Waves and waves

Phew! I made it, another trip with VISIONS survived. I have had an up and down past few days. Two days ago we bid our summer participants farewell. I began the second part of my trip travelling. Yesterday in an Internet Cafe I had my hippy bag stolen. The thing that added a little extra salt on the wound was that the place had video monitors and captured the event on tape. I watched the man come sit at the computer stall next to me. I watched him wait and wait until just the moment to grab my bag which was sitting by my side.

There was nothing of any real value in my bag, but a few sentimental pieces, like my journal from the past two year (I only had one page left!!) and my cribbage board that has accompanied me on all my travels in my adult life. I guess losing Jitterbug Perfume wasn´t so bad, but now how will I find out what happened to Alobar.

Getting robbed is just a difficult emotional reaction to process. The largest part of my reaction is feeling so stupid for being so careless. I bounced out of it today. I decided to take a bus to Parque Carolina in downtown Quito. Quito! What an amazing city. I was blown away with how much it reminded me of Logan, nothing really about the city, but the green mountains that surround the city.

I made it to the Parque, asking a few locals along the way. I ran (/slowly jogged) for a bit, and then just walked and enjoyed people watching. The park is enormous and full of life. I stopped and watched some futsol soccer matches. I passed a basketball court and asked to shoot around, that is probably what tipped my energy from downer to happy.

I also had a thought today. One of the things that i lost were my sunglasses. Consequently, as I have been out walking the streets I have been squinting. I wonder if at times I trick myself into feeling in a worse mood then I actually am. What if my face is confusing my sunny squint with a nasty scowl?

The point is, I had a rough day, the but the park and energy of Quito has brought me back to a good place. Tonight I am taking a red eye bus for the coast, and you better believe I am going to take on surfing again!! Wish me luck!!

Galapagos pictures on the way, what a crazy other wordly place, the marine iguanas blew my mind, and so did snorkeling. Snorkeling had life changing impacts which I will have to wait for another day to explain!

My group, Ecuador 2012

volcano uncovered.

waterfall tour of near banos by bicycle, amazing!! what a day off

this is my fearless leader shawn using the plumb bob on the brick wall for the kiosk. i also learned how to use the plomaba and piola to put up brick walls, i think i may have to build a brick something in my backyard.

our maestro italo at the kiosk

this is the kiosk we finished, and the wall i helped put up.

this is where i have been sleeping the past three weeks, i love this simplified version of life.

we took a gondola down to see the waterfall.

and my hermanastra ashley and i had to do a jump shot for the occasion

my coworker vinicio and his amazing sister ruth, beautiful people, i feel like i now have family in ecuador.

these were my two buds in the city of sucre, haha, city, i mean very small village. matthias and judi (who i called juli for the first week ) we had our special handshake, i´m really going to miss them

then we watched a soccer game in sucre, the tiny place where we built the kiosk.

and as i guessed, lupe and i are in fact best friends ever.

We leave for galapogos thursday morning. I had a dream today that i flew home early  and missed it, and then my tooth fell out. Saying goodbye always stresses me out. But it´s been a great trip nonetheless.

We had a marathon travel day and ended up in miami at 1:30 in the morning, i may or may not have dropped my passport and a lady may or may not have picked it up and found me, because i still look like a 19 year kid.

We arrived in Quito after 3 days of travelling, flight cancellations, shenanigans, under the cover of darkness, but the view from our hostel in the morning made it all worth it

Our crew minus Vinicio from the top of the basilica in Quito.

That is my home this month, our dining hall.

We arrived to find the kitchen a mess, we spent hours upon hours making it spick and span.

I´m starting the suspenders trend, one of our participants even asked if we could make visions suspenders, its working....

This is our view from our homebase, volcano tungurauhua, which erupted in 2008 and the tourist town of banos had to be evacuated.

Our guapo group of men, vinicio, shawn, y nico suave

our whole group together at a finca up the mountain. it is incredible here how people farm in the mountains, mostly without machines, i have seen a couple tractors.

one of our projects is at the casa de ancianos, we are building a casa de pollos so the house can have fresh chicken eggs everyday.

our first visit to our tiny town in sucre we came upon a festival of corpus cristi, there were bulls running the streets.

check out this spider, cray cray, we also found a large tarantula in our kitchen, which we removed, i have never seen a spider that big in my life.

the misty mountain roads remind me of ireland. the principal of our school took us on a drive to a small village where one of atahualpas brother lived, it was very cool being so close to history.

