Sam Gable
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Sam Gable" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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05:15 pm
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three weeks left
I'm leaving Quito and that's strange. I think I have about three weeks left, then I'll be in the midwest for a month and a half. I got into the TEFL program so I'll be living in the cities for a month of that. I feel a mixture of excitement but sad to go. It's how I imagine dying of old age or a terminal illness. At first I was filled with thoughts about things I still wanted to do but won't be able to, and now it's contentment and appreciation.
Also I can't spell in English for shit anymore, and a bad ass 14 year old school girl wanted to beat me up on the metro. She was all four feet tall and in her uniform and gave me such a dirty glare, then she was like 'chucha!' under her breath which is the crudest swear word here and women never swear. I think she got mad becuase I laughed at her. Where is she now?!
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07:27 pm
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Pusulli
So the internship's still cool. I get to go in a car all around Quito doing investigations into the families and schools of kids that used to be at the center. And because they're generally from poor areas, I get to see parts of Quito that gringos never get to, like the north ghetto that is so ghetto that the reason people live there is because 15 years ago they invaded the land, cut down the forest, and build their own neighborhoods out of clay houses and dirt streets. Wow! They call it 'la invasion.' When you drive into Quito from the north you see it as a mass of gray square houses because no one can afford to paint them or care. It's one of the ganglands of Quito, and today I was supposed to go there to interrogate a married couple about their lives. The mom is schizophrenic and thinks the world is the devil so she locked her kids in the house for a month and barely fed them, which is why they got taken to the center, and the dad is too alcoholic to be useful. So I was supposed to ask them things like, 'So are you drinking? What are you doing to stop?' and to the mom 'Are you taking your meds, are you still acting all crazy?' But I didn't get to. This internship is helping me not be intimidated by anything.
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01:28 pm
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You know, half-frog, half-man...
I got a new Spanish/English dictionary, but this one doesn't have an entry for 'frogman' like my last one.
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04:29 pm
[Link] | I`m in an internet cafe and surrounded by mainly ultra-stereotypical British accents, and it reminded me how in Patagonia when I was waiting for the catamaran there was a group of people at the dock and they were all speaking in different languages, and it was the first time I was finally separate enough from English to realize what it sounded like and why it wasn't as pretty as some other languages. Basically, English isn't very clear, as in we're not forced to enunciate as much probably partly because of the lazy vowels, and there aren't many ups and down. I was hearing a group of American college girls, and comparing them to a group of people who I think were from Israel, and the Hebrew was very beautiful but the English was strictly monotone. On that note, English in a Hebrew accent is the sexiest accent I've ever heard, which was unexpected.
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01:14 pm
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no ghetto bitches
Alright, Chile is done and I'm back in Quito for the second internship. By the end of Chile when I went back up north to Santiago I realized that Chile is very cool and it can simultaneously be completly like Canada and completely it's own Latin America. I think a lot of our stereotyped images of Latin America are found in Chile, except for how the 1960 earthquake destroyed most of the colonial architecture. And I think the classic latino hot person probably comes from Chile. I'm not sure why but Chileans were very attractive people.
The internship in Quito is incredible. I'm doing social work at an organization in the historical south of Quito. It's amazing what they let me do. So far I'm assisting investigations they do into families and institutions, reading case studies and helping the kids that stay at the orphanage there. Then they're telling me I'll be doing my own investitagions eventially, and we'll be going all around Ecuador next month. I spent an afternoon last week in the office of the psychologist who recieves the incoming people into the org., and I got to hear why there were there in 5 min. segments, like, 'my husband stabbed me kid. I thought it was in the arm, but it was in the stomach,' or, 'yeah, he beat the shit out of me and then said he'd kill me.' They're either sobbing or completely nonchalant.
I feel mixed about Ecuador. First, this is becoming an awesome quarter. And my friend Ray and I just got an apartment above a full spa which we get to use for free. I can't explain how incredible the reality of that and the actual apartment is, so I'll post pictures later. But the other side is that I'm leaving in early June and I'm excited to go. It's good though, becuase when I wanted to leave a couple months ago it was becuase I hated being here, but now I'll actually be sad to go. There, there's my fucking update.
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09:39 am
[Link] | Alright I need to start posting again. I'm in Chile, right now in an island called Chiloe which is off the coast of near Puerto Montt, where the highways run out and you either have to take a ferry through the patagonian fjords or a bus through Argentina. I'm taking the bus route, instead of four days in the dank bowls of CC deck (out of AAA deck) for $421, with the men shoveling coal into furnaces. I picture TB and stowaway families of Jewish mice.
