A Short Look At the Cuenca Art Scene

I've gotten to know Ecuadorian art in three different ways in the two or so months I've spent here.  One is through street art, which I have to say I find mostly terrifying and off-putting.  The street art in Bogota was colorful and exciting and imaginative; the street art I've seen in Quito, Baños, and Cuenca looks like one of your creepier acid trips: paranoia tinged with apathy and despair.

Also, I have an age-old phobia of octopuses, or giant red bugs that look like octopuses (octopi?)  This is actually one of the less harrowing street murals.  It's painted on one of the walls overlooking El Barranco, the cobblestone walkway along the prettiest river I've seen since I came to South America.  Seriously, who wants to look at a demented, red octopus when you can look at this?

Anyway, the other day while exploring some of the cathedrals and plazas in the downtown areas, I came across a Museum of Modern Art and decided I'd take a look.  This was, in fact, a terrible idea, because what that museum actually held was nightmare fodder for the next four months or so of my vacation.

It reminded me of this Soviet Czech film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland I saw once, where Wonderland was basically someone's neverending tool shed filled with rusty protractors and dusty workbenches, and the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter were these moth-eaten, demented wind-up tinker toys.  This was quite possibly the most horrific art museum I've ever been to.

And then last weekend I was invited by Lino, a guy sleeping in my hostel room, to come and see his art exhibition.  His work, while still pretty dark, was much more interesting than the stuff at the museum.  It was fascinating seeing how his style evolved over the past three years.  My favorites were his earlier works, which were done in a very illustrative style, and had a lot of color and energy to them.

And then, mysteriously, the works from 2013 became much less friendly and more, to my mind, misogynistic.  There were a series of digital paintings of the top halves of women's faces where their eyes had been so doctored and stylized that they looked like dolls, and then a series of naked, shimmering female torsos.  It was especially interesting because Lino, from the talking with him that I did, is very cool and thoughtful and not at all your stereotypical macho Latino.

At any rate, afterwards we headed out into the city with a bunch of his artist friends and ended up at a bar overlooking El Barranco, drinking beers and a big pitcher of this hot cocktail from sugarcane liquor and naranjilla juice called canelazo.  The stuff basically tastes like warm Sunny Delight, and I downed most of the pitcher without realizing it.  And, as it's essentially all sugar, I woke up with the worst headache of my life.  But it was altogether a great show and a great night, and a good send-off from Ecuador.

Final Stop: Cuenca

Final stop of Ecuador, that is.  I'm pretty ready to leave the country... I'm getting so sick of the food here, which seems to consist entirely of white rice, a greasy chicken leg that's mostly skin, iceberg lettuce, and lots and lots of bananas, bananas everywhere, even in the soup.  If I never see another banana, I'll die a happy woman, but somehow I doubt that's going to be the case.

But otherwise, Cuenca is hands down the loveliest place I've seen in Ecuador yet and I'm sorry I didn't come here first.  I'm not sure whether it's spring or autumn here, because there are trees covered in flowers and then there are trees dropping yellow leaves tragically into the brook.  It's always chilly and often drizzly, with these great, brooding overcast skies which reminds me of Dublin.  And every corner you turn you stumble upon this great, century-old stone cathedral, monastery, or otherwise magnificent work of colonial architecture.

There are tons of tiny parks and cobblestone plazas hidden away between the streets, where people are selling things, roasting guinea pigs over open coals, or just sitting around watching people go by.  As always, there are tiny old women charging up and down hills and staircases with enormous bundles on their backs, with their fedora hats and long braids and colorful, embroidered skirts.

Otherwise, on a stop-off in Guayaquil to fix my camera (dropped it in the sand and all the gears froze up, urgh...) a Canadian girl in my hostel gave me the first book in the Game of Thrones series.  After two days of reading it I'm already a third of the way through the 800 page book, and I have very mixed feelings about it.  It's not the greatest writing, and I normally don't like to invest in reading a book unless it has prose and a story-line that will help me improve as a writer.  I swear, if I had to read the sentence, "Jon messed up Arya's hair," one more time, I was going to tear the book in half.  Also, good god, we get it.  WINTER IS COMING.  Shut up about it already.

And yet... I'm having so much fun reading it.  I may be too much of a book snob for my own good, and I think maybe the decline in my fiction reading over the past few years is (aside from no longer being a student with all the free time in the world) because I make it a point to choose books that are onerous to read.  But Game of Thrones is so evocative in showing you the world, and the characters are so interesting - the female characters are all strong and complex as well, which I appreciate, and of course a tomboy princess with a pet wolf is just great.  It's making me want to go back to the fantasy novel I've been cyclically writing, abandoning, and revamping for the past 15 years or so.  I've always considered multiple point-of-view narration to be shoddy writing, but I've seen it done well in the past, and there's so many more facets of a story you can tell than with just a single narrator.  And I've already written five pages of a prologue, so we'll see how this goes.

