Patience...

Delays Ahead

There are a lot of things about life in Ecuador that are different from what I am accustomed to in the U.S. For instance, the people here are a lot touchier, and even greetings with complete strangers manifest themselves in kisses on the cheek or awkward, extra-manual body contact between dudes. Most of the differences are easy to get used to because they simply involve learning a customary courtesy or accepting the fact that people in this country put ketchup on everything, but others have more profound implications on the way I live my life on a daily basis. One of the most difficult adjustments for me has been dealing with Ecua-time.

Ecuadorians have shown themselves to be a warm and welcoming people, but they are not celebrated organizers. I'm currently learning this first-hand as I deal with the start of my next semester teaching at SECAP.

Since SECAP is a trade school, the students are of all ages and they sign up independently for individual semesters of classes. Because registration is semester-by-semester and the teachers at the school frequently move in and out of positions, it is up to the students to remember on their own when classes start and to sign up for them. To help recruit students every semester, SECAP puts out ads in the paper when the new semester starts.

This semester, the administration neglected to put out any advertisements for the classes. The result was that I had three students show up for my first class.

The cultural difference was immediately highlighted when I brought up the fact that there were only three students in my class to the administration. "Don't worry,"they told me "more students will sign up over the next couple of weeks."

In the U.S., the first day of class is the one that everyone attends. It is when the teacher has the opportunity to lay out all the rules and expectations for the class, and set the tone early on about how the class will run and what the students can expect from the course. One of the areas I skimped on in my first semester was not clearly establishing all the rules of the course on the first day. The result was that I had students who would come in late to class and miss test days with no real consequences other than a stern talking to.

This semester I was determined to get it right so I wrote up all the rules clearly outlining how the class would operate and the repercussions for things like missed tests and coming to class late. I ironed my shirt and debuted a new sportcoat so the students would know from the start that I'm a boss. I was all ready to give my first class and kick off the new semester on the right foot when only three people showed up.

I have no problem teaching a class of three people. In fact, it would be a great class for the students because they would have much more talking time with me. What I do have a problem with is having students come in a week after classes have started so that they are already behind and down a week of attendance.

In the U.S., we place a high value on scheduling and promptness. The American in me wanted to go on a tirade about how we have a schedule and the students should have all already been registered long before the teacher came in for the first day of class, but then I remembered that I am not in America.

The only way to survive living abroad is to roll with the punches and adopt the local attitudes, so I holstered my frustration and came to an agreement with the administration to push everything back a week so we can get more students, inform them when classes begin, and start this semester the right way. The more time I spend here the more my Ecuador is beginning to show, so let's just hope that I adjust back to American-time when I head back Stateside.

Homestay Horrors

Since I have not been working this week due to the delay of the start of the semester, I have been spending a lot of time in my house. The extended family was back in Ambato visiting, so I got to share some warm memories with the children of the family who never cease to astound me with their ability to have multiple distinct crying episodes in a single minute.

Yesterday morning I was woken up by the sound of the youngest kid crying in the bathroom right outside my door. The reason? He was taking a dump and he was screaming for his dad to come wipe his butt. At 7:30 in the morning.

There is an old saying in my family that sums up how I feel about this situation. It goes, "If you can't wipe your own ass, don't take a shit at 7:30 in the morning."

Tonight I was scavenging in the kitchen for leftovers from lunch when I found that there was still some chicken soup left. I poured myself a few ladles and a hunk of unidentified chicken meat and began distractedly eating it while checking my e-mail.

Halfway through the soup I picked up the chicken part and tried to find some meat on it. I was biting different promising areas, but coming up short each time. I started looking more closely at the piece of meat in my hand and noticed a flap of skin that was hanging off in a weird way. It had ridges on it and I thought it looked a lot like the floppy thing that chickens have on their heads. Then I noticed a slit that looked like an eye socket. Then, about 30 seconds later that I should have, I realized that I was in fact sucking on a chicken head.

"I'm watching you!"

When it finally hit me that I was eating a chicken head it freaked me out and I actually jumped in my seat a little. Again, I was shown in dramatic fashion how American I really am by being scared by finding a chicken part in my chicken soup.

I eat chicken all the time in the U.S., but because our culture (at least in N.Y.) has managed to put so much distance between the living bird and what ends up on our plates, I am still thrown by seeing meat that reminds me that it came from a live creature.

And if you think this image is going to give you nightmares, wait until I upload a picture of a whole guinea pig being roasted on a skewer. Trips to the pet store will never be the same.

Grammar Talk: Impersonal Constructions

SECAP Ambato decided not to put out advertising for this semester's classes. The result was that I had three students in my class on Tuesday and we have postponed classes for a week to promote the coming semester in the local newspaper and get some more students.

The result of this one-week extension of my break is that I have been hitting the Spanish grammar books again to put an end to my doubts about impersonal constructions and move forward on my quest to becoming a Spanish genius.

Is it like English?

My first instinct when trying to put together impersonal statements was to use the same constructions we use in English and translate them directly.

In English, one common way to create impersonal sentences is to use the second-person singular pronoun you, as in You have to cook oatmeal before you eat it. While this utterance uses an ostensibly specific pronoun, it is really making an impersonal statement and the advice that oatmeal should be cooked before it is eaten applies to everyone, not just the person being directly spoken to.

I can't recall ever hearing this use of the second-person singular tú in Spanish to convey an impersonal meaning as it would in English, but B&B states that it is used informally in Spain, even in situations in which the speakers are using usted with one another, Es increíble, si lo piensas (It's incredible if you think of it). In Ecuador, I never use or hear this construction, so I would not recommend its use in this country.

