By far, the question most people are asking me is what I like most about Macas. Since I'm kind of using my blog as a journal, I'm going for total honesty. That way, when I look back in a year, I can laugh at how silly I was 'way back when'. So, here are your answers:
- The people here are so very friendy, and so accepting. Macas is very similar to small-town Mississippi...after being here only a week and a bit people recognize me in town, remember who I am and what I'm doing here, stop me to say hi on the sidewalk. I might not have even met them yet, but 'Oh, you're the new American teacher at Emanuel school, you're Teacher Laura's roommate, you're here to work with the Gutierrezes!' Being one of only about five white people in town makes it easy to figure me out :) But because I'm a gringa - that's white chick, in Spanish - they're extra patient. They try to talk slowly, even if they only last a few words before they forget and they speed up again haha, they don't mind if I try out my Spanish and accidentally say something crazy, they go out of their way to try to strange Spanish words so I can understand it with my very limited vocabulary.
- Everything you could want (well, everything you can buy in this town anyway) is literally withing walking distance from your door. At home if you need an egg, you have to get in your car, drive to Wal-Mart or Dollar General or wherever you can get to the quickest, and get out, buy the eggs, and drive back home. At least a twenty minute deal. Say I run out of milk. I walk two doors down, buy a thing of milk, and walk home. And when you want to do a big grocery shopping trip, say, getting more than three bags of groceries (that's a big deal here), you can take a taxi home.
- Taxis. Oh me. I'm going to be spoiled on taxis when I come home. It's so nice just to kind of shake your wrist at a yellow car and have someone take you anywhere you want to go for $1.
- The bread stores. I can buy five hot-from-the-oven baguettes for fifty cents on my way home for lunch, and back home Americans are content to eat their $2.50 cold Wonderbread.
- Prices on anything in general are amazing here. Sunday at the market, Laura got bananas for ten cents each. I bought two bags of tomatoes for $2.25. A bottle of water here costs thirty cents. Eating out at the best pizza place in town costs about $4, with your drink.
- The other teachers, well, they're pretty much exactly like your crazy co-workers back home. They sing in crazy voices to the Spanish love songs on the radio, we discuss the different pet names for spouses/significant others in our respective cultures (Ecuador: fat, cootchie cootchie. And they think our food names like 'sugar', 'honey', and 'cupcake' are funny...), yeah. Some things cross all culture barriers.
Yellow lights- some things that were VERY different to me when I first got here, but I quickly got used to them:
- Milk, instead of coming in jugs by the gallon or carton, comes in rectangular boxes or thick plastic bags, and it isn't refrigerated until you open it. The milk here is ultra-pasteurized, so it can be sat on a shelf until opened, kind of like condensed milk or creamer in the US. But, after the initial shock of finding the milk on a regular shelf in the grocery store, I'm over it. It tastes 99% the same, maybe a little richer than ours, but not enough to notice.
- Our oven. Oh, the oven. It's a gas oven, which I'm used to from home, but not natural gas. It runs off a butane tank, and it's sort of a process to light it. To light an eye, you press the 'pilot lighter' button, then turn on the gas. Whoosh, you're lit. To light the oven is a little trickier. You turn on a burner, and light a candle we have sitting on the counter. Then you turn the oven's gas on, and with the candle, light the oven's pilot light. It's quite a shock the first time that happens and the flame 'whooshes' on and blows your candle out!
- The weather. Macas weather is not warm, and it isn't cool, and it isn't in the middle. It's all of the above, and sometimes all on the same day. You might wake up and it be chilly, only to be sweating your jacket off by three o'clock. Or vice versa. Or have it start pouring rain on what started out to be an utterly cloudless, sunny day. I told Laura today I think they have some kind of bi-polar temperature controller. But I'm getting to where I can sort of predict it, and it keeps you from getting in a wardrobe rut for sure. Definitely better than 6 months of solid burning to death or freezing, like in Mississippi!
- The electric showerhead. Pretty much anyplace where the only option is a shower is automatically deducting happy points for me, being in a committed relationship with my custom made bathtub like I am. But I've been nice to it, kept attempting to make friends, and it's finally getting to where it will let me actually have hot water, and a decent amount of water pressure. Nothing compared to my bathroom back home, but it's not bad considering I started in the relationship getting the cold shoulder!
Red Lights- the things I am have not yet come to liking yet. Trying, persevering, but still in the fight:
- The juice. I love juice. In the US, I'd rather have drank juice than just about anything. But in the US, juice comes either from a gallon jug that says Welch's, or a frozen cylinder you mix with water. Here, you can either make it yourself, or mix frozen fruit pulp with sugar and water. Either way, it produces a very natural but very thick, pulpy juice. I'm a very texturally conscious person, so if my juice makes me feel like I'm drinking a loogey, I'm probably going to pass.
- The Spanish. In spite of my continued attempts to absorb as much as possible, and to listen to my Spanish CDs, and to look up every phrase I remembered I didn't understand from my conversations, it still leaves my head hurting and me discouraged at the end of the day. In new situations, I tend to be naturally in the background just listening and absorbing everything, and apparently the best thing for Spanish learning is to just jump in regardless of your ignorance and try anyway. That isn't me, that's totally against every fiber of my personality, that terrifies me. I don't even like talking to people I don't know in English, much less in a language I'm not cool with yet. Definitely need your prayers with that. School starts next week, with me and my non-English speaking assistants and non-English speaking students. My parents are ordering me a Rosetta Stone program, since they would benefit from it too once I came home, but it'll be at least two weeks to a month before it gets here.
- The total flexibility and looseness of life and scheduling here. AKA Latin American Time. I'm one of those naturally organized people, who are constantly making to-do lists and keep two or so calendars and planners going all the time. I get here and time is a more-or-less thing, and I kind of don't know how to approach it. For example, if you tell me to be somewhere around lunch I'm probably going to show up at twelve on the dot, but here that could mean anywhere from twelve to three or so. Or if you tell me that something is going to happen early next week, I'm thinking Monday or Tuesday, but here that could potentially stretch into Wednesday or even Thursday. So I'm having a hard time adjusting my exacting way of thinking to the more, uh, lax way of life here. I'm trying to control my OCDness, not be frustrated when I know it's me that's the different one, but it's a struggle with patience at times.
- The COCKROACHES!!! Ugh. In Ecuador you pretty much are guaranteed to have one of two pests, ants or cockroaches. We have the latter, both in our apartment and at the preschool where I work. I do not do not do not like cockroaches, and I am not attempting to like them in any way. I am attempting to rid the country of as many as I can before I leave. Sort of like a public service. We have cleaned our kitchen spotless, bought tupperware for our food or put it in the fridge, and researched 'natural cockroach repellent', so maybe they'll go away and leave us alone!
In other news, I am now addicted to Pinterest. Oh my, what a problem this could potentially be :) However, I'm getting many many ideas for a big big project you all will hear about sometime in the hopefully very near future! Ciao!
No comments:
Post a Comment