why you might see me soon (if you live in new york)

so, we came to buenos aires with the hope and expectation that the job market would be more or less like the job market in cuenca, just with more options because it is a bigger city. well, let me start over: we came to south america with the idea that we could probably get good jobs anywhere we went because they are available and we are qualified - no - overqualified for the majority of them. in cuenca we found a school. a decent, well enough run school that had semesters, regular pay - all the things you would expect from a school. we worked there for the amount of time we agreed, then came here to buenos aires more or less expecting to find something similar. sure, the pay wasnt great in cuenca, but we werent expecting anything much better and we were able to cover our living expenses and not spend too much of our savings.

 

however, here in buenos aires, the job market is a little bit different. for example, there are no schools. well, of course there are international schools - schools where diplomats send their children. you go to these, sign a 2 year contract, get paid an american salary and sometimes get housing. we are of course qualified for this, but, we didnt think of this last year as we were planning our year. so, the job market that we are thus a part of - the backpacker job market here in buenos aires is quite grim. for teaching english, you are basically a temp working for various agencies that hook you up to teach businessmen. the pay is paltry, and can change at any moment. the classes are not in fact classes and can be cancelled at any moment. the hours change week to week and you might not get any classes at all. you know ,a temp job... after one of these interviews, we decided that ok, we are now in teh system so we might get a call at any point for one of these jobs so great - but it is rather beneath us to try to base our lives around this kind of work - us with masters degrees and years of teaching experience etc.

 

the other thing is that in order to get paid, and to get paid in such a way that the company who finds the jobs for you dont have to pay so many taxes, you have to falsify a tax document called a 'factura' which is also the word for some kind of commonly found pastry here in buenos aires. everyone says that it is quite common for people to falsify tax documents in this way. but the way i look at it, people of my age, education and experience should be getting jobs that give them visas to legally be in countries if they want to work in foreign countries (immigrants to the u.s. notwithstanding). so, either way, the job market is grim. on the other hand, there are personal ads taken out on craigslist for people who want to learn english and will put cash in your hand for your services. and, there is the option of posting flyers so that you can get this kind of work without the agency. but this is not the way i want to make a life. anna either.

 

so, rather than go find another city where we will probably have the same problem, go back to cuenca where it is fine but will cost money to get there and we will only get paid a little, find some village somewhere who needs someone to give out condoms or something all day for room and board, find some hotel somewhere who needs someone to clean up the piss of backpackers for a free spot on the couch, etc., weve decided to come back to new york early so as to not spend all our money doing any of the above mentioned, or just sitting around unemployed in buenos aires - fun as it may be what with the steak and wine and espressos and overall good-citiness of it all.

sort of not the same

so we are living in an apartment in the center of buenos aires. we go out almost every night to eat huge steaks and each night at around 8 we have wine hour, which means that we buy a bottle (no, not box) of argentinian wine for about $2.50, then buy some grapes, some pears, some plums, some figs - whichever fruit we can get for under $.50 at the supermarket and then sit in our apartment drinking the wine and eating the fruit and remarking how cheap and great all of it is. at around 10 we go to the parilladas at which point we order said huge steaks, another bottle of wine - with club soda as its done here - and salads. over dinner we eat greedily and then remark about how cheap and good all of it is. by the time we are done, it is 12am or so. this is what time people ere stop eating. then we go out for a drink or something or a coffee, which inevitably comes with a cookie and a glass of bubbly water, and sit at the outdoor bar or cafe and watch people walk by and drink our drinks or coffees and remark about how nice the weather has been and how relaxed and healthy we feel. the truth is that although we are eating so much steak, it is always preceeded by fresh fruit, always accompanied by a healthy, colon cleansing salad and always followed by an arterie cleansing glass (or bottle) of wine. now that i have a mirror in my apartment, unlike in ecuador, i can see that ive become quite plump in my final weeks of ecuador. i attribute this to the pig binging i was doing. also the copius pairing of white rice with each and every meal couldnt have helped. and, the fact that the most commonly used - by about a ladelfull in every serving - spices found in ecuador are salt and sugar, couldnt have helped. here, though im eating cows all the time. they are not heavily salted. and, they dont come with white rice. so, i feel healthy. we have spent the days - after we deem the morning worthy to wake up to (aka11am) - walking around the city for miles on end, visiting cafes, visiting stores, visiting people weve met, visiting potential jobs, watching people and remarking about how many of them there are - how we didnt know that this city was about as populated as new york, and how we could really get used to this.

of course, tomorrow we have some job interviews and we wont have our days free to walk around town feeling like some slacking aristocrats with nothing better to do, but its been nice.

all tht travelers we have met, and even people we knew in cuenca ill prepared us for this city. the majority of travelers come to south america to see indigenous culture because a) it is most different and b) the places where it is found are generally cheaper than the places where it is not found. so, people get their flights to buenos aires or out of buenos aires when they want to travel the whole continent. they get to buenos aires and waste a bunch of money and grow bitter because they now cant travel as long as they had wanted to. or, they finish up in buenos aires and have already spent all their money and cant enjoy it here as they would have wanted to. so, when you see them in the mountains of peru or ecuador and they are sitting around the hostel hungover from a night of overindulging on the local moonshine, wearing a newly purchased poncho and boiling their daily pot of plain pasta, they will tell you that argentina is not the real south america. that is fallacious. admittedly, we are staying in a free apartment courtesy of annas godfather, and so dont have that daily expense that other travelers might have. but, the fact of the matter is that given argentinas recent economic crash and unwillingness of the people to change their lifestyle, a good bottle of wine here costs less than the bottle of moonshine (ok, i know, the same amount of the moonshine will get you more drunk, but who needs that?). they probably got ripped off for the poncho no matter how hard they bargained or how down with the people they feel they are, and, their daily meal of plain pasta just shows their general lack of creativity. so, i am here to tell you that buenos aires is definitely the real south america: its just different than the rest.

we also have hot water. but, in order to flush the toilet, we have to fill te toilet tank up. but, the toilet tank is not like a regular toilet tank. instead, it is controled by a knob on the side of the toilet and a faucet that pours water into an unseeable container behind the wall. i cant even really describe this... its weird though. and to flush the toilet you have to reach your hand into the wall and pull on this hook-like contraption. to get cold water in the shower or any of teh sinks, the toilet water faucet has to be gushing, and, to get hot water in te shower the sink has to be running too... i dont know how to describe that any better...

change of plans... but not too much!

so, again for those of you who are counting - you will be interested to know that not one aspect of the trip laid out in my previous entry went as planned. some aspects for teh better, some for the worse. well, none really for that much worse because i am here in buenos aires which is an amazing city, and im unharmed.
first of all, i would like ot announce the fact that the road that goes from cuenca to guayaquil shouldnt exist. what happened, in a short version, is that our bus had to stop at 5 in the morning because there was a landslide. we waited on the bus and around the bus for 5 hours. the plow came to help about 3 hours into this, and then at about 10, there was another landslide. this one happend so that anna and i had to actually run away from falling rocks. this was scary, but also an adrenaline rush in teh sense that we next had to run through the landslide at a moment when it was calm so that we could cross to the other side and not get trapped. once we got to the other side, we found a pickup truck that was also waiting to cross from the other direction, paid them to take us to the nearest town, and then waited. this is why we never got to guayaquil so that we could eat the breakfast we had talked about. instead, near the little town, there was a tollbooth that we waited at until our bus passed. we were quite dirty at this point and we had to wait for the bus for 3 hours in teh sun so that by the time we did get on the bus we were more sweaty and more tired. we flagged the bus down and got on and it was a comfortable bs where the seats go back kind of like beds, but there were a couple of crying babies and i couldnt get comfortable enough to sleep because i was still sweating and had a layer of grime and mud that blocked my true access to the chair. a woman remarked that my feet smelled. rather than shoving my sock in her mouth as i should have, i just noted that she was an unhappy person and tried to sleep and ignore the babies.
so, we got to lima and then decided not to spend the night in the airport, saving money though it would have, but instead to go to a hotel and shower. this was a good decision. the water rolled off me black like coal. we also decided to eat at chilis which is something i have never done before. but, since we had recently escaped a natural disaster, and narrowly (i cant stress enough the closeness of the huge rocks that were falling around us - and it was foggy so we couldnt really see where we were going. im serious!), we figured that to spend a bit of money on some baby back ribs wouldnt kill us.
so, we got up at 4 to go to the airport and did. no problem there. then, we checked in and everything and went to go eat a good mcdonalds breakfast (again: natural disaster, us, reward...), and while we were eating, the lan agent came running to us and told us that there was a flight leaving at the same time our flight was scheduled to leave, but going direct to buenos aires. this was better than having a layover - cool as it might have been to go to chile for a moment. so, since they were begging us to take a flight that was better than the one we had planned to take, we figured they didnt need to bump us and so therefore didnt ask. we got the exit seats which had as much leg room as first class and personalized tvs, on which i watched the garfield movie which was quite bad considering how funny garfield usually is. oh well. therefore, every aspect of our plans changed except for the fact that we are here in buenos aires...

