Exitoso!!! some fun(ny) things

(From 10-04-09, Originally likemikeposts.com)

Well, Latacunga was a bust... Our cultural awareness is proven to be in need of some attention- The festival didn´t start until late Sunday afternoon after we had to leave!!!! So it ended up being mostly boring- nothing much to do except check out another tiny market with mostly stuff none of us needed. We tried a local soup, though I can´t remember the name of it. I kind of like this story though. I thought it was just a potato based lamb soup, as we had all assumed. It was quite good, however, when I noticed a slight inconsistency in the meat portions, because I was fairly famished and I had no prior lamb experience to compare, I paid little attention and enjoyed the soup and beer. We looked up later, as the others in the group were more curious than I, in our Lonely Planet book that the town is kind of famous for it´s potato based soup with it´s ¨floating chunks of blood sausage.¨ Basically, they just kind of put the inside chunks of the lamb in the soup, and it clicked why all of the intestiney- looking meat seemed so strange. Upon realization, my stomach didn´t settle for hours and I didn´t have a real appetite for a few days. I guess I don´t have much of a stomach for stomach... Who´d have thought?

So- my status- In school: definitely more caught up than the last post, however, sometimes just as lost. These experiences of complete and total cultural cluelessness are becoming fewer (weekly rather than daily) but funnier. My university provides amazing opportunities that I am trying to make sure to embrace full throttle. I will surely visit a real volcano soon. I am starting a film appreciation club, and may have found a school to volunteer at teaching English and maybe playing guitar. I am enjoying my classes very much. They make me feel like I am where I am supposed to be, which is important. I LOVE my sociology class: gender and society- we are learning about many kinds of social realities related to gender. I find that this environment is an amazing place to learn of feminist movements in the world because of the lack thereof in this history and culture. This class reminds me of three personal heroes of mine: Mrs. Ladd, high school English teacher and avid feminist, Nikki Skora, the most socially aware and intelligent person I know and amazing writer/thinker, and my aunt Maria, who embodies the struggle, and showed me how to appreciate beautiful things. I am very happy to have recently chosen a minor in sociology in addition to LAS and Spanish. They compliment one another well.
I have a history class- which is astoundingly unorganized, a literature class ¨El Boom Latinoamericano¨- which is very profound when I can follow, and a cultural anthropology class - which, to me, is the most intense, in terms of what we confront. I would like to try to connect some of the many overlapping themes of these classes to both illustrate my love for interdisciplinary studies and maybe to help myself make sure I am understanding them correctly. Writing does that, I think. But not this time. That will be another post. This paragraph only paints a bit of context for a funny cultural misunderstanding - that was completely my fault.

The first project for my cultural anthropology class was a series of interviews I was to conduct in a sector of Ecuadorian society. As a matter of making the most of my living situation, I decided I would interview the national police that I see on my way in and out of the penthouse everyday. The short - non-academic ¨DL¨ is as follows: There are no state, city, or county police, only national. They have a pretty rowdy reputation and struggle with corruption and an amazing lack of resources, very bad pay and benefits, not to mention the responsibility of representing the law in a government that has thrown out and changed its leadership some eight times in the last ten years, and recently (last week) voted in the new president Correa, who´s government plans to write an entirely new constitution. Women in the police force is a very recent phenomenon. I interviewed two of them. My questions touched on such topics as violence, gender, and corruption. The answers were widely diverse and incredibly interesting. It was, to me, more badass than repelling from the waterfalls- There was one question, though, that all the officers struggled a little to understand, never told me why, but I always had to rephrase it before I got an answer. I am told that Ecuadorians, in general (though I hate to generalize) can be very passive with certain social confrontations. The question was a warm up question, which meant to ask what qualities separate the most successful officers from the others. Success- translates in Spanish to the word ¨exito.¨ Naturally, I presumed the adjective form of this noun would be ¨exitado.¨ It is not. I would like to make it clear that the word for successful is exitiso. And also that I am grateful that my host mom is graceful enough to let go of the cultural passivity the six cops displayed when she informed me of the sexual context ¨exitado¨ has in its direct translation - excited. Yup. This was the second question in my ¨warming up¨ part of the intense interviews. I was embarrassed for a while, until my next cultural experience with the police. (I don´t know if I should post this but I´m pretty sure they were off duty) I had no idea what they probably thought of me, or how many other stupid things I must say that go untold. I felt like my fly was always down every time I just needed to say something. - Well, when I came home late one night after having some fun, I was walking up to the apartment when one of the cops told me to come with him. I followed him through a few rooms, a million things running through my head, relieved to find that they were only late-night-celebrating with an abundance of the local beer. I made it to bed a few hours later after some funny, curious, and kinda fuzzy conversations, but with some new police friends, which, I am told, is not a bad thing to have.

The interviews were very useful, in an academic capacity. The other questions were worded appropriately, but I still haven´t confronted my prof about the confusion. I hope she has a good sense of humor...

I promise that´s not the end of my cultural stumblings- which is nice if the blog is enjoyed by my humble but lovely audience, because there will be much more. We will laugh. We will cry. We will draw from our emotions and learn something good about ourselves and each other. Or maybe not. ¿Who knows? This weekend I go to the beach, and next weekend to the city of Cuenca, which, I´m told, is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I hope to share some good images.