Chiloe is a cool island. It's landscape reminds me a mixture of Wisconsin and the forests in looney toons. It's known for houses like this:
It's also known for having avoided the globalized homogenity of the rest of the country. Chile is strange for that reason because it's a latin american country that's not desperately poor, so it feels more like Canada than Latin America. I like it a lot though, and it's very beautiful. I keep noticing all these privilages and signs of a modern country, like how most dogs don't have balls, and you can open ice cream freezers yourself. That's what wealth is.
Today I'm going to the end of the island and therefore the end of Hwy 5 which starts in Alaska, and goes through Vancouver and the west coast of the Americas. Then I'll go back on the homeland, and on Wednesday head to Patagonia.
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02:22 pm
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murciélago = bat
This moth was outside my bathroom window. Fucking shit!
Some people in Yunguilla think they grow into bats. (but they´re wrong)
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02:30 pm
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fluency is hard
Starting this week there are three more weeks of this internship, a trip to as close as possible to Antartica: Patagonia, Chile, then 2.5 more months of internship. Then home. It seems eerily short, but judging how the first half of the Yunguilla internhsip went it could be an eternity. I´m beginnign to feel kind of driftless in South America. I think the longing for home and people phase is over, so now I´m just here. My recent memory now starts when I arrived in Quito instead of before I left.
I met with my advisor for the research project in Yunguilla for the first time a few days ago and she whipped me into shape. She´s a social psychologist. I´ve interviewed the two older generations in Yunguilla, but not the current one, which is what the research project is about. She wants me to have a rap session with the teenagers and ask them what they want from their future, if they want to leave the community, etc., which I don´t see happening. Teenagers make me nervous. I´ll probably just hand out questions and try to fit in some casual drilling for answers.
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06:59 pm
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this time I´m going to see that fucking bird
I´m back in Mindo for tonight and early morn, when I hope to find the inspiration to wake up at 4:30 AM to see the jungle bird dance. But on the bus I chose to sit by the least likely to be crazy man, and it went ok until I asked him what movie we were watching, I was wondering if it was Apocalypse, and he acted like I asked him something inappropriate. So I thought either: he´s one of those people who sees a foreigner and assumes they couldn´t possible speak coherent Spanish so doesn´t even listen. This annoys me a lot, and I know it´s not me becuase people do it to foreigners in the states all the time. Or 2: something´s wrong with him. As the movie went on he started babbling about what was going on, like anouncing anything that came on the screen: ¨Bees!¨ ¨Poison dart!¨ And then I noticed that he smelled, like a crazy person does. But I´m telling this story becuase it filled me with deja vu, and I know that I´ve made the wrong gamble about bus people before. I should just sit next to young women, even if it terrifies them.
So if anyone has seen Apocalypse, is it basically tons of running through the jungle with a group of guys chasing another guy painted blue, and a pregnant woman with a kid at the bottom of a pit-trap/ditch? That´s all I got to see before the DVD malfunctioned.
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01:20 pm
[Link] | First of all I have to talk about a cup of coffee I had moments ago that for some reason was one of the most pleasurable, deeply satisfying coffee experiences I´ll ever have. And it wasn´t even real coffee, it was instant Nescafe, which is more like a bitter, coffee-inspired tea. I´m sorry I´ll never truly be able to convey my satisfaction to you all.
I´m in a first-growth jungle town called Mindo. It´s got butterflies that hatch in the morning and elusive dancing birds you have to wake up at 4:30 to see. I didn´t make it for the the bird, but for some reason the town is provoking nostalgia for towns I know in the Midwest, even though they´re nothing alike. But I´m enjoying myself a lot here. The bus ride here was awe-inspiring. It was misty and getting dark and we were basically driving through a mountainous Congo, a place where gorillas horde diamonds that people want to do something with satellites. Just like that. And then I got laid, which means more than normal because it´s been four months. On the bus I had a thought that I probably won´t have any sex in Ecuador, and like always happens to me when I make any predictions like that the opposite happened within a day. I don´t know what it is, but sex and affection is significantly more important to me now that it was a couple years ago.