Another common impersonal construction we employ in English is using the third-person plural pronoun they to refer to no one in particular when the subject is either obvious or unimportant.  

They say that talking on cell phones gives you cancer. Who is they? The speaker didn't bother mentioning the names of all the institutions that came to this conclusion because he either doesn't know their names or he is talking to someone who wouldn't care even if he did know them.

Also, They arrested Tim's uncle yesterday. Since an impersonal construction is used here, we can assume that the captor of Tim's uncle was the police since that is the most likely possibility. If Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife had done the arresting, the impersonal they would probably not have been utilized because they are not the most likely subject and they deserve specific mentioning.

In Spanish, the use of the third-person plural forms to signify impersonal constructions works exactly as it does in English, Hablan feo en la costa. The speaker is not referring to the speech of particular individuals, but to people from the coast in general.

I encounter this construction frequently in Ecuador and use it a lot myself since it is so similar to how I would speak in English. This is perhaps the easiest way to make correct impersonal statements for native English speakers.

How One Uses the Impersonal

A less common form of the impersonal in English is to use the word one to mean a person in general, One should never take calls at the dinner table. In English, this sounds a bit stuffier than using you or they to make impersonal sentences, but the Spanish word uno/una functions the same way, Uno tiene que aprobar para pasar al próximo nivel.

As I'll talk about later on, the use of uno to denote an impersonal subject comes in handy when pronominal verbs make using the impersonal se impossible.

Spanish Only Constructions

There are two more ways to express impersonal subjects in Spanish that we do not have equivalents for in English (both of which are quite confusing).

The first is the one that I was familiar with before I came to Ecuador: the impersonal se. In this construction, the pronoun se is added before a verb conjugated only in the third-person singular, Se come mucho pescado en la costa (They eat a lot of fish on the coast).

The impersonal se can lead to some ambiguities when the subject is singular (since the impersonal se is never plural, Se venden manzanas en el mercado can only be passive), but I rarely find that they interfere with the essential message of an utterance because context clues are usually available to clear things up.

For instance, B&B gives the example sentence En España se come mucho. In a discussion about a particular type of food, garlic for instance, the se in this sentence would be interpreted as the passive se and it would read A lot of garlic is eaten in Spain.

If the discussion was about the quantity of food eaten in general, it would be interpreted as the impersonal se and would read People in Spain eat a lot. Like I mentioned before, the main point usually comes across depending on the context and the impersonal and passive se rarely get me mixed up.

The impersonal se is very common in my experience and it is definitely worth mastering.

*It should be noted that in sentences with pronominal verbs, the impersonal se cannot always be used. For instance, the pronoun is essential to the meaning of the verb cansarse. In this sentence from B&B, Con estas cosas se cansa mucho, the subject is someone specific and the meaning is that He/She gets very tired with these things. If someone wanted to make this sentence impersonal it would be impossible to have two ses next to each other. Instead, the pronoun uno/una must be used to make it Con estas cosas se cansa uno mucho (One gets very tired with these things).

The last variety of impersonal constructions is the one that has eluded me until I arrived in Ecuador and started paying close attention when listening to people speak and reading the newspaper. It is the impersonal se with the personal a.

When the subject of a sentence is a living thing that is capable of doing things to itself, the passive se can lead to difficult ambiguities. The example provided in B&B is, Se mataron dos ingleses. This can be interpreted as a passive, reciprocal, or reflexive se to mean that Two Englishmen were killed, Two Englishmen killed each other, or Two Englishmen killed one another.

A common attempt from an English speaker to rectify this ambiguity would be to invoke the passive using ser (Dos ingleses fueron matados). B&B notes that this style is typical of written language but rare in spontaneous speech.

To avoid this ambiguity in spontaneous speech, therefore, an impersonal construction can be used to imply an unidentified human agent as the subject to eliminate the reciprocal and reflexive interpretations. With this construction the sentence would read, Se mató a dos ingleses. The only interpretation here is that two Englishmen were killed. The information conveyed is the same as the construction with the passive se (two Englishmen were killed by an unnamed subject) but without the possibility of confusing it with other constructions.

Other examples from B&B include:

• Se persiguió y encarceló a millares de creyentes. (Thousands of believers were persecuted and jailed)

• Se incitaba a las muchachas a trabajar más que los muchachos. (The girls were encouraged to work harder than the boys.)

•  ...hasta que se les pueda evacuar (...until they can be evacuated)

B&B notes that many speakers prefer to use le/les instead of lo/la/los/las with this construction even when the pronouns are the direct object of the verb, which explains the pronoun choice in the last example (leísmo anyone?).

Conclusion

Expressing impersonal with:

• Second-person singular: not particularly common where I am; I don't recommend it.
• Third-person plural: easy for English speakers and common in Spanish; do it.
• Uno/Una: more familiar for English speakers than the impersonal se, and necessary with pronominal verbs.
• Impersonal se: tricky for English speakers, but learn it.
• Impersonal se + personal a: technically an impersonal construction, but used to express otherwise exceedingly ambiguous passive constructions; worth at least being familiar with.

New Year's in Drag

I had a long, one-month break after my first semester of teaching English at SECAP, so I met up with my friend who teaches with me, Caitlin, and her visiting friend from home to travel around Ecuador a bit.

Mindo

Our first stop was a town called Mindo. It is a very small place in the cloud forest, about two hours outside of Quito, where visitors go to enjoy nature (birdwatching, hiking, butterfly farm) and do extreme sports (rafting, zip-lining, bungee jumping). I was fortunate to have been able to experience both the natural and extreme aspects of Mindo during the one day we spent there.

