The Off Putter

Question: the thing that puts me off, that's an off putter, right? Or is it an off puter? Because I don't want a putter like I'm golfing. But I don't want some slangy way to say computer either. I mean putter as in that which puts. Off, in this instance.

Earlier in this month I was put off from blogging by an incident. I was going to blog about the Parque de Carolina. It is a large and beautiful park in Quito. And it has everything. Okay maybe not everything, I didn't see a helipad or roller coaster. But it has:

• Soccer fields
• Volleyball courts
• Track
• BMX track
• Skate park
• American football field (though clearly unused)
• Paddle boats and a paddle boat stream
• Science museum
• Botanical garden
• Vivarium

 

A Bell of World Peace - in the park

Point is this is a very lovely place. And I wanted to blog all about it.

But for the incident which occurred in the park.

I got pick pocketed. My wallet was stolen.

So this isn't life or death. I had $10 in cash. The thief got credit cards and probably did get some money with those but I don't have to lose that money so that's good. And my driver's license was in there.

So while that wasn't a tragedy it did leave a metaphorical sour taste in my mouth. It has also caused some slight modification to our plans, nothing major. More on that in a future post.

That incident kept me from having much desire to blog for a bit. But I am on the comeback trail.

Story: When Carver was four, he loved to play War. You know the card game where you flip cards and the higher one wins the cards. Sometimes when I was losing but then something went in my favor I would say I was on the comeback trail. And Carver, in his early days of learning how to talk trash would say no, instead I was on the go away trail. Put me in my place.

But that was a place putter, not an off putter. And regardless of which trail I am on now, think of this post as an up catcher. Or an on putter.

By Way of Africa?

The date was February 11. It was a Sunday. And an amazing coincidence happened. In truth it was of no life shattering consequences. But it was unusual enough that I took notice.

That day Alrica and I traveled from Quito, Ecuador to Lima, Peru. We took a plane. The two cities aren't that far from one another. So why did we go by way of Africa?

That would be mysterious, right. Well it didn't happen, not in terms of physical location. We were in or above South America the whole time.

But in the car ride to the airport in Quito, our driver turned on a radio station playing American music of the 80s and thereabouts. For example, we experienced a total eclipse of the heart. But we also blessed the rains down in Africa.

When we landed in Lima we took a car ride from the airport. Different car, I promise. But this driver also turned on American radio from the 80s and vicinity. This time I was watching you (with every step you took, every move your mook, every bond you brook.) But guess what, we once again blessed the rains down in Africa!

Twice in one day! In two different countries, neither of which are secret hotbeds of the English language.

It was enough to catch my notice. And I wonder if it could ever go the other way. Could I hear songs about South America while in Africa. Are there any songs whose lyrics include the name South America? Is this a gnawing absence in need of repair? Here is my attempt to address the issue.

I bless the maize in South America.
It could be choclo and it might be mote too.
Some maize is purple, some is white, and some is blue.
Come cook with maize in South America.

Void filled!

The Mixed Stomach

When it comes to Ecuadorian food, it’s really a mixed bag. But since the ultimate bag is my stomach, it is a mixed stomach. Some things in Ecuador are amazing. A couple things are not to my taste. But the majority of traditional Ecuadorian cooking is fine. It’s not bad, it’s just not… flavorful. Sometimes my tongue screams, “Discover cumin and garlic and oregano!”

So for my tastes, which I am sure differ from those of the Ecuadorian people, I would group Ecuadorian foods into three major categories: the good, the bad, and the bland.

The good: First and foremost, the fruits here are varied and wonderful. Some of them are very sweet, like maracuyá (passion fruit). Others are very tart, like taxo (I don’t know it’s English name). Some of them are both sweet and tart, like uvillas (which I have seen translated as gooseberries, but when I think of gooseberries it’s not this.)

And as the fruits are so good, so are the juices of those fruits. That’s not a surprise, right? But along with fruit juices, you know what else is just better here? Powerade. They have better flavors of Powerade in Ecuador. Instead of fruit punch, you have tropical fruits and it tastes better. Instead of whatever our orange one is, here it is maracuyá citrus. The addition of the maracuyá flavor (chemical no doubt) just improves it. You go Powerade!

Leaving drinks, encebollado is a seafood soup. It is very good, and it is served with lime and a lime juicer. You can add your freshly squeezed lime juice to taste. Sour soups are amazing.

Breads are wonderful here in much the same way that they are at home. But here, you can buy small fresh breads (like croissants about 1.5 times the size) at most any corner minimarket. Or you can go to a panaderia, a bakery, and buy them there.

Chifa is a genre of cuisine. It is Chinese food. But it is more properly a fusion of Chinese and Peruvian food. Chifa is generally built around a serving of chaulafan. This is fried rice, and it is dark and usually has some meat in it. Often that is shrimp, but it could be something else. Then you can get something along side your chaulafan which is similar to the kinds of things you get at Chinese restaurants in America. There are chicken dishes, or pork, or seafood, or beef. They come in flavorful sauces and with lots of vegetables. But here is where it gets weird. At the chifa place we tried, this is also served with French fries. (They call them papas which means potatoes.) Don’t misunderstand, it is very good. But I am unused to serving both rice and French fries as sides (or maybe the rice is the entrée and the meat is the side) on the same plate.

Pizza is good enough here to be on the good list. The toppings are great. The cheese is mozzarella which is very similar to, but slightly different from, the mozzarella to which I have become accustomed. It has a slight aroma of being a goat cheese rather than a cow cheese. (Why don’t we say cow cheese. We say goat cheese if it comes from a goat. But we don’t mention the cow when the milk came from a cow. We just call it cheese. Are cows missing out on their right to recognition? Then again, maybe it is like not putting a little two on a square root sign. It is the default, so we don’t bother.) The thing that holds pizza back in Ecuador from being as good as at home is the sauce. The sauces aren’t as seasoned. There is oregano, but not as much oregano. There is garlic, but not as much garlic. In fact, there isn’t even as much sauce. More sauce, please!

Chocolate is certainly a thing here. In Ecuador it is very high in cocoa content, and also expensive in comparison to other Ecuadorian prices. But if you like chocolates that have a lot more chocolate than you are used to in American candy, then it is for you.