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10:05 am
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Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
I have escaped Yunguilla for a day to demand an explanation from a clinic for my stomach troubles. They gave me a dish for my stool sample that's less than a centimeter deep. I think I went partly just to get out for a day. Yunguilla is going fine but time is passing unbearably slowly. I got up at 5:45 this morning to catch a van full of high schoolers to be dropped of in the neighboring town. I'm in San Antonio right now, which has Ecuador's ecuator line monument/museum, and walking around town this morning I'm realizing how surrealistic Ecuador's landscape can be. San Antonio is surrounded by mountain-like scrubby hills and clouds that are so close you can see the moving grey and white vapor. But something about the landscape doesn't fit, it's like the foothills around Boise. They feel like a painting or a room where someone built an incomplete imaginary landscape.
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02:40 pm
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Cows are disgusting, stupid animals. I´ll explain later.
dear god I´m sick of being in this internet cabina. This will be short. Yunguilla is going well, I´m still a mixture not wanting to be in any particular place, but being fine with where I am and aware I should be here. I´ve milked cows a lot and they´re hideous. Walking around never ceases to amaze me. I´m starting to teach English at the school which is terrifying but I´ll try to pacify them with games, and teaching at the school is sort of a joke. I showed up for a day last week to teach and they basically said, ´Well, teach English,´ like ´Do your magic.´ There is no curriculum or any idea of what to do, so I winged it for the three hours or so I was there. The social environment is exactly how I imagine prison, especially when we had lunch together. You have to assert your authority immediately or it´ll get ugly.
I saw this from my window.
Yunguilla is pretty
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08:34 pm
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Culture shock is vultures fighting under the roof of your hostel
I cant make apostrophes. I dont know what the hell that chao business was about, becuase everyone says it in Yunguilla. Maybe its just with wives. And everyone swears in front of my mother, who is visiting. They break out all the chucha madres (mother fucker, well actually your mothers vagina), jodido (fucked), and hue puta (Im not sure how to spell hue, but its short for son of a whore). If I asked any Ecuadorian if theyd swear in front of someones mother theyd deny it.
Culture shock is gone! Im excited about being here again. Yunguilla is great. Its in a cloud forest in the motherfucking Andes and were constantly inside clouds. Therere roosters, volcano, really nice people, this sexy, rustic group of brothers called the Callaguazos, and a couple really attractive cows Ill talk about later. Becuase its a cloud forest the landscape is constantly unfolding 20 feet in front of you, making it mysterious and constantly exciting for me. The village is on a sort of plateau above a steeply sloping terrain. Im doing a lot of varied things at the village, like working at the orchard and the school, making cheese, and developing a research project. The cows are...pretty. I didnt know they could be like this but they have incredible, big black eyes and coquettish lashes, and bone structure that just pleases one for some reason. They appeared the other day outside my window, and I guess theyre being tethered there for awhile. And these arent even adult, legal cows. These cows are teenagers. Anyway, all Im saying is maybe I understand those folks that do things.
The host family is fine, definitely better than in Quito. Ecuadors poverty is a lot more evident here. The mom and her sister ship themselves to Quito everyday to work at peoples houses, and the dad walkes to the other side of the valley to work on a rich Spaniards farm. They have ostriches. We have an ostrich egg in our house and its painfully obvious that birds are dinosaurs. For some reason whenever the mom comes home from work she always talks incredibly loudly to us and way too nice. Its awkward becuase I know shes exhausted and she should just not worry about us. Its interesting being in that situation, to visit a country like Ecuador from the states. Im always wondering what they think of us, not so much my last family but this one because theyre definitely poor. We stay in their houses in their ailing, jobless country, and then when were done we go back to our opportunities and they continue with their crappy lives. I guess Im paying them.
Im at a hacienda in a town near Quito with my mom. The histories of haciendas are starting to interst me a lot. Yunguilla used to be one, and anyone who is old enough in the town now used to work at it. There was a land act in the 60s and the owner had to give it up. It was basically slave labor before. I think next quarter is going to be about visiting haciendas and volcanoes.
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01:35 pm
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Yunguilla
Alright, I´m going out of Quito for the next 2.5 months to live in Yunguilla, which isn´t really a town but a collection of houses and farms in the Andes, so I´ll only have internet on the weekends. I´ll probably be working at the school, and they seem to want me to do lots of psychology stuff there. I´m afraid of how reserved the people will be there. I said ´Chao´to someone´s wife there, becuase that´s how everyone says bye, and then found out later that to them it´s too sexual.
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04:05 pm
[Link] | Quito was a ghost town yesterday, at least in Old Town. The only people out were a surprising amount of loitering, still-drunk old men and a prostitute who hissed at me. That´s how they show sexual interest here, by hissing. The men always hiss or whistle at my female friends here, and give cat calls that are too vulgar for me to understand yet. And then some of them try speaking in English, because a man who can say no more than ´hello,´ and ´I love you´ in butchered English really turns the foreign women on.