and the irony is...

so thursday was my last day of classes and i was actually sad to say goodbye to my students. tomorrow i will be sad to say goodbye to the cats, and eventually i will be sad to say goodbye to all the things i have liked in cuenca. however, i am a bit too excited about going to argentina to to get too sad at the moment.

one ironic thing is that anna and i decided to go back to the first restaurant that we ever went to in cuenca when we came here in july. this is a typical food spot (for food, typical means traditional here in ecuador) that we found wandering around last summer. so, we went there as a sort of cheesey full circle kind of thing, but the ironic thing is that the food there was quite good. well, thats not the ironic thing. the ironic thing, i guess would be that we stopped going there after our first week because the food wasnt as interesting as we would have liked and we went on a search for more interesting food (whatever that means) until today and once we went back to the place we set off on our journey for more interesting food from, we realized that their food is more interesting and tasty than most. thats the ironic thing. also ironic has been our quest, during the past couple of weeks, for non-widely available typical foods such as sancocho, that culminated last week with a 3 hour walk around the outskirts of the city, and was accidentally achieved at this restaurant, our first ever, squarely in the center of town. i had some very good sancocho there today, and a nice, cheap empanada, and even a maracuya juice, which i thought was out of season based on the non-availability of it in other places. so, the irony is in the whole things you are looking for being right under your nose aspect.

so, sitting in that restaurant today, i was thinking about how certain aspects of everyday life in cuenca are vastly different than what im used to. simple things, like the grunginess of the floor in the restaurant, the aprons the ladies who cook and serve wear, the fuzziness of the television that is blasting. basic things. like the fact that there are songs here that i hear everyday that i dont even like all that much, but when i hear them i will forever think of cuenca, but i dont like them enough to buy them, and theres a good chance that i will probably never hear them again. but of course there will be new songs...

so, we are off to argentina and it wont be easy to get there, for those who are counting:
tonight, after a night of packing and carousing, at 3 in the morning, we are getting on a bus to guyaquil. we will get there around 730 - 8 at the latest. we are supposed to be at the ormeño station (our next bus company) at around 1030 in order to leave at 1130, but if we get there at 11 im sure nobody will decapitate us, defenestrate us, or care. the decision process that went into this was as follows:
we have a monster bus ride ahead of us. we could get an ok nights sleep (not good) in our apartment, wake up at the crack of dawn and then take the bus to guayaquil only to rush to the ormaño bus and start bussing all over again. or, party until 230, get on the bus at 3, sleep a little bit on the bus, then have time to stretch the legs and eat a good breakfast (probably at the place we passed by with my parents after we had already eaten breakfast, but noticed that the papayas and pineapples were the size of young elephants) and recharge the damned digipod that only has 4 hours of battery life. plus by the time we do get abck onto the bus, we will be tired enough to sleep. the ormeño bus that has been being referenced will be a 27 hour long affair, taking us to lima. as you may know, anna and i have been expert busriders throughout our illustrious relationship. but, this stil engenders feelings of fear and why-the-hell-did-we-decide-to-do-this. heres why: flights to buenos aires from guayaquil are about $530, while flights to buenos aires from lima are about $280. of course, flights to buenos aires from buenos aires are even cheaper, but of course there must always be a limit to the amount of pain and suffering that you want to inflict upon yourself. somehow, we determined that 27 hours on a bus combined with the cheaper airfare was well worth it. the good news is that we will have peruvian style bus seats that fold back into beds, a laptop/dvd player with a fully charged battery, and a season of the sopranos on dvd that we havent watched yet (season 1).
once we arrive in lima at about 3pm on sunday, we will go to the airport and put our baggage away, then get out to miraflores (fancy neighborhood with things like starbucks, burger king, and other worthwhile things) and hang around until we get tired, at which point we will get back to the airport and sleep a bit. yes, the airport. why? because our flight is at 7am monday, which means that we have to get to the airport at 4 or 5am anyway. and, since we will at that point be on a roll of being uncomfortable and dirty, why ruin all that with the conveniences of a hotel? however, if everything goes as planned, we wont even get on that flight. we have heard that lan (the airline) has been very lenient with some people about bumping them. we have friends who when they flew out of lima, got bumped from 2 different flights just because they asked to. so, they got to where they were going 2 days later, but they also got $1000 worth of airline credit. thats cool. so, all day sunday, as we are walking around miraflores without a shower, and without a place to stay, anna and i will be pumping each other up. keeping each other thinking positively and head strong about how we shouldnt get weak when the moment comes. of course it will be inviting to just get on the flight and get the trip over with, but no. we must remain strong and ask to get bumped! of course if we do get bumped, we will then get a hotel - we arent crazy!
once we arrive in buenos aires, we will shower and go looking for jobs. what kind of jobs? who knows. is that important? yes. teaching english is cool, and it may be what we get as soon as we get there just because we are good and have recommendations. but in the long run, no, its not what we want to do. why? because we have been doing that here in cuenca and despite the manner in which we travel, we do want this next step to be a step up in life.

in related news, both my students and annas, yesterday, decided to take us out for food. my class took me to pizza hut, which is the height of class here in cuenca. they have a garden, indoor palm trees and waitress service. annas class took her (us because i came) to cafe austria - an overpriced, but nice cafe. i would have settled for sancocho and morocho...

 

activity day

activity day was never a good idea.
it is a pr thing for cedei, mainly, where classes are forced to go on stage and show off the english that they have learned over the course of the semester. it is billed as a community event, where parents, doners, and random people off the street who hear the irresistable sounds of the performing cedei students can come and enjoy themselves for an afternoon.
there was activity day last semester, but fortunately for me, i was working in the non-central building and was therefore exempt from the proceedings. the report i received about activity day were not uplifting. bad performances and bad emceeing. still, this meant nothing to me because i didnt have to do it. instead, i went on with my life - went to cartagena, came back to cuenca, bought tickets to go to argentina, ate pig, etc.
however, upon returning to cuenca, the powers that be at cedei decided that because activity day was such a disaster last time, the correct course of action would not be to cancel it altogether, but rather to make it higher stakes. it was so decreed that all classes would have to participate in activity day, and on top of that, that each participation would have to include a performance of some sort - you know, singing, dancing, etc. and furthermore, their performance would count for 10% of their final grade.
now, i worked all those long hard hours online getting my very prestigious tefl certificate. this was so that i could join the ranks of the world changing do-gooders known as efl instructors. this was supposed to be a job consisting of teaching english. now, all of a sudden, i had to become a producer as well.
here is the folly: a cedei semester is 10 weeks long. there is midterm week, finals week, the first week which is spent not doing much, and various short weeks due to holidays etc. this leaves about 2 weeks for doing activity day related work. needless to say, this is not academic in any way, nor is it in any way productive. for example, my class has spent the last week.5 to 2 weeks perfecting our lines for our romeo & juliet puppet show instead of learning how to write a paragraph, or to use the present perfect tense. my other class has spent the last week.5 to 2 weeks perfecting their lines for their axe commercial spoof (which wasnt even aired during activity day because the schedule was overbooked) rather than discussing important cultural differences between this and that.
anyway, point is that it was an unmitigated disaster. theres more i could mention by way of proof, but i dont really feel like writing about it anymore...

instead, i will talk about how this weekend, anna and i decided to go find the pig lady so vaunted and mythological. this is a lady who sells pig, which is the basis for most good ecuadorian traditional food. the problem with this traditional food is that, at least in the center of town, it is impossible to get unless you are eating at the market (which, of course makes it eminently possible to get). the majority of new restaurants opening up seem to cater to tourists, and the traditional restaurants that do exist in town are very much interested in serving seco seco and only seco. which is good too. however, on some special occasions, like independence day, i have seen the sancocho bubbling in pots around town, heard the crisp of the sancocho, seen cuys roasting over open charcoals, etc. but never in town.
my students had told me that there is this one street, don bosco street, where they sell lots of traditional pig oriented food. a couple of weeks ago, anna and i went over to this supposed street, walked along it for about an hour then gave up and went to the mall. this weekend, conversely, we walked towards don bosco from another angle, which took us longer, but in the end was more accrate. so, we spent the weekend eating succulent pig products and being happy about it. then, we decided to not go to a party that sounded like it wasnt going to provide us with any particular emotion. doing that made us happy too.

