Desfile...
Showing posts with label Cuenca. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuenca. Show all posts
Día 145 | Domingo, 24 de Mayo | 2009
Familia...Today was my last day in Cuenca. I am going to miss it here and part of me doesn't want to leave. I hope that I will return sometime soon. We'll see.
Today was mostly relaxing – I finished my book report at around noon and then my family and I went for a drive out to the country. We stopped in a little town about a half hour drive outside of Cuenca called Gualaceo. There, we had lunch, walked around the town, I bought a flashlight, and then we sat on the banks of the river (where I took this photo of us). I wanted to take more photos of my family but, even after staying with them in their home for two months, I still feel really nervous when I have my camera around them.
We got back to the house at about six or seven in the evening. We had tea, coffee, and cake (one of my host aunt and uncle came by to give a belated birthday cake to my sister) and then just relaxed for a while.
Later, I went upstairs and packed my bags.
Día 144 | Sábado, 23 de Mayo | 2009
Calle San Salvador...Last night's goodbye dinner was truly great. They fed us so well (all you can eat buffet) and it was just very calming to be able to feel the accomplishment of finishing the quarter. My Andean Literature class performed a traditional Kichwa song, I played guitar as one of my mates read the Kichwa version of Dust in the Wind, and I also performed Nuestro Juramento (a song by Julio Jaramillo) solo.
Today was the first day of sleeping in since I don't know when. Slept until about 8 or 9 and then got some breakfast (the typical mandarin orange, two mini-bananas, and a cup of tea) and then I went up to my room to work on my book report that is due on Monday.
The day passed on pretty lazily – I ended up taking a nap after lunch from 2 until about almost five. I woke up on my own and then went out on the street to take this picture. Here is a picture of my street here. This is the view I saw everyday when I would go out to walk to class. In the distance you can see the Coliseo – the main sport / political / musical venue in Cuenca. Some nights, if there was a big concert or if Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa was in town, you could hear the shrills and shouts of the crowd from our house.
Today was the first day I have started to realize that I will be leaving here in couple days. The truth is that I feel so many emotions, I can't say clearly how I feel about it. I will miss my family for sure though. They have been really nice to me and I am so thankful.
My family invited me to a first communion party and I said yes. The party started around 8:30PM and lasted until about 3:30AM. It was held in a banquet hall that kind of reminded me of a YMCA except everything was decorated very nicely. I danced Salsa and Merengue with quite a few little old ladies and then later I was asked to play some songs on the guitar. At first I was really nervous playing for about 150 foreigners that I had never met, but after I thought about it for five minutes or so, I wasn't so afraid. I played Stand by Me, Nuestro Juramento, Black Bird, and Cucurrucucu Paloma. Everybody seemed to like it – it is weird that in South America the audience starts to applaud randomly in the middle of the song if they like what they are hearing – and I left the stage feeling nice and warm.
After the songs, I danced with my sister Verónica. It was a fun little Russian number called Moscow. There were a lot of folded arms and choppy leg kicks.
Día 136 | Viernes, 15 de Mayo | 2009
On the Rooftop...Only one more week of classes. I cannot wait to be finished with all of this work.
Here is a picture of me, Ryan, and Bryan as we ventured out to see the Cuenca skyline.
Día 124 | Domingo, 3 de Mayo | 2009
Balcón...This is the view from my bedroom window. The view is mainly of another house nearby but it is a view nonetheless. If I have talked to you on the phone in Ecuador, chances are I am looking at these walls during our conversation.
Today was pretty uneventful. I had lunch and dinner with my family and I felt really comfortable coming back to Cuenca. It was so nice to be able to get back into the mountains with the crisp, cool, and thin air. The coast was just too humid. It reminded me of the deep south in the way that your shirt just stuck to your body and everything was just damp. For fifteen minutes, I took a glorious shower today. You can't see it in the picture, but the shower is situated right on the balcony and there are three big windows looking out of the shower. It is such a lovely experience to take a shower there because you can see out into the Andean mountains to the right as the day begins. I think I will miss that when I return to Ohio.
Día 98 | Martes, el 7 de Abril | 2009
Desfile...After morning class, I wandered into the downtown area to witness this huge parade. There were tons of drummers and little kids participating in the parade around the central park (Parque del Calderón). I coincidentally ran into one of my program directors (Lewis) and we were trying to figure out what it all meant. It seemed to be some celebration of all the different schools in Cuenca or something -- students carried banners of their school or had on their school uniforms. All in all, it was interesting to witness the sights and sounds of the parade.
