Ecuador Day 2: Grounding

Waking up shouldn’t be an unfamiliar event.

Assuming you do eventually fall asleep, most people naturally and without effort wake up in the morning, even if some of us don’t make it out of bed. And even if we wake up in a strange place, we still wake up. Walking up in a foreign bed, in an unknown room, is nothing new. But, for the first time in since longer than I can even remember, today I woke up to the calamity and rustle of three youngsters. Three children who live, as we all know, more to the tick-tock of their own internal impulses of hunger and curiosity than to the shared clock on the wall. Traitors.

The window I wake up to in the morning. It faces East with the early sun, a view I am used to and comfortable with. What throws me off balance are all the feral animals that live below my second story abode. Dogs, cats, chickens, roosters and birds all call out early in the morning, Nature's morning alarm. The barking, chirping noise is not disturbing, just new compared to the quiet early mornings of the Japanese countryside.

The morning time came early for me as I was excited to start a new day in a new town. At breakfast already sat the jefe Galo and wife Mathilde, my grandmother Celia, and the youngest of the crew, little Antonio. He sat at the end of the table eating a breakfast of well minced vegetable sauce using a plastic tipped spoon. He is a bit shy and prefers to speak with his body more than use his words, I smiled at him as I walked in and he stopped for a moment to give me a thumbs-up.

Mathi is French, so naturally its Frenched pressed coffee in the morning. 

Eventually, one by one, we all awoke and took turns serving a breakfast that fit out mood. Coming straight out of Japan, I would normally skip the morning meal since I was already half way out the door and getting ready to teach classes. Just enough time for a cup of coffee until lunch. And you know, I never missed eating in the morning after that. A light lunch and dinner is more than enough. So, I poured some coffee and thought about a piece of fruit.

Fortunate for us, the massive outside yields plenty of bananas, oranges, tangerines, mandarins, and avocados to pick and enjoy. Avocados. We have a long history. In California I took them for granted. More protein than a steak dinner, and needless to say much healthier, despite the accompanying fat. And memories of Indonesian street corners ripe with juice vendors willing at a moment’s glance to whip up an avocado and chocolate milkshake for pennies on the dollar. But in Japan…in Japan it would stare up at me and I down at it under the cool sprinklers of the supermarket produce isle. Hours would pass, taunting me with its shriveled miniature body and high price. It was all gone.  

The first angle of the yard, the walkway is lined with manderine trees. Just around the bend we find four massive avacado trees and there's always something to harvest.

Here, just a few meters away from the breakfast table, I walkover and reach just over the height of my head and pull down a softball size, healthy, green, not too soft and not too hard avocado perfectly ready to eat with salt, hot sauce, or sliced into pieces and eaten with cheese and/or tomatoes.

Some time passed and eventually the house was alive again with music, the smell of meat on the grill, seconds of coffee, children running and the soft laughs that interrupted morning exchanges. Getting settles on some semblance of a plan for the day, we took the bus to the nearest town, Quinche, to explore the market.

From left to right, it's Zoila, you'res truely, and Emily; all taking the bus to the market, goofing off all the way.

Although it was Monday, and just after the weekend rush, Zoila, Emily, Gabi, Tio Gorge and I still found plenty of everything. Veggies, fruit, some earrings for the girls, snacks of corn and chorizo, fresh juice, and some surprise candles and presents for Zoila, who’s birthday is tomorrow. The town is indeed small, the roads are cobbled an unpaved. There are no McDonalds, no convenience stores, and no one has ever heard of a no-foam soy chai latte. 

Hungry? Always for chorizo, choclo, salsa, and ahi. Eat up, Ecuadorian street food is at the top of the game. 

In Japan, strawberries are very popular, the harvest season for the berries is even celebrated. Around that time you'll see all kinds of cakes, pastries, and desserts with the popular berry added. One thing though, they aint cheep. A basket of regular, normal strawberries of ten or so will run you five dollars. Do the math. Then, if you want to buy the good, large berries, expect to pay a lot more. Luckily for me in Ecuador these delicious red berries with their seeds on the outside cost close to nothing, we cleared half this man's inventory for just a dollar. 

The undisputed center of town. It's early in the week, but believe you won't find a place to sit or barely stand during the weekend market 

Getting back at a reasonable time, I wanted to eat a small lunch with the family and maybe go outside to take a small nap under the shade of one of the giant trees, and play with the dog Simba. I got to the first part, but the nap never came. The sun was out but it was not too hot, the wind was blowing, and all the chores were  

checked off; there was no reason why the neighboring three children wouldn’t come out to play in the yard with us.

Now let me say that I’ve graduate university and have my wits about me, and that I’ve don’t some dumb things I don’t regret, but today I made the monumental mistake. Somehow it didn’t seem like a bad idea that I was the only adult outside with six kids running around in the yard. Faster than a three-year-old begins to cry, I was somehow playing basketball, doing math and Spanish homework, playing referee, investigating into bushes, overseeing a drawing competition, breaking up fights, insinuating fights, climbing fences, walls, and play structures, filling up water balloons, and picking fruit for the sake of picking fruit, swinging kids around in turn, and somehow giving them all a turn on my shoulders. Time again sped up, as I was forgetting how to measure time by the clock on the wall.

I remember going upstairs after dinner to fetch my book with intentions of bringing it downstairs and putting a few chapters between conversations with the family. Intentions it seems, didn’t care so much about hospitality. Tiredness gripped me tight and I didn’t wake up until the next morning.

-A