Our toilet flushes twice

I bet YOU don’t have a toilet that flushes twice!  Everyone is always asking if the toilet water spins the other way here, 20 km south of the equator, but usually the person asking can’t remember which way their own toilet spins, and neither can I.  On that issue, I think it has more to do with the design of the toilet, but I’m not sure.

We have a more interesting phenomenon.  Sometime in the last couple of months the toilet in our main bathroom started flushing twice.  You know how some people can’t sneeze just once?  Our toilet flushes, pauses, then flushes again.  It’s perfect for when you flushed, then suddenly remembered that you wanted to blow your nose and were hoping to also get that flushed down before it’s too late.

I was thinking about trying to video it, but unless I dyed the water it would be right up there with a video of a snowstorm at night for clarity and drama.  If you want to check it out, come visit!

Three-Dog Day

A couple of months ago we awoke to find that our landlady Kathy, who lives downstairs, had gotten a third dog. This was shocking and dismaying. But first, some background.

An early post, Dog Rallies, was partly about the two mutts Kathy already had when we got here. They each enjoy barking, but in different ways. Jake likes to bark at passersby but is quizzically quiet around us. Jake, on the other hand, still thinks we are intruders, enemies, six months and more into our residence in his territory. His bloodcurdling barking and lunges at the gate are truly terrifying for a dog that weighs just fifteen pounds.

Perhaps I need to clarify. Yes, for some reason both dogs are named Jake. What I forgot to mention is that they both have second names. Jake Sweeney is the white brillo pad dog who is silent around us. The psycho (and he may be truly psycho) floppy-black curls one is Jake Farley. Perhaps, though, passersby-barking Jake Sweeney might live up to the Demon Barber appelation in his own way: Kathy keeps them separated at all times or Jake Sweeney will attempt to rip psycho Jake Farley limb from limb.

We kept hoping Kathy would get rid of one of the dogs (preferably the psycho Jake), and she always talked about how one or the other was supposed to be a temporary thing.

So when Nora showed up, we were a little freaked. Kathy explained: Nora was to provide company for Jake Farley and calm him down. Did we roll our eyes? Not in front of Kathy, of course, but the way we saw it, you don’t fix too many dogs by getting even more. Plus, we’d had a history of ineffective strategies in trying to calm down Jake Farley. First, Kathy would soothe him until we could pet him ourselves — surely some sweet patting and ear-scratching would convince him of our general goodness and lack of ill-will. But no. The slit-second Kathy moved away, he nearly bit our fingers off while resuming his insane barking. Next, we beseeched him with doggy treats. This didn’t work either. Then Kathy read in a book that we needed to spray him with water, and she got us a little sprayer (like a Windex bottle, except made of cute, orange plastic in the shape of an upside-down carrot). This worked for about two days until he realized he could back up 6 feet and keep up the earsplitting barks.  Finally, I started opening the gate and chasing him down the side of the house growling.  This was the most effective so far.

But now there is Nora.  An adorable cocker spaniel puppy.  And Jake the maniac Farley loves her to pieces.  It really seems to be working.  And now, besides the hummingbirds, we have another animal entertainment out the window: Jake Farley and Nora wrestling their little hearts out, and then sleeping curled up together.  Sweet!

Comings and Goings

So sorry it’s been entire months since I’ve written. It’s been an interesting and busy first part of the year (I can’t say “spring” down here).

Since our big New Year trip, we’ve hosted some travelers, and done some traveling ourselves. Visiting us were: former Austinites Kat & Damon who are in the Peace Corps on the Ecuadorian coast, who thrilled at our fancy house and hot water, and Austinites Bob and Evey who visited during UT’s spring break for a week. As for our journeys, we spent holy week visiting Cartagena and Bogota, Colombia. Tomorrow my brother Bruce and Mom and Dad arrive. Bruce is staying just a week. Mom and Dad are including a Galapagos trip and will be here a total of three weeks. On the 17th and 18th (during my parents’ visit) I’ll be spending two days with the 6th grade on an overnight sojourn to El Refugio, a camp/retreat center about an hour from Quito.

