Amazonian Bologna, with Mayonnaise

After working from dusk until the god-forsaken madrugada everyday for $4 an hour these past six months, Ryan and I quit. Enough is enough, and since I had recently suffered several childlike breakdowns that consisted of "No! I can't. I simply can't teach anymore. I have nothing left. I CAN'T!", we knew it was probably time to cut the cord and say goodbye to English teaching for a while. It wouldn't have been inappropriate for me to follow these embarrassing tantrums with a food stomp or a Ghanaian arm flap that I learned from my frequently upset toddlers, and in order to save our relationship and our sanity, we opted to take a much needed vacation. 

We left cold, wintertime Cuenca for a nice, relaxing vacation in Parque Nacional Podocarpus in the South of Ecuador. Camping is one of our favorite past times, and usually we have enough equipment and planning to get us by in the US - even if we do end up hiking through several feet of snow in light zip-off pants and sweaters. Ecuador presented a bit of a predicament in regard to preparation. You see, my generous sister had brought down a duffel bag full of our camping gear when we met in Viva Mexico for Easter break. We ended up with: a tent, my sleeping bag, Ryan's sleeping pad, a stove, a lantern, Ryan's hiking shoes and a pooper scooper kit. What we did not end up with was: Ryan's sleeping bag, my sleeping pad, fuel for the stove, and my hiking shoes. Where those things have escaped to, I do not know, but if they're reading this: Please, come home.

The adventure began before we even left. We had a list of items we needed to find and very little expendable income to buy these special items in a country where almost no one ever camps. Ever. And if they do admit to camping, it doesn't take long to realize they spent the night in a cabin in the woods with several amenities, such as bed frames, mattresses and hinged doors, that we couldn't fit in our backpacks. We did, however, found a light sleeping bag at the local grocery/clothing/music/drugstore/sporting goods/department store for a decent price and even a pad to go along with it! Eventually our frugalness caught up to us though, and we opted to share the one bag and the one pad that we already owned. Fuel was the most essential item, and of course, the most difficult item to find. We went all over town, trying to find it in any store that might carry things even vaguely related to camping. Our search came up dry, so we had to make a new plan. We'd have to carry pre-made food. 

Long story short, we ended up with bologna sandwiches, sliced bread (the first loaf of bread not made by us or a mom-and-pop local bakery since coming to Ecuador), good gouda cheese and a package of mayonnaise. Plus, tons of granola that we made in bulk a few days before. And my idea for bringing a bag full of homemade pancakes ended up with fermented flapjacks. Oops. 

Background: We haven't had meat in forever. Especially lunch meat. Especially meat that isn't really considered meat by most people (B-O-L-O-G-N-A). 

This clustermess of a meal plan ended with full and upset bellies but enough energy to last through the trip. By the way, our bologna had a third name, it's oh-my-god-I'm-sick. 

So we made do with what limited resources we had, and we headed out into the Amazonian rainforest to have a simple, non-eventful vacation. Or so I thought . . . 

And the answer is . . .

None of the above!

What have we been doing lately? Mostly watching this (and similarly captivating performances), over and over.

Other than that, working. Working, working, working, breaking down, fighting through, and working more. And napping. Lots of napping.

Our lives here have been defined by nothing if not constant uncertainty, as our last blog indicated. At any given moment of our vagrant life, we've had exactly zero options or a dozen options, depending on the particular moment, but never one undeniably perfect, this is it!, too-good-to-pass-up, divinely inspired, ohm'gawnoway, skies-parting, revelatory breakthrough. Until now!

In the space of six hurtling days, Molly was notified of, applied for, interviewed for, was offered, and accepted a dream job of sorts for this point in our lives: an internship with her study abroad program in Mexico. The benefits: meaningful work, side trips to rural villages and new countries (Cuba?!), a rent-free apartment for two, free food for one, free or discounted Spanish lessons, a plane ticket there, and, at long last, real stability and certainty for nearly a year. It almost sounds too good to be true to our world-weary ears. No financial pressure as we meander around looking for jobs. We'll get there just in time for English teacher hiring season, right before school starts, so I'll be able to carpet the town with my now-substantive resumé.

Strictly speaking, our vagrant life will be taking a temporary hiatus. As much as we sometimes romanticize the life of a gypsy, it's been difficult to adjust our mindsets fully to the cultural practice of deciding things (especially important things, like jobs and money) a few days or hours before they happen. A period of relative settling down will do us good.

So for the next two months, we'll be (what else?) working. And in the few weeks in between, we'll be checking off some experiences before we say goodbye to a country that's been very good to us. The people, the culture, the scenery, and the climate will be extremely hard to beat; in seven months, despite the uncertainty, this place has become a comfortable second home. It'll be hard to leave, but the landing in Cuernavaca will be a soft one.