Día 95 | Sábado, el 4 de Abril | 2009
Sala de Sigsig...Friday night Billy and I went out to canvas the town. We started out at this place called Wonder Bar. It's a really quaint little café that serves a variety of drinks, appetizers, and deserts. It has a really calm ambience -- soft lights, warm drinks, and their walls are adorned with those artsy and old-style posters that used to be French advertisements for vermouth, french cinema, and movie posters that have beautiful women like Marlene Dietrech smiling while smoking cigarettes. Billy and I met up with Ryan at the bar. Ryan is a really cool and nice guy who seems to always laugh at my jokes -- even the bad ones. Ryan is a man of few words -- I haven't heard him talk a whole lot on our trip but that doesn't mean anything bad (no value judgments here) nor does it mean anything good...it just means what it means. It was a good time to sit back and relax at the Wonder Bar after a somewhat disorienting week. It seemed like we had made it out, survived the week, and it was a nice release to sit down at a bar and sip orange juice for a couple hours (Billy and Ryan on the other hand were handily tasting some samples of Ecuador's fine breweries). Later on, some more members of our program coincidentally met up with us -- Emily, Nick, Megan and Jake -- and we sat at the Wonder Bar for some more time.
Later on we went to this liquor store called Taxi and it was all so strange. I felt like we were in the middle of a theater set. People were all gathered around the store drinking and listening to reggaeton -- it all actually reminded me a lot of when I was in Spain back in 2005. People just sitting outside in their cars, drinking, smoking,....conversing. After Taxi, we went to this dance club called Zo. That place was really surreal -- pretty dark place like a cavern with a bunch of flashing neon lights, hordes of dancers, and the heat from everyone dancing made us all sweat. This was the kind of place that, without all of the people in it, could be pretty functional for brainwashing someone. Just strap them down in a chair in the middle of the room, pump up the music, turn all the whirring lights on, and just let them go crazy. After about an hour there, I felt a little crazy myself and I wanted to go. I didn't want to leave Billy there alone though, so I made sure we left together.
The night was okay but it wasn't my thing. Some people just like to lose themselves in a dark dance club full of drunk strangers. Alcohol, lights, and music pumping through their veins, they abandon consciousness to chase a surreal fantasy. It is places and times like those that remind me how absurd existence really is -- "can't believe the things we ask for; can't believe the things we need."
Today was really fun. I got a chance to break away from my program mates and do my own thing. This week, I met a really cool and nice guy named Judd. Judd is doing a independent study in South America over Andean music. In the fall, he'll be attending the University of Illinois to get a master's degree in Ethnomusicology. When we met, we hit it off and decided to become recording partners. So Saturday, we both travelled with this band called Cañara (I think that is their name). Cañara is a seven-person group that plays Andean folk music. Today, they performed in a little town called Sigsig as a part of a local music festival. Judd, Lauren (another student at CEDEI), and I all went to hear some music, have some local food, and relax. The music was very fine and Judd and I both recorded it from the audience. The picture above is of the auditorium after the show and it shows the room in which the audience sat. The room itself was pretty problematic in terms of getting good sound. There was a echo of about 500 ms built into the room -- this caused a good bit of low-end feed back, confusion, and just a general unpleasant 'boxy' sound. When the band first started out, I felt pretty insecure setting up my sound equipment. Maybe not insecure as much as conspicuous -- the room was filled with about 200-250 people and they all glared at me as if I was some kind of alien. I suppose it was a pretty strange sight to see -- some gringo setting up a boom stand and microphone -- and I sat smack dab in the middle of the room with my boom stand raised about 15 feet in the air.
The recording turned out pretty good though and it was nice to make friends with people from Cuenca. This Thursday, I am going to go to Cañara's practice. I'll probably be able to get a better recording of them there -- they won't have an annoying echo in their practice space.
Día 88 | Sábado, el 28 de Marzo | 2009
Derrumbe...Today we spent 9 hours on the bus. The roads in Ecuador are adequate to poor in quality and most of the roads we took were through mountainsides like this. It is pretty common for mudslides (derrumbes) like this to happen. This mudslide was actually in our route as we were traveling from Patate to Cuenca. It held us up for about half an hour at a standstill but we were able to pass through once all the street maintenance crew were able to clear all the mud out of the way.
The bus ride was pretty nice, despite all the bumping around and sitting in one spot for nine hours. I was able to finish the second part of The Soundscape, so I made some tangible progress. The second part is concerned with the considerable transformation of the soundscape in the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of machines in factories developed the first flat-line noise (basically sound waves that stay in a constant line) that the world had ever seen (heard). The only things in nature that are analogous to a flat-line of a machine are the humming of bees and the buzz of a hummingbird's wing. These have different sound qualities (attack, decay, sustain, and release) than those that of machines, however, but they do resemble machines in a lot of ways.
Today was the day that I met my host family. Their house is on the corner of San Salvador and El Batán. It's located about two miles away from the school so each morning I will have to walk a ways. The family is pretty nice -- Oscar and Lida are the father and mother (respectively) and they have three children (Johana, Paúl, and Verónica). Johana and Lida were the ones to come and meet me at CEDEI. CEDEI stands for "Centro de Estudios Interamericanos" or "Center for Interamerican Studies" and it is the building where my program mates and I will have classes. Anyway, the first night was pretty terrifying in a lot of ways -- I was testing out my Spanish, trying to get a feel for how their family operates, and just trying to familiarize myself with being (or at least feeling) pretty alone in a foreign house, city, and country. I remember sitting up in my bed and feeling intensely lonely. I took a chance to write in my journal and then I went to bed.
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