I’ll try to do better about writing. Maybe I’ll be do fewer big multimedia posts - it takes forever to get all those photos chosen, resized, uploaded into flickr.com and moved into slide.com. Still, I want to share pics from beautiful Cartagena, and from the Botero museum in Bogota as well as Suesca, a great climbing area outside Bogota…

Yet Another Survival-Epic-Adventure-Vacation

Over the Christmas/New Year holiday (finally getting around to writing this after turning in my grades today), our friends Victor and Erin visited. Victor’s from France, though we met him in Austin years ago. In fact, he’s the one who introduced us to Andrea, our reason for moving to Quito (her home town)! Andrea’s now married to Keith (with daughter Emilia in tow), and Victor’s dead serious with Erin. Two years ago we all camped, hiked and climbed together at beautiful Lake Tahoe, California. This year Erin and Victor got a flight to Quito on pretty short notice and voila as Victor would say, we were all together again.

We bought hundreds of dollars of groceries, and headed out for El Altar, considered the most beautiful mountain in Ecuador (click here for the slide show of the trip). Our plan was to hike to it (1.5 days), camp at the lake in the crater (sounds beautiful, eh?) for three nights, then hike back out. We had hired mules and a cook, to make it a little more cush. The problem was, the weather didn’t cooperate. It was cold and drizzly, but even worse, the recent rains — combined with the grape-stomping prowess of the mules — rendered the track a sucking mousse of mud anywhere from a few inches to over a foot deep. The mental and physical challenge of the trail (uphill nearly all the way, at altitude, and did I mention the mud?) left us with little time or energy to enjoy the incredible scenery. The whole slog from the cars to the cabins at the base of the mountain, which turned out to be just ten km (6.2 miles measured by GPS), took us eight hours to negotiate. Erin was not feeling well and turned back, and Victor (our strongest mountaineer) with her. We got beautiful views of three of El Altar’s nine separate summits, spent the night in the cabins, and turned around the next day, so unfortunately we never went up into the crater nor actually saw the whole mountain.

We had returned with 90% of our food, and still had four days to kill. We were wet, filthy, tired, cranky, and cold. After a brief powwow, we headed to Baños (Bath in English, from the hot springs there. Click here for an entry on our previous visit to this great town). On the drive toward Baños we got a big thrill when we saw, with our own eyes, Volcán Tungurahua erupting (intermittent alternating burps of white steam and black ash — you may have seen this on the news. Spanish sidenote: the Spanish word for burp is erupto). In Baños no one was worried about the volcanic activity happening practically above their heads. We chilled out in a hotel with queen beds near a waterfall, took long showers, ate at great restaurants, and generally thawed out in the semitropical valley. Those of us with energy to burn went on a day hike and rappelled down waterfalls (sorry, no pictures). Finally, at New Year’s we followed Ecuadorian tradition by burning the Año Viejo, the Old Year anthropomorphized as an old man, an effigy stuffed with wood chips we bought at the market.

When it was all said and done, Keith summed it up perfectly: there aren’t many people you can spend a whole week with and not be sick of them. That may sound like faint praise to some, but the fact is we all feel blessed to have such great friends who are so easy to travel and spend time with.

Joy and the Snob Jelly

There are many familiar, American and European brand names at our grocery store here in Quito, Ecuador: Hunts, Campbell’s, Quaker, Prego. Other local or regional brands abound as well, and sometimes the names look and sound funny to English speakers, because they are take-offs of English words — like Hony brand Graham Crackers for example. One of my favorites is the brand “Snob.” That would Almost work as a brand name in the U.S. — we certainly have brands intended to appeal to the elitist in us, but this one a little too descarado (bald-faced). We’ve been getting canned Snob palmitos (palm hearts) since arriving, and we recently bought their strawberry-blackberry jam for an abortive trek — it comes in these great tough flexible envelopes with a screw top nozzle, perfect for travel.

Normal American brands marketed here sometimes have local twists. The dish detergent we get is Joy brand (my sentimental favorite for its stubbornness and resolve when it comes to cleaning). For some reason, in smaller print above the big JOY logo, it says, “non-ultra.” So we buy Non-Ultra Joy. My wife Joy assures me that there is no Ultra Joy available (because, among other reasons, she is not for sale). Anyway, it’s like, “just in case you were wondering, you are not buying the amazing new improved version of this product, which by the way we no longer sell at this or any store.”

I wonder if this will start a marketing trend, campaigns of lowered expectations. Here are a few ideas, no charge: Half-decent Hellman’s, Mediocre Matzo, Not-so-fresh Salad Mix, Don’t-get-your-hopes-up Doughnuts, Not your Mama’s Macaroni & Cheese.  I think this approach was actually behind one U.S. state’s 1980s tourism campaign, “Oklahoma’s OK.”