Homestay Family, Climbing Pichincha

So Intag was great. But there wasn’t much time to digest it all once we came back. The next morning, I found myself standing awkwardly with my fellow students in front of large group of happy looking Ecuadorians. Two guys were playing a guitar and singing, around 50 others were carrying flowers and other little gifts and generally looking quite well groomed. Yes it was that time of the semester – HOMESTAY!!! We all crowded around trying both to find our parents and not step on anybody else in the process. I was a little nervous and more than a little self-conscious though I figured my family probably wouldn’t have a hard time finding my family. I was finally greeted by a rather motherly-looking smiling Ecuadorian woman. My new mother´s name is Ingrid and she pulled me to a corner of the crowd and introduced me to my new father, Ruben. Hugs all around, I presented them with a small cake I had bought that morning, they gave me an Ecuadorian bracelet. We finally left the hotel, and we got into their car (medium-sized, can´t remember the model, well-kept) and drove off to the northern side of Quito. On the way started getting acquainted and talked about Namibia and Intag and then my parents started pointing out roads and landmarks and buses so that I could get easily oriented. I found out that my family was very helpful like that, they always explained where I could get stuff, which bus with which colored letters would get me where, how I could get pirated DVDs for a dollar etc. Basically Quito has a few long main roads and everything else leads from those, so its not difficult to find your way around. My new residency turned out to be right next to the airport in a little complex (complete with gate and guard) and the house itself is small but homey. Nicely decorated, dining room table for Sunday lunch and guests as far as I can tell, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen, living room dining room, little garden in front, sweet view of car company office buildings from the roof – which is where they hang their laundry to dry. I have two brothers whom I met shortly before lunch – Sebastian and Ruben (17 and 19 respectively), who I have enjoyed hanging out with a lot so far. They´re very sporty and fun to spend time with in the house. As far as I can tell they are neither terribly studious nor wild party animals, and I´m currently developing a master plan to get them to take me along to the gym and also get a membership. On Sundays my family had a big lunch, and went shopping twice in the afternoon. I went with my parents to the nearby “supermaxi” grocery store and was shocked to find bottles of South African produced Amarula in the liquor section. I explained the origin to Ingrid who then explained to me which liquors she liked best to cook with. Ruben (papa) as we call him is a businessmen who sells seafood and Ingrid works in an office in town but I´m still confused as to what exactly she does. Ruben is currently on vacation from the Catholic University and Sebastian is at a private high school. Apparently in Quito many private schools are cheaper and better than public schools, and only some have basketball teams. At least, this is what Sebastian told me when we went outside and shot hoops for a while before dinner.
We (Ingrid, Sebastian and I) also went to church before dinner (which is usually around 8:00 at night (yay) and not the main meal of the day (aka soup)).
Church was interesting – catholic service, of which I understood was the sermon because the guy spoke pretty clearly, but this comprehension was wasted on my brain that decided to block it out after a while. I couldn’t tell whether we were supposed to stand when we were singing or when we were praying or both, when we were supposed to lift up our hands or not and opted against crossing myself three times in a row at some point. I also managed to accidentally use the kneeling bench (name?) as a foot rest but caught myself before anyone noticed.
Suddenly everyone started getting up and going to the front. I was confused so I asked Ingrid. My conversation with her went somewhat as follows (in spanish.)
Me: where are all the people going?
Ingrid: they´re going to go eat the body…
Me: uh… oh you mean the body of Christ, the blood, they eat those-
Ingrid: yes, they get a wafer
(Silence for a long moment)
Me: why are some of them gong and not others?
Ingrid: well they decided whether they are cleansed enough to do so, if they have gone to confession enough…
Me: how do they know if they have gone enough? How often do you have to go to confession?
Ingrid: well that depends on them, whether they feel they have sinned, if they haven’t then they don’t have to go, the church doesn’t force people to go to confession a certain number of times per month
(ok so I don’t really know anything about Catholicism. It took me ten minutes to figure out what the people in the line next to the little rooms with the priests inside were waiting for. I also haven’t figured out how religious my family really is. They were going to skip church when they found out I was Jewish until I said I wanted to see what it was like.)
So for the last two weeks I´ve gotten into a schedule – classes start at 8 in the morning, so I jump on a bus around 7:30, that goes to Estacion Norte, I grab a free newspaper and take the trolley into the central part of town (this costs me 25 cents total.) I then walk up Mariana de Jesus, after getting off at the stop and go to Spanish class in the Experimento. We usually have lectures from 10:30 onwards and we learned about petrol conflict in the amazon, economics of a waterbasin project in northern Ecuador and botany among others. Around one we are either done for the day or on lunch break, I usually go to an internet café every couple of days and check email. Work has mostly involved readings and one analysis paper as well as group discussions.