We got to Mindo late at night, so we went right to sleep and starting exploring early the next morning. The first thing we did was visit the butterfly farm in Mindo. It is essentially a big room with with net walls and butterflies everywhere. There were so many flying around that it was hard to walk anywhere without bumping into them constantly, and they occasionally land on visitors' bodies and hang out.

The pattern on these guys is supposed to look like the head of a snake, although I don't see it anymore.

I'm not a huge fan of butterflies in general because they still freak me out like any other bug. However, it was cool seeing so many of them in one place and there were some massive butterflies the size of my open palm, the likes of which I had never seen before.

After enjoying the serenity of the butterfly farm, we all decided to get radical and head off to do zip-lining. A zip-line consists of a cable connected to two distant points that slopes downward. The user gets into a harness and attaches a (pardon my technical jargon) spinning thing to the cable and slides down, fast. The attraction of the zip-lines in Mindo is that since it is in the could forest, the views from up on the cable are great.

In addition to sliding down the cable in a seated position in the harness, we also had the option of two other positions called superman and butterfly. Superman puts your body horizontally so it is like you are flying through the forest like a superhero, and butterfly situates you upside down so the harness painfully digs into your hips and makes you wonder why you chose to do it over the other two perfectly enjoyable options. I hate extreme sports and won't usually even ride a roller coaster, but I was feeling particularly brave that day and tried out all the positions. The pictures were taken on my friend's camera, so I will put them up on the Photos page when I get a hold of them.

Ambiguous advertising

Before I go on to describe what I did next, it will be necessary to go back to earlier that morning when I bought tickets to the zip-line. After I had purchased a pass to do the normal zip-lines, the girl at the desk brought a new attraction to my attention: Tarzan Swing. The poster advertising the attraction provided absolutely zero information about what it was, except that it would be extreme with a capital "X". The girl trying to sell me the ticket mimed something that resembled a zip-line on a long cord that swings back and forth. She was talking really fast when she was describing it to me, but I didn't ask her to say it again because she was cute and I didn't want to embarrass myself by admitting that I didn't understand. The only utterance from her I completely understood was "It's really cool." "I'm really cool too"—I thought to myself—and a ticket for Tarzan Swing was bought.

Now back to the cloud forest. After I had completed zip-lining, our guide started fitting me into a new harness for the Tarzan Swing. I still had in my head that it would be a modified zip line in which my body would swing from side to side while I went down the cable. We walked up to a platform over a huge pit, and the only thing I could see overhead was a series of cables coming from several directions meeting at a common point far off from the platform.

I started to use my imagination to figure out what I was going to connect my harness to and where I was going to slide since all the cables led to the same point. The stupidity of what I signed myself up for didn't click until I asked the guide what was actually going to happen. Words weren't necessary in this case, and all it took was one casual wave of the guide's hand to reveal that Tarzan Swing was simply a free fall off the platform.

Like I said before, I am not much of an adrenaline junkie, so I ran as fast as I could away from the edge of the platform and refused to do it until I saw someone else do it first. Thirty minutes and three Tarzan Swings by other tourists later, I figured since I already paid for the thing I might as well do it so I sacked up and strapped in. One of the scariest parts of the Tarzan Swing was that it took four guys about five minutes to hook up all the necessary cables to me. Wires and pulleys were flying all around my body, and I could imagine how easy it would be to get them tangled up or miss a buckle.


The way it works is that they tie the rope to your harness very tightly and hold you back until the gate is opened, so that instead of having to jump off they just let go and the rope pulls you off. When I was all hooked up and ready to go, I had a few final questions for my guide.

- How do I fall?
- Upright.
- Do I hold on to this?
- Yes.
- Will I faint?
- No. Worst case scenario you shit your pants.

With those words of encouragement I was off, and as I was swinging back and forth I screamed every Spanish language expletive I could come up with. The guides all got a kick out of it, and I'm glad they did because I annoyed them enough by pacing around the platform for thirty minutes before finally deciding to go.



New Year's

After Mindo I headed back to Ambato so I could be home in time for the New Year's celebrations. I got ready to go out with some friends in a popular neighborhood of Ambato called Ficoa. As I was leaving, my host father warned me that it would be difficult to find a cab, and he was right because it took me fifty minutes to get one (an absurd amount of time in Ambato) and I had to pay twice as much. I was reluctant to give the guy so much money for a ride, but when we were driving and I saw how difficult it was that night, I started thinking that three dollars wasn't enough for what he had to go through.

On New Year's Eve in Ambato (and I think in other parts of the country as well), men dress up like women and take to the streets to molester passing cars. The get in the way of traffic and don't move until the drivers hand them some change. It was incredibly bizarre, but even more annoying because the cab had to stop two or three times every block to give the cross dressers money.

A more understandable New Year's tradition in Ecuador is the burning of big paper figures called "old years." These were displayed all over the place and they sometimes took creative and funny shapes, like one of president Correa in a gas mask and wheelchair from the police protest a few months ago. At midnight, people light their huge paper dolls on fire in the streets. A couple of minute after midnight, dolls were in flames everywhere, people were launching fireworks, and Ficoa straight looked like a war zone.

If you're looking at this picture right now going "Wow that looks kind of creepy", it's because it was.

Montañita

My month-long break between semesters ended with a trip to a popular beach town in Ecuador called Montañita. It was a long ~eight hours of bus travel to make it to the coast, but it felt really nice to breathe warm air and swim in the ocean.

