Evil spirits

Dear amigos,

I am writing to you as a newborn Quiteño. That is, I have gotten accustomed to the city, my lungs have gotten to the pollution and my tongue is getting accustomed to Spanish. My eyes can’t seem to get accustomed to the surroundings here though. The Andes (sw. Anderna) are really beautiful and they surround the entire city.

As I wrote before my hostmom Sonia aka ‘Morsan’ (eng. the mom) is taking really good care of me. This week she took me, Marta and her cousin Mercedes aka ‘Mercan’ (who drove a 4WD Toyota) down the country.

We started by going to Baños (spanish for bathrooms) through Ecuador. I know now that it’s just a big scam that Lord Of The Ring was shot in New Zealand. We saw it all and soon you will have photo evidence. The mountains. The waterfalls. The hobbits (the indian people are really short, I haven’t checked their feet for hair though). It must have been shot here!

The cool thing about travelling with Equatorians is that you do a lot of things you probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. The bad thing about travelling with Equatorians is that you do things you normally are too smart to do otherwise. The first thing they did when we arrived to Baños was running to the first little stand where they sold fried pig skin…mmm…This led me and Marta to start the Official Ecuatorian Food Scale. Fried Pork Skin landed on a strong 1 (out of 10). Our road snack Ovenbaked Greasy Cornthingy in Leaf was a 4.

An interesting thing with the Equatorian cities is that they all have a specialty. We drove through a cone-shaped-icecream-town, a jeans-selling-town and some meat-thingy-town. When I say they have a specialty I mean that every second store sell it and it can’t be found elsewhere. It’s weird.

Baños specialty was adventure trips. The only adventure trip we did was around the blocks a couple of times though. The next day was better though. Mercan & Morsan showed to be kind of adventurous. We took an impulse stop and took a cabin over a valley. 100 meters up in a small little cabin run by a diesel engine. It was truly awesome!

We went on to visit a friend of Mercan who lived in Puyo (pronounced Poo-Jo, the seeming relation to bathrooms is unintended). Puyo is in the outskirts of Amazonas and where the last house ends, the jungle begins. Mercans friends’s boyfriend knew an indian village about 2 hours into the forest so we went there to check it out. They weren’t too happy to see us and there were spider webs everywhere that had about 50 seven cm spiders in webs that were about 2×2 meters…Soooo, we left.

We went on a little bit to something that seemed like a small resort. After riding a ridiculously unstable boat I finally got my soul cleansed. We went in one by one in a hut and got our evil spirits perished by a shaman. He rubbed holy cologne with a sacred stone over my entire body while humming some ancient hymn, just for the price of $5! I think I am going to be a shaman when I grow up (with a specialization on female evil spirits).

We were invited to some of our new friends at the Engineering school to a barbeque on Saturday. They had 7 different types of meat that took about an eternity and a half to prepare. I think the meat would have needed a shaman as well to get rid of the evil bacterias. Yesterday, I was lying in my bed all day except for an occasional visit to the sacred bathroom to flush out some evil bacterias. If it wasn’t the meat it just could have been the chicken heart we had the day before (2 out of 10), another greasy cornthingy (3) or the sugar cane (sw. sockerror) (5, tastes like wood).

Not all Ecuatorian food is…interesting. Some is really good, especially the juices. It’s a party for my tastebuds everytime I try maracuya (like passion fruit), naranjilla (like orange juice with lemon) or juice from guanabana (just plain heavenly).

Oh, and I have finally gotten my cell phone to be somewhat close to working. Call (593 to Ecuador) 96110821 and hope for the best.