**Update from Ecuador**

My daughter finally emailed another summary of recent adventures in Ecuador. This email was more of a nail-biter than usual and my head is still full of images of her traveling out of the city on a bus and disembarking IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.

Doesn't she realize that parents have nightmares about their kids.

She has now replaced my earlier parent nightmare - the one where I become a new mom and simply forgot that I had a baby and thus neglected to feed her for a week - to this new nightmare - innocent, trusting and intensely free spirited daughter believes coniving, fare collector-wannabe-boyfriend's directions and gets off a bus in a rural deserted area, never to be seen again.

I won't get into my own history of hitchhiking around Kenya because I am trying to avoid those "like mother, like daughter" comments.

For those who don't receive her emails, here it is, cut and pasted...

Another update from Quito...

I received a ´letter´ yesterday and was really excited until I realized the address on the front was in my handwriting. It turns out it was a letter from K about stress with some questionnaire I filled out last spring about how I deal with stressful situations. While I realize the study abroad office is trying to be helpful by this gesture, if I was having a hard time here the excitement of thinking I received a letter followed by the disappointment of realizing what the letter really was would depress me far more than not receiving a letter at all. Interestingly, I recently spent a lot of time doing the stress-relieving activities I described in the questionaire

One of the things (not including people) that I miss most here is the freedom/independence to do things on my own, especially after dark. It gets dark between 6 and 6.30 in Quito and once it is dark it is really not safe to be outside by yourself. It just so happens however that I love to go for long walks at night that are many times accompanied by long periods of swinging at random playgrounds that I encounter.

A few weeks ago we took a trip with K to the Paramo and during our stay at the hotel Aruba I discovered a playground. So that evening, feeling a bit swing-deprived, I spent two hours swinging before dinner and another two hours swinging after dinner. Then, I took a two hour walk around the hotel which basically translates into me doing way too many loops around the property.

The next day, I had blisters on the palms of my hands from the swings and my stomach muscles were so sore that it was hard to walk. Oops.

Besides the swinging and walking, one of my favorite parts of our trip to the paramo a few weeks ago (see the pictures on webshots) was inventing biological musings with A., A., and V.. We were constantly asking each other questions about things we saw and in turn coming up with possible explanations (some albeit more probable than others). They ranged from a discussion on determining the sex of a song bird based on its coloration, to the morphological difference between a duck and a goose to A.'s prediction that there was a limit on the height of Frailejones because if they got too high they would easily tip over in the wind to (my favorite) V.'s pig-chicken: a chicken lacking feathers on its back that she then tried to convince everyone was the origin of the mysterious but delicious jamon de pollo lunch meat that exists around Quito.

A. and I both skipped out medicinal plants trip to the markets to collect plants (A. to go on an amazing andianismo trip to an erupting volcano and I to collect stories for my oral literature class). We were going to make up the trip but Vlasti insisted on going with us to make sure we were safe. We felt kind of bad for making him lose an entire morning just for us so we decided one day on our way to school to buy him a cookie and coke as a way to show our thanks. Unfortunately, we decided on a cookie that was half covered in chocolate and as we bought it around mid-day before we had even made it out of the store it had become a very unappetizing mess inside its bag. By the time we made it to Cumbaya, the cookie was in so many pieces and looked so gross that we decided it had passed even the "it's just the thought that counts" part of gift giving.

Even more amusingly, at that point we had ditched the coke as well. As the owner of the store started to open Vlasti's coke we asked if we could take the coke to go which we thought insinuated that we did not want him to open it. He opened it anyway and then proceeded to pour it into a plastic shopping bag, which he nonchalantly handed over to us as he told us our bill. I tried unsuccessfully not to laugh but it was too much. We walked for about 20 minutes with our shopping bag full of coke but since neither A. nor I drink soda and at this point the coke was already warm and we still had another half an hour before we would arrive in Cumbaya we finally decided to dump it out.

A. and I always seem to have something go wrong when we travel together: this weekend we tried to take a bus to Otavalo to hike around lake Cuicocha but about an hour out from Otavalo the two left rear tires exploded for an unknown reason and it took the driver so long to fix them that we couldn't do the hike before it got dark.

I cooked lunch for my family this weekend, which was certainly an amusing experience. A couple of weeks ago I baked bread for a potluck at A. house so I was prepared for things like translating farenheight into celcius to use the oven and the fact that my host family does not own a measuring cup. But my meal of dolmades (stuffed grape leaves), a spinach salad, and apple crisp turned out to be quite an undertaking. I first got the idea when A. and I were on a quest for dried fruit that took us to many stores that sell imported goods (there is a great business opportunity in Ecuador for someone who wants to start dehydrating the amazing fruits that exist here because as of now there is not a single place to buy non-imported dehydrated fruits) when I saw jarred grape leaves. I got really excited because dolmades is one of my favorite dishes and I never expected to be able to find grape leaves in Ecuador. First, it didn't really occur to me that other ingredients crucial to the dish (aka dill) would be impossible to find. Second, the ingredients that did exist were super expensive (I cringed as I succumbed to paying 5 dollars for 6 ounces of feta cheese). Once I (sort of) pulled together all the ingredients or tried to invent substitutions, even my bread making experience had not prepared me for the difficulties one can encounter cooking in another country. For some reason I have not quite figured out things cook a lot more slowly on my family's stove. The imported grape leaves were a little old, torn, and of completely random sizes with a strange neon green tinge. I couldn't find dried cranberries for the salad and the almonds I was going to use were 5 dollars for a tiny bag so I settled on raisins and sunflower seeds instead. The whole ordeal took a lot longer than I had planned and my family was very paitent as we sat down to lunch over an hour and a half late.

Fortunately in the end everything turned out really well and the best part was that my family really enjoyed the food. My papi normally doesn't eat salad but wolfed down two helpings along with 9 dolmades, even though they are green too :). So a million thanks to you, mom for the recipies :) The meal really reminded me of home and made me realize how different the flavors of the food I normally eat in the states are. Just like I am constantly amazed at the delicious flavor combinations my family comes up with every day I think they were surprised at the combinations I used.

A few weeks ago I asked my histology professor if she knew of any veterinarians with whom I could do an internship. It turns out her husband is an avian veterinarian who works in a huge chicken farm outside of Quito. Over the next couple of weeks I wrote him a letter and translated my resume into Spanish and my professor gave me his business card (anything takes a long time to do here).

Finally, on Thursday my professor told me he accepted my letter and that I could meet him at the farm on Friday at the time I had mentioned. Well, I had no idea how to get to the farm and my professor didn't either so I spent that evening with my mami calling her friends trying to figure out how to get there.

The next day, I was so nervous I couldn't pay attention in any of my classes. I took a bus to Quito after oral literature and ran to the ecovia where I sat impatiently for it to arrive at the station at the other end of Quito, La Marin. Once the bus finally made it, I must have asked 10 policemen where the busses to Conocoto/Amaguaña left from since the ecovia didn't even make it all the way to La Marin because of road construction. I finally found a bus that said Conocoto but it didn't quite fit the description my mami had meticulously written for me on the back of a business card so I asked the driver and he assured me that his bus would pass by Incubadura Anhalzer.

I climbed on and as soon as we pulled out of La Marin the helper who collects fares sat down next to me to tell me that he would personally advise me when we reached my stop. That's nice, I thought, thinking he would then get up and continue collecting fares. But instead, he kept talking to me, asking me increasingly personal questions until arriving at the inevitable, "do you have a boyfriend?" And that's when I lied. "Yes," I calmly responded thinking that the moral sacrifice would leave me in peace as the bus rambled around the bends of the road. I was very wrong. He continued questioning me, asking me detailed questions about my boyfriend (how long we've been dating, what he studies, if he really loves me, etc) until he tried another tactic: "do you have a boyfriend here, in Ecuador?" "No!" I almost shouted in response. I wasn't expecting that one.