He also told us that this old woman was a descendant of atahualpa, we asked how long she lived here, and sha said 4 years, so maybe our friend is just a skilled storyteller, which i´ve always been told, an irishman never let facts get in the way of a good story, maybe the same holds true for ecuadorians.

Inca artifacts gathered in a ´museum´ near this monument. We had to walk a quarter mile along a ditch to get to the persons house who had all of these artifacts, unlike a museum we were able to hold everything.

Quito is enormous, it goes on and on!!!

There are rainbows everyday. This was the most spectacular one yet, on our way to Sucre where we are building the kiosk.

Me and my kitchen, and as Ashley my coworker calls it, my Aguacate dress.

We made Quimbolitos, an Ecuadoran specialty, basically a sponge cake wrapped in a pumpkin leave and boiled.

My buddy Emily Jackeline, Lupita´s granddaughter.

The Quimbolitos!! Cooked.

A night on the town (we were the only ones in the bar) with Lupe my new best friend, the owner and Ashley. I finally feel like a tall person here, I tower over the locals, and Ashley. If only I had played basketball here!

Hola Ecuador

Hello friends,

I hope all is well in your part of the world. I made it down to Ecuador. I am doing my third summer with VISIONS service adventures. My first two experiences were down in Nicaragua. I have told many of you of what VISIONS is and what I typically do. This summer I´m in a new place a new culture and a new home base.

For those of you who don´t know about VISIONS, I will tell you a little. It is a service learning adventure company for American High School kids. They come from all around the country and they arrive not knowing anyone else. We all live in the same place, eat all of our meals together and do significant service projects. This year our projects include finishing a kiosk for a tincy tiny village called Sucre. The hope is that kiosk will serve as a place for local artesains to sell their crafts to the travellers passing through. There is a legend that a treasure exists in the mountains near Sucre, the treasure of Atahualpa, the Incan leader of Ecuador. He was tricked into a peace meeting with the Conquistador and later executed. His general his all of the gold from the Spaniards and to this day it has not been found. Another project is building a chicken coop for an old person´s home up the road from our homebase.

We are staying about 20 minutes away from Sucre in a town called Patate. Our homebase is an Agriculture school. It is more like a campus with a series of buildings and a kitchen and dining area. One component of VISIONS is our ´circle time´ where we all gather in a circle and share our feelings. It sounds a little silly, but when people buy in and share their experiences it is a pretty fantastic insightful experience. Last night we had our first Allyo (community in Quechua) with our group of kids. I couldn´t believe all they were sharing. Because  our trips are an unplugged experience, with no music players, iphones etc, many kids commented on how good it felt to talk with people, face to face rather than chatting, texting. They also remarked on how easy it was to just be themselves and yet still get along with such a diverse crew of peers.

When I come home at the end of these trips I gush to anyone who will listen about how great of an experience it is. As the year goes on those sentiments stay the same, but the reasoning becomes less and less clear. I go to this place, I have to work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, I sleep on the floor with pretty simple accomodations and I´m constantly around people.  It does not sound like my ideal summer vacation. Now that I am here again I remember why I love it so much. I am present. I go through the day and my mind is in the moment. I spend a day working working working, and when I hit the pillow it feels good to feel so exhausted. I´m very happy to be here.

My co'leaders and I arrived almost two weeks ago to prepare everything for  the kids. This summer I am assigned the task of food honcho. Details have never been my strong suit, and that may be a dramatic understatement. I have been stressed and excited for the challenge of managing food for a group of 30 people in a foreign country. Despite the stress, the benefit  is that I am able to work closely with our cook, Doña Lupe. In Nicaragua our cook Darlín and I were besties.

Our first night in our little village town of Patate we met Lupe. I came out of our bus and said ´You and I are going to be best friends´, and she looked at me with her skeptical stoic stare and I held my smile for awhile until the silence between us became awkward and I retreated to the bus again. Since then we have slowly been getting a feel for each other. Yesterday I spent 5 hours in the kitchen with Lupe cooking a traditional Ecudorian meal (Llapingachos, huevos fritos and chorizo). I am slowly but surely removing the layers of her serious demeanor and we now do fist pump explode everytime we pass by each other.

