This weekend, Nora Skelly, Becka, Grace, and three other girls from our trip (Emily, Carla and Christina) and I went to a little hostal called The Magic Roundabout in a cloud forest in Las Palmas, about 3 and a half hours from Quito.
The couple who runs the hostal, Meg and Ali, are British expatriates. Ali decided that he was sick of England, so he and a friend packed up and moved to Ecuador because the living is cheap (though a month after moving Ecuador dollarized, so that isn´t as true now). They bought a parcel of land in the cloud forest and let it be, and built the hostal. A few years later, Meg wrote to Ali and asked if she could come and work for awhile. She and Ali fell in love, got married, and now Meg is 7 months pregnant with their first kid. Oh, and they are huge hippies - Meg is having a water birth, both have dreadlocks and Meg has an organic garden where she grows tomatoes, 7 kinds of lettuce (Which made the best salad I´ve eaten since my summer working with the CSA), sweet corn, peas, some other fruits, herbs, etc. They started growing tobacco plants for the purpose of making botique tobacco products (and because tobacco plants are good organic pesticides), but then Meg got pregnant so they ditched the tobacco products idea.
The food was organic and amazing (for the first time since arriving in Ecuador I felt like eating was a healthful activity) and there were hammocs (hamacas en español) where we sat and read that overlooked the forest and road, and I took a couple of hikes to see waterfalls on the property. We didn´t realize it before starting our first hike, but we may have risked life and limb to see these waterfalls. There were some pretty steep dropoffs on one side, and a couple of the hills we scrambled up required ropes for holding onto. And we had to wade up a river (they had us wear Wellies). Oh, and did I mention that it was raining? Still, the first hike was really nice.
Sunday, I went for one more to see the "big waterfall". Grace wanted to come but she slipped and bruised her hip the night before, and Becka tried to come but her asthma got to her, so it was just me, Ali, his two sweet dogs (Guinness and Winston) and a machete hiking up this really steep, muddy, jungle mountain. I fell a few times (and got a bruise on my knee from a boulder in the river), but came out alive. I´m not as sure if that waterfall was worth it, but I know that I would have regretted it if I didn´t go to see it. And when there isn´t much else to do that´s as good a reason as any, right?
We were sad to go that afternoon, but it was enough time to relax, rejuvenate a little, and adventure enough to feel like we had taken a worthwhile trip.
Oh! Mom and Dad - they had a poster up for the Secret Garden hostal in Quito Antiguo and said it was a pretty nice place.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
El Lavabo/My most embarassing 30 minutes ever
Story time!
Setting: My bathroom, Thursday, 1:30 am
Once upon a time, there was a club called Bundalow 6. On Wednesday night, this club has no cover and free drinks for women between 7 and 10 pm. Wednesday night is universally, among CIMAS girls, the night to go out to this club, have a few drinks, and dance. Generally, we dance until about 12:30 or 1 am and then go home. This last Wednesday night we went to Bungalow 6, left at 12:45, and got home around 1 am. I proceeded to get ready for bed and noticed that my feet were a little dirty from wearing sandals. And I couldn´t wash them in my shower because it only functions as a shower, not as a bath. So, I decided to wash them in the sink. Because I didn´t want to get my sheets dirty, of course. As I was washing off my feet (and not pressing very hard on the sink) all of a sudden the sink fell off of the wall. You read that right. Just for emphasis, I´ll repeat myself. The sink fell OFF THE WALL. But it was still attached to the sink pipes, so I just stood there and turned off the water and held the sink while propping it up with my knee. Of course, the water was still on and so started spraying into the floor. At which point I came out of shock just enough to call for my host brother - "!Fabian, ven aquí, por favor!" - and he came. His response was somewhere along the lines of "what did you do?!" and he got his mom, Cecilia. So, Cecilia came in, looked at the pipes spraying water, and said essentially "I don´t know what to do, I´m going to go get Oswaldo." So in comes my 60 year old host dad, wearing pajama pants and slippers and bearing an enormous wrench. He takes a look at the wet floor and says "just a minute, I´m going to go change and turn off the water." He went to do that, and came back in bare feet and boxers. And I held up the sink so it wouldn´t crash onto his head and kill him while he proceeded to disassemble the piping and detach the sink from the wall. Then I gently put it in the bathtub, where it spent the night. Somewhere along the way, I said something like "Ridiculous things always happen to me!" and my dad starting laughing - at me, at the situation, I´m not sure. Probably a little of both. - and said "nope, this has certainly never happened before!" Meanwhile, Cecilia swept the water into the drain on my bathroom floor and got a little mad, asking me if I had put a lot of pressure on the sink. I guess I might be a little mad too, being woken up at 1:30 in the morning by my son because my host daughter broke my sink. Overall, both of my host parents took it all very well. It made me appreciate my host dad a lot, both because he knows how to fix things like sinks that have fallen off of walls and because he kept laughing and doesn´t get mad when things go wrong. And I appreciated Cecilia because she didn´t give me a hard time about it the next day.
In the end, I think that the moral of this story is that one should not attemt to wash their feet in a sink that is attached to the wall.
Setting: My bathroom, Thursday, 1:30 am
Once upon a time, there was a club called Bundalow 6. On Wednesday night, this club has no cover and free drinks for women between 7 and 10 pm. Wednesday night is universally, among CIMAS girls, the night to go out to this club, have a few drinks, and dance. Generally, we dance until about 12:30 or 1 am and then go home. This last Wednesday night we went to Bungalow 6, left at 12:45, and got home around 1 am. I proceeded to get ready for bed and noticed that my feet were a little dirty from wearing sandals. And I couldn´t wash them in my shower because it only functions as a shower, not as a bath. So, I decided to wash them in the sink. Because I didn´t want to get my sheets dirty, of course. As I was washing off my feet (and not pressing very hard on the sink) all of a sudden the sink fell off of the wall. You read that right. Just for emphasis, I´ll repeat myself. The sink fell OFF THE WALL. But it was still attached to the sink pipes, so I just stood there and turned off the water and held the sink while propping it up with my knee. Of course, the water was still on and so started spraying into the floor. At which point I came out of shock just enough to call for my host brother - "!Fabian, ven aquí, por favor!" - and he came. His response was somewhere along the lines of "what did you do?!" and he got his mom, Cecilia. So, Cecilia came in, looked at the pipes spraying water, and said essentially "I don´t know what to do, I´m going to go get Oswaldo." So in comes my 60 year old host dad, wearing pajama pants and slippers and bearing an enormous wrench. He takes a look at the wet floor and says "just a minute, I´m going to go change and turn off the water." He went to do that, and came back in bare feet and boxers. And I held up the sink so it wouldn´t crash onto his head and kill him while he proceeded to disassemble the piping and detach the sink from the wall. Then I gently put it in the bathtub, where it spent the night. Somewhere along the way, I said something like "Ridiculous things always happen to me!" and my dad starting laughing - at me, at the situation, I´m not sure. Probably a little of both. - and said "nope, this has certainly never happened before!" Meanwhile, Cecilia swept the water into the drain on my bathroom floor and got a little mad, asking me if I had put a lot of pressure on the sink. I guess I might be a little mad too, being woken up at 1:30 in the morning by my son because my host daughter broke my sink. Overall, both of my host parents took it all very well. It made me appreciate my host dad a lot, both because he knows how to fix things like sinks that have fallen off of walls and because he kept laughing and doesn´t get mad when things go wrong. And I appreciated Cecilia because she didn´t give me a hard time about it the next day.
In the end, I think that the moral of this story is that one should not attemt to wash their feet in a sink that is attached to the wall.
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