There are a lot of aspects to the latin take on love/lust that don´t charm me at all. I like the frigid logic of Americans who know the difference between the two. I think it´s becuase here they´re traditionally less slutty than we are, so they´re used to calling any sexual whim love. Whithin a week a guy will say ´te amo, te quiero mucho mi amor.´ Somehow there are foreign exhcange students who find that romantic. Although I think that by now they´re just as slutty as we are, except women are still supposed to be chaste so they can´t talk about it as freely. I can´t remember the statistic, but there are a vast number of teen pregnancies in Ecuador and marriages that result from them. And some husbands forbid birth control because they think it´ll make their wives cheat on them, because they couldn´t just buy condoms or say the baby was theirs.
The culture shock is gone I think. It was a week of hating everything and feeling lonely. And the last day and a half all I did was stay in my hostel and watch Spanish dubbed American movies on TV. Except I just took a walk and a random asshole said to me in English: ´Hey Gringo, fuck off you fucking pussy´ and it pissed me off way more than it should have, but then a random guy said hello to me and I´m filled with longing.
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08:25 pm
[Link] | I got mugged! It ended up being fine though. I was walking through a neighborhood that got deserted when I turned for the main street, and these two guys saw me and changed direction a little. I tried to duck into a fruit store but there was only an 8 year old boy inside, so at the entrance they started pushing me and reaching into my pockets, but then the whole neighborhood saw it and freaked out at them. And then I got in someone´s car and we chased them for a few blocks. I was kind of confused and wanted to just walk away becuase it was only seven bucks, but they chased them and I followed, then the guys from the car got out and kind of hit one of the robbers a lot until he gave me my money. I got on the trolley to go grocery shopping and kept laughing from the nervous energy.
Then for the evening I did one of the three stupidest things I´ve done here, but somehow didn´t get robbed or beaten. I walked up to the Virgin in the evening, which means I went through parts of town that foreigners are never supposed to go, especially in the evening, but I´m cheap and didn´t want to pay for two cab rides. The neighborhoods on the hill where the virgin is are poor, which I guessed ahead of time because whenever you climb up the valley they get poor, so everyone stared at me and I just kind of speed walked up an endless series of stairs until I got to the top and collapsed. It was worth it though, becuase I got there exactly at night fall and I was surrounded by the lit up city. You can´t see either end becuase it wraps around the valley both ways, but most places I can´t really go anyway. The lights I thought were Dr. Seuss trees are really enormous stylized shepards and oxen. I´m not sure why they´re oxen and not sheep.
Adding to what I wrote about Ecuador and New Years in the last post, Quito celebrates New Years with men dressed like hookers stopping cars with rope until the drivers give them change. Nobody seems to mind getting extorted though. I got a ride to the bottom of the virgin hill and took a cab from there, and the cab driver was ok with giving money to all the kids and crossdressers.
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07:05 pm
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(I think I have parasites)
Quito is full of mimes. It´s probably something to do with New Years. But that´s nothing compared to what happened on the coast, where in all the towns and villages children dressed in masks made out of fabric with eyeholes, walked in gangs, and carried beating sticks. I think I got out just in time. I´m in Quito right now hiding out in a hostal and trying to budget so I don´t have to go back to my host family´s house until Jan. 3rd, when my mom comes to visit. Again, there´s nothing that wrong with them... Also, I guess it´s a South American tradition to make life-size, painted paper people, and set them all on fire for New Years. They all have bright pink faces and black hair, some of them have glasses or mustaches, and there´s the ocassional Spider Man. I bet it´s caused a few city fires.
So the culture shock business is getting better. I´m having that thing where you want to be unconscious as much as possible, becuase waking up is depressing since your dreams purposely take you to more desirable places when you don´t like where you´re living. But I can sense it going away, and whenever I drink a cup of coffee or alcohol or walk through the city I feel fine. I took a huge walk today until I scaled the east side of the valley and saw the city fill another one. I really like Quito, but I´m not going to love it. I´m having to accept that in most cases you can´t put on a new culture. I´m stuck to my country, or Canada. After a while you want to be surrounded by people you instinctively understand and can speak the language of.