but to tell the truth, there are some aspects of cuenca that i think i will miss the rest of my life. i mean, i dont know when the next time im goingto be living in the andes is. more than anything, though, i cant wait to get to argentina and see whats up there. there is nothing like the week before a change...
anyway, to makea long story short, activity day is not something that is keeping me here in cuenca and i have to lok past it in order to truly see what great things cuenca does have to offer.

by the way, i may have forgotten to mention the fact that my one class did a video spoof of an axe commercial (which beg for spoofing). it was a good commercial, but we were pretty far down on the totem pole as far as scheduling was concerned and therefore didnt get to go. it was sad, although my students didnt mind too much. their commerical was good. i was hoping for a big teary thing that would have made cedei feel bad, but no such luck.
my other class wanted to do a puppet show of romeo & juliet. they watched the movie, developed dialogue, made puppets out of cloth and panty hose, rehearsed and then totally dropped the ball behind the puppet wall. well, they did alright when they were actually talking, but they spent most of the time giggling into the microphone at each other. they are silly.

average

i guess there is no doubting that cats are animals. i often wonder about their lives now that anna and i are leaving. who will feed them? who will play with them? do they need anyone to take care of them? will they jump over the walls and run away to some long forgotten cat world?
in any event, they were in my room last night being playful/annoying. fat-fat has this thing where he takes abot 30 minutes to get comfortable in a place, so he crawls and prowls around in a circle no matter if he has to crawl over you, your clothes, your food, etc. it is one of his charming things. then, his sister, tentatively named, schmeeberq, is in the habit of attacking his tail when she wants attention. therefore it is quite difficult to relax while cats are around. they are kittens though, so its funny.

also, anna and i have taken to not sitting in the living room anymore. we are leaving soon and have nothing to really prove in the apartment. also, we have a laptop that has a dvd player, so we retreat to our room to feed our sopranos obsession. this includes watching while eating. and, last night i made turkey curry and put it over rice. i made a few variations on the normal turkey curry i would make. for example, i used swiss chard instead of celery. i used cinammon sticks. i used dried mushrooms for the broth. these things make a little difference. but, i wouldnt necessarily prefer it that way over the original way. its just that i was restricted by what i could buy here (celery is outlandishly expensive), and how big the pot was (not very - not enough to fit a good amount of cauliflor). it turned out good enoughand i finished it ravenously and put it on the floor because i couldnt be bothered to reach over to the night table. schmeeberq was cool about it and continued sleeping on the foot of the bed, but fat-fat, who is problematically jumpy, nearly had a heart attack at all the motion going on around him. he jumped down and hid under the bed. moments later, i heard some real animalistic laping noises. with great effort, since i slept on my neck wrong the other night and had a pinched nerve, i leaned over the side of the bed to see what was going on and saw f at-fat dragging my nearly cleaned turkey leg bone out of the bowl and onto the floor so he could gnaw at it easier. schmeeberq was also intrigued by this and was roused out of her curled position and hopped down to join her brother in the feast. moments later, i heard, emitted from the bowels of fat-fats cat soul, a deep growl that stunned his sister.
its weird though because the only cats these cats have ever met are each other and theyve only lived in the backyard, so its interesting to see what kinds of cat behavior they exhibit and to wonder what kinds of human behavior we would exhibit if the tables were turned.

so, it turns out that the dvd player wasnt working so well last night. it kept freezing and so rather than throw temper tantrums and throw things, anna and i decided to spend a quiet night reading. i just got this book from the book exchange yesterday. its one of those books that everyone read a couple of years ago and i didnt, but it seemed like a fast, interesting read. it turns out that the narrator is autistic. i normally dont like when narrations are too heavily affected like that, i feel that its a way for authors to fill their books with mundane observations that are supposed to sound interesting because its coming out of the mouth of a child or an autistic person. usually not my cup of tea. but then again tea wasnt really my cup of tea until recently.