The bad: I personally did not like ceviche. I know it has many devotees and I don’t want to say it isn’t good. I will just say it isn’t good to my tastebuds. But it is something you should try, because you might love it. Alrica enjoys it. What is ceviche? It is fish, but rather than cooking it (denaturing it with heat) you soak it in citrus juice. This also denatures it. There is some debate about whether or not it eliminates all the bacteria. After it is denatured, various spices like chili pepper and garlic are added. (See, they do know about garlic.) And it is often served with chopped onions in it. And I like chili peppers and garlic and onions. But I still didn’t like ceviche. More than the sum of its part, as the old saw says. (I know saws don’t talk.)

Next up, lemonade. Okay, this shouldn’t properly be in the bad category, because bad isn’t the right word. When you order limonada at a restaurant in Ecuador, there’s no sugar in it. It is lemon juice (or maybe lime juice) and probably water. But you better be ready for sour!

I ordered habas con queso which literally translates to beans with cheese. I was very curious as to how this would be prepared? How would the cheese be incorporated. What kind of sauce would it be in. I figured it would be like rice and beans. Rice and beans is not literally merely rice and beans. There are other things in it.

Why is this even a meal?

 

Boy, was I wrong. Habas con quest is entirely literal. I got a plate of boiled lima beans with a thick slice of queso fresco sitting on top. Not shredded on top. One thick slice. Now I like beans, but in the rankings of the beans of the world, I think many people would agree with me that lima beans sit at or near the bottom of any such list. Still, even with the world’s worst bean, you could do all kinds of interesting things with them. You could at least boil them in water that had seasoning in it. But no, these beans were cooked and that’s all you can say about them. I like queso fresco, but it cannot save a plate full of unappetizing grass-colored lima beans.

The bland: I find the majority of traditional Ecuadorian cooking to fall in this category. It’s kind of like when you are in London and you wonder why don’t the British season anything. Well, the British and the Ecuadorians are flavor soul mates.

Before I talk about specific Ecuadorean dishes, let me talk about rice. Most dishes are served with rice. Plain rice. Plain white rice. This would be great if, like when you go to an Indian restaurant, there were plenty of sauces on the other parts of the meal that you mix with the rice and eat all together. I’m sure you can guess what I am about to say. That is not the case here. There isn’t enough sauce to mix with all that rice. And there isn’t enough flavor in the sauces to make the rice, well, interesting.

Menestra is the kind of dish I should love. Its main ingredient is lentils. (I’ve read that it can be beans instead, but so far I have only had it with lentils.) Now, I like lentils. And menestra has those lentils cooked in a brown sauce. It is served, you guessed it, with rice, and usually some meat. Either you get a piece of chicken or a slice of beef. It’s so close to being good, but there just isn’t enough seasoning to make the lentils exciting. And then the rice just drags it further down into blandness.

Mote is popular here. You know how grits are made from corn, but if you looked at them, or ate them, you wouldn’t immediately know it was corn. That’s mote. It is like hominy. It’s corn kernels that have been peeled and boiled. (I’m not sure which comes first.) It is chewy in an unexpected way, and it isn’t super flavorful. Usually mote is served with some sort of meat.

Locro de papa is a potato and cheese soup. We held out high hopes that this would be the traditional Ecuadorean food that tipped the scales toward yummy. But it didn’t. It’s fine, but it’s not amazing. Locro de papa is usually served with sliced avocado, so that has some flavor.

It looks like it's going to be good

 

I know you’ll think this is lame, but one of my favorite meals in Quito has been fried chicken at KFC. Why? Because they use the exact secret mix of eleven herbs and spices that Colonel Sanders formulated all those years ago. And that’s about ten herbs and spices more than I get in anything else.

But I wouldn’t say my mixed stomach is suffering. I get enough food and it is plenty nutritious. It’s really my tongue that dreams of something better.

American Comparison Day

Familiarity breeds contempt, so says the idiom. But familiarity can also breed comfort. So says I. And I hope that I am neither an idiom nor an idiot.

Today, Alrica and I decided on an American comparison day. We wanted to see how certain Ecuadorian experiences of American-y things compared or contrasted to the American-y experiences of the American-y things. (I do recognize that American-y is not a word. Not only that, I am taking an adjective and adding the letter y to the end to make it more adjective-y. I make no apologies. Because I am not apology-y.)

They don't have our Thanksgiving, but they have our Black Friday? Capitalism rules!

 

We visited the Multicentro Shopping Center, also known as a mall. It was laid out in three floors with a central atrium you could look through, very much like some American malls. However, this one was much smaller than the malls at home. It also included kinds of businesses we don’t see in our malls, like an orthodontist’s office or a barber shop.

Shopping and teeth, what convenience!

 

These are the sorts of things we have seen in other places in the world. In fact in December of 2016, my whole family got haircuts at a shopping center barbershop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here’s a blog post about that.

A big difference between malls at home and malls here are the anchors. In the states, the anchor stores of malls tend to be big department stores like Macy’s or big sporting goods stores like Dick’s. But they don’t tend to be grocery stores. In fact, grocery stores in malls is almost unheard of in the USA. But that’s not the case in many other countries. And in Ecuador, the big anchor store was SuperMaxi, a grocery store.

We went into the SuperMaxi to buy a few things. The grocery store is much like the ones we have at home, aside from everything being labeled, as you might expect, in Spanish. But one thing that was new to me was hanging fishnet bags of vegetables. Mm, I want a sexy stocking full of potatoes! Oh papa! (Papa is Spanish for potato.)

Admit it, those are some sexy potatoes. Well, each has appeal.

 

We also visited two American classics: McDonald’s and KFC. Here is something very interesting, both of them had a separate counter for postres, desserts. In fact at the McDonalds, the postres counter was outside so drive by traffic could stop for ice cream.

Drive up convenience

 

We didn’t eat at the McDonalds but did check it out. They have kiosks for ordering and you could change the language to English. That was fantastic. However, we were surprised by how expensive the various burgers were. There were a couple of combos you could get for $3.50 which is more in line with the prices of Ecuadorian meals. But several of the items would cost you over $8 for the sandwich alone. That might not be so surprising in America, but in Ecuador that is sticker shock, baby!

The KFC had an upstairs seating area which stretched over its KFC only parking lot. KFC also had kiosks for ordering, but unlike McDonald’s the only language choice was Spanish.