The view of the city from my hostal´s roof is amazing. The hostal´s in my favorite part of the city, which is where old town and new town merge, and the architecture mixes. You can find beautiful, delapidated mansions boxed in and hidden by ugly office buildings. The neighborhoods aren´t too colonial or too modern. It´s night right now and everything´s misty. It looks like a painting by a famous artist from here named Guayasamin. Which I´ll post.
And the Virgen on the hill is surrounded by Dr. Seuse-like trees made of christmas lights. I have to make the taxi ride up there by tomorrow night before they take everything down, except the Virgen, who is very pretty.
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03:01 am
[Link] | Hello everyone. A few things have happened on the trip so far. I´m in Mantañita right now, it´s a town in Ecuador on the mid-Southern coast. We´re leaving for somewhere else tomorrow that´s supposed to have apple pie, and then I´m going back to Quito for New Years. The plan though is to stay in hostals in Quito until Jan. 3 becuase for some reason the idea of even saying hi to my host parents before then is unbearable. I think three months is the maximum amount of time to live with people you who don´t have anything wrong with them per se but who you wouldn´t choose to live with.
Mantañita has the warmest ocean water I´ve ever swam in. And the sand is like flour. But we´re thinking the town is telling us to leave. There´ve been sand fleas (which can drive humans mad), jelly fish stings that made us think Carissa was going to die today, a malaria swamp by our hostal, and hens or roosters that hang out on a tree right outside our window and in the early morning hours make as much noise as possible. First of all, I didn´t know chickens spent time in trees, or even could get up them, and second, these chickens don´t make normal noises. It sounds like aliens or broken machinery, and it´s so fucking loud. I think they only climb the tree to be assholes. Tonight were going to kill one and hang it from a branch as an example.
The last few days I´ve been thinking up escape routes from Ecuador. For some reason all of a sudden I don´t want to be there. I want to be back in the US with people I like and living where I want. I think it´ll pass when I get back to Quito and start doing things again. Pretty soon I´m to live in an
Andes village for the next three months to do an internship that involves, hopefully, working with learning disorders at the english school and communication with a psychologist in Quito. I´m trying to work things out where I can stay in Quito over the weekends. The tranquility of a poor Andes village is great, but I think I´ll go crazy if I can´t get out on the weekends. The problem is I have to convince the school or the family to not make me pay for those days, becuase it´s 12 dollars per day which is ridiculous. OK bye for now.
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04:41 pm
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I have a cold
Being sick and living at the whims of people who don´t know shit about health is annoying. People in Ecuador, and I think a lot of Latin America, still have this folk wisdom about health that I´m having to put up with. They think all illness stems from air temperature, like most ancient greek medicine, so I have a billion blankets on my bed and can´t leave the house without a coat. But the reason I´m annoyed is becuase my dad keeps waking me up at 8 in the morning to give me juice, and I´m like ´fuck off, I´ll drink it when I wake up.´ Then he watches how I drink it and makes sure I drink it slow because that´s supposed to help my throat, but it´s always sugery (sp?) and milky, which is not what I need when I´m congested and coughing. They also try to feed me heaping spoonfuls of honey, which I know people do in the states too but it´s stupid. Anyway, I´ll get over it.
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03:53 pm
[Link] | We decided not to go to Colombia. This was after a month of wavering and getting different advice from everyone. The problem is that when something goes bad in Colombia, it always seems to be fucking horrible. A friend here had a friend get kidnapped and held for randsome. She was in a car with her family and the FARC just pulled them over and took them. I can´t really expect someone to pay a $10,000+ randsome right now. And I´ve always been reading news about the FARC, and how they´ve had hostages in the jungle for over five or ten years because they want the government to release hundreds of guerrilla prisoners. The pictures are really depressing. We´re going to Peru instead, but when I´m fluent in Spanish I´ll definetly go.
Wow, the loudest, maybe retarted, New York couple just came into this cabina. They sound like Adam´s mom. I´m pretty sure the wife is mail order.
I met another homo yesterday. It´s getting easier to spot them. And I don´t feel like I´m going to want to kill him later. The only reason I met him was because I was confused about the etiquette about pissing on walls here, so I ended up wandering several blocks toward a mall. I saw him and we exchanged looks and started talking. But he told me that you can piss on any wall or tree at any time as long as it´s not a main road or a neighborhood guard is watching, and all the neighborhoods have guards on the side of town I live. But you can do it in front of police because they do it too. Basically, there´s no law or problem with public urination. When I got here I saw it all the time, like I saw all those people sleeping in the day in parks like corpses. They sleep completely face down.
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