so the election results are in!!!!! well, they should be by now.....all we've heard is that the president, rafael correa, a very good looking PhD from Illinois with a Belgian wife.....is very happy that most of the people coming in for the asamblea to rewrite the constitution are on his side.....let's hope for the best! people are hopeful and patient but still wary (keep in mind, 11 little presidents in the last ten yrs.)

yesterday, jessica & i went up to the panecillo (little bread loaf) to get some views of the city, and we saw these two vehicles. one here is obvious, the europeans who have come to do elections monitoring! and the other is a caravan of humvees from venezuela, who are doing a tour of south america in order to unite it!!!!! thru story recording & film, etc......they are being sponsored by some oil company (thanks to venezuelan oil! - we all know the humvee needs some of that readily available chavez crude) and some television station in venezuela - also! the only tv stations left in venezuela are the ones he has not shut down already.....

anyway, as for the elections, jess was explaining to me about the work she's done in all of the native american reservations regarding our (US) own elections monitoring, horrible horrible & amazing crap that we read about (esp. the last two presidential elections)...anyway, i wonder what they can monitor here since voting is mandatory....and no one is really blocking people from the polls........how does monitoring work (where does all the corrupt stuff happen?????)? and how do the Ecuadorians count all the ballots so fast????? everything else seems to be so SUMAMENTE slow!

(oh, the panecillo is on the edge of the colonial center of town & has the statue of the Virgen of Quito on it.......she is the only virgin mary from all catholic cultures who stands on a dragon - where & when did they get dragon from????? any catholics out there with any clue?)















(and here is a mural of another spiritual ilk.......coming down the hill in the taxi, jess asked me to get a shot of this one.......why o why Did they not terrace the agricultural part under Mother Earth's breasts? and also the fried egg part is distracting.....)

a few days ago, i gave a speech to this group of kids at the U. in chinese. it was actually quite horrendous, my chinese that is....as for the experience, well, they say the only way to deal with the fear of public speaking is by simply having to do it????? well......i did it! luckily, i hope, no one understood mandarin. these are a group of entering students in the undergrad program for business & economics. the dean, who is this amazing guy, wanted some foreign "professionals" to give a speech in their respective languages (my god, i am more comfortable in spanish than mandarin - i don't even know what i was saying while i was saying it, let alone, know if my tones were correct.)

luckily, mom and dad translated this thing into mandarin, then on skype, read it to me, as i am illiterate in chinese, then i wrote it for myself in a sad hodge-podge of pin-yin, wade-giles, and yale roman systems - a conglomeration of all the ways i have studied mandarin, then read it three times to my parents on skype, which i am just getting used to (we sound like we are in tin tunnels - but free & easy!) my mom goes, Oh! it is soooooo good! anyway!, so i go to bed, then wake up the next morning hoping to cancel on this man.....

well, he was very happy with it, and i think it was good. gracias a dios, i had the use of a podium.....unlike the other people who walked around with a mike. i think they were trying to hide me, since i was without a jacket & tie and i had my shirt untucked.....as usual......(they were all dolled up for the standard school orientation.)

anyway, the whole point was to just expose them to the fact that there is a world outside of ecuador and the spanish speaking world. i have no idea what the kids were thinking, since i was messing up the tones, probably making run-on sentences, and my new 80s eyeglasses were all fogged up!

i think there was one asian kid in the group, giving me this look of disdain.....but probably just paranoia on my part.....

the good thing is we are going to get the business school students to come in later in the semester and work with my design students to figure out some marketing strategies, as well as working with the manufacturers....etc.......it's nice to do this academic stuff, and since we are really doing this furniture project for export (at the same university), to do something with practical applications.....also!???? (why i am talking like this all of a sudden?????

this is the Catolica, where it all happens 4 evenings a week..................the architecture dept. is at one far end of the campus, and is an interesting hybrid of new and old, with the nicest part where often spaces are open to the air - temperatures relatively constant all yr. round...........the classroom shot is the calm before the storm........

democracy in action!

not sure how many of you know, but ecuador is in perpetual political change....with something like 11 presidents in the last 10 years or so......the current president is trying to rewrite the constitution, with a national assembly (and local ones, too.......) i am not entirely sure how this all works, but basically to create the assembly, which will rewrite the constitution....there are over 700 candidates to pick from (no one i have talked to knows how they can possible understand who all of these folks are and what they "stand" for.....) anyway! so you have to pick 24 total national, and depending on your province another group....which depends on population/province, so in pichincha, where quito is, there are 18 more.......

you can choose by platform....groups of 14? (i think) which each have a an equal amount of men and equal amount of women.......and supposedly each of these sets also carries a nice mix of diff. political ideologies.....you are also welcome to choose independently, the 24 candidates regardless of platform "set", but the weighting of those chosen that way, is significantly less than....those chosen in clumps?????? and there are no guarantees the final assembly is gender balanced either.....

anyway, we were at a cafe the other day! and the family who owns the place was going thru all of these images in the paper.....but everyone seems to be in an utter state of confusion.....(maybe this is the point?) then.....everyone points out that potentially most of the country will just find one or two obvious people they like in each set, and just vote for that column....hmmmm......

this is happening on Sunday! interesting.......and no drinking in the country starting 12pm fri - sunday nite!!!! (when jo & i arrived in vietnam in may before some sort of elections, they also had the curfews & no drinking laws, but you could occasionally find the random foreigners wandering the streets drunk - largely ignored by the local police if foreign....but here, it's supposed to be a great time for police to crack down.....) oh, and voting is compulsory, so people are fined if they don't do it!

quito is situated in a high valley between two volcanoes.....so in the map if it's legible...look for pichincha and ilalo volcanoes, and that stretch inbetween is where quito sits! it goes north/south and is growing both directions, as well as over the edge to east into the valleys...... mostly to the south, though......with the central part as the historic colonial core.....the one foto is of the pichincha, the closest one to the city! you can see one edge of it....behind jazz sitting in the apt.....and it last blew ash into the city in 1999...........a few inches.....hmmmm....

to the farm near Patate, a little exhaust, a little migraine, a little dread-locked burra, a bit of un-terraced mountainside agriculture, a big eucalyptus tree (not endemic, nor good for the land - but smells good), a couple of lazy cows (the farmer using them to plow the field got fed up that they wouldn't move, so he went for lunch and left them there), a lot of productive plastic, a little volcanic action from tungurahua.....more activity from the mount, without a worry from the dogs, and a little bit of mossy bent-wood furniture!

a hard hat moment in the south of quito before ana maria left town......

So.....I have been in Quito now for a month! And things are starting to get hairy........teaching at two Universities, and both positions are projects run in conjunction with actual projects with practical applications in the real world....(more explanations later as these things start to happen - I hope they come to fruition properly!!!!????? whatever that means.....) Don't ask me how this all happened, as I like to think of things as being purely theoretical......well, the simplest answer is I have assumed Ana Maria's life for the moment, while she is away in the States for a year!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, life is alright. I think I have finally acclimated to the altitude (we are at 2900 meters), and I think I don't smell car/bus/truck exhaust anymore, either!!!!! As well, I have flirted with danger here and there by walking at night. The usual recommendation is to take cabs after nightfall, no matter how short the distance is......After class the other night, I could not bear losing another opportunity to have a casual walk-off from the trials and tribulations of the students, by walking 15 minutes to meet Jazz and Jessica for dinner. I was talking to a friend on the phone, giving her my location at every intersection......then advising her to call the police if something happened! (needless to say, I made it alright...luckily, as most people here put zero trust in the police, after the customs dept., possibly the second most corrupt gov't agency?????)

Anyway! Jessica is in town.....a friend from Grinnell who I had lost contact with for the past 15 years! We just reconnected thru Marky Mark about a month before I left NYC. She also just decided to leave a job of 8 yrs......to move here to Quito for a short stint, to work with the Kallari cooperative, a group of about 800 Amazonian Kichwa families who produce organic fair trade coffee & cacao.....they also have a little cafe in Quito, and do some other things.....She wants to work with them in promoting products abroad...so keep an eye out for their chocolate...very good!

They also make a nice gringo-healthy lunch.....we got to dine with the finest group of foreigners in this backpacker neighborhood (by day - but by night it is full of drunken quito kids) here, Mariscal which is north of the historic center.....they made some nice sandwiches with challah bread???? Jess is going to do some baking with them....and some new pastry ideas, as well!

So.....later after class (which is 4 nites a week till 9pm!) I head down - by foot, in the dark back to Mariscal to meet Jazz and Jess for dinner at Indochine! Jazz & I have been trying to go here for a week now.....it's the only Vietnamese place in town and relatively new!!!! and thank god....it's a real Asian place......hmmmm......it's been a little tough.....getting good international food here.....

Oh, and the first place I've been able to procure a good vodka martini without having to talk to the bartender about how it should be.....

Anyway! The owners are a 1/2 Vietnamese & American.....then an Ecuadorian from DC who trained in Paris...with last night, a waiter from Brooklyn..and bartender from Argentina.........We met these guys below, from NYC who are from the NY Latin American Film Festival who are doing a little thing in Quito tomorrow night. The surprising thing is that the girl next to Jess, is her brother's - who is in brookyn - new "friend" who Jess has never met before! Quito, mind you, is a quiet town and almost nothing seems to be happening anywhere to the visible eye.......alright! I will figure out pics and this slow connection at home........(I've kind of slacked on the incessant foto taking, and let my flickr account go unpaid....but will figure that out in a bit)


OH! and happy birthday to my little Ana Maria, in faraway Cambridge....que triste!!!!! bueno!!!!!