Parking below, eating above

 

Surprisingly, of the two restaurants, the KFC had the bigger play area for children. I wanted to eat at KFC. You may know, KFC is in more countries than any other fast-food chain. I don’t think it has the most locations; I think that is McDonald’s. But it is in more countries than McDonald’s or anyone else. I wanted to know if the chicken tastes the same. Do they really use the Colonel’s secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices? It says on the wall that they do. But is it true?

Would a wall lie to me?

 

I will leave you in suspense on that for a moment. Let me tell you about some of the combos you could buy. You could of course get chicken, but with what? French fries were a choice, not so out there. But several of the combos offered menestra and rice. Menestra is a savory dish made of either lentils or beans. It is usually served with plain white rice, so you can mix the two if you want. I have tried menestra here in Ecuador and it is tasty. But not at KFC. Well, it may be tasty at KFC, but I didn't try it at KFC. I was going for American Comparison Day.

I got a drumstick and thigh with French fries and a 12 ounce Pepsi. (It was in ounces!) My friends, I bring you the news of the Andes. Yes, the chicken at Ecuadorian KFC tastes exactly like the chicken at American KFC. Independent of elevation or latitude, those eleven herbs and spices hit the palate in precisely the same way. It was a little taste of Kentucky in Pichincha. (Pichincha is the province of Ecuador in which Quito is situated.)

Alrica got a sandwich. Also very true to the KFC flavor spectrum.

 

I am not suggesting that Americans abroad should try to eat only American foods. Part of the joy of travel is to try new dishes, like menestra. But let’s not be completely contemptuous of familiarity. Sometimes it helps make being away feel right at home.

Unexpected Differences

When you travel to a foreign country, you expect a lot of things to be different. Like here in Ecuador, of course I expect most things to be written in Spanish. I expect temperatures to be given in degrees Celsius. I expect there are different foods in restaurants and even some of the foods I think I know won’t be quite the same.

But there are unexpected differences too. These aren’t like “Wow, I never would have imagined!” It’s more of day to day things that I never would have imagined, because why would I think about it?

Let’s take an example: Coca-Cola. The Coke here is much like the Coke at home, but they don’t use high-fructose corn syrup. And they use less sugar. It says so right on the bottle: Original Taste, Less Sugar. But this isn’t Diet Coke. It has sugar, just less.

Check out the volume?

 

At home you could look at the nutritional information and get a lot of details you probably don’t retain or care about. Here, the nutritional information is only three things: Sugar, Salt, and Fat. And they don’t give you a precise measurement (not a ratio level of data for my statistician readers), but just a scale: Alto (high), Medio (medium), Bajo (low), or "no contiene" (Doesn't have any). For those keeping track, that is the ordinal level of data. You know, for your edification.

Not the healthiest, huh? Buy hey, no fat!

 

What’s more, you can buy Coke in a 3.05 liter bottle. You can’t do that at home! Incidentally, why are beverages the only things in America that we measure in liters? And it isn’t even consistently all beverages. You can buy Coke in 12 ounce cans but also in two liter bottles. Weird.

Here’s another difference that, had I thought about it, would have been apparent. Ecuador, being situated as its name might imply, on the Equator, does not have Daylight Savings Time. Why would they need it? When your days are always twelve hours long, what would be the point?

I think this difference is leading Google to a savior complex. I was looking at my Google Calendar, and I noticed that these classes I teach at 8 PM Eastern Time were listed at 8 PM Eastern Time up to a point. After that, they were listed at 7 PM Eastern Time. In fact, all of my appointments from a certain date onward were shifted up an hour. I puzzled over this.

My first realization was that the shifted calendar appointments begin in March, just after Daylight Savings Time begins. I think Google is trying to save me! Certainly my Android cellphone knows I am in Ecuador. So Google knows. And it wants me to realize that 8 PM appointments in Eastern Time in the US will really be 7 PM appointments if I am still here. (At least after Daylight Savings Time begins.)

So now I am curious what will happen when I return the U.S. Will Google automatically move all those appointments back? Or will I have to shift them myself? I guess only time will tell. (Pun, get it. “Time” will tell. The time. Of the appointments. Have I over-explained it?)

At least my bad puns haven’t changed. Ah, consistency.

Eaten by a Bear

The trouble with knowing each other through our social media is that our social media lives are stellar. We post the interesting things, the exciting things, our great triumphs, or our fun encounters. We don’t tend to post the other parts of life. And so everyone is jealous of everyone’s life if they only see the social media happy side of it.

This includes our blog. For the most part, I blog about the amazing, interesting, or at least humorous experiences I have had in my travels. I perhaps get too pedantic, but I don’t usually get too pedestrian. No one wants to read about tedium like what settings I use for laundering my clothing or how I get confused as to which key opens which lock. Maybe I am over-generalizing. I shouldn’t say no one wants to read about that. Maybe someone does, but I don’t necessarily want to write about the tedium. (Those of you who would make the valid argument that most everything I write is tedium, well, keep your thoughts to yourself.)

There is a saying that goes “Sometimes you eat the bear. Sometimes the bear eats you.” I think the bear is a metaphor for life. It can’t really mean bear, right? I have actually never eaten bear. I don’t think I have even been in a situation in which bear was a menu choice. Also, while I am sure some people are, in fact, eaten by bears, it isn’t exactly common enough that we carry around bear repellent. I don’t think I know anyone personally who was eaten by (or had a loved one eaten by) a bear. So let’s all accept the bear as a metaphor and say sometimes you win at life and sometimes you don’t.

At present, I would say the bear is tucking a napkin into her collar and picking up her fork and knife. So in the spirit of #unvarnishedlife let me blog a bit about when travels aren’t going all that well.

I will begin with another idiom, “Into every life a little germ must fall.” (I know it is supposed to be rain, and it does rain here. But germ is more appropriate in this context.) Early this week I got sick. It really wasn’t terrible. No fever, no stomach pains, no headaches. But I completely lost my voice. I was also slightly fatigued. And the muscles where my spine and skull meet were not happy with me looking any direction but straight ahead.

This was awkward. For one thing, we are living in an apartment on the third floor. To get here involves walking up 38 steps. (Not quite Hitchcock.) Even pre-germ, the altitude sickness from being at 9,650 feet above sea-level meant we needed a moment to catch our breaths after each ascent. Now with my fatigue, well, that moment grows into a siesta.