Please forgive the scattered thoughts of my experiences thusfar, I will put up some pictures soon. Our kitchen has a view of the Volcano Tungurahua the same Volcano that erupted in 2006. But I have only seen it twice in two weeks (it´s always clouded over!)

Hasta entonces!!!

Best 5K Hike of My Life

This was the best 5K hike I have ever been on. I am learning the tricks and trades of my roommates research work. She has been teaching me her fieldwork the past couple days, telemetry, veg plots, etc. Today she let me go out on my own to track a few of her birds. She is studying Sage Grouse, out in a little tincy tiny community called Grouse Creek, about as far North and West as you can get in Utah.

Today, I went to track some birds. I had always previously only gone with Steph and learned how to use the gear and everything. I had never come upon a bird that I didn’t flutter. I had a plan this time around though, I was going to make slowly smaller and smaller circles. After hiking for about an hour and a half, I started zeroing in on the bird we named ‘Juvie’ because its just a youngin. Steph also let me borrow her amazing, I mean amazingly incredible binoc’s. So I’m zeroing in on this bird after almost two hours tracking her. I start focusing on this bush, that I’m sure she is in. I am taking every precaution this time to not make her flutter. I’m walking like Robert Redford in the movie Sneakers, you know, that scene where he’s trying to steal the little black box back from Ben Kingsley, but he can only move in slow motion, that’s what I tried to recreate as I zeroed in on my bird. So I’m staring at the shrub, and I look down and to the right, and my eye catches the staring eye of Juvie!!! Right next to me! My heart jumped up into my throat.

Did I mention I saw a mountain lion the other day? Like from me to 1^st base close, I bring this up, because I had the same reaction, I froze. I caught that Grousse staring at me, hunched down in her shrub, and I froze. When I gathered my wits, I started moving slowly away, Redford slow. And then I watched her for twenty more minutes with those sick binocs. Such an amazing rush. Something I’ve never experienced before.

By that point it was nearly dusk, and I new I needed to head back before Steph started worrying that I was lost or eaten by a mountain lion. I luckily had the where with all to punch in my car’s location into the GPS before leaving for the bird, otherwise I still maybe trying to find my way back to the car. That’s another thing, I realized on the way, that I hadn’t eaten all day, and the only food I could find in my pack was a pulverized orange peanut butter cracker thing, and you know what, it’s amazing, but if you pore all those crumbs in your mouth, it tastes exactly the same as if the things weren’t all broken down.

Anyway, those last 2.5 km’s back to my car were the most gratifying I’ve had. I have never scene something like that out in nature before, and been able to spy on it. And I finally found a bird without making it fly away. So awesome.

I love it out here in the country. I had a flash forward to my future me, married to a cowboy and living on a small farm or ranch. I’m pretty excited about it. I’ll have a small pick-up truck with a stick shift, but really I’ll probably just ride around on the horses. Steph has been a great patient teacher out here. I feel like I can now finally talk to these fun amazing Natural Resources people and not feel like just a groupie.

I’ve been out in Utah now for almost 9 months. I just moved into a house, that I love, I cannot wait to get settled in there, and start having frequent jam sessions in the back yard. I’ve met some pretty amazing people out here in Utah, and I am in love with my school program, whoever’s out there looking out for me, I’m very greatful. Logan's a trippy little town, a culture shock for sure. But there is a great community of really fun kind hearted souls who enjoy the adventure that life is, my kind of people, it helps having that canyon as a backyard.

Yo Soy Nosotros

sign in parque juarez in san miguel

I had many possible titles for this blog post some of the rejected:

¿Quieres champiñones?
Who knew I´d have to travel to Mexico to fall in love with the Hollywood Classics!
Tourista fea soy yo
What do you mean what kind of frapacino do I want?
Of course we should break egg shells on our heads.
C´est la vie.

