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!

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!

Only a month or two behind schedule, here are some highlights of our “Spring Break” (what does that mean on the equator?) trip to Cartagena and Bogota, Colombia in March, 2008. Cartagena is a beautiful colonial city — the old town is completely walled in from back in the day when Sir Francis Drake was trying to attack the city (you can bet the residents of Cartagena weren’t calling him “Sir”!). Everywhere you looked it was gorgeous, and the weather was thankfully hot, just what the doctor ordered after months of cold and wet in Quito!

Bogota was cooler (but not as cold as Quito!) and cosmopolitan, with vibrant street life and some great museums and restaurants. Here are some images from our visit.

Cartagena Pictures

Here is a video of the shark feeding frenzy (a still photo is in the Cartagena slides above): we took a boat from Cartagena to some nearby islands for a day of Caribbean sand and sun. Part of the deal was to go to this aquarium, which featured a guy feeding “pens” of different kinds of sea creatures. The craziest event was the one featuring these really fat sharks.

Here are our Bogota pictures, including the amazing Botero museum. Botero is Colombia’s most famous artist, and perhaps the world’s most famous living painter. Our favorite restaurant in San Antonio, Texas (Rosario’s) features huge replicas of some of Botero’s sympathetic yet critical paintings of big, fat people.

Here are pictures from my rock climbing adventures at Suesca, near Bogota. I got to go two different days, with two different Colombian climbers that I had met a month before when they were visiting my favorite climbing area near Quito. Suesca has over 400 routes of varying length, both bolted routes and trad climbs (where you place your own gear as you go). The Columbians who showed me around, Gonzalo and Ivan, were extremely generous and justifiably proud of this great climbing area.

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…

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.

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.”

Thursday at school I got a form addressed to Luque Stolimas saying that a package had arrived (Joy’s dad and step-mom sent us a box of stuff on November 29th , which was supposed to arrive in six to eleven days) and to go to Customs to get it. So here’s what we did:

1. Find customs/post office, go to first window. A woman (hereafter first-window-woman) tells me I need two copies of my passport.
2. Go across the street, get copies. Return to window.
3. First-window-woman charges one dollar to use several stamp-pad stamps and then motions me to sit down on a bench and wait for my name (Luque Stolimas) to be called. I sit.
4. After about an hour, I walk up to the door. People standing at the door ask if I am from Academia Cotopaxi (I have a school t-shirt on which provides the clue). Apparently they had called Academia Cotopaxi “about a thousand times.” You can’t really hear them calling from the benches.
5. After only five or six minutes I am taken to see (but not touch) my package. The customs man opens the package and sees that there are books inside (among other things).
6. He puts a stamp on my original form (the one from first-window-woman) and hand-writes on a scrap of paper the name of the next place we need to go, the Camara Ecuatoriana del Libro (Ecuadorian Chamber of Books) and where it is located (half-way across town).
7. We get in the car to find the Chamber of Books. We find the right building, but the Chamber of Books office door is closed and locked. I knock, not finding a buzzer. I knock again a couple of times and in a minute or so the door buzzes open. The only person in the whole office tells me that I need a photocopy of my passport as well as one of the first-window-woman form.
8. I walk down 9 flights rather than wait for the elevator, get the photocopies at a little store on the corner and go back up to the ninth floor.
9. Book-man takes my paperwork and asks me to have a seat. Ten minutes later I get my papers back with some stamps and am charged three dollars.
10. We drive back to the customs office. I am told I need another photocopy of the Chamber of Book-stamped first-window-lady form, and another photocopy of my passport.
11. Go across the street for copies and return.
12. Go to another window and wait for a different guy to look up the original form in a binder, take all my forms, and have me sign another form.
13. After more than three hours, get the package and go.

It’s just that simple!

We were practicing Christmas songs at school this week in preparation for a community service visit to a low-income day care center, and one Villancico (Spanish Christmas Carol) caught my ear - in a funny and weird way. There are verses about Mary washing diapers in the river and so forth, but here is the rousing chorus:

Pero mira como beben los peces en el rio
Pero mira como beben por ver al Dios Nacido
Beben y Beben y vuelven a Beber
Los peces en el río por ver a Dios Nacer (to listen, click here)

Here’s my translation (I’m not making this up):

But look how the fish drink in the river
But look how they drink, seeing God born
They drink and drink and return to drink some more
The fish in the river, seeing God born

What am I supposed to think? Is this what all the drunks in Ecuador sing as they’re getting trashed at Christmas? Like, “Hey, what do you expect me to do? (hic) God’s being born!”

So here’s the evidence, as I see it, that this song is basically a Christmas drinking song:

1. Drinking is about the last thing I would think of fish doing in the river.
2. There was no way to ascertain during ancient times if fish were drinking more or less than usual at any given moment.
3. There is no biblical evidence of Jesus’ birthplace being particularly near a river, much less a seafood market or pet shop.
4. Only a few species of fish can see clearly what’s going on above water.
5. Witnessing supernatural events is not known to make people or animals thirsty.
6. The only other mention in any language of fish drinking is the English phrase, “drinking like a fish” which refers exclusively to alcohol consumption.