Still, this didn’t stop Alrica and I from going out. We tend to go out for lunch each day. In Ecuador, almuerzo (lunch) is the big meal of the day, not dinner. Here, it is more cost effective to go out for lunch than to cook (at least in a place you’ve rented that doesn’t have any spices. I don’t want to buy spices only to leave them when we leave.) Now, I am no master of Spanish, but I tend to understand it and speak it better than Alrica. She took German when she was in school and that does her very little good in Ecuador. So my being unable to speak made things, let’s say, trickier.

However, here is one amusing sight I saw as we were out. And I have a whole story to go along with it. We must travel back in time to when I was in high school. My AP American History teacher was, I'll be gentle, not good. Early in the year she decided which students she liked and were good at the subject and which were not. She didn’t pay much attention to the assignments we turned in, and she tended to give us work that took up tons of time with very little learning.

One thing she started was giving out these sheets that had names of historical figures, names of places where historical events happened, or names of historical events. And we had to scour available resources to write a paragraph about each of these names on the worksheet. Mind you, this was pre-Google. This was when scouring meant finding books in libraries. And there were about forty names each week. So this took up a ton of time.

I had a friend in the class, Abdul. I still have Abdul as a friend. Well, Abdul and I realized that Mrs. C (see how I protect her identity) never read any of the worksheet answers. She just put a grade on them based on, who knows, her reading of tea leaves, and then handed them back. So we decided that rather than treating each name as a miniature research project, we would treat each name as a creative writing assignment. We made things up.

And it worked. Week after week, we got reasonably good grades, even though we hadn’t taken the assignment remotely seriously. That is until Marshall Ferdinand Foch. He was a name on one of the worksheets when we were studying World War I. If you don’t know, he was, at times during World War I, the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces. Foch is known for having been very courageous and ordering his troops to do some pretty reckless things. But they worked! Go Foch.

I didn’t know this when I was taking AP American History. And I didn’t bother to find out. Both Abdul and I wrote something based on the similarity of the name Foch to another four-letter word. After all, how do you think military blunders came to be know as Foch Ups?

I am sure you can see where this is going. This was the week that Mrs. C finally looked at the worksheets. Needless to say, she found our answers far less amusing than we did. Punishment ensued.

I bring this up because I am living near Plaza Foch in Quito, named, as I am sure you guessed, for Ferdinand Foch. In fact, many of the streets in this part of town are named for military leaders who fought the good fight. Not too far away is Jorge Washington Street. But back to Plaza Foch. While walking through it the other day, I saw this on one of the walls:

What the Foch?

 

Not only is this amusing in the same way that Abdul and I were amusing all those years ago, but it always interests me on another level when the puns in a non-English speaking country only make sense in English. I recognize that English is a lingua franca of the world, though here in Ecuador, almost no one speaks it. How many people find that joke funny? Maybe in this case it turns bawdy, lowest common denominator humor into something that only the select, in-the-know few can appreciate like certain fine wines which only true connoisseurs can appreciate for their subtle bouquet.

Enough of that tangent, back to the bear. Through the healing salve of time and the extrication through expectoration of a good deal of phlegm (which is a word you don’t find in just any blog, my friends), my voice is improving. I can’t yet master my Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget imitation, nor my Gizmo from The Gremlins. But when I just talk normally, I sound like a slightly scratchy version of myself.

But the bear wasn’t done with us. Yesterday, Alrica got very sick; we think most likely food poisoning. Her stomach was in agony, no position was comfortable, she could barely sleep, and other things. (If you were squeamish about me mentioning phlegm, I will just let your imagination fill in “other things.”) Note: I considered putting “other things” in single quotes just to make Alrica go a bit crazy, but since the bear is already upon her, I decided to she had enough on her plate. Or she was enough on the bear's plate.

So, at this moment, we are not having the best time in Quito. Alrica isn’t up for going out. I made lunch at home, and it was terrible. I bought pasta and pasta sauce at the grocery store. But the pasta sauces here aren’t like the ones we have at home. I bought this one, a brand called Los Andes.

No bueno

 

The Andes Mountains are not a region of the world one associates with high-quality Italian seasonings. That should have been my warning. Whoever the chef at Los Andes is that was put in charge of formulating their spaghetti sauce, I can only imagine it is someone who has never eaten spaghetti. They did know that the base is supposed to involve tomatoes, but beyond that, I think it was guesswork. What we end up with is something closer on the scale to barbecue sauce than spaghetti sauce, but even that is a generous description of its qualities (or, in truth, lack thereof.)

I recognize that my treatment of this fine Los Andes chef is a bit unfair. After all, the United States has many Italian immigrants and their descendants to carry on the fine tradition of sauce making a la the Italian palette. Ecuador does not.

Still, I ended up throwing much of my pasta away. And Alrica, who needs to eat as her stomach is more or less a vacuum at this juncture, found my lunch offerings insufficient to overcome her natural revulsion at foods in her present state.

So, yeah, the bear is enjoying her feast and we are the victuals. But this too shall pass. As soon as my vocal chords are back at one-hundred percent, I’ll let that ursine beast know who’s boss. In my best Dr. Claw impersonation, she will hear me growl, “I’ll get you next time, Bear. Next tiiiiiiiiime!”

Exit, pursued by bear.

Market Marked Differences

What it means to go to the market can vary from place to place. When we were traveling with our kids from 2015 to 2017 we often when to the market. There were different words for them, and there were different styles. We even have them in the United States.

Of course, there is the supermarket. You find that in most (but not all) places. They are not all entirely the same, but they aren’t all that different either.

Whereas the market can be quite different. In the United States we have farmer’s markets in which farms send people with goods to sell from a stand on certain days of the week. Some of them are temporary; they build the stand and take it down each time. You can find these in many cities. Other places, the stands are permanent and inside a building. Though it is generally not open seven days a week (or even five), they are open multiple times during the week. This is closer to the market we find in other countries.

One big difference is that these markets tend to be open every day. (Sometimes closed on whichever day is the Sabbath for that country.) They are usually much larger than the markets in the States. Some are laid out with meat sellers spread around and fruit sellers spread around and baked good sellers spread around. Others are more like department stores. There is a fruit section and all the fruit vendors are around that. There is a meat section and all the meat sellers are there.