Onward!

The Woes of Vagrants

We named our blog "Our Vagrant Life" assuming that it would be a cute, Fleet Foxes reference with a little truth to it in regards to our actual lives. Turns out, we sealed our fate when we named that blog. Vagrants we wanted to be, and vagrants we have become. For better or worse, in sickness (such as e-coli, UTIs, stomach viruses and the traditional migraine) and in health, we are humble, simple, flat-broke English teachers attempting to remain abroad for the foreseeable future.

In November, my best friend is getting hitched and a new baby will be entering our family (separate events, similar times). Obviously, we'll be returning to the States, over a year after we left, to partake in these celebrations. Our problem, however, is what will we do in the meantime? We can't sign contracts at new schools, because we'll be leaving mid semester. We can't bring ourselves to go home early and take temp jobs at Sears or any upper class pyramid scheme like we did last Fall. We want to keep improving our Spanish and immersing ourselves in the warm and vibrant cultures of South America. 

However, we'd also like to be able to pay rent and continue making foods with a sprinkle of precious cheese in them. Thus, we have mulled over countless scenarios that could or should or might or probably won't happen in the next 5 months. Each and every scenario that is dreamed up comes with approximately 7 or 8 if's. If we do this, then we'll have to figure out how to do that. And if we do that, we have to make sure that this other thing actually works out because if it doesn't the whole plan fails. You know, that sort of thing. 

Below I have briefly described the three main situations that could arise in addition to their offshoots:

Situation #1: If we get jobs in New York for the summer and the price of tickets isn't too much, then we'll buy one way tickets to New York, live it up in the often-nicknamed but hotly-disputed "Capital of the World," and then go to Guatemala where we can take Spanish lessons from the Spanish-social justice-human rights-Coca Cola hating-coffee obsessed school I went to when I studied abroad. We could take lessons for a month or so, I with my former sassy teacher turned friend, and Ryan with her goofball husband. Then we could work on an organic farm in the countryside or maybe travel through Central America until November. In essence, Situation #1 would be ideal - also, seemingly impossible.

Situation #1a: If we get the jobs in New York for the summer, we could buy round-trip tickets and come back to Ecuador. We could take Spanish lessons somewhere in Cuenca - if we can work something out with our landlords so we can leave all of our things in the apartment for a month and not pay. Then we could volunteer at a couple rural schools in the Sierras of Ecuador. And we could work on an organic farm in the south of Ecuador near the "Valley of the Immortals" where we could search for the fountain of youth  for a while and practice Spanish until November.

Situation #1b: If we get the jobs in New York and yada yada yada, then we could fly back to Ecuador, work in the same schools and do the same thing, but maybe be able to afford an apartment in town with a real roof and perhaps a connection to the world wide web. This isn't the most exciting scenario, but it is the most financially lucrative and probably the most adult choice. 

Situation #2: If we don't get the jobs in New York but we do get new work visas, then we can stay in Ecuador until November and try to start up our very own private tutoring business. We could also work at the same schools and live in the same apartment. Except that we really want to move somewhere else since we don't have internet at all and the apartment floods after a heavy rain.

Situation #2a: So we could stay in Ecuador and work at the same schools and try to find another apartment, but we would want to live in town and they're all gorgeous and colonial and way out of our price range. So this doesn't seem feasible.

Situation #2b: If we don't get the jobs in New York but do get new work visas, we could work on an organic farm for the months of July and August with a sweet family that would teach us Spanish and feed us fresh veggies all the time. That would only work if we can leave all of our lives' belongings in our little apartment and leave it for a couple months without paying for rent. 

Situtation #3: If we don't the jobs in New York AND we don't get extensions on our visas or we can't get new ones, then we'll move. Maybe to Peru where we could for a school 9 hours from any real highway or byway, and we could work way too many hours a week for almost no pay. And apparently the whole town is devoid of kitchens. 

Situation #3a: If we don't get the jobs in New York AND we don't get extensions on our visas or we can't get new ones, then we can stay illegally for a while without too much punishment. But we wouldn't be able to come back to Ecuador for at least 9 months, and we might ruin our chances of ever getting another long-term visa here. But we wouldn't have to sacrifice half our month's salary either . . . 

Situation #3b: If we don't get the jobs in New York AND we don't get extensions on our visas or we can't get new ones, then we might have to pray for a miracle. Or at least miracle jobs that hire us within days and then fly us down to their school which so happens to provide visas, housing, transportation and the like. 

And that's not even all of them. The nice thing about being a vagrant is anything seems possible for us; unfortunately, it also means that just about anything could happen to us. No, we don't live under a bridge.

But it sure feels like it when it rains.