Puerto Lopez

Puerto Lopez is delightful!  I am reunited with Lisa and Darragh, who came south from Canoa after hitting Tena, Quito, and a lot of places in between.  (They're much better travelers than me, as I seem to be just whiffling aimlessly around the country just looking for cafes with tasty sandwiches and reliable Wi-Fi.)  But Puerto Lopez during the off-season, as this seems to be, is so peaceful - rather dusty and derelict, with tons of open-air markets roofed with rusty corrugated tin and packs of stray dogs, just like I'd been expecting towns to be when I came to South America - and I would like to stay here longer but I'm getting restless.

We're staying at Hostal Maxima, a villa-type place that has gardens and hammocks and a mini-menagerie of parakeets, an iguana, a cat, and a gorgeous little kinkajou.  The kinkajou looks like a cross between a monkey and a tiny anteater, with big, black eyes and a prehensile tail and silky fur.  This one likes to get his tummy rubbed, and he kept grabbing my fingers through the bars of his cage with his claws and trying to gnaw on them.  And then he tried to steal my coffee.

So the other day, a group of us hailed down a pair of motor-rickshaws and went on a journey to a secret beach.  (Not exactly secret, as it was in a national park in Frailes, a little bit north of Puerto Lopez, but there was hardly anyone there because it was so out of the way.)  Our drivers, young local guys, got very competitive about racing us to the beach, resulting in a very tense, Ben Hur-esque rickshaw race to the destination.  (Our guy won!)

But the beach, once we arrived, was the most perfect beach I've ever seen.  Soft, sloping sand and cliffs and tide pools and blue water as far as the eye could see - nicer even than Playa Blanca, because there was no Gringo-targeted kitsch to get in the way of our swimming, sunbathing, wandering a long way away, and throwing rocks at the water.

A few nights later we discovered, to my immense joy, a Russian restaurant, run by a Russian emigre family, serving proper Russian food - pelmeni and borscht and potatoes with sour cream and the like, cooked up as you order by the mother.  It was such a relief after nothing but white rice and pan-fried chicken, and we are going to go there for dinner tonight before moving onwards.

Montañita de las Fiestas

Again I've been slacking on updates!  In my defense, I spent most of my time in Baños working, and thus came up with nothing very blog-worthy.  After that I spent five days in Montañita, a small, excessively touristy party town on the Pacific coast of Ecuador.  It reminded me a lot of Galway, in that it's essentially one constant, perpetually overcast carnival filled with hippies and weirdos, and so small that if there's someone you are trying to avoid you'll absolutely run into them five times a day.  I picked up three stalkers in five days, which is a new record for me.

Otherwise, I met my lovely friend Jean!  She's been in Montañita for a few weeks doing an ESL course, and she recently left for her new job teaching English in Puyo in the center of Ecuador.  Luckily, we got a few good days in of hanging out surfing, drinking beers, and eating ceviche, though not all at the same time.

She introduced me to her cool friend Jorge who taught me how to surf for the very first time.  It was thrilling, waiting for that moment when you feel yourself caught up in the wave and speeding along to the shore, and I even managed to stand up a couple of times.  Of course, the other fifty times I ended up getting knocked over by the waves and then getting punched in the ribs or clobbered in the head by my rogue surfboard.  But it's all part of the experience, I guess.

The next night we went to a beach party where there was a live brass band and the dance floor was just sand.  And the next day I did the most amazing thing of possibly any trip I've ever taken, which was ride a horse along the beach!  I've never actually galloped on a horse before, so it was sublime, in the Romantic sense of the word connoting awe and terror at the power of nature, to go thundering down the sand next to the waves and these stormy, dark clouds over the horizon.  Jorge and I had this little colt tagging along next to our horses, frolicking in and out of the waves, and then this pack of stray dogs came sprinting out of the sand dunes to race joyously along next to us.  I seriously felt like the king of the cowboys; of course, that was four days ago and my legs are still sore, but it was worth it.

I have since fled Montañita, as it's much too touristy and party-addled to stay for long, and gone to Puerto Lopez, a smallish, quiet town to the north.  The ocean here is much more peaceful and deserted, with men fishing in boats off the coast and flocks of enormous pelicans swooping back and forth over them, bobbing up and down in the water looking for handouts.  We shall see what this town holds!

Las piscinas, un gorro

At last!  I have finally gone to the hot springs!  They were worth every cent of the $2 admission fee, and I'm kicking myself for not going sooner.  (Luckily I have two more weeks in Baños, and I fully intend to go almost every morning.)  

Yes, they really are that brown and sludgy looking, but it's from the sulfur and other minerals in the water, not from people's dirty feet.  They pump the water in straight from the volcano, (my flatmate Johnny, who's big into homeopathic healing, goes everyday and he says that the pools are much hotter in the morning,) and when I went you could see the steam rolling off the surface of the water.  

