Futures

Of course, while I have been here, lots of people ask me what happens after Peace Corps, and I cheerfully tell them the truth: I have no freaking clue. Of course I have ideas, there would be ways to stay in Ecuador or ways to extend this period of travel in another part of Latin America. Presumably, there are jobs for which I would be a convincing candidate in New York or DC or some part of North Carolina. But these are only ideas, and as of yet I have no strong feeling about what the right move would be.

Riding the subway, walking the streets, I remembered how it felt to live in the city. But I found myself here, feeling very much like I used to the first day back from vacation. You know that sense of peace and well being and ability to put things in perspective that goes away about halfway through the third day after you go back to work? I suspect that taking up residence again there woul be like the life-scale version of that. Right now, the part of my brain that was always occupied with work, social life, apartment details, where to buy groceries that day, how much I spent on dinner last night and what have you, is curiously still. And I thought: if I could live in New York without it generating the list of complaints, anxieties, and heachaches that New York seems to produce in me then I could really enjoy it. It would be a great place to return to.

What I note is an absence of a distinctly unpleasant feeling that I often had for many years while living there. Something like guilt, a nagging sense of having let many people down, of having done things badly or shoddily. I do feel preoccupied with things in Ecuador the collective I have been organizing, the complicated details of my friends' lives in which I am much too involved, but there is a safety valve. When I go in August or whenever that happens, my responsibility and ability to be affected by them simply come to an end. And right now all those challenges seem remarkably far away and short lived. I suppose the question is how to design your life so you feel that way anywhere.

Lord knows how to do that.

Winter, trees, food, and light

Mainly, this week. I ate. I will leave it at that.

I did go jogging every morning but one. If I never had a day job, I would be super athletic. Today and yesterday, I went down Second Ave. to where it become Chrystie and followed it out onto the Manhattan Bridge. I do love that part of town, the way you see where it was Puerto Rican, but before that Jewish and before that who knows what and then you pass into China Town in a part which was once Little Italy, and of course most of the Lower East Side is terribly gentrified, and there is a ginormous Whole Foods on Houston, cause apparently the the one at Union Square isn't sufficient. But its still charming retaining its edge even with all the boutiques and cafes.

I passed the warehouse where a friend of mine lived back in the day on the corner of Chrystie and Grand. It wasn't zoned for residence, their roof deck was bathed in fumes from the industrial dry cleaner below, their neighbors were a brothel and a sweatshop, and they ended up moving out because a man broke into the apartment while his girlfriend was sleeping there. Still it had its own urban gritty new york story charm, the entire episode. He now lives in Europe and I miss seeing him here.

Back home side

New York. I love that city. I was walking around Herald Square with my backpack on wheels, looking at the people, looking at the Christmas mania happening around me. It's like no place on the world. How could I think about not going back, I thought in that moment.

Then I waited an hour and forty five minutes for a bus to Boston, simply because it didn't occur to the people in Port Authority to tell me that the ticket for a 5:30 bus they sold me didn't actually mean there was a bus a 5:30. And I remembered how enormously complicated everything is here.
In Ecuador this kind of thing should be attributed to cultural norms having to do punctuality, efficiency, and customer service. In New York it should be attributed to everyone being an asshole.

Now I am in Cambridge, a charming city full of excellent cuisines from all over the world, stunning late afternoon winter light, and a river I can jog by.

Despedidas

Three weeks between one vacation and another went by in a flurry of writing reports, drafting bi-laws, making lots of pumpkin pies for people, lots of bickering between my friends, workshops on homophobia that someone had to give and who knows what other details. I ate crabs from the shell and kept up with my jogging. The time to go to the states was forever getting closer but I didn't ever really have time to get excited about it until I was on the plane to Panama.

To say good bye a couple friends of mine I went to sing karaoke. It was one of those plans you have always pending until someone Yeah. This is the night we go. The place turned out to be a little disappointing. It was smokey and full of big groups of men without dates and no one would take our song requests for a really long time. Everyone, especially the men, were singing the most sentimental ballads ever thought possible. The microphone got passed around tables and people sang from their seat, an arrangement I only can describe as merciful. I chose Brian Adams' Heaven (sentimentality and all) and was a conscious of the expectant rustle when a song in English came up on the screen. I have had some bad moments singing with a microphone in front of people. Once in college, I sang in front of A LOT of people, and once in a karaoke bar and it was scarring. So I don't want to sounds too arrogant but this was different. And I could hear my little voice coming out of the speakers and knew I had them, my audience, my fans in my pocket. When I finished there lots of cheers and some kid came over to congratulate us. I finished my set with Mama Mia, following the wise cues of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

