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.”

Luque Stolimas and the Chamber of Books

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!

Transcultural Christmas Humbug

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!

Thanksgiving in Cuenca

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!

Nightmare starts to great trips

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.