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.

Back in the Andes

Quito: I've been here nine days and don't think too much of it.  To be fair, I've been working tons and planning out/writing drafts of my first week of posts for my new blog, and haven't had much time or inclination to explore Quito given how on my first day I went to a public park and in broad daylight this sketchy old guy tried to snatch my purse.  And then twenty minutes later a sketchy young guy tried to get me to "donate" money to his "help the disabled children charity."

But there are some pretty aspects of Quito I've seen in my wanderings.  Here are some of them:

Poor Quito.  It just exudes sketchiness, and the people aren't particularly friendly enough to give it any sort of charm.  (I say this, of course, having been completely spoiled by the enormous charm and friendliness of virtually everybody in Colombia.)  But the people are amazing to watch, though.  Little old ladies no higher than four feet high, charging up these mountainous streets with giant bundles on their backs as big as themselves.  Women in shawls and fedoras with tiny peacock feathers in the brims - fedoras seem to be fashionable for women here.  People walking down the street holding a big lump of blankets like a sack of potatoes, at the center of which somewhere there is a baby.

Moreover, I am loving the prices here.  Breakfast every day are two gorgeous fritatas, a fried egg with aji salsa, a cup of juice, and a mug of coffee - this costs $1.25 USD, and it is filling and delicious.  You can buy single eggs from vendors from 10 cents, and then a bag of vegetables for guacamole for 50 cents.  I am pretty much living like a king here... a lonely, transcribing king who rents a tiny room and eats a lot of fried eggs and guacamole.

Furthermore, 25 cents got me a ticket for the MetroBus, with which I made a lengthy sojourn to the Mitad del Mundo, a very charming tourist trap located an hour out of the city at 0' 0" 0".  Here is the required picture of me with one foot in the Northern hemisphere and one foot in the Southern:

After that I bought a doll from one of the eighty identical artisan shops, checked out creepy bugs at the insectarium, (Hercules beetles and tarantulas!) and then headed back to Quito to catch a Cuban film festival.  The movie I watched was called Lucía, by Humberto Solás, a very arty film full of intense black and white close-ups and sweaty people having passionate nervous breakdowns.  It followed the lives of three women named Lucía through three ages of Cuban revolutions, and I would have found all 159 minutes of it less exhausting if I'd been able to understand anything anyone was saying.  Either my Spanish is worse than I thought, or Cubans just speak incredibly fast.

Otherwise, I actually found the movie on YouTube if anyone's curious:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POJMlXmVDnE

Cartagena, La Heroica!

Whew!  I have been amazingly busy these past two weeks or so, and updates have had to go on a back-burner for a bit.  I've been accepted for a job writing posts for a language blog, and being as languages are some of my favorite things, this is very exciting stuff!  Plus, I've been in Cartagena, Colombia's coastal city on the Caribbean Sea, and trying to enjoy it to the utmost, which I think I did a pretty good job at.

First of all, I did finish my red sweater on my last day in Medellín, but I lost interest halfway through and wasn't too thrilled at the result.  The pattern was great, but the yarn was just lackluster, and Medellín was too warm for sweaters anyway.

In the end, I left the sweater behind because it wouldn't fit in my backpack.  I took the bus to Cartagena, which took roughly 18 hours, and as we sped through the dark I deliriously watched house after open-air house speed by, and it seemed that every single one of them had a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the front porch surrounded by dozens of tea candles.  The entire family of each house was sitting around their shrines on lawn chairs, making me wonder if there was some sort of religious holiday going on, or if that was just what people do at nighttime in rural Cartagena.

The weather in the city was sweltering and humid, just the way I like it, and it stayed that way all week.  This, of course, drove me to the beach almost every day.  The beach at Bocagrande was nothing special - although I did get attack-massaged by a wandering beach masseuse, who grabbed my foot while I was in the middle of telling her off and practically yanked me off my towel.  My response to this went something like, "Now, wait just a second, what do you - oh, wait, that feels pretty good.  Carry on..."  The real tropical paradise was at Playa Blanca: white sands, aquamarine waves, palm trees, the whole shebang.  Used to swimming in the freezing, grey Atlantic at Ocean City, Maryland, I was pretty thrilled to for the first time ever be able to swim in water that felt like it was bathtub temperature.

(This was actually from a short stop at Islas del Rosario, right around the corner from Pablo Escobar's private island.)  Yes, Playa Blanca was quite cheesy and full of kitschy cabins with palm frond roofs and vendors pushing you to buy their necklaces, seashells, and coco locos... but it was beautiful nonetheless, and I hear if you stay overnight in a cabin you can have the island virtually to yourself once the tourists head back to the mainland.

The rest of my stay at Cartagena involved exploring the city, which is just perfect for walking and biking.  The inner city, that is, everything inside a century-old stone wall (built to protect the city from pirate attacks!) is built like a labyrinth of colonial and republican architecture, kind of a mix of New Orleans and Havana.