Also what many of these markets have is a food court. They might call it various things, but that’s what it is. Here you find stands with prepared foods along the walls or the pillars and then tables throughout the area where you can sit to eat. Just like the food court in the mall, right? Well, there are differences.

Mercado Santa Clara - flower section and fruit section

 

Yesterday, Alrica and I went to Mercado Santa Clara. This is a market of the sort I was describing, what here is called a Municipal Market. This market is set up in sections, a fruit area, flower area, dry goods area, meat area (on the middle floor) and at the top is the patio de comidas (the food court.) There are entrances from the street which take you in at the bottom level (fruit, flowers, dry goods). There are other entrances from the street which take you up exterior stairs and land you in the patio de comidas.

We got lunch in the patio de comidas. Alrica had a rice dish and I don’t know what it was called. I got Caldo de Gallina (which is chicken soup with some delicious grain in it.) But they don’t cut up the chicken into bits. They must use chicken to make the broth, but when it is served, they put a quarter chicken in it, skin and all. I got a drumstick and thigh with my soup. This would be fine, except the only utensil I received was a spoon. I guess you eat it with your hands? That’s what I did.

I found the patio de comidas overwhelming. There were many choices and I walked around seeing what I could have. Of course, multiple stands were serving the same things. But one key difference here is that many of the stands have a woman shouting at you. You could just read the sign that tells you what they serve. But in addition, the woman is calling out the items on the menu. Even when I was within three feet of her, trying to read the sign, she was still shouting, and facing me. And this goes on all around the patio de comidas. So, the space is loud and difficult to concentrate in.

For the locals, this is probably the norm. They didn’t see bothered at all by it. For me, I had a hard time reading the signs and decided what to eat within the cacophony.

I discovered other differences too. You say what you want but then they don’t give it to you. Someone walks you to a table and sets it down there. You ask how much it costs and then give that person your money who goes away to make change. I assumed I was supposed to follow her to get my change. That was apparently not the case. They weren’t mad, but it was apparent I was not following the social norm.

Here is another difference in the market, imprecision. This isn’t meant to be deprecating. In some ways, this is wonderful. Let me explain.

Alrica bought some red bananas. Side note: Much like when we were in India, we are experiencing many types of bananas here in Ecuador. In the U.S. you only get one variety, the cavendish. But here there are finger banana and red bananas and more that I don’t know the names of. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blogpost.

Alrica asked for cuatro, four of the red bananas. But the woman at the fruit stand took a huge bunch of them and just broke off a piece. (Not four of them, it was actually five because that was easier to break off.) At an American market, these would then be weighed and a price per pound would be used to calculate what you owe. No, here she breaks it off and looks at it and says it will cost one dollar.

Red bananas, Cherimoya, Uvillas, Tuna (not the fish, the prickly pair)

 

We have found this at the fruit stands throughout the city. They don’t seem overly concerned about weighing most items. (They weigh things like berries, but not much else.) They just give you a price, usually rounded to the nearest quarter.

I like that imprecision. I’ve often thought in the U.S. that if I just peeled my bananas before I got to the register, think of how much money I would save. Yes, my bananas would get smushed and rotten, but I’d just have to eat them fast. Here, that’s not a concern. So long as no one is yelling at me from three feet away.

Crossing a Line

Guess what that yellow line is

 

When someone says to me, “You crossed a line!” (which you can only imagine how often that occurs in my life,) it generally means I have broken some social code or caused offense in a way that cannot be easily remedied. In this case, the line is a metaphoric line in the sand, and the sand is just as metaphoric as the line. In full disclosure, I did recently cross a line, but of a different sort.

There are many kinds of lines, metaphoric or actual. There are the aforementioned lines which bound social dictates. There are mathematical lines which stretch indefinitely in two directions. I suppose these are neither metaphoric, nor actual, but intellectual constructions, abstractions. You can’t really cross an abstraction, at least not concretely. There are picket lines, and those can be crossed! They aren’t truly lines, but groups of people with a metaphorical boundary, but we all know what it means to cross one. If you are wondering if that is what I crossed, no, I am not a scab.

But what about actual lines? There are a lot of these actual lines, though usually you can’t see them, and most of them are not really straight. They might seem locally straight, but they curve or bend. So here I need to expand my definition of a line to a one-dimensional curve in which corners and cusps are allowed, or to be mathematically precise, a shape which I can describe parametrically with only one real variable. (Many of you likely shudder at that last description, sorry, ignore it. You will know what I mean by a line.)

But even these actual lines I would separate into two categories: Lines that humans invented and lines that humans use to describe natural phenomena. This last category is, in my opinion, the coolest.

Let me explain what I mean. A month ago (and it feels like a lot longer ago than that,) Alrica and I visited Mount Sassafras Observation Tower. This is on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. And we were able to stand with one foot in each state. Does it matter which state I am standing in? Well, I guess if Alrica had chosen that moment to murder me it might determine which set of state police had to solve the crime (Alrica is too smart to leave much evidence) and arrest the perpetrator. How would they decide that? Where the attack came from? Where the body fell? Where a larger proportion of the body fell?

My body (still alive) straddling the border

 

The border is one of these lines, the ones that humans invented. In fact, all borders are invented lines. We, as a people, have decided that this is where one set of property or governmental jurisdiction ends, and another begins. There is nothing in nature that describes a shift there, only in our minds. In a thousand years, those borders could be different. Think of the world a thousand years ago. Not too many borders have stayed the same.

Another example of these lines that are a product of our imagination is lines of longitude. Don’t misrepresent me. These are very useful lines and they make logical sense to encircle the Earth that way. But why is the Prime Meridian, the zero line, where it is? Because humans arbitrarily chose to put it there. Astronomers working out of an observatory in Greenwich, England set the line so it would go through their observatory. Had Muslim astronomers defined the zero line of longitude while math and science were flourishing in Arabia and Europe was in the Dark Ages, we might have Baghdad Mean Time.

At least the Prime Meridian is a semicircular arc! (I might say it was straight, but you and I both know that’s stretching the word straight.) If you want to see just how active the human imagination is, check out the International Date Line! Yeah, it is supposed to be the meridian directly opposite the Prime Meridian. But that would be so inconvenient for places that it cut through the middle of. It’s Friday at my house but Saturday at my workplace down the street. Do I have to go in today? To handle such inconvenience, we use our imagination once again. What the heck, don’t go round the bend getting bent out of shape if we bend over backwards to bend it like Beckham! (Though Beckham’s bending is of a very different bent than that of a meridian.)

What about lines of latitude? Some of these are more than just our imagination, they have astronomical reality.

Take, for example, the Arctic Circle (or the Antarctic Circle). The Earth revolves about an axis (another line which you can’t see but describes a real world phenomenon.) And the Earth orbits the sun in a plane we call the ecliptic. But our axis and the ecliptic are not perpendicular. The axis is tilted about 23.5° (from being perpendicular. It is tilted about 66.5° from being a line in the plane of the ecliptic.) The Arctic Circle is the line of latitude at 66.5° north (and the Antarctic Circle is at 66.5° south) corresponding to this tilt in the Earth’s axis. Beyond these circles, there will be some winter days without sun and some summer days where the sun never goes away. These two circles represent a physical reality.

The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn do as well. These are the circles at 23.5° north (Cancer) and 23.5° south (Capricorn). They are the northernmost and southernmost latitudes where the sun could ever be directly overhead. And its all about that tilt!

There is a certain irony for me personally about these two circles. When we were in Namibia in December of 2015, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. I blogged about it then and you can check it out. You can even see pictures of my adorable children, much younger, at the Tropic of Capricorn with Alrica and me. But what’s the irony?

Even though I have lived most of my life in the northern hemisphere, I have stood upon the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere, but never stood upon the Tropic of Cancer in my own home hemisphere. I’ve crossed it in airplanes and even on ships, but they don’t have signs you can stand next to midair or midwater. We were pretty close to it in Al Ain, UAE. But there is a limited list of when close counts, and I’ve never heard Tropic of Cancer included in that list.

Finally, there is the granddaddy of all the lines of latitude: the equator! (Granddaddy is also metaphoric. There is not biological descent among lines of latitude.) And that brings me to our recent trip to Mitad del Mundo! (Yes, it took me over 1,100 words to get to the story. But hopefully at least 315 of those words were interesting.)

Mitad del Mundo, which translates as Halfway Point of the World, is a destination of the equator, by the equator, and for the equator. (Apologies to Lincoln.) This is a real line (or circle really). It is the circle around the surface of the Earth that is equidistant to each pole. Here the days last twelve hours and the nights last twelve hours all year long.

Head in the Northern Hemisphere, Feet in the Southern Hemisphere

 

Friends, I have stood upon the equator! I have sat upon the equator! I have laid upon the equator! I have risked being pulled apart by Coriolis Effect forces to have part of me in one hemisphere and part of me in another. (That last sentence is only half true. I was in two hemispheres, but there is no risk of being torn apart by the Coriolis Effect.)

If you make it to Quito, I recommend this attraction highly. We came in the morning when it is a lot less busy. We visited the monument built on the equator. You get to go up in the elevator and walk around it, crossing hemispheres as you go. But there is a lot more there than just the monument and the line.

At one place, tables have been set up, each with a nail sticking up so that the nail is on the equator. You can try to balance an egg on the head of the nail. Alrica tried, no success. And it doesn’t make any sense to me why this would be easier or harder at the equator than anywhere else.

There are museums here, shops, and historical recreations. For example, there are houses, recreations of the houses that the indigenous people built before the Spanish came. All of the houses were built of local materials like mud, reed, and grasses. This portion was split into three parts. There was a house of the natives from the Amazon region. There were two houses of the natives from the mountains, one round house which showed techniques before the influence of the Spanish and one rectangular house that showed techniques after the influence of the Spanish. Finally, there was a house of the natives of the Pacific coast.

One of the museums was all about the expeditions that were sent to Ecuador to find the equator and measure the curvature of the Earth at it. The expeditions were French, but Ecuador was controlled by the Spanish at the time. Spain allowed France to send the scientists. Did you know that after Newton proposed Universal Gravitation, there was some disagreement about what that meant for the shape of the Earth?

Many of us are taught that the Earth is a sphere. It’s not, but, to be fair, it is close. Newton proposed that the Earth was an oblate spheroid, like an M&M. In an M&M, it is like a sphere got squashed pushing on its poles, so its equator bulged out and its poles got closer together. Well, Newton didn’t think the Earth was as squashed as an M&M (in fact, all reliable evidence indicates that Newton never once even ate an M&M), but he did say it was the same sort of shape, just not squashed so much. The radius at the equator, said Newton, is greater than the radius at the poles, but not by a huge amount.

There was another school of thought that said, no, the earth is a prolate spheroid, where you would pull on a sphere at the poles, more like an American football or a rugby ball. They believed that the earth’s radius at the poles was greater than its radius at the equator.

No one really knew for sure which was right. No one had ever made the appropriate measurements before. The French, believing this to be an important question, both scientifically, and due to its impact on mapmaking and worldwide commerce, decided to send out two expeditions. One would go to the North Pole, the other to the equator. Each was to measure the curvature of the earth at their destination to settle the question.

The expedition to the equator chose the province of Quito. They thought it would be very close to the equator (they were right) and would give them enough access to enough land that they could make the measurements needed to calculate the curvature of the earth. They built checkpoints over a huge area of land in the Andes mountains. They made measurements of the stars in Orion’s belt from these various checkpoints. Then mathematically, they measured the curvature of the Earth using their observations.

It turns out that Newton was right, the Earth is an oblate spheroid. The equator is further from the center of the Earth than the poles are. This is because the Earth spins. When the Earth was forming, that spin caused a bulge in the middle, a centrifugal force effect.

So if anyone out there is still holding onto a belief that the Earth is a prolate spheroid (or that it is flat), I’m sorry to tell you this: that’s not the case. If, in so challenging your belief, I have crossed a line, well, I think we’ve pretty well-established that I'm a line crosser.

Double Chocolate

I’m sorry if I have you thinking about muffins or ice cream flavors at this point. Not my intention. Instead, I wanted to share the results of two recent adventures we had into the fascinating society of chocolate.