Despite his best intentions to convince me that it would be okay to have and Ecuadorian boyfriend (aka him) while my (imaginary) boyfriend continued to pine away for me amidst his architecture studies in New York, I kept insisting that it was not okay to have two boyfriends.

Finally he got up to collect fares again and a woman with a small child sat down next to me. I thought I was saved, but to my astonishment the bus assistant actually asked the woman to stand (there were no seats left) so he could sit next to me. Finally he told me my stop was coming up but when I looked out the window things didn't look right (as in there was nothing but a field on the side of the road).

Apparantly he was thinking of a different place when he told me his bus went to Incubadora Anhalzer and the bus I was on really doesn't pass anywhere near where I needed to go. So I convinced him to drop me off at an intersection where I could catch the right bus and to make a very long story slightly shorter I finally arrived at the yellow adobe walls that mark the entrance to Incubadora Anhalzer.

However, when I knocked on the iron gates and asked the guard for Dr. M. he told me that he wasn't there. "What?!" I almost shouted at him in disbelief, You have got to be kidding me. So after standing there dumbfounded for a few seconds I got the brilliant idea to call his cell phone since I had his business card. No one answered. A few seconds later I got a call on my cell phone that turned out to be from him asking me what I was doing calling him. After I hastily explained who I was he said he was in Guayaquil and wouldn't arrive for another half hour. It didn't exactly occur to me at the time that it is impossible to travel from Guayaquil to Quito in half an hour regardless of the form of transport.

I told him that I would see him soon and sat down to start writing this letter outside the gate of Incubadora Anhalzer (the guard still wouldn't let me in). There had been some thunder in the background for a while, but after about half an hour it started to rain. About two seconds after the first drops, it started to pour. About two seconds after the pouring began I was treated to the added entertainment of silica-bead-sized hail. I managed to convince the guard to let me in so I didn't have to sit in the hail but it wasn't for another two and a half hours until Dr. M. arrived.

While I was waiting, I asked some women who worked there if they wanted any help because I didn´t have anything to do. Although they said yes, I really didn´t know enough about what they were doing to be of any help but we ended up talking for a while and when in response to some question I explained that I was an exchange student, they were all really surprised and didn´t believe me for a little bit because they said they couldn´t tell I had a foreign accent and that I spoke Spanish perfectly. It was a really nice complement to receive.

In the end it was a good thing I waited: he is really sweet and the internship is going to be awesome, I think. I am going to be working with the reproduction side of the company, learning about raising chickens from birth to slaughter, vaccinating and examining them, performing necropsies, etc. And as an added benefit there is a woman who works in the accounting department who lives somewhat close to me in Quito so she can take me home at night so I don't have to ride the bus for two hours in the dark.

I had a presentation in my oral literature class about décimas, a type of oral poetry used by residents (mostly of African origin) in Esmereldas. I wrote my own décima to see how hard it was and it is really difficult. There is a pretty complex structure that you have to follow and add to that I was presenting on religious décimas so I had to write one on something from the Bible (not exactly my strongpoint) so the process was pretty hysterical. In the end it was
quite rewarding because when I sat down Andrea, my partner for our field work, wrote me the following note: "Me encantó! Realmente felicitaciones. Cada palabra que decías se
sentía que lo disfrutabas. Que hermoso que hayas escrito esta décima, porque puedo ver que te gusta mi país, que ahora también es tu Ecuador".

Otherwise, classes continue to go fine although they can be tedious at times. What I really want to do is spend time with my host family or at my internship not struggle through dry anthropological readings on whether corn was first domesticated by the Mayans in Mexico or by the indigenous Amazonian people in Ecuador. But the semester is more than half over so I think I can make it through :)

I hope you are all doing well and I send you good thoughts from the middle of the earth.