I wasn't expecting to be too impressed - in general no hot tub in the world is ever hot enough for me in my perpetual coldness - but the water was actually scalding and I could only get in by inches.  But then I just sat around soaking in the warmth with a bunch of old people who've probably been doing this every morning for the past seventy years.  And then when the heat got to be too much, I climbed out and stood under the jet of water diverted straight from the waterfall, and KABOOM!  It was like a jolt of wakefulness straight to the heart and all my capillaries immediately constricted and the mountains looming in the distance seemed a hundred times more vivid.  So I did this, back and forth from hot spring to waterfall, for about two hours and by the end of it I felt like a tiny god, just shiny and clean and pretty darn thrilled with the world and everything in it.  So I think I'll be going every morning for the next two weeks.

Otherwise, I finished knitting my hat!  I used the wrong-sized needles, so it's baggier than I think it should be, but the pattern is gorgeous.

I think something so intricate would be better suited to light yarn, so I'm trying this again with the last of my good yarn, periwinkle blue bamboo-ewe wool blend, hoping it doesn't run out by the end.  So we'll see how that fares.

Hot springs and roast chickens

Well, it seems I haven't updated in two weeks, and that's no good.  In my defense, I was sick for almost half of it with something dreadful which I will assume is either Jungle Wasting Fever or cholera.  (Given the fact that I haven't been to the jungle yet, let's just say cholera... cholera's romantic.)  But to make up for my slacking, here is a picture of the mountains and waterfalls they built Baños in the middle of:

While the city itself is pretty touristy, the mountains all around are gorgeous like something right out of Middle Earth.  It's generally cool and rainy here, though I hear the dry season is supposed to begin soon.  There's a huge, snow-capped volcano named Tungurahua overlooking the town, which erupts every couple of months.  Baños is full of legends of the Virgin Mary stepping in and saving the town from boiling lava, as well as creating the waterfall overlooking the hot springs.

I've made friends with some lovely people from Ireland, England, and Alaska and have moved into a house with two of them.  We spend our time practicing Spanish with our landlord Markos and having pancake breakfasts and dinner parties.  (Fresh guacamole is my specialty these days, ever since Quito, and it's going over pretty well.)  Markos has commandeered me into roasting a chicken for him, ("Can you cook?  Do you cook chicken?  Good, somebody will bring a chicken over today and you can roast it.") which I am somewhat leery of.  I've roasted a duck before but never a chicken, and I am particularly terrified of having to disembowel it with my bare hands.  But we'll see how that goes.

Given sickness and busy-ness, I haven't actually been able to do any of the tourist things around Baños, which is the "adventure capital" of Ecuador.  I've gone on one mini-hike up a mountain to go see the volcano, and aside from that I've mostly been drinking tea in cafes and researching articles for the new blog I now write for.  (Incidentally, the link to it is here: http://www.languagetrainers.com/blog/ in case anyone's curious.)  I've also been stalked by this hugely irritating tour guide who knows everyone and is everywhere in the center of town, and who keeps flagging me down and trying to buy me coffee.  I think the ultimate idea is to turn the tables once I'm sufficiently infatuated with him, because nothing gets me hot like a corpulent, middle-aged Ecuadorian man, and then leech as much money off me as he can.  (My flatmate has had this same trouble with a local creeper named Milton; Gringo-hunting is apparently a popular sport in these parts.)

Otherwise, it's good to have a clean place to stay in for a few weeks now.  A friend of mine for Baltimore is currently in Montanita on the coast, taking a course in TEFL, so I may head out that way to meet up with her afterwards.  But for now, I have a chicken to figure out how to roast!

Baños de las Aguas Sagradas

I have made it to Baños, a sort of hot springs tourist town high in the Andes Mountains.  From what I've seen so far, it's gorgeous, and I'm looking forward to renting a bicycle to explore tomorrow.

Otherwise, I would like to take back what I said about Quiteños being unfriendly - they may be a bit guarded towards foreigners, but everyone who found me whiffling around looking for the bus to Quitumbes, the bus station that would take me to Baños, was very helpful with giving directions.  Then, noticing I was about to pass out on the overcrowded trolley bus weighed down with much too much luggage (I really must start unloading more at every place I stay,) a bunch of men shoved over to let me stand by the window, and then one of them even walked me to the Baños window once we arrived at Quitumbes.  Lovely people, the Ecuadorians.

Otherwise, I forgot to mention the hat I'm knitting, which I'm just thrilled about.  The yarn is cheap, but the pattern is amazing, like an optical illusion in fibers, "Crooked Paths" by Melissa LaBarre:  http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/crooked-paths

I can actually see myself knitting this one again and again.