It seems to be a common misconception that all of Ecuador is some kind of tropical paradise and that there is always hot weather here. On the coast that is certainly the case, but where I live in the mountains the weather is much cooler. We are on the equator, so the sun is still incredibly strong when it is out. However, because we are at such a high altitude the weather is much cooler here and I wear a jacket out at night. Not that I'm complaining (I actually prefer the weather here in the mountains) but I just thought I would give some justification for the long bus ride to anyone at home who was unaware of Ecuador's climate diversity.

While I was in Montañita, I gave surfing another try after a two-year hiatus. The lesson I took was a half-hour of "surf theory" on land followed by an hour and a half of water practice. I understand the utility of the land practice since a lot of getting up on a surfboard is having trained muscle memory so you can get into position fast enough to catch a wave, but I could not stop laughing at how ridiculous I felt paddling in the sand and bouncing up and down on my board to simulate riding a wave.

I am happy to say that for my second time surfing I am pretty awesome. I got up more times than I didn't, and my instructor was thoroughly impressed (I didn't tell him it wasn't my first time, but he never asked). If I keep up this pace of taking a surfing lesson for an hour and a half every two years, I should be able to go out on my own by the time I'm 73.

Back to School

This week I start my second semester of classes. Now that I have a few months of teaching experience, I feel incredibly optimistic about this semester. It was a strange feeling the first few days of classes being in front of a room full of students when my entire life I had always been one of the people sitting in a desk. I have come a long way to the point of actually feeling like a teacher and being comfortable managing 20+ students for two and a half hours at a time. I also recently bought a new sportcoat that I look great in, and everyone knows that nothing commands respect like well-fitting, smart-casual outerwear.

I talked to my parents this past week and they both asked me "When does school start?" They've asked me that plenty of times throughout my life, but it was very weird hearing that when they really meant to ask "When do you start work again?"

Word Recycle

I entered a travel writing contest about a month ago and just recently found out that I was not selected as a finalist. Since I wrote an essay for my application and it has to do with my experiences in Ecuador, I figured I would post it here so people could read it.


A Different Breed of Freedom

Life in the United States is on-rails. The American dream is a roller coaster that promises happiness to anyone willing to work hard enough to pay the park entrance fee (or jump the turnstile when no one is looking). Once inside, you learn the rules and understand that you have to wait in line just like everyone else in the park. When it is finally your turn, you file into the cart and strap yourself in. Remember, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. The rides are sometimes scary, but somewhere in the back of your head is the knowledge that you are on a track, and nothing can go wrong.

Ecuador has no rails. Life in this country is like playing on a trampoline in someone’s backyard. The amusement is cheap and accessible to just about anyone walking by, but there is no guarantee that it won’t collapse. There are no lines or any system that polices who gets to enjoy it—whoever can jump on and not get shoved off does whatever he wants. No maneuver is prohibited, no matter how ill conceived: back flips, mid-air chicken fights, flying dives into a nearby kiddy pool, or what have you. The taste of complete freedom is sweet, but along with it comes ample opportunity for dangerous mishaps (see: any episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos).

My point is that, as an American, I pride myself on all the sophisticated freedoms I am granted in my homeland. Lofty ideals like freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial come at a price, however, and there are some more basic freedoms that must be revoked in order to preserve our first-world way of life. This is usually done with the ends of fair treatment and safety in mind, but it has taken living abroad for me to realize that we do not enjoy every flavor of freedom available to mankind in the States. Nowhere has this been demonstrated to me more clearly than in third-world traffic.

I am from New York City, a place where the public transportation system tirelessly pumps the human life force of the city to every extremity of its five boroughs. There are precisely timed schedules, time-saving Metro Card swipes, and safety regulations abound. If a train doesn’t come on time or someone gets hurt due to reckless driving, the city is sure to have a mob of outraged citizens on its hands. Public transportation in New York is sometimes described as “crazy”; I think a better word is “busy”. No matter how packed the train gets, you can be certain that someone is carefully monitoring safety. Even though you might get pushed around a bit at rush hour, there is always an overarching order to things that the people respect.

Public transportation is Ecuador? Now that I would describe as crazy.

Let’s talk for a bit about the bus system, which is the form of transportation I utilize most frequently in my South American foster home. A new dimension of freedom is apparent even before the bus is boarded because in Ecuador, bus stops do little to control where buses stop. At any point on the route, prospective passengers can wave the bus down and board. Bus stops be damned; I’m free to get on the bus wherever I want in Ecuador!

Another consequence of not having bus stops is (you guessed it) the buses don’t stop. If you’re an old lady or you are carrying a baby you may get the luxury of a full stop and three seconds to get your feet off the ground. If you are anything else, you had better be ready to get a running start and grab on for dear life because that driver isn’t waiting for you to get behind the white line.

The same goes for getting off. Once the driver acknowledges that you want to exit the vehicle be prepared to hit the ground running because he wouldn’t want to (gasp!) make the bus come to a complete stop just for you to get off.

Jumping onto and off of a moving bus is the kind of freedom I yearned for as a kid. This was the kind of thing I saw people do in movies and television, but in the States the ride never starts moving until the safety bar has been securely locked in place. It appears to be such a simple action, but there are too many restrictions in the U.S. to even think about a driver not coming to a complete stop for a passenger.

Passengers are not the only people to take advantage of the freedoms allowed on buses. Vendors jump on buses at red lights and walk up and down the aisle to shamelessly hawk merchandise: candy, fruits, CDs, and pretty much anything else they can carry on board with them. On longer bus rides from city to city, bus vendors up their game.