The first of these was called the Chocolate Experience. We met a woman named Ruth who brought us to her house. It began in her garden and we picked some flowers and herbs that we would later use in the chocolate we were making from scratch! You could probably guess that after the garden it was on to the kitchen. The other adventure was visiting Chocolate World, a shop in la Cuidad de Mitad del Mundo.

Chocolate cocktails! (Though one is alcohol-free)

 

Between these, I learned a great deal about chocolate, its history, its present, and its variety. Where to begin? Logic dictates: the beginning.

When the Spanish arrived in the New World, chocolate was already being consumed in much of Mesoamerica. It was completely new to the Europeans. Chocolate comes from the cacao plant which had been domesticated and spread throughout the region. But where did it originate?

Cacao is a rather short tree that grows in the canopy of taller trees. It requires a lowland region with lots of heat and lots of rain. That still leaves a lot of possible locations for the origin of cacao. Yet, scientists have pretty good evidence of where it all began.

Anthropologists were able to find organic remnants of cacao on pottery artifacts that are 5,500 years old. This is the earliest known evidence of human interaction with cacao. These artifacts were found in the Amazon rainforest in what is today eastern Ecuador. Thus, the best evidence we have so far indicates this is where chocolate originated.

But you must understand how far it is from a cacao tree to chocolate to wonder how the earliest cocoa pioneers figured this out. The cacao plant, after pollination by bees or hummingbirds, produces cobs. They are bigger than an ear of corn, shaped somewhat like a football (an American football, a rugby ball for those unfamiliar with American football), but about half again as large. Within those cobs is a pulpy fruit and within that are what we call the cocoa beans. Each cob has between thirty and forty cocoa beans. (It takes about ten to fifteen cobs to make a pound of chocolate.) The process to get from tree to bean has many steps. The cobs are harvested. Then they are placed in a wooden box, covered by banana leaves, and allowed to ferment for several days. The banana leaves help keep the heat of fermentation in the pile to allow it to happen better.

After two days, the outer leaf of the cob has biodegraded. Now there is the pulpy fruit. The yeasts eat the sugars in the pulp, creating acetic acid as a byproduct. Everything smells like vinegar and the pulp turns into slime or liquid and drains out of holes in the bottom of the box. Acid is an important part of preparing the beans.

Four days after going in the box, the cocoa beans are taken out. Then they are dried in the sun for a couple weeks. Cacao farmers don’t want to take the beans too early or they won’t make good chocolate. They need to get down to 7% humidity or less. The beans themselves are in a thin shell, and the farmers press on this shell to see if it is still pliable (too wet) or starting to get brittle (dry enough).

Now the beans are ready to be roasted and this is where we came in during our Chocolate Experience. While cacao is grown and sold in many places in Ecuador, it is not grown in Quito. It isn’t grown anywhere in the Andes Mountains. That’s because cacao needs low elevation and lots of heat. The Andes are high are very temperate.

Ruth, who led our Chocolate Experience, travels about three hours by car toward the coast of Ecuador to find the cocoa beans fresh. One could also travel east out of Quito and head into the Amazon River region to find cocoa. In fact, the most elite, sought after, and expensive chocolate comes from that region, the birthplace (we believe) of chocolate. It is called Arriba Chocolate, but this is because of a problem in translation. When the Dutch and English traders came to the ports of South America to buy the cocoa beans, they would ask the Ecuadoreans what it was called. The Ecuadoreans (now Spanish speakers) didn’t really understand the question. They told the traders this chocolate was arriba (which means above), trying to indicate it came from upriver. The traders took that to be the name of the chocolate.

Where you get the cocoa beans does matter. Remember I mentioned the bees and hummingbirds that pollinate the plant? Those animals also collect nectar from the taller trees which surround the cacao plants. So some of the nectar and pollen of the taller trees gets mixed into the cacao flower and affects the flavor of the chocolate that will be produced by that cacao plant. The seeds that Ruth purchased came from cacao that grows in the shade of banana trees and so has just the subtlest banana flavor.

Recall the beans themselves are in a thin shell. You take these beans, with their shells, and you roast them. We used a clay pot to roast them. The shells get very black, and sometimes you hear a loud pop similar to popcorn popping. Legend has it that if you are more calm and at peace when you are stirring the cocoa beans as they roast, you will hear more pops. If you are stressed, you will hear fewer. I don’t think I am particularly stressed, but no beans popped while I was stirring. Syarra got one pop. Alrica didn’t get any pops either. The blessings of childhood, I guess.

After they are well roasted and the shells are black on all sides, you take the beans, one by one, in your hand. Yes, they are very hot! Now you crack the outer shell and pull the bean out of it. The bean is brown and shiny and has an outer layer of oil. This not only protects the bean during the roasting and makes it shiny, it also makes your fingers soft. The broken shells are collected in one dish and the released beans in another.

Shells left on the left, shiny on the right!

 

The shells are ground with a mortar and pestle. This powder can then be used to make tea or it can be used to make a lotion for your hands. The beans are also ground, but not by mortar and pestle. They are ground in a large crank grinder, like a sausage grinder. It is a lot of work to turn the crank and grind the beans. What comes out are thin shavings of brown cocoa. Tasting them at this point, they are very bitter.

That’s one big irony of chocolate, it’s actually quite bitter. Of course, sugars are going to be added in the cooking process.

Here is another interesting historical happy accident. Before the Europeans came to the New World, there were no cows in the Americas. In fact, the Americas had very few animals which could be domesticated. Wolves had been domesticated and became dogs. In South America, llamas and alpacas were domesticated to be used as pack animals and for wool. They were not generally eaten. And they were certainly not milked. So the natives didn’t have milk.

When the indigenous people of Mesoamerica cooked their chocolate, they mixed it with water. The Spanish were the first to bring the beans back to Europe where it was to be prepared for the king. The explorers had asked the natives how to prepare it, but in a multilingual game of telephone (metaphoric telephone, as telephones were not yet invented) mistakes were made. A group of nuns in Spain were preparing the cocoa for the king, and they thought they were supposed to use milk when they cooked it. So milk chocolate was born from an accident.

Before

 

Back in present day, we took our ground cocoa beans and mixed them in orange juice (for some natural sugars), milk powder, some lavender, and some white sugar. This is not really how the pre-Columbian natives would have made it. They didn’t have white sugar, and they didn’t have oranges. Oranges are native to East Asia. We cooked it for about thirty minutes to get a beautiful bubbling pot of brown goo.