Gettin' Cuy-zee

To be honest, discovering our hidden culinary capabilities has made us somewhat disillusioned with the local cuisine. The comically cheap, generously portioned, and often tasty almuerzos sold on every corner in town, for all their virtues, can't really match up, for instance, with the delectability and pride afforded by our balsamic vinegar-marinated eggplant-mushroom-onion-mozzarella sandwiches on homemade wheat buns still steaming from the oven and dressed with garlic-basil mayo, served with home-baked potato chips. So instead of spending $1.25 for a filling lunch, we spend less money and more time by making it ourselves.

Every once in a while, however, our adventuresomeness and curiosity in our new surroundings get the best of us. We happen to live in a section of Cuenca renowned for its large number of comedores serving the local delicacy: cuy, the onomatopoetic Spanish word for guinea pig. Every afternoon on the bus coming from work, we pass a dozen roadside storefronts with rows of rodents roasting on spits, next to whole pigs, entire bodies still intact, eerily smiling at us with strips of golden-fried skin shaved off their flanks. We still haven't quite gotten used to the sight. But after having been asked by our students dozens of times whether we'd tried cuy, we decided that since we're here, since it's so strange, and since we probably won't have this opportunity again anytime soon, it would be worth a try. So a couple of weeks ago, we did.

When we pass by the row of restaurants, we often see two dachshunds running around a particular stall, probably scrounging for the scraps of the meals their owners are preparing. Having both had wiener dogs growing up, we took it as a sign that, if we have to choose, it was an easy choice: trust the wiener dogs. So we made our way down the street one Saturday night, nervous but determined to tuck away an iconic Ecuadorian experience. 

We awkwardly approached the restaurateur and asked to try cuy, then were shown into the large and completely empty dining room, where we sat and nervously anticipated our meal. First came the appetizers of puffed corn and potatoes and then, soon after, an entire cuy presented on a plate, hacked to pieces but still easily recognizable as having been the furry little creature found in cages in so many American elementary school classrooms. We couldn't resist going through the unbearably gringo ritual of posing with the poor critter's greasy head.

 

And then we clumsily attempted to separate the edibles from the inedibles, a process that never seemed to quite make sense. Molly got through a few bites of the chicken-like meat before giving up; I kept at it much too long, trying to divide the disgusting bits from the more disgusting bits. Neither of us was hungry at the end of the meal, but it didn't have much to do with the amount we ate. We've yet to cook meat in our Ecuadorian home, so we now eat animals only on our rare ventures to restaurants. Yes, it was incredibly greasy, but it really didn't taste that bad. Our stomachs are conditioned to a near-vegetarian diet, though, and the cuy was stretching their limits.

On the whole, totally worth it. We're not curious anymore, and when our students ask us if we've tried it, we can proudly answer in the affirmative - and politely decline any invitations to try it again. 

Help Bring Justice to Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment Victims

As you may already know, we wrote an article for the non-profit website, Change.org. We are petitioning the US government to financially compensate victims of an atrocious medical experiment that took place in Guatemala during the 1940s. With US taxpayer money, the US Public Health Service conducted an experiment, similar to the infamous Tuskeegee study in the 1960s. Believing that Guatemala would be an ideal place to escape scrutiny for such a blatantly unethical medical test, The US Public Health Service purposefully infected male prisoners with syphilis through inhumane and often painful procedures. Additionally, they sent infected prostitutes into the prisons to contaminate the men. All of this was done without the knowledge or consent of the victims. 

Furthermore, orphaned children and mental health patients were subjected to testing which never contributed to finding a vaccine for syphilis.  

We are asking for 200 signatures, and we need your support. All you have to do is follow this link: http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-the-us-justice-department-to-compensate-guatemalan-syphilis-experiment-victims?share_id=YkgcfEyKAs&pe=pce

Sign the petition, send the letter to President Obama and if you would like, please tell others about this cause. We cannot and should not stand idly by while our government refuses to rectify such intentional injustice. 

We'd really appreciate your support. 

If you'd like more information about the Guatemalan syphilis experiment, you can read these articles:

Science Based Medicine

Reuters

Cuencano Culinary

We have discovered the art of cooking. We don't know how it happened or why . . . but it did. We are suddenly, to put it lightly, cooking geniuses; and I have to admit that we have done little to nothing wrong in our culinary attempts over the past few weeks. When we first moved to Ecuador, we easily fell into a rut of tomato and onion based everything. We played it safe with fresh tomato sauce and pasta, veggie sandwiches and countless rice and beans varieties. Not now . . . oh not now. It was time to break free of our pico de gallo ingredients, and we broke past those barriers throwing our inhibitions and tomatoes out the window.