I was once on a bus ride to the capital city and a man walked on with a large tin filled with fried chicken and French fries. People were buying hot meals on a bus ride from some guy who just jumped on from the side of the road. Did he have a permit to prepare food and sell it on a bus? I can say with confidence that he did not, but true freedom doesn’t require permits or licenses—if it is physically possible (and anything short of murder), no one is going to stop you from doing it in Ecuador.

When buses aren’t an option, taxis are the next best way to get around town. It’s easy, just wave one down, hop in the back seat, and fasten your seat… wait, where’s the seatbelt? Oh, that’s right, taxis never have seatbelts because no one cares. The law might technically oblige everyone to wear a safety belt, but in the incredibly rare instance that a car is pulled over, it’s nothing that can’t be solved by throwing a few bucks at the ambitious policeman.

But the freedom doesn’t stop at what happens inside the vehicle. Stop signs and red lights are best described as suggestions in Ecuador, and drivers ultimately pass through them as they see fit. That is not to say that Ecuadorian drivers are all blowing through red lights and stop signs, railing pedestrians and crashing into other cars at every intersection. They take precautions to prevent such disasters.

I can recall one salient example of a taxi I was in whose driver used an ingenious technique to prevent collisions. As he ignored a stop sign or red light, he would hit the panic button on his keychain so his car would emit a loud siren. This would (presumably) alarm possible side-coming traffic of his intent to ignore traffic conventions. I didn’t see him get into an accident while I was in the cab, so I can’t really say it was a bad method. What I do know is that it was a bold demonstration of the kind of freedom in this country that is unfathomable in my own.

I have learned from my experiences with third-world traffic that freedoms of every variety do not coexist in the United States. It is nice to know that life in the States is safe because everyone is on rails, but sometimes it is fun to jump off track and see what you can do when no one is around to stop you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just had a great idea involving a trampoline and I need to find a hose to fill up this kiddy pool.

We Wish You an Ecua-Christmas

TLI

I am very fortunate to have a host family here in Ecuador that looks out for me and includes me in their family plans. The only problem is that they have a bad habit of not telling me what their plans are until we are just about to do them. For instance, when my dad was leaving Ecuador, my host family graciously offered to give him a ride to the airport in Quito. I went along, but after we dropped him off we drove around Quito for a while until we arrived at the gate of a recreation center for soldiers and their families (my host brother is a UN Peacekeeper). This is the conversation I had with my host mother in the car outside.

- Where are we going?
- This is a recreation center for the military. Did you bring a bathing suit?
- (*sarcastically pat pockets mock-searching for the bathing suit I obviously didn't bring because I thought we were just driving my dad to the airport and I didn't bring anything, then put on a face acting like I am surprised that I didn't find it*) No.
- That's fine, you can buy a bathing suit inside.

I quickly checked my tone because I figured that even though they didn't tell me to bring trunks, I could still buy a pair inside the place and go swimming anyway. Problem solved. Once inside, I walked up to the counter with my host mother and she asked the lady for a bathing suit for me. What the woman placed on the counter was a thin, 3'' by 3'' plastic package that even before it was opened loudly proclaimed "You will not wear me."

The woman working at the counter took the piece of fabric out of the package and unfolded it. The bathing suit she presented to me was so revealing that I wouldn't even feel comfortable wearing it as underwear, let alone in a pool full of witnesses. Needless to say I didn't go swimming that day. Instead, I took a three hour nap in the lobby until my host family decided to leave.

Staying faithful to their "don't tell Krishna, it'll be funny" policy, my host family didn't tell me anything about what their plans were for Christmas. My family explained to me that in Ecuador, people traditionally eat a turkey dinner for Christmas. I saw the turkey in my kitchen throughout the day on Christmas Eve and got really excited about eating a big dinner that night. At around 6:00 p.m., everyone sat down at the dinner table and we had tamales for what I assumed was an appetizer. I only ate one small tamale and my host mother asked me if I wanted another. "No thanks," I replied coolly "I'm saving space for the turkey."

Everyone ate their tamales, but then dispersed after they were done. I was confused about why we weren't being served turkey so I asked my host father if Christmas dinner happens on Christmas Eve or Christmas day. He assured me that we would be eating turkey that night for dinner, so I resigned to waiting patiently in my room until I was called out for dinner.

I fell asleep in my room waiting, and was woken up at 12:00 a.m. to come eat. What my family had failed to tell me in this instance was that the Christmas meal is traditionally eaten at midnight on Christmas Eve. I evened things out when I ate about a dozen of the leftover tamales over the next two days.


Christmas on the Farm

The next day I was Skyping with a friend of mine in the living room when my host brother poked his head in the room and declared simply "C'mon Kris, we're going", foolishly assuming that I was told anything about what we were doing that day. It turned out that the family was going to spend Christmas on their farm, so I jumped in the car with nothing but the clothes I was wearing and headed out with them.

We got to the farm at about 2:30 p.m. and had a BBQ for dinner. I was ready to go after eating and being on the farm for a few hours, but my host brother started going around collecting money from everyone to buy beer. He was collecting $5 from everyone, which made me nervous because in Ecuador $5 buys a good amount of booze and he was collecting from a lot of people.

He came back with two crates of beer and the family started drinking and playing cards, quite competitively if I might add. It started getting late and it became clear to me at about 10:00 p.m. that no one had any intention of going back to Ambato that night. I begrudgingly accepted my fate and started trying to figure out where I would sleep since there were so many people there, when at the eleventh hour one of my host brothers stopped by the farm and offered to give me a ride home.

From now on, whenever my host family offers to take me anywhere I am packing a pair of trunks, a toothbrush, and an air mattress.


