A Day in the Cloud Forest

Buenos dias mis amigos y familia.  ¡Les extraño mucho!

This weekend was a typical weekend in Las Tolas, Ecuador:

I woke up Saturday morning at 6am to eat breakfast with my host mother, (fried plantains with queso, breakfast tortillas, and local herbal tea), then saddled up for a wet morning in la chagera, or small farm.

Good morning, Las Tolas.

Ready to go.

We spent the morning in the steady rain digging up weeds, replanting different vegetables, and chopping down a few things for lunch:  a sort of squash, a type of bamboo, and another vegetable with thorns that I can never remember the name of.  The gardens here are different in that they are all on the mountain side, which means that they are very slanted.  On one hand, it’s easier on the back since there is less bending over involved, but on the other hand, it is tough work maneuvering through and around crops on a steep, muddy incline…

Magdalena was a pro with the machete, although her hands and arms are covered with scars from years of use. 

Magdalena and her machete.

I caught this pic after we cut off the thorns; what a shame.

Afterward we walked the vacas, or cows, to the stable for milking.  I was pretty slow at it at first, but I eventually got the hang of it.

Before heading back to the house, we slaughtered a rooster for lunch.  Now I know that every chicken sandwich I’ve ever eaten had come from a slaughtered chicken, but it’s always different when you’re the one actually doing the slaughtering.  So in all honestly, I cried a little when it came time for me to kill it:

Sad.

Magdalena thought I was being a big baby.

We headed home and ate a very fresh lunch, with food that was in the ground and milk that was in the cow just a few hours before.

Sunday I woke up incessantly scratching a few of the many bug bites I acquire throughout the night.  I can’t figure out a way to avoid them outside of sleeping in jeans, socks and a sweater, (which I’ve now taken to doing every night).  But each morning brings new bites.  I’m actually getting to know my variety of bed bugs fairly well.  For example, the ones that leave welts seem to like legs and arms.  The ones that cause bleeding usually stick to my ankles and wrists.  And the really small ones, the ones that itch terribly, love my back.  Ugggh, those ones are the worst!

 

After breakfast I went with Magdalena and Antonio to look at chanchos (pigs) to buy.  We all piled onto his motorbike, which I found so amusing.  We barely fit, couldn’t make it up one of the muddy inclines, (“Because we feed the gringa too many tortillas!”), and Magdalena & I giggled the whole way.  What an odd-looking family we must have looked like.

 

Grocery shopping.

 

We returned later with the truck to pick it up.  Kind of like ordering take-out.

 

The rest of the afternoon was spent watching Antonio play futból and cheering on his team to the championship.  A 10-team league from the surrounding barrios with cash prizes made this final game of the season an important one.  It was a close match, and in my excitement I kept cheering in English.  But Las Tolas proved victorious!  We celebrated afterward with a big neighborhood dinner.

 

 

Nice job, Antonio!

Definitely Not in Kansas Anymore

So one of the many things I’ve learned about the U.S. while here in Ecuador is that we waste a lot of food.  And I don’t just mean leftovers.

For example, when Ecuatorianos slaughter an animal, they eat all of it.  And I mean, all of it.

The ears, the tongue, the feet, the skin, the fat… everything.  None of it ends up in the garbage.

Chicken heads and chicken feet ready for cookin’.

Cow stomach. Yep.

Cow feet, usually served in soup.

Found these pig feet in the freezer one morning. Also usually served in soup.

It definitely took some courage to stomach these foods with a polite smile, but you know what they say: waste not, want not!


Another difference in food is the tremendous number of exotic fruits they have here...

These are called Tomates de Arboles, but they’re not tomatoes. They’re not eaten raw; they’re almost always used for juice.

 

Claudias. Very similar to our plums, just not as sweet.

 

Here the oranges are green.

 

This avocado, as big as my hand, is considered small.

I forget the name of this fruit, but it’s eaten raw, and you can eat the peel.

 This is guava, and it completely weirded me out my first time eating it. I was in the Amazon with two Australian tourists when an elderly woman handed it to us and kept saying “comida, comida.” We figured to break open the leaf and found fuzzy, white stuff inside, which is basically like eating a sweet-tasting cotton ball. But even stranger are the seeds inside the cotton balls, which have a remarkable likeness to shiny black beetles.

This vegetable from Magdalena’s garden is normally covered with long, green thorns.

Yeah... What??

The mangos here can get to a size as big as your head!

Not only are all the fruits delicious, but they’re also very cheap!

 

The biggest meal of the day is lunch.  It's comprised of the same basic components: sopa (soup), seco (dry), ensalada (salad or veggies), and of course: arroz (rice!)  Among my favorite of the snacks are chifles (plantain chips) and colada (liquid oatmeal, essentially).  And with every meal is juice, (jugo).



 

Oh, and Ecuadorians are very proud of their official national beer: Pilsener.

I’ve also encountered a few interesting creatures during my stay here:

 I almost stepped on this little guy on my way to work. He is also a frequent visitor in the bathroom!

I wish I had thought to put my hand next to him for size perspective, but this beauty is about the size of a chicken egg.

The spiders here can get pretty monstrous in size; I had encountered a tarantula as big as my hand the other day, but didn’t have my camera with me. :(

The first arachnoid pictured co-inhabited my bedroom, and the second was spotted in the babies' room of the daycare.

 

 

After two and a half months of discovering new plants and animals almost every day, I am reminded that there truly is "no place like home."