Sleeping with one eye open

I must have slept last night with my right eyelid hanging open. Today it feels like the Atacama in there. In my youth, I took my eyelids for granted as tight, elastic covers with an impervious, ziplock seal, but they seem to have degraded into something more akin to the flaps of a weathered pup tent, dependent more on gravity than anything else to stay closed, and hopeless at providing a decent seal from the elements. Maybe this is why I seem to be better at falling asleep sitting in a meeting than I am when horizontal in bed.

I won’t go into all the other out-of-warranty body parts that aren’t performing at their previous level.

Hummingbird City

Mindo, Ecuador has an interesting feel — one part dirt-road frontier outpost, one one part ecotourism Shangri-la, one part uncontrolled boom-town.  It’s a tiny place about two hours from Quito, but lower enough in altitude that it’s warmer.  It’s in what they call a cloud forest that feels more like a rain forest with bromeliads and vines on every tree and scads of different ferns. We visited Mindo with Joy’s Mom Bettye and step-dad Bob while they were here in October. For a town with just one paved street and dirt side streets, it had tons of new lodging under construction, giving it the feel of a tropical gold-rush town struggling to keep up with its manifest destiny.  Then there are the hummingbirds, waterfalls, orchids and butterflies.

 

We stayed in a beautiful place, all wood and bamboo, with a banister made of branches stained dark and shiny, artfully assembled to support the handrail. The town, renowned for being tranquilo, revealed another side on this particular weekend when night fell.  A tiny Colombian circus was in town (under the “medium top”), which sounded quaint and curious as heck, with the best seats costing a whopping two dollars.  Bettye and I were going to go, but we all got lazy and tired after a day of traversing a canyon on a cablecar, and hiking down steep trails to see waterfalls. At bedtime our adjacent rooms divulged the disadvantage of the village emphasis on rustic wood and bamboo construction: we carried on normal conversations through the walls as though we were sharing one room.  The only thing that interfered with our evening conversation was the circus, which though on the other side of town, packed quite a wallop through the hotel walls, competing later with some dance music from a local fund-raising event.  Music and announcers “entertained” us until about 4 AM.

Still, like a rain shower on a camping trip, the previous night’s noise faded to nothing more than a humorous anecdote as we reveled for a second day in the marvelous hummingbirds of Mindo, this time at the Orchid Garden.  It was endlessly impressive to watch dozens of hummingbirds visit the feeders.  Still pictures don’t capture it, so below I’ve included the video Bettye took, which feels way too short every time I see it.

To view a slideshow of Bettye and Bob’s trip, including the Equator Monument, Mindo, and Quito’s folkloric ballet, click here. To view all the sets of photos we’ve put on Flickr, mostly without any description or attribution, check that out at Flickr.

Popcorn in your soup

Ecuadorians are big into soup. The daily lunch specials (from $1.20 to $3.00) at every restaurant in the country start with a soup of some kind, always homemade. The other day at school I had, for the first time in my life, tomato soup that wasn’t from a can. It had a different flavor and was REALLY good. This sounds stupid, but I don’t believe I ever thought about how you would — or could — actually make tomato soup.

As in the U.S., people like to put crunchy stuff in soup before eating it. One of most popular items to dump in your soup here in Ecuador is popcorn (canguil in Ecuadorian Spanish, pronounced can-GEEL). Joy has mixed emotions about this: popcorn is one of her favorite things to eat, but she doesn’t like eating it all mushy, so she’ll never put it in soup. On the other hand, she loves the payoff this tradition brings: they’ll often supply a bowl of popcorn to the table at the beginning of a meal - she just eats it, well, like popcorn.

Keep an eye on The Word Page blog for an upcoming discussion of some of the words in Latin America for corn, including at least 6 different words for popcorn.