quito requires a many-layered awareness. of course, there is the standard, heightened awareness of what is normal and lovely and cool about traveling. we cruised through the smaller jorge washington market, which reminded me of nothing so much as a saugus swap meet -- rows and rows of similar products, sprinkled here and there with a gem of something completely different. it was surprisingly uncrowded, only a few stray gringos wandering the aisles, all moving in the same direction, as if pulled on an invisible conveyor belt. murmurs from the vendors as we pass by -- alpaca blanket, handicraft, cinquante centavos [referring to a yoda finger-puppet], alpaca blanket -- while some slurped thin green soup from covered wooden bowls.
me: que es los pelotes verdes?
senora: higos.
whitney: well, they still look like little balls of kryptonite to me. no, i don't want one.
and some of the less-typical interactions that i feel lucky to experience, touching the lives of people who live here. whitney, tom's sister, teaches evening classes in english to quiteno teenagers and adults, and thursday was oral exam day. she set her students up hard: to prepare, she asked them to think about what a hypothetical american visiting quito for the first time should know (teens) and what questions they would like to ask an american if given the chance (adults). then, she gleefully revealed us, in all our hypothetical american glory, and snickered as the collective jaws of the classroom dropped to the floor. some useful things i learned from the kids: make sure to visit st. augustine, la compania, y santo domingo churches; when bargaining for handicrafts, don't lowball (e.g., my counteroffer for a $10 scarf should be $7.50, not $2); i should not take the buses alone (more on this in a bit); the brown stuff next to the fig candy in the picture above is also candy and is made with coconut; and i should get married someday in order to keep my rights and property. some fascinating questions about americans from the adults: are americans racists? what do americans think about war? is it true that two women can marry each other in america? is president obama capable of helping the world? (i hope that my answers adequately represented the opinions of the american people.)
that same night, some of whitney's friends from canoa rolled in for some party, ecua-style.
cesar, on the right, is whitney's little button of joy: surfer, masseur, reiki practitioner, dispenser of native cures (for strong bones, rub the black sands of canoa on your legs ... if a woman has kidney problems, she should have sex with a black man); he also makes a shot that includes cane liquor, scorpions, and fungi that roughly translates as "nails of the beast." michael jackson, on the right, is a master salsa dancer, singer, drummer, ecua-freestyler, capoeiristo, and human being. not pictured: naranjas, who first shared with me the ecuadorian philosophy of compartir -- it is, perhaps, no accident that his hometown canoa is also called la playa -- and jorge, who peers out at the world through wide-set and brilliant black eyes, fringed all around like tidepools, like barnacles, and whose spanish is completely incomprehensible, even to spanish-speakers. four fine ambassadors and a very fine evening of impromptu capoeira on the balcony of finn maccool's ... tom belting out a new "knowshon moreno" operetta to the beat of michael jackson's drums ... my spanish rapidly improves as the night progresses ... and my new favorite name for a dancing establishment: the next level. as in, let's take it to the.
and then there is the other awareness-layer, that part of the brain that constantly chatters: do i trust? i prefer to set that part to "yes," assuming my instincts are not screaming "no, no!" but i have been warned, repeatedly, by almost everyone i've met in quito, that by simply taking it all in, i am opening myself up to unsafety and unsavoriness. the oddest thing is that quito doesn't feel sinister; there is beauty, and folk meet the eye and sometimes respond to smiling. and while i like my stuff and would prefer to keep it, there's nothing it would kill me to lose. but yet ... another english teacher robbed twice in three months, once by a man wielding a machete ... whitney's roommate andrea mugged today by a man who ripped out a chunk of her hair, though she ultimately foiled her attacker with a swift kick to the groin ... whitney sprayed with ketchup and her backpack swooped up ... earrings ripped out of andrea's friend's ears in old town ... maybe its just that folk speak of crime so vividly and with such immediacy -- i mean, these are entertaining stories, and we all like a little sensationalism. but the result is that, even as i smile at the folk passing by, another part of me speculates how i might physically disable a friendly face turned attacker. and every time i come back to whitney's apartment unscathed, i feel victorious.
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