Kids Just Don't Understand

Since Christmas eve, my extended host family has been staying at my house. That means that there are six children running around all the time, and they are unbearably annoying. They consistently cry any time anything happens to them, no matter how trivial. It's like they are in a constant state of crying and they occasionally take a break when they get tired. I swear that the biggest crybaby of them all cried at least 10 times on Christmas Eve. This is a bad enough offense by itself, but what really gets me is that the kids have no dedication to their sobfests.

When these kids cry, they turn on the waterworks and scream at the top of their lungs, but when they either get attention or realize that they are not going to get it they stop on a dime. They then continue doing whatever it is they were doing before they started crying as if nothing happened.

When I was a kid, I cried my fair share but I had much more respect for the art of hissyfit. First of all, when I cried it was almost always for a big deal. I remember one time I had to go with my mother to drop off the babysitter, and she assured me that I would be back home in time to see Power Rangers. When we got home and I realized that I had missed it, I lost it (because she promised!) and demanded that my mother turn back time so I could watch it. Missing Power Rangers might not sound like a big deal to you now, but trust me that in context of the incident it was devastating.

Second, I committed to a temper-tantrum and continued to appear miserable and upset for hours afterward, whether I got attention or not. Locking yourself in your room, sulking in the corner, and packing a bag to run away from home are the kinds of things that contribute to the proper delivery of an episode and must be performed if anyone is to take your whining seriously. It kills me when these Ecuadorian kids are crying hysterically and thirty seconds later you would have never guessed they were unhappy earlier that minute.

Lastly, Ecuadorian kids don't have even an ounce of shame for their ridiculous behavior. One of the kids started crying uncontrollably when someone put ketchup on his rice (which, unfortunately, is a normal practice in Ecuador). They quickly gave him a new bowl of rice and he stopped crying, but it was clear that he didn't feel silly about crying over ketchuped rice after the issue was resolved. When I was a kid I cried over plenty of silly things, but afterward I always realized how silly it was and felt ashamed about it.

Bottom line: I still hate kids.

Crabs

Tonight my family ate crabs for dinner. I'm going to go ahead and say that eating crabs is stupid. They freak me out because they look the same dead as they do alive and they have all kinds of hairs and hard to identify meat parts. They are also a lot of work to eat and they don't really taste like anything. Crab eating is even worse in Ecuador because they apparently haven't adopted the use of shell-breaking tools yet, and everyone at the table was using their teeth to crack the crabs open. My molars were hurting just listening to it; I'm going to have to brush my teeth with Sensodyne twice tonight.

Host parents, brothers, a couple of wives, and one baby.

Grammar Talk: Object Pronouns

In English, the existence of formal grammar rules put forth by any number of style guides or linguists rarely enforces how language is used (written or spoken). Even the Spanish language, which has an official governing body in the Real Academia Española (RAE), exhibits a grammar that is open to interpretation on many points. This inability for even academics to come to agreement on grammar points, along with the number of geographically dispersed places where Spanish is spoken, makes some grammar topics extremely difficult for foreigners to grasp due to the number of distinct variations accepted.

I have learned Spanish in formal classroom settings in the U.S., by living in Mexico, and now while working in Ecuador, and I can say from experience that no one set of rules is sufficient for understanding the language as it is used in different parts of the world. These differences are not only limited to regional vocabularies, but include fundamental language devices like pronoun usage and gender forms that have not-so-obvious implications beyond simple word choice.

With the new feature on my blog "Grammar Talk", I hope to elucidate some of the finer points of the Spanish language that I have gleaned from living abroad and reading up on my formal Spanish grammar. Along with the Internet and the forums at WordReference.com, the greatest tool for learning about Spanish grammar that I have ever encountered is "A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish" by John Butt and Carmen Benjamin (B&B). The book provides a thorough treatment of every grammar point I have ever consulted it for thus far, and it is commendable for its coverage of the Spanish used throughout the world, not only in one particular place (Latin American Spanish or Peninsular Spanish, for instance). It is this broad consideration of the various forms of Spanish that has made B&B particularly useful for me when, for instance, the Mexican Spanish I learned in college fails to help me understand a sentence from an Argentinian text.

My goal in studying Spanish is to speak it in a way that is generally understood and accepted as correct by the most number of native Spanish speakers possible. I am cautious of Spanish that is specific to a small region because what is acceptable as educated Spanish in one country might sound foolish in another country. Because of this, I am not content to simply mimic the Spanish of the people around me, but to develop a way of speaking that will serve me just as well when I leave Ecuador.

Some aspects of languages are not easily learned in books and are best understood after spending time abroad. As a student of Spanish, I find that the best advice always comes from people who have lived immersed in the Spanish language long enough to appreciate a grammar point and then are able to verbalize their understanding in English. I hope that these posts will provide a similar kind of help.

In short, Grammar Talk is written for people interested in Spanish grammar, and will therefore probably only be enjoyable for those studying Spanish. I majored in Spanish in college (and took one semester of Linguistics... which counts for something, right?), but I am far from an expert in the grammar of any language. If I make an error or anyone reading disagrees with my conclusions, please leave a comment so I can learn from my mistakes or write a snarky reply burning you for trying to call me out.

Subjective Objects

When I was learning Spanish in school, I was always taught that there are two sets of object pronouns in Spanish: one set for direct objects and one set for indirect objects. Luckily, the first-person and informal second-person singular object pronouns me, nos, and te are the same for both sets. This means that the only object pronouns that should give foreign speakers any trouble are the third-person object pronouns lo/la/los/las and le/les (which, it is worth mentioning, are also used for formal second-person singular/plural and informal second-person plural).

