Sam Gable - Culture shock is vultures fighting under the roof of your hostel
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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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