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.