Over the past week we have made: banana pudding, apple-cinnamon rolls, the best pizza on the most delectable pizza crust ever, breakfast burritos with fresh guacamole, enchiladas, carrot cake without a recipe and with cream cheese frosting, apple pancakes with cinnamon-apple syrup and yogurt, strawberry pancakes with strawberry-yogurt syrup, broccoli-green bean-mushroom alfredo sauce, citrus tea, Semi-German Chocolate Cake with coconut icing, and All, might I add, from scratch with no packaged anything.

You may look at that and think, "sugar!" You'd be right. We've overloaded ourselves on sugar, but that doesn't mean we won't go home and eat a piece of carrot cake before bed. Because we will. Oh we will.

We are attempting to eat as local as possible, which for us means all of our produce comes from local vendors who have farms in the mountains nearby Cuenca and all of the dry goods come from somewhere in Ecuador. And if you think eating locally is a struggle, take a second look:

Strawberry Pancakes

Ryan's Birthday Spread

How we feel when we taste the juicy fruits of our newfound talents

The perfect pizza crust

Second Christmas!

Carrot Cake Photo Shoot

Semi-German Chocolate Cake

Black Bean Lasagna

How'd you like to hang your stocking on a great big coconut tree?

Every so often while we’re roaming Quito, a double-long trole bus will rush by, blaring the first and last 14 notes of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It’s an old, homey song in a very new, foreign setting, and one can’t help but put words to the music: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer / had a very shiny nose / Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer / you’ll go down in history. I sometimes wonder where the rest of the song went, until I remember the music is mostly there to forewarn wayward jaywalking pedestrians, and then the last two lines promptly take on a dark double meaning.

La Navidad in Ecuador’s capital hurtled by as nolens volens as one of those buses; that sacred period from Thanksgiving to Christmas was consumed with our striving toward a vital triumvirate of goals: find teaching jobs, find an apartment, obtain 12-IX visas. As of today, we’ve accomplished two of the three, with our search for an apartment suspended until we get down to Cuenca, where our first jobs are.

Our Christmas Eve was spent at our quaint little hostel with the motherly little hostel owner and manager, Ornelia, who roasted a turkey for us and a dozen others. She brought in a traditional Ecuadorian folk band for the occasion, and they strummed and piped their tunes as we gorged ourselves on the bird and the fruit salad, broccoli, green beans, an Ecuadorian date and rice dish, chocolate cake, and red wine.

It was a feast fit for Baby Jesus himself.

Our friend Altaf, whom we met on our CELTA course, came and dined with us, then guided us to midnight mass at a gorgeous colonial cathedral. We are so not used to being up that late, but the spectacle of the thing was enough to keep us awake: the kids’ sparklers illuminating the pews, the intermittent recorded-synthesizer-and-guitar accompaniment, the bizarre informality of the congregating-decongregating-recongregating-etc. congregants.

Christmas was filled with the things that befit a great holiday: the people we love and the food that makes us fat and happy. After waking up late, we made our specialty breakfast as of late: strawberry pancakes with home-mixed strawberry yogurt topping, served with a steaming mug of semi-sweet organic Green and Black’s hot chocolate (simply the best - thanks, Bethanie and Bhadri!). We gorged again, really outdoing ourselves. ¡Qué rico!

We sat down to let it settle for a few moments, then made our way to the new Harry Potter movie in a shopping mall south of our hostel. We blinked a few times before comprehending that Christmas was clearly a normal Saturday in Ecuador; the mall was packed, everyone was eating fast food, hanging out with their novios y novias, paying no apparent mind to the import of the day. The movie was dubbed, even though it clearly said “Subtitles” at the register. We enjoyed it nevertheless, as we gorged ourselves again, this time on saladisimo popcorn.

Of course, Christmas isn’t complete without Christmas dinner, so we spent the rest of the evening brewing a batch of Molly’s mom’s citrus tea and making an enormously rich dinner of garlic mashed potatoes with some delicious gravy (thanks again Beth and Bhadri!), green beans, and Annie’s macaroni and cheese (made with yogurt for a creamy, tangy zip - the dinner would have been nothing without you, B&B!), and proceeding to, of course, fill ourselves to the breaking point. And, on top of that, a no-bake, butter-based apple pie made on the stove with excessive amounts of sugar, cinnamon, and quinoa granola and served with vanilla ice cream. It was a fittingly succulent and exquisite end to the holiday.

We’ve somewhat reluctantly settled into an early-morning schedule of Spanish classes this week, our last in Quito. CELTA was an afternoon schedule and, being the sleep devotees we are, it’s hard to wake up when we have to. From here, it’s off to see some places up here in the north – a New Year's finale in southern Colombia, SA’s largest indigenous market in Otavalo, the kitschy monument at the equator, the highly recommended Quilotoa area – before we head into the Amazon and then down south to Cuenca. It’ll be fun.

But so much hustle can scarcely be as satisfying as a day of strawberry pancakes, salty popcorn, and sated palates.

A few more photos here.