You might be stunned to find out that I’m not the only person perplexed by this “drinking carol.” For you Spanish readers, here is a discussion among people trying to make sense of the drinking fish in this song and whether fish really drink. At least one sarcastic writer in Spanish agrees with my assessment: here is the link containing many other tongue-in-cheek claims about this particular carol, referring to “alcoholic fish” and calling Villancicos in general a “fountain (or source) of perversions.”

Merry Christmas! Feliz Navidad!

Joy’s turn to write again (Luke’s all worn out from writing two posts last night).

When we were preparing to leave Austin, I practically begged my dad and step-mom Ellen to schedule a visit this fall - because I was scared that I would be homesick. Their much-anticipated visit came in November, just in time for Thanksgiving. It was really more like Christmas because they came bearing a large suitcase full of things from the States (pleasure reading books for me, Luke’s favorite granola from Whole Foods, Christmas presents from Luke’s family, and other things like vitamins and unscented soap that we can’t find in Quito). They stayed a couple of days with us being tourists in Quito and getting used to the altitude, then promptly flew off to the Galapagos islands for a five day tour on a yacht. They had a great time (although this trip also had its share of misadventures - like Dad falling into the water with his camera around his neck - a total loss (the camera, not the neck)). Ellen kept her neck and camera dry, so they still came away with hundreds of photos of the wildlife on the islands.

Back in Quito, they had another day and a half to be tourists before we all left for the colonial Ecuadorian town of Cuenca for Thanksgiving weekend. We toured the famous Eduardo Vega ceramic workshop in the hills overlooking Cuenca (Luke and I are sitting in front of one of his mosaics -above). We also visited Cuenca’s modern art museum - which we can’t recommend highly enough. It featured a fantastic exhibit of a local artist in a quaint old building with beautiful courtyards. Cuenca was a beautiful city, a relaxing place, and such a great way to spend Thanksgiving. We hope YOU will come visit us next!

We seem to have a knack for bad starts to weekend trips. A month ago on our way to Tena (Monkey Town) to hang out and go rafting, we traveled through Quito in a heavy rainstorm to catch a bus for the “five hour trip.” Once we were finally on the bus, there were at least two mudslides on the highway to Tena, one resulting in an hour-plus delay. The second forced our driver into a sideways powerslide-stop mere feet from two cars blocking both lanes (both cars stopped to figure out how they were going to get through the mudslide). The cars had no lights on, so they weren’t visible from any distance.

That was perhaps the worst of it in terms of danger, but arriving in the wee hours of the morning to Tena, we were the last to get off the bus, and incredibly discovered that our bags were no longer there. No one quite knew what to do, so the driver motioned us back on the bus and we rode around the deserted streets looking for signs of our bags. No luck. Exhausted and still in shock back at the bus station, we began tallying what we would need to replace the next morning, what we could live without, and the monetary and functional value of it all. At this point a pickup loaded with probably 15 people came tearing in to the parking lot saying they’d found a bag among their things that wasn’t theirs! So my pack was recovered, but not Joy’s. The driver told his assistant to get on the pickup with them (now 16 people?) to see if Joy’s bag could be found. Ten minutes later at least as many people returned with Joy’s bag. When they’d gotten off the bus, this giant extended family had just said, “all those bags are ours.” The bags had not been opened and everything was perfectly intact. The rest of the weekend was awesome, as recorded in Monkey Town.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Joy’s dad and stepmom Earl and Ellen were here, and we decided to avoid the 12-hour bus ride to Cuenca by flying. But we found out that even when flying you can still have an epic journey. We arrived at the airport at about noon to find that our flight had been canceled due to a rainstorm earlier that day. Instead, they put us on standby for a 5:00 flight. The four of us sat in the airport from 1:00 on, keeping our fingers crossed - as fog shut down the entire airport for an hour or more. Finally, we boarded at 6:30 and by 8:00 we found ourselves crammed in a taxi en route in the rain from the airport to our hotel.

But it was not to be “our hotel.” The highly recommended, restored 100-year-old mansion hotel had no record of my telephone reservation made a month before, and no rooms for the night or the rest of the weekend. They dug around and uncovered the note documenting our phone call on their computer, but no action had been taken beyond referencing the conversation. The hotels we called from their lobby were all booked as well, until we found a cheap gringo backpacker hotel (my kind of place - $20 for a double with breakfast included!) a mere nine hours after our trip began. But my in-laws aren’t really the backpacker sort, so the next day we moved to a higher end hotel - a gorgeously restored old mansion. We ended up having a great time in Cuenca, which you’ll doubtless get to read about soon.