After

 

Also, chocolate making is about joy, so you have to dance while you stir. Naturally, right? We listened to “Bate que bate el chocolate” and showed off our swaying hips as our spoons and feet when round.

We tried our chocolate with seven different flavors (one at a time): Rose (actual rose petals we had picked in the garden), peanuts, salted caramel, ginger, chili pepper, cinnamon, and coconut. They were all very different, even using the same chocolate. Alrica and Syarra liked the cinnamon best. I was all about the chili pepper. (You don’t really notice it at first and then there is a delightful transition of flavors in your mouth.)

At Chocolate World we got to experience chocolates made in Ecuador and the region. We learned how each company is a community or a village. Some are in the Amazon region, others nearer the coast. They are working to sustainably produce their chocolate and have various social justice initiatives. One community on the Ecuador-Colombia border is giving young men jobs and skills as chocolate makers so they won’t become drug mules making border runs. In another place, a group of indigenous women wanted to make chocolate, but their tribe restricted what women are allowed to do. So they moved to a nearby village and started their own chocolate harvesting and making company. They help other women to greater autonomy.

We purchased some chocolates from some of these communities. We also got cups of hot chocolate. They were so thick and so rich that the stirring straw stands straight up when you leave it in the liquid!

 

Straight up (and not because we are on the equator)

The next time you enjoy chocolate (even in muffins or ice cream), look at what percent cocoa it is. It’s likely not that high a percent. And when you consider how time-consuming and labor intensive it is to get and prepare the beans, you’ll understand. True 100% cocoa is expensive. But so worth it!

Highs (9350) and Lows (-2)

One week can change everything! Well, maybe not everything. I didn’t change my name, nor did I gain or lose toes. So, there are a few minor things that stayed the same. But plenty of things changed. Speaking as a mathematician, I would say I have had great changes in two axes, the vertical and one of the horizontal axes. I’m not even in the same hemisphere as I was.

So let’s lay it out from a Wednesday to a Wednesday. On Wednesday, January third, I woke up in Leesburg, Florida where I was pet sitting a dog and two guinea pigs. On Wednesday, January tenth, I woke up in Quito, Ecuador where dogs roam the streets and people eat guinea pigs as a delicacy. That may already sound like a lot of change, but I didn’t even get into what happened in between.

That first Wednesday was the last day of our housesit in Leesburg. Note: “Our” in this case is Alrica, Syarra, and me. Syarra is on break from school and is spending her Winter Break traveling with us. We left in the late Wednesday morning and headed to Destin, Florida to visit Alrica’s sister, Adana, and Adana’s husband, Don. Destin is a very pretty area that is 26 feet above sea level. Though, you can go to the beach (which we did) and be at sea level. Because you are at the sea. See?

We had a wonderful two days in the Destin area, dare I call it the Destin destination? But then, on Friday we traveled through a rainstorm to reach New Orleans, Louisiana. Here we met Alrica’s brother, Kevin, Kevin’s wife, Mandy (or Amanda, but she has always been Aunt Mandy to my kids), and their two kids, Konnor and Rosie. The rain tapered off and we did a bit of an exploration of the French Quarter that evening.

We had a fantastic seafood dinner. We shared so I got to try crawfish etouffee, gumbo, shrimp with a heavy-in-horseradish cocktail sauce, and delicious seafood boil on flatbread. Next, we wandered Bourbon Street. We heard some lovely live music and danced in the street (which is not the least unusual for Bourbon Street.) Alrica went into a bar she had heard of after which the bouncer freaked out that maybe Syarra (holding the hands of the two elementary school age cousins) was going to follow.

On Saturday, Adana drove in to spend time with us. This was the first time the three Green siblings had all been together in, well, awhile. (I should note that Green is an appellation not a description. They are neither emerald in hue nor, at this stage of life, wet behind the ears.) We did a more thorough exploration of the French Quarter, visited some amazing art galleries, watched a street magician whose finale was “the Frodo” (where he throws a ring up in the air and catches it on his outstretched index finger), saw the Cathedral of St. Louis, ate hand pies in Jackson Square, bought pralines, and visited the French Market. We played some dice games and board games, and then we bid goodbye to Adana.

Pics or it didn't happen! Adana, Kevin, and Alrica together in front of the Cathedral of St. Louis

 

That evening, we returned to Jackson Square. There was a parade honoring the birthday of Joan of Arc, part of an unofficial start of the Carnival season in New Orleans. This was a parade unlike any I have attended. It had a plot! First, they honored various saints such as Saint Andrew (including bagpipers), and Saint George (with a huge dragon with moving parts and lit eyes controlled by several puppeteers). Then the parade went through various stages of Joan’s life, her victories, her trial for heresy, her death, her posthumous pardon, and her eventual (like 450 years later) canonization.

The next day we visited the Garden District with its amazing architecture. We had incredible Po’ Boys for lunch. There was this gravy on my Po’ Boy which was so savory and delicious, I wonder what was in it. We took a ferry across the Mississippi River and visited Algiers Point. This is an adorable neighborhood in which the houses have bright colors and beautiful detail work. We ate beignets at Café Du Monde. I got coated in powdered sugar. And you can see the ground littered with powdered sugar for a block in each direction. Also, not to neglect the most important details, I saw the distinctive fire hydrants of New Orleans. They are narrower (smaller diameter) than most other cities and they have caps of various shapes, designs, and colors. (I know, most of my regular blog readers are in it for the hydrants.)

Pair of hydrants for my peeps!

 

On Monday, we left New Orleans which has points two feet below sea level to fly to Quito, Ecuador at a staggering 9350 feet above sea level. That’s our change in the vertical axis. (For full disclosure, we actually spent a night in Miami, Florida so we didn’t reach Quito until Tuesday.) But now we are in the Southern Hemisphere! Not by a lot, we are at 0.2 degrees south latitude. But that’s still south! (For those keeping track, that is the change in the horizontal axis.) As for the other horizontal axis, well, Quito is at almost the same longitude as Miami. Still, it is a change from New Orleans.

Yes, it was a lie, not everything has changed. I was being hyperbolic (meaning I was using hyperbole, not living on a hyperbola.) But wasn’t this sufficient justification for a bit of puffery? I’ll leave it to you to decide.