Everything was a bit pricey compared to Bogota, but you can buy a fresh coconut for a dollar, and the vendor will hack off the top with a machete and give you a straw to drink the coconut water inside.  The fish there is the most delicious fish in the world - they catch it fresh in the ocean, scale it and dunk it back in the seawater to salt it, and then fry it up right then and there for you.  Also delicious is cebiche, a Peruvian dish of raw seafood - I tried the shrimp, but there's also things like mussels, lobster, and octopus - marinated in lime juice and with finely chopped onions and cilantro.  The girl at the cebicheria who introduced me to this dish was extremely friendly, and also a little bored at work, so I hung out and we had a good, long chat as a rainstorm rolled in from the sea.  She lamented how ever since she had a baby her social life has gone out the window, and then she taught me the word bobo, which is Colombian for "dummy."  There are also friendly women walking around with bowls of mangoes on their heads, who will let you take a picture of them, and ghostly nuns taking sunset strolls along the circumference of the wall.

Most of all, Cartagena was a great place to unwind, relax, drink mojitos, and dance salsa at rooftop hotel parties.  I met a guy who was a dance instructor (so he said, anyway,) who actually managed to instruct me somewhat in the rhythm of salsa, so I'm not quite as abysmal as I was when I first got here.  I think the secret is to not move your shoulders... and also to try hard not to crash into your partner, wherein my difficulty lies.

But alas, I have left Colombia behind, and I miss it dearly.  There was something special about that place, I think.  Everyone was intense and friendly and beautiful, and it's my favorite country I've ever visited except for Ireland.  I'm in Quito now, not too sure what I think of it because I haven't had much time to explore yet.  But time will soon tell....

Medellín is so different from Bogotá it's hard to believe they're actually in the same country.  Medellín is warm ("City of Eternal Spring," they call it,) Medellín is clean, with regularly spaced bins around the city and outskirts for people to throw trash rather than the side of the road, and Medellín is much less hectic.  Drivers have less of a run-you-off-the-road attitude towards pedestrians.  From what I've seen, Medellín is also quieter, though that might be because I'm staying in a very pleasant little suburb, Barrio Laureles, rather than in the center of town.

Medellín is also, with no offense to Bogotá who is gritty and mad and wonderful, much prettier as a whole.  Colombia's second-largest city, Medellín also sprung up in the middle of a mountain range, but here it seems the sun is always out.  There are trees and small parks and water sculptures with little kids splashing around in them and random sculptures and interactive artwork all over the city.  In fact, an edict was passed making it a requirement that every new building in such-and-such a range of the city center include a work of public art, giving all of downtown the feel of a giant, outdoor art museum.  The buildings are all either very creative or very bizarre or both, (the central EPM building was designed to look like a giant tanker ship,) making you feel like you're wandering around in the capital city of some might sci-fi planet.

But Medellín is very proud of its citywide spirit of innovation (it's the first city in Colombia to have a Metro!) and really, I can't get over all the art they have just for the sake of art.  They have interspersed patches of sand in the middle of business districts, with signs urging people to take off their shoes and feel the energy of the earth.  They have jet-powered tide pools where people can just hang out and dunk their feet.  They have bizarre shooting fountains everywhere and little bamboo groves filled with hanging light bulbs and metal flowers that are actually shaped like planets.  They have benches and chairs all over the city that look like they're made of cement but are actually recycled plastic.  

And furthermore..... THEY HAVE THIS!

I am staying with a lovely family - a mother with two daughters and a hyperactive dog - who invited me to the older daughter's birthday party which involved an amazing home-cooked meal of beans, rice, chicharron, and a cake with arequipe.  (I wasn't too keen on arequipe when I first came to Colombia, but it really grows on you.  Pretty much all their dessert pastries are filled with it, and it's delightful on strawberries.)

For a week spent in the city, I didn't exactly get to do all I wanted.  I never got around to the Botero Museum, for one thing.  But there's enough Botero artwork scattered around the city to make up for that.  He is fast becoming my favorite painter of all time, second only to Hieronymus Bosch.

Fernando Botero: he is just a million kinds of genius.  Otherwise, I take the allegedly 13-hour bus-ride (it will actually be more like 16 or 17-hour,) to Cartagena tomorrow.  Onwards!

La Ciudad de la Eterna Primavera

I have arrived starving, exhausted, and somewhat delirious to Medellín, the erstwhile Pablo Escobar's city.  According to Wikitravel, the city stopped  being a hotbed of drug trafficking and kidnapping and became safe for tourists "since his demise in the mid-1990s."  I can only hope that someday my death too will be referred to as "her demise."

Last night for dinner I had an arepa, which is a flat sort of corn pancake, stuffed with pork, cheese, corn, mushrooms, and bits of chicharron and then grilled over an over fire with loads of butter.  It was amazing and delicious and I couldn't finish it all or I might have had a heart attack.

Otherwise, I'm still currently writing articles for WomanScope News Magazine in Baltimore, and my article on Kyoko Mori, the writer in resident at Goucher College in Towson, is up this month:

http://www.womanscopenewsmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/fine-arts/2013/07/06/culture-kyoko-mori-blending-two-cultures-by-anna-snyder-staff-writer/

Now, to figure out how the Metro works here...