I ended up sticking with Yo soy nosotros. I just loved Reading that in the park the other day. To back up, I´ve been in Mexico visiting my dear tía Virginia in a city in the heart of Mexico called San Miguel de Allende. I arrived in Mexico through Puerto Vallarta on Friday and took an all night bus to Queretaro, and from there a bus to San Miguel Allende.

Cathedral and main square where the egg mayhem went down

It´s only been a few days, but I cannot believe all I have seen and done in that amount of time. I knew this trip was going to be a good one as I waited in the Phoenix Airport for my connecting flight to Puerto Vallarta. I was really hot, and decided to go grab a Frapacino from Starbucks, I had never ordered one, but my sister loves them. So I go up and scan the menú, and find Frappacino, it says I have to decide what kind of milk, coffee, and whether I want whip cream or not. So feeling all prepared I go up to the counter and ask for a frappacino with skim milk and regular coffee. Then the lady at the counter asks me, what kind? And I´m like, oh no, I forgot tos ay the whip cream part. So I repeat myself, and she repeats herself, what kind? At this point i´m red in the face and so confused. I was like, what do you mean what kind? And she says, what kind of frapacino? Eventually we got to the point to her walking over to the menú and pointing out to me the plethora of frap options, oh dios mio! And this is before i had entered the foreign country!

Mi tia and her first family she stayed with, lovely people!! Como no?

San Miguel is a beautiful town about 3 or 4 hours northwest of Mexico City in the state of Guanajuato. It is full of retired expatriates. The buildings are beautiful, and this is by far the best climate I have ever experienced. Everyday its about 70 degrees, sunny, dry and no bugs. We are staying with the cutest couple ever, Miguel and coincidentally Virginia. They are a retired couple in their 70´s. They rent out the three apartments they have, but only to people who find them through Word of mouth, they do not advertise. We have a cute Little kitchen and a terraza to have our breakfast and dinner.

All the wonderful food from the market

Ginny has brought me around to meet some of her new friends, including to older women who work a stand in the market. We bought the most delicious fruit and vegetables from them the other day, and for so cheap!! Ginny is particularly fond of the woman in the picture, and i´ll have to get her name the next time i am in. We also bought a few things from the woman a few stands down. I was talking with her a Little bit in spanish. She asked if we wanted champiñones (mushrooms), so i turned to my tia Ginny to ask her. My question was greeted with a familiar blank stare that left me wondering if she Heard me (my aunt has a Little hearing impairment). So I asked her again a little louder to no avail. I started thinking to myself, wtf ginny, do you want mushrooms or not, and at that momento i realized i was asking her in Spanish. The three of us laughed and laughed over the momento, as we were all confused.

I made Ginny some lunch

This has been a great trip so far. It is carnaval right now in San Miguel. After having a siesta of Margaritas and totopos (chips) we came out in the main square to kids running and screaming. Women were selling bags of eggshells 10 pesos for 10 eggsshells or about 1$. We bought a bag and walked through the square, which apparently was declaring ourselves part of the ensuing battle. Kids of all ages and we three gringos (Ginny´s travel companion Rose was also with us) were going crazy smashing these eggshells on each others heads. This craziness will continue until Tuesday night and the end of carnaval. The best thing was watching these toddlers walking up to each other, one would smash an egg on the others head, then would stand and wait to get an egg smashed on their head. So adorable.

Last night Ginny and I went to this really cute movie theatre and watched ´Dark Victory´ a black and white hollywood movie starring Bette Davis, so good! and it came with a drink and popcorn. The lead actor looked just like Zac Efron, and the supporting cast, Humphrey Bogart and Ron Reagan, not too shabby:)

I love being back in the Spanish speaking world. The people i have met so far have such a wonderful spirit. Ginny has been a hard worker making friendships and trying hard to use the spanish she is learning, i´m very proud and impressed with her progress.

The craziest thing happened the other day at the bus stop. I noticed this man sitting next to me speaking French, and there was another Mexican there. This woman walked up to the bus stop wearing a skirt, and she tripped!! And the French man said, ´C´est la vie´ and the Mexican said, ´yo tambien´

Thanks to my new friend Lee who told me thatJ (I have a way with men in their 60´s for some reason, it affirms my compatibility with Joe Biden I think)

Final thoughts of Nicaragua...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxiF0434Adw

There I said it...I'll miss it until the day I return:)