Scooby Doobie Do Where Are You?

Last Sunday I arrived in Cuenca, the city that I will be staying in for the next few weeks. Some more obversations...

You cannot put toliet paper in the toliet. Next to every toliet there is a trash can where you must put all the toliet paper otherwise you will clog the toliet. The sewage system isn't like the one in the United States and cannot handle things like toliet paper and whatever else Americans like to put in the trash. It smells less than you would think. Generally speaking at least. I don't think anyone has taken a super Jason yet.

I am putting Charles on the endangered species list. By choice, I am walking about two hours a day and I am eating less. Much less. In comparison I might walk 45 minutes at school every day. Now I walk from my host family's host to my school and then back for lunch. In the afternoon I return for lunch and then go back to the school for lesson planning. Each way is about 30 minutes. The other night I could barely finish my dinner. When is the last time I struggled to finish anything? These may be the final days for Charles (my stomach).

The only thing that is saving Charles are all the bakeries. There's some crazy statistic that says there is a bakery for every 14 people Cuenca. I believe it. Every day I go across the street from my school and get a piece of bread at least once or twice a day. It's $0.15 or less per piece. I love it.

Everything is all natural here. The fruit, the meat, everything. It either tastes so much better or it's one of those “grass is always greener” deals. Either way, at every meal I have had a different type of juice to drink. It's great. I stopped asking what things are and now I am either drinking it or eating it. This probably won't end well.

On my way back today I decided to start playing a game “Gringo o Cuencano.” The gringos stand out so much. Whether they're taking pictures or just speaking English, they stick out like a sore thumb.

If gringos stand out like a sore thumb, then I must stand out like a sore thumb on crack. In Cuenca, I am not a gringo but rather a chino. Some market lady cursed me out the other day. I don't know what she said, I didn't hear it, but me cago en la puta madre de ella. :D

I feel like I am one of the international students at OU. I travel in a pack with the other people in my group most of the time. We speak English only even though we all speak Spanish to some degree. We are probably loud as hell. We make, what we like to call, a “gringo train” when we walk home because we're all too cheap to get a taxi (It'd be less than $3) and too scared to walk alone at night.

My host brother has a VW van. Yes, one of the old ones, similar to the Mystery Machine. It's bad ass but it doesn't run at the moment. I hope he gets it fixed because I would love to ride in it.

I haven't had Cui, guinea pig, yet. We did go to a pen that had plenty of Guinea pigs though. I thought it was going to turn out like a trip to the lobster tank at a seafood restaurant. Or at least I wish it did.

They love to honk their horns here. I don't know why. They are so honk happy. They honk their horns while I'm walking on the street. They honk to tell people to move in traffic. They honk their horns because they're bored. They love to honk their goddamn horns.

Driving in the mountains is terrifying. The bus was just about as wide as the road. We were a foot away from the edge. There was a several hundred foot drop. We were about a moment away from death. People were driving behind us, going much faster than us, passing us on turns. People were coming at us on said turns, again faster than us. That may have been the closest to death that I have been to in awhile.

Cigs are $2.50 a pack or less. The most expensive are marlboro. Everything else is less than $2. The smokers here are in heaven. One girl is from Chicago, she pays $9 or $10. Be happy with Ohio prices.

I don't know my own langauge. The other day we had to teach the concept of some and any. My group spent an hour trying to explain the concept to ourselves. The only girl who knew the rules was the only non-native English speaker.

It's really nice not to have the Internet and be off the grid for awhile. I am not fiending nearly as much for the Internet as I thought I would. It's nice to be away from everything you know every once and awhile.

The coffee here is wonderful. It's about twice as strong as it is in the United States. I still drink it black. Even some of the locals think I am crazy to drink it black but I do it anyway. Here's a conversation I had with someone about it:

Amigo: It (the coffee) looks like oil.

Me: But where's the shrimp?

::dead silence::

I won't be making any more dead baby jokes any time soon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihumor