Justin McCandless

Here's my long post. Let me try and write a little about everything that has happened so far since I've been here, and then I'll be all caught up to keep the updates coming at a regular basis.

I'll start with the trip over here. I began by departing from Las Vegas at 11pm PST on the 5th of May (not including my Ann Arbor to Chicago to Las Vegas travel which ended two days earlier), and after stops in Miami and San Jose, Costa Rica, I arrived in Quito about 13 hours later. I slept for the majority of each of those three flights, so neither of them was too bad, and I managed to find my next gate at each airport without too much trouble. My only complaint would be having to lug around my super heavy barely-qualifiable-as-a-carry-on carry on, though it would be my only bag for my whole four months in Ecuador and I didn't want to risk losing it in all my flight changes, so I guess the pain was necessary.

Anyways, once in Quito I was forced to wear a surgical mask and listen to somebody lecture me and the rest of the people from my flight about all the things I had better not have done before entering Ecuador because I would be at risk for having swine flu (or el gripe porcino in Spanish). Since most of them consisted in one way or another of hanging out with swine flu infected people, I deemed myself safe and continued through immigration. And to those of you thinking that this sounds backwards, yes, the people of Ecuador are afraid of ME giving THEM swine flu. As of last time I heard, there has been only one case of swine flu in Ecuador, as opposed to the many many cases of swine flu in the US. And that one Ecuadorian case was someone who had just come from the US.

But back to my travels. I then found my next, perfectly timed flight reserved and waiting for me due to my good man Ángel in Loja, and also due to the fact that there were a sufficient number of people who spoke English at the airport. This flight I stayed awake for; it was only about an hour long, and it was over some pretty nice scenery. We were over the Andes mountains the whole time, which are really green and awesome and remind me of Jurassic Park without the dinosaurs, and even have a few snow capped peaks super high up. I landed in Catamayo, whose airport is basically the size of the one in Jean, Nevada, (small) but with a 30 foot by 30 foot room where you can pick up your luggage. I was grilled about swine flu in Spanish again here by a doctor while waiting for my bag, by the way.

But proceeding outside, I was greeted by a whole bunch of AIESECers holding a sign with my name, a few of which I was glad to find spoke passable English. I loaded up into one of their cars, and after buying me a delicious coconut/jello ice cream, we started the 45 minute or so drive over the mountain to Loja. And this was my first introduction to Ecuadorian driving. We were flying up this little mountain road with deadly cliffs everywhere, tailgating like I've never seen in the US, and a few times even passing someone while there was oncoming traffic so that three cars had to span a two lane road. That's typical driving here, and in the city people don't really obey stop signs or traffic lights that much either, and everyone just kind of periodically honks so that in case there was another car coming, they would hear them and stop. It is also pedestrian's express responsibility to stay out of the way; cars don't slow down or wait for anyone. But I guess you kind of get used to it.

We ended up making it to Loja without any fatalities, and I was then given a quick tour of the city. So let me take the time to describe Loja now. Loja is a fairly small town of about 150000 people in a valley in the Andes mountains in the South of Ecuador. It is the capital of the province of the same name. The valley has 2 rivers that run into it and meet in the city, and it is at about 7000 feet above sea level. The weather is almost perfect, it's not really humid, and I comfortably wear a tshirt and jeans pretty much every day. It doesn't rain as much as I thought it would either, and if it does it is usually really brief and then sunny again a few hours later. And apparently, because of the whole being close to the equator thing, it's pretty much like this all year round.

The forest around here is crazy too, it's like nothing I've seen in the US. It's different than the Amazon, which is a few hours from here, because here we're up in the mountains more. It's really dense green tropical forest, but that even has some conifers, and covers huge steep mountains. A lot of the forest around here is called bosque nublado, or cloud forest, becuase since we're up in the mountains pretty high wispy clouds kind of just float around in the forest.

But back to the city, it's a pretty laid back place (besides the driving), with all kinds of parks and squares all over. Downtown consists of a bunch of narrow streets surrounded by connected store fronts on the bottoms of really traditional looking buildings a few stories tall. Lourdes street is one of the main streets downtown, and it has supposedly been conserved in pretty much the same state for the past 150 years or so. It's a narrow one way street, basically made of dirt with misshpaen rocks "paving it", but with two cobble stone tire tread lanes for cars to drive on. And shops on either side.

The houses where people live are generally more like apartments because they're interconnected. They're also completely surrounded by walls and generally don't have much of what would qualify as a yard in the US, except maybe a small space between house and wall that might be occupied by a dog if you have one. There are also tons of little shops all over that just sell your typical US gas station type stuff, but they're way smaller, and I think people run them out of the fronts of their houses. Also, security is really high here: every car has a super sensitive (and annoying) alarm, all house windows and doors have bars over them, and every building is surrounded by a wall that is topped with some sort of barbed wire esque deterrent to those who would want to climb it. Despite this, I actually don't think that there is all that much crime here in Loja. I don't read the paper all that much, but I never hear people talking about crime, and I walk by myself to work everyday looking like a blantantly obvious gringo, but I never feel the slightest bit unsafe or anything. Overall, Loja is a pretty cool place from what I've seen so far.

So after the Loja tour we drove around meeting people from AIESEC, including Ángel who I mentioned above, which was the only person in Loja I was able to communicate with before I left the US. We hung out at the University for a bit, where there was a concert going on, and then I met my host brother Renato. Later he and I went back to his house, where I'd be living for the next 4 months. I met the family, consisting of Renato's sister Conchita and their parents. I have had a great experience with my host family so far, they very nice and always make sure I am well taken care of and have everything I need. Renato and Conchita are both about the same age as me, so we have a lot in common and we get along well. Plus they both speak some English, so between their English and my Spanish we can more or less communicate without a problem.

The next day I had to give a presentation about the United States at the university, UTPL. Ángel had warned me about this beforehand, so I came prepared with a few typical American things to demonstrate and a bunch of pictures. I found out UTPL was having some sort of culture week thing, so the few other interns and I would each be presenting about our respective countries and then running a booth during an event for culture week. My presentation went decently well, I made a Power Point using my pictures and wrote a short description on each slide with some proofreading help from Renato, so all I had to do was get up there and read from the slides. The booth was more fun though, a bunch of people asked about my football and a few other things I brought, and there were two girls here from the US too so I always had backup if I couldn't answer a question in Spanish.

Ok, that was way longer than I expected, and I'm probably not even half way done. I'll continue this asap, hopefully before I leave for Manta which I think is Wednesday.