Using object pronouns in spontaneous speech has always been difficult for me because of Spanish's double set of object pronouns that force me to think about the nature of the object (direct/indirect, masculine/feminine, singular/plural) before I decide which pronoun to use. Regardless of how long it takes me to construct a sentence, I like to think that I have a good understanding of how to use the object pronouns correctly. This is, of course, until I hear an utterance like "Le vi anoche (a usted)."

This is a sentence I heard someone say here in Ecuador, which doesn't make any sense if the direct/indirect object distinction dictates which object pronoun is correctly used. The speaker saw someone, so in this case the person who was seen was the direct object of the action and the sentence should read "Lo vi anoche", right?

Well, it turns out that object pronouns have been a constant topic of controversy (even within the RAE) for decades, and there are a number of exceptions to the over-simplified direct/indirect object dichotomy.

Indirect Respect

The above example can best be explained by the tendency of some Spanish speakers to use the indirect object pronouns when referring directly to a person (even when that person is the direct object of an action) as a sign of respect for the person. B&B provides a fascinating example of this phenomenon in usage:

"Argentine informants were convinced that they would say no quería molestarle 'I didn't mean to bother you' when speaking to their boss, but molestarlo when speaking about him."

I support this usage, not because I understand why it comes off as more respectful to use le (although how much could it hurt to try to be more respectful anyway?), but because the direct object pronoun lo can mean a variety of things, the least likely of which is the formal second-person singular usted. For instance, if someone said to me "Lo vi ayer", the first translation I would think of are the third-person singular translations "I saw it yesterday" or "I saw him yesterday." For me, using le in place of lo/la when the object is a person being directly talked to is helpful because in the absence of leísmo (which I'll talk about later), it eliminates the interpretation of lo meaning "him" or "it", and it alerts the listener that he is being referred to, rather than leaving the frustratingly ambiguous lo up for interpretation.

As I am finding out, most of the problems I have with Spanish come from overworked pronouns and their ambiguities...

Leísmo and Laísmo

Outside of using le to show respect for the person you are talking to, there is also a tendency for some Spanish speakers to always use the indirect object pronoun for third-person singular male humans . This phenomenon is known as leísmo. For instance, "Lo vi" is reserved strictly for "I saw it", while "Le vi" is used to express "I saw him." Female humans continue to receive the ambiguous direct object pronoun, and "La vi" is used for "I saw her" as well as "I saw it."

B&B notes that this flavor of leísmo is considered by some to be sexist, since men are "elevated" to indirect object status while women  are referred to using the same pronoun that inanimate objects also take. A more explicitly sexist variation of this object pronoun style is known as laísmo. In this phenomenon, human females are referred to using the object pronoun even if they are indirect objects, for instance "Yo la dije la verdad" (I told her the truth).

B&B discourages the use of laísmo because it is controversial and in decline, but notes that leísmo is used by "the most prestigious styles in Spain, i.e. the variety used in publishing, the media, and by most educated speakers in central and northern Spain."

To me, laísmo is clearly not worth imitating, but I also don't recommend that foreigners learning Spanish adopt leísmo unless they live in Spain because it doesn't really clear up any ambiguities like using le for respect (as a matter of fact, it greatly eliminates the usefulness of using le for respect because with leísmo, "Le vi" can mean "I saw you" or "I saw him"). Of course, it is still useful to have a knowledge of these conventions for understanding the speech and writing of others.

In any case, if you're in the club and you're trying to find the words to describe a girl without being disrespectful, go easy on the leísmo/laísmo and stick with the indirect object pronouns. 

Leísmo in Ecuador

In Ecuador, I have observed an extreme form of leísmo where the indirect object pronouns are used for humans of both genders and inanimate objects that are direct objects. For instance, the other day my host nephew asked for a glass of soda right before we got in the car. His sister handed him a cup and said, "Tómale rapido" (Drink it quickly).

B&B notes that this usage is not endorsed by the RAE unless it is "a rare instance of genuine personification." I agree that leísmo for inanimate objects is unnecessary and should not be imitated by foreign learners (even though I hear it all the time here). 

In another instance, my host sister-in-law wanted her brother to pick up her baby girl, so she commanded him "Cógele." While the leísmo in Ecuador at least appears to be less sexist than other varieties, I still maintain that it is unnecessary for foreign learners to adopt and should only be noted so that native speakers can be understood.

Conclusion

Object pronouns in Spanish cannot be easily explained by any one rule, but the direct/indirect object distinction is a good place to start. It is also impossible to say that one style of usage is absolutely correct because there are so many different accepted usages depending on what country, and even what part of that country, you are in. What I have written here are only a few of the points that I found interesting in the thirteen(!) pages of B&B that deal with the correct usage of object pronouns. I haven't even mentioned loísmo, which substitutes direct object pronouns for indirect object pronouns, or my own original grammar style that I am proposing to the Academy, noísmo, which rejects object pronouns and their confusing ambiguous bullshit altogether.

If object pronouns still don't make sense and are getting you down, remember this: just like it's always 5 o'clock somewhere, regardless of what object pronoun you end up using in a sentence, it is almost certainly considered standard usage in some part of the hispanophone world.

Galápagos Shmalápagos

Mitad del Swamy

While my dad was in Ecuador visiting me, we took a trip to the tourist spot la Mitad del Mundo. This is the place where they claim the equator passes through the country, so people like to do silly things on the line and take pictures.

Not that silly.

One of the attractions at the equator is a simple scale because since the Earth bulges at the equator, people weigh less when they are there. My dad jumped on the scale and the machine told him he weighed four pounds heavier than he did when he left for Ecuador. 

I guess the Earth isn't the only thing that bulges at its equator (that's a hint, Dad).
 
The Plan

Last week I departed on a four day adventure in the Galápagos Islands with my father. We flew from Quito to Guayaquil, then from Guayaquil to the island of San Cristobal. My father made the reservations for an all inclusive trip that included the hotel rooms, meals, and most importantly, English-speaking tour guides. When we got off the plane we were met by our tour guide who told us, in Spanish, where to put our bags down.

Since my father doesn't speak Spanish, he just stared blankly at the guide waiting for him to start speaking English. The tour guide's face became filled with anxiety as he struggled for the words in English, "You... don't espeak Spanish", to which my father replied in the negative. The look on the tour guide's face immediately informed me that I would be serving as a translator for the rest of the trip.

I can understand Spanish pretty well at this point so I didn't think it would be a big deal to translate what the guide was saying for my dad, but people who live in the Galápagos Islands speak with a coast Ecuadorian accent. This means that they speak very quickly and like to drop consonants. For instance, in the Sierra (where I live), the phrase "más o menos" would be pronounced exactly as it is spelled, with all the letters being vocalized. On the coast, they drop some consonant sounds and it comes out more like "maomeo." I had to hear the tour guide say "tolaila"about five times before I realized that he was saying "todas las islas." I personally dislike the coast accent and don't like how it sounds, but I guess I could just be bitter that I don't understand every third word they are saying.

Do not Touch!

Nearly all of the land (97% I think) of the Galápagos Islands form part of a national park, so as soon as you step off of the plane you need to pay a park entrance fee. For foreigners, the fee is a whopping $100. For nationals, it only costs $6.

I am obviously not an Ecuadorian citizen, but I figured since I work in the country I might as well try to get by paying the park fee for nationals. I walked up to the counter and showed the officers my visa to work in the country.

- I'm not Ecuadorian, but I live in Ambato and I have a visa to work here. Can I get in as a national?
- (*looks at me, inspects visa, looks back at me*) This kind of visa is only given to diplomats or people who work for the government. Are you a diplomat?
- Uh... yeah, sure.
- Do you work for the Ecuadorian government?
- ... Kind of.
- (*calls another official over, followed by inaudible mumbling and a short pause*) Alright then, $6 please.

Boom.

The first stop on our tour of San Cristobal was to a beach. Like I said before, I didn't understand our guide that well, but I was pretty sure he told us that there would be "water wolves", and he warned us that if we got too close they could bite us. I took a class about evolution in college and read a lot about the animals in the Galápagos, but I never heard about water wolves so I was both excited to see what they were and terrified that I would be hunted down by a pack of amphibian lupines.

It turned out that in Spanish, the word for sea lion translates to sea wolf, so what he was really talking about were harmless seal-like creatures, not vicious marine/land pack animals. The sea lions summed up pretty well what most of the animal watching on the Galápagos was like.

First of all, they don't do anything. The only things they did in my presence was lay out on the beach making honking noises and smell like shit. One interesting aspect about the species on the Galápagos Islands is that since it is very difficult for animals to make it to the isolated archipelago, the few that do make it there usually don't encounter many natural predators that they need to be cautious of. This means that the animals live very comfortable lives of not doing a lot of work and posting up on the beach.

Second, the animals on the islands are not afraid of humans at all. Our guide warned us about not getting too close to the sea lions because they might attack us, but everyone in our tour group was walking right up to them and the sea lions didn't even flinch. At night when there is less pedestrian traffic on the boardwalk, the sea lions come onto the sidewalk and into the streets and just hang out. A few times I walked right past sea lions hidden in shadows and under bushes and didn't even notice it until they moved or honked at me.

Third, you are not allowed to touch a lot of things on the Galápagos because people want to conserve the nature there as much as possible, and human interference can screw up the natural order of things. For instance, we were told not to touch any of the baby sea lions because if our scent gets on them, the mothers can reject them and they will die from not being cared for.

You will never know how hard it was for me to not try to grab this baby and put him in my bag. It would have been just like having a Pokémon...

The next type of impressive animal we saw were the Galápagos tortoises. The tortoises are awesome because they weigh up to 400kg and can live to be over 150 years old. Like the sea lions they don't really do much, but at least they have an excuse since they are 100+ year old turtles.

Me trying to fit in with a little guy.

The islands used to be crawling with these tortoises before humans came. The thing that did so much damage to the species wasn't direct human action, but introduced species. Feral cats, rats, and fire ants were all introduced to the islands by humans, and they all like to eat the eggs of baby tortoises. Goats also contributed to the drastic decline in the tortoise population because they feed on the same plants as the tortoises do and provide too strong a competition for them.

An interesting thing I learned about the Galápagos is that the only species that were able to get to the islands naturally were the ones that could survive without water for long enough to make it from the mainland to the archipelago. Birds and bugs can obviously fly, but only the plants with seeds that could survive the long journey without water were able to grow when they finally reached land. Amphibians are not present on the island because they need lots of water to survive, and all the reptiles on the islands are endemic, which is to say that they are not found anywhere else on Earth (neat-o!).

George

Lonesome George is a turtle they found on one of the islands who is currently the only known survivor of his species. He was moved from his native home island to the most populated island in the Galápagos, Santa Cruz, so he could be cared for and studied to possibly find a way to keep his species alive.

The different tortoise species I saw had slightly different shells, but they pretty much all looked the same, so I wondered why they couldn't just breed George with a slightly different species