep i could feel how close we were. i suddenly had a bundle of energy and happily kept going, telling a friend behind me when i could see if the trail kept going flat, up or down.

the last stretch was wide. i kept going until i could see through the trees to the top. i saw inti punku, the sun gate, where stones had been placed and where the sun was shining on it just perfectly so that these thousands year old stones shined bright and yellow while the surroundings were shady from the trees.

a happy camper having just reached inti punku. machu picchu is in the middle at the end of the road where buses take people from the village below.

here is where i got my first impression of machu picchu and it was a good one. machu picchu is large and charming yet modest. the obligatory photo shoot with everyone's cameras followed and then we descended the last 30 minutes and were actually really finally there. it was around four thirty and the place was nearly empty and so quiet. the sun was just beginning to set and gave a soft light and glow to machu picchu. a llama walked by but before leaving the first few people there, posed for a camera.

the great awakening

the third day was election day. i tried very hard to keep it out of my mind and actually could for periods. at dinner time, around eight thirty we still really had no idea. after an internal debate i decided i would go to sleep after dinner instead of staying up like a bunch of us were doing until news found itself into the program leader's blackberry inbox.

the program leader's inbox got an email around eleven which lead to him poking his head out of his tent to announce the news to the vigilant and slightly drunk students waiting in the center of where all the tents were.

at this moment some screaming woke me up, and unlike most backpacking situations where i would be concerned to hear such screaming so late at night, i knew immediately the reason and laid in my sleeping bag with a smile, absorbing the moment, in light of the situation, the beauty i was in.

machu picchu

the locals, the quechua speakers pronounce machu picchu, machu pik'chu.

a closer view of machu picchu.

the town down below, where everyone goes through to get to the site is called aguascalientes but is trying to change its name to machu picchu.

no one knows for sure what machu picchu is but it was empty before the spaniards arrived, possibly because of a malaria epidemic.

machu picchu has a sun temple that lets the sun shine through it just perfectly on the summer solstice.

when it was found again by academic herman bigham in 1911 it was completely covered in trees and grass and took a long time to find out how epic the place actually is.

machu picchu is special. gorgeous. highly impressive.

machu picchu has a sun dial.

lima

i love the grand city of lima, peru.

it is a coastal city and everytime i remembered i had the ability to, i would breathe in a nice breath of salty chilled coastal air.

i walked by myself to a starbucks, bought a chai tea latte and felt completely comfortable, even more than i do after two months in quito.

i really loved lima.

the only picture of lima i have.

lima doesn't have the constant beauty of cusco, where every building looks like it belongs more a couple centuries ago than in this age. lima is a city's city. it has character.

it also has one of the most impressive central plazas i've seen in all of peru and ecuador.

i will go back to lima one day more certainly than any of the other places i've been to so far this semester.

lima was my last impression of peru.

san clemente

tomorrow i go to an indigenous village called san clemente for ten days where i will do many things i probably won't do ever again. more details on that in about ten days.