On that Friday, we had an excursion to nearby mountain Pasachoa. The drive in traffic took an hour and a half though it was a thirty minute climb. We found ourselves at a clump of buildings which were reception, bathrooms and accommodation, and from which we headed out for an educational walk in the woods complete with guides and our Spanish teachers as well. We learned a lot about the vegetation and medicinal use of some of the plants. The guide gave me a little yellow flower to chew on. It made my tongue go numb for a few seconds and tasted horrible. The woods were similar to those of Intag but dryer and higher up too. At a look out gap in the trees we could see across a valley and to the next row of mountains.
We ate lunch and everyone prepared to go home except for 3 friends and I who ambitiously had decided the day before to stay overnight at Pasachoa and hike the mountain the next day. Sarah, Zab, Christa and I were shown to a nice bare room with mattresses and also were allowed to use the kitchen to boil water. After the others left, we took a little walk of our own, hung out eating chocolate spread and stared at some llamas that passed by our room. The hike we planned to take was estimated at 4-5 hours (depending on sign) and was supposed to take us on a walk along the Pasachoa crater (remember Andes = volcanoes) and hopefully with a look out over the nest of Condors. These amazing birds are 1 m tall and are the national bird of Ecuador, so we really hoped to see one. The next morning we started hiking around 6:15, passing through the forest from before and onwards through bamboo thicket and then paramo. The paramo is a bit like an alpine savannah – take away the acacias, add a very steep slope and lots of pretty flowers and strange bushes. The path led us on and on, from one spectacular view to the next, we walked along the ridge of the mountain. The path was so steep that we were in pain and out of breath most of the time. Our climb was interrupted by gasps of surprise at the view or at a new exotic flower. A couple of great quotes were mentioned including:
Zab: “looking at this scenery I really feel like we should be sprinting after orcs with our longbows”
Sarah: “toilet paper? But we can wipe with melastomataceae”
We were exhausted as we finally started approaching the rock. The mist was thickening around us and soon we couldn’t see into the bowl of the crater. We continued through another forest to avoid rock climbing and found ourselves on something you could hardly call a path, we ducked under branches, used vines and leaves to pull ourselves ever upwards, grateful for a chance to use our arm muscle to help our aching legs out. Finally, we reached the first peak of rock and scrambled up a steep face aided by a tree. The drop was somewhat terrifying and as we looked upwards we saw the top of the peak but nothing else. Cloud had completely covered our view of the crater, so we couldn’t see any condors. It also prevented us from realising that we weren’t at the second peak yet so we never made it that far. However, as we climbed down to try to overlook the crater from the ridge of the mountain we could hear a sound similar to that of an eagle screeching. We listened to them as we snacked and Sarah climbed a tree. This was also after Zab and Christa had to beg me not to attempt to climb all the way to the top of the first peak, the rock so treacherous looking that they thought I wouldn’t be able to make it down. I sort of agreed with them but I wanted to climb it so badly that they had to threaten my physical restraint.
Much laughter accompanied our descent (slide) back through the forest. At some point we found ourselves using vines to rapel down a muddy face. Except for Zab, we all managed to fall in the mud, and since I was in front I got the worst of it. I avoided a rock face that we had climbed on the way up, but while leaning on a branch across the path, my legs slid out from underneath me and I found myself hanging from it by both arms, completely suspended. This was almost as funny as when Zab finally fell into a puddle at the very end of the hike for no apparent reason. The hike took us five hours to ascend and 2.5 to descend. That´s how steep it was. We made it back to Quito eventually, catching a green bus into the old city. We later found out that condors are quiet birds, so we probably hadn’t heard them after all.

Monday was carnaval and Ingrid took me to Mitad del Mundo – the ecuator. It was in a touristy area north of Quito, with some museums and restaurants and clowns whose jokes I didn’t get and tasty mora ice cream. The roads were packed with people trying to go to swiiming pools and spraying each other with water and foam, as is customary for carnival. In the afternoon, my family and I went to visit Ruben (papa)´s mother. I learned to play a card game and then over a very nice dinner, my abuela (grandmother) made me explain why the Jews killed Jesus. We didn’t really resolve the ensuing argument. Oh well.

The next day we had another excursion, this one to the paramo with a local botany expert who was very knowledgeable. Unfortunately the weather was miserable, and midmorning found us frozen to the bone by wind and rain, and me stomping around in wet muddy fields trying to look for insects for our field investigation project, and wondering why no one had told us to bring our botas de caucho (rubber boots.) We stopped to observe a pipeline and a lake that had been polluted by oil. Detergents had been put into it to break down the petroleum but these had other effects on the vegetation. Wasn’t very pretty, especially in the rain. The late afternoon was spent at las agues thermals – hot springs – of Papallacta, where we warmed up in swimming pools full of Ecuadorians.

Yesterday (Saturday) I took a ride on the “Teleferiqo” with 6 friends – basically a ski lift or cable car – up Pichincha, one of the mountains directly overlooking Quito. It was a beautiful view of the city and we soon embarked on another hike up to the top of the mountain. We were in paramo habitat again and we kept pausing to look at cool plants and make silly videos with my digital camera about the vegetation in which I referred to lichen as a plant on accident. I was the only one to actually make it all the way to the top of that mountain partly because the way was brutal near the top and partly because I´m dumb. I chose (badly) to ascend the sandy path instead of the trail. I figured it would be just like a nice shaley dune, and it was, except that I forgot how hard they were to climb. Three steps forward two steps back, I was at least 4000m high, and once I hit the ridge I refused to turn back after all the effort. The view was amazing. Two friends and I made it that far to look out over the other side of the mountain amongst boulders and cliff faces, and then I did some rock climbing. The top was awesome, full 360 view from the top of an Ande, Quito and sky included. Then I ran half way down the mountain to catch up with my friends and fell down a lot.