oh, and i was also thinking about something else today: on the one hand, new york is a police state. you cant go anywhere or do anything without noticing or feeling police presence.  we are told in new york that the more guns we put into the hands of eager 22 year old officers will result in more safety for the rest of us. the statistics tell a different story. on the other hand, here in cuenca, people have a tendency towards spending the night on the ground where they fall when they are drunk. every morning you can see any number of non-homeless people laying around, groggily standing up, or not, after a night of so many bottles of zhumir. these people would be rounded up in new york, especially because they dont always choose out of the way places to fall. on the third hand, i saw one such man lying outside my building this morning. he was on his back lying in the gutter part of the street. this man was slightly different though because his face was covered in blood and very much bruised. i walked over to him and another man did so too. he asked me, "have you seen him breathe?" we both looked at him for a couple seconds. then, he breathed. i saw it and said, "there." satisfied, we both continued onto our jobs. now, im not calling for a police state, but perhaps some interventionist attitude is necessary sometimes. me? im excused because i dont know the abulance phone number here in cuenca nor do i have a phone. besides, he was gone by the time i got back from work and there was a huge puddle of water next to where had been lying. i guess someone from the apartment above didnt feel like looking at him there and carnavaled him.

clos, but no steak...

if you were to have asked me two weeks ago what i was doing with my life, i would have told you this:

im going to argentina for a month or so, coming back to cuenca for another semester, going to the galapagos, then taking a flight to new york to determine what will come next.

 

if you were to ask me the same question one week ago, i would have told you this:

we will go to aregntina, come back to cuenca and work half a semester. then, we will go directly to portland maine and open a soup restaurant.

 

if you ask me today, i will tell you this:

we are going to argentina, getting a job and then either coming back to new york to decide what to do next or depending on how much money we can make/save in buenos aires, taking a short trip to spain to see the san fermin festival with some other friends who are going there.

 

things change.

 

you see. we have visa problems here in ecuador. you are only allowed to be in ecuador on a tourist visa for 180 days in a year. when we got back from colombia, we only had 60 days left. however, the customs official, either through the kindness of her heart, or the ineptness of her math, granted us a 90 day visa, which has allowed us to be here as long as we have. when we are going to argentina, we will be flying out of lima. the flight from lima is $250 cheaper than out of either guayaquil or quito, so it makes sense. it is 31 hours away by bus. we are moving out of our apartment. first of all, our apartment has become an uncomfortable place to live based on many space:amount of people who live there ratio factors. second of all, if we arent allowed back into the country, it would suck to have all of our stuff still in the country. therefore, we will be traveling with everything we own. the prospect of arriving to the border on a bus, with all our stuff, and not being allowed back into ecuador - getting kicked off the bus in the middle of the peruvian desert - is unappealing.

it isnt certain that this would happen, but why take the chance when we could just stay in buenos aires (we are arriving during the high hiring season) and avoid that stress. cuenca has been nice, but there are other things to see too other places to live, etc. especially other place that have cheap steak and wine all over the place. ok, the one thing to be really disappointed about - if you were me - is that i wont get to see the galapagos. but here are some things about the galapagos: from where i am standing right now, in ecuador, the galapagos is $500 away - and that is just flight and fee, that doesnt include hotels, tours, or cruises. also, it isnt as though we havent seen any animals. that is how im rationalizing that. plus, argentina has capybaras. so, essentially, im trading a turtle for a capybara. seen that way, its an even trade.

 

ecuador does not have a huge industry for the things that we big city folk would like to think of as the finer things in life. though the traditional food of ecuador can be quite tasty, it is usually not housed in great restaurants, and the food they choose to recognize as their national food is white rice. their national alcohol is unrefined sugar cane liquor. their national beer is called, 'pilsener', kind of like the fly - they never bothered to think of another name for it. the best wine you can get (for the price i am willing to pay) is called clos (pronounced, 'close'). it is tasty wine, but im assuming that i will get better in argentina. all these big-city lifestyle things are starting to creep back into my head as we are preparing to get to buenos aires. the rain in cuenca is back with tremendous force. things are winding down.

i still dont have any definitive parting words for ecuador, that will come soon enough. and i still dont have any definitive plans for what comes next. that may not come.