Beach Baby

So there was a trip to Machu Pichu, which despite being inundated by thousands and thousands of tourists, was very impressive. (Angkor Wat may have ruined the cities of every other ancient civilization for me to be quite honest, but it was cloud-covered, green, and crazy to imagine a city up so high on the hills.) Then a final short morning in Cusco, a last minutes dash to the airport, of course only to find that our flight was delayed. There are thousands of bus companies with buses that run up to the beaches near the Ecuadorian border, our final stop on our trip, but they all have separate bus terminals all over Lima, a notoriously large and dangerous city. As the afternoon wore on, it became clear that we were going to miss the one bus we knew about, which we were told had big comfortable sleeping beds, key to a 16 hour bus ride. We got a list of other companies from the tourist info desk in the airport and sucked up the $13 dollar cab ride to the one that seemed the most likely to have evening buses going vaguely in the direction we wanted to go. We got to see some of the slums of Lima, and its true that Lima has some very poor sectors, but we also got to see some of the center of Lima and some of the 19th century architecture. Stuck in traffic in front of a different bus terminal, I looked in at the board showing departures and we realized that this company had a bus going directly to Mancora, our planned destination in only an hour. We hopped out of the cab and were soon on our way.

Today we spent all day on the beach and I got sunburned on the back of my legs. I was thinking how I´ll need to be draped in my sarong all day tomorrow, which reminded me of beach trips from days past. My travel partner Lindsay got a big kick out my memories of the time at the beach with my parents when I got sunburned and I had to wear a white turtleneck under my little red bathing suit. I really did look like a geek. Somewhere there are photos.

Choquequirao

OK, so BEFORE I made the mistake of checking my email, and finding out that everything fell apart the minute I went on vacation, I want to report that I did a four day hike to Choquequirao an Incan ruin far far away from anything convenient. I have not done any real hiking (meaning more than a few hours) since college, so I was a bit apprehensive, but the whole thing went off pretty well. We did it in four days and three nights, cooked on a camp stove, slept in a tent. We did not backpack, though. We hired mules and and a kid to take them along. I think I might have fallen off the mountain if I had had to carry anything more than a water bottle, a camera, and a jar of Nutella.

Machu Pichu tomorrow.

The L Word

You know, I should know better than to check my email on vacation. And its too long a story to explain fully in a blog post, having to do with a large well known gay organization from a large coastal city in Ecuador, coming to Cuenca and doing a song and dance about organizational strengthening for the GLBT community but really just wanting to fill their numbers for their funder in their project on HIV prevention. So when we send mixed group of leaders to their seminar they say, oh no, its only for men, because its a project for prevention with gay men. But if they want to strengthen gay, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender communities, being as GLBT is the operative acronym in wide use, um, everwhere, you need to pay attention to the Lesbians, at the very least. I mean at least let us include a lesbian in our strategic planning weekend. Jeez.

Folks, never take the feminist movement for granted. You do not know how much you will miss it, till you start working with people who have no freaking clue what you are talking about. People who believe an appropriate intervention in homofobia is to educate women so they can raise their sons to be less homofobic.

And no I am not making this up.

Cuenca to Cuzco

Listening to Duran Duran in the the backpacker hostel in Cusco, and thinking about how nice places like this can be, with free internet and big pots of free coffee all day. I left on vacation with my friend Lindsay yesterday and we travelled for 24 to get here. A three hour bus ride to Machala, another two hour bus ride to Huaquillas on the Ecuador Peru border, then a walk across the border in which some policeman picked us up and told us it was dangerous to cross the border on foot, and left us in front of Peru immigration where I almost transformed into a crazy gringa because we got directed into the wrong line by some sketchy guy selling currency, but the immigration guy was nice to us and took us to the front of the line.

Then we argued with some guys that tried to cheat us with a taxi ride to the airport in Tumbes (Five dollars!) while we were waiting for a colectivo, the guy offered to give me his cell phone if we could get a colectivo ride to the airport for 1 sole, the peruvian currency. And we did get it for 1.50, but I didn{t try to take his celular. And all this time I had a horrible head cold and brutal cough, so when we got to the airport in Tumbes, I fell asleep for several hours in the chair and only woke up to check my luggage and get on the plane. In Lima, we stayed in the hotel belonging to perhaps the nicest man I have ever met and I found that supermarkets in Lima make Supermaxi in Cuenca look like 7/11. I bought some cough syrup and Lindsay made me take it in the airport, while I savored my Dunkin Donuts coffee. The woman swore the the cough syrup would not make me sleepy, but did not mention it make you super loopy. So as we were getting off the plane, I felt like I was completely stoned and I proceeded to enter Cuzco, another lovely south american city beginning with a c, feeling no pain.

Off to find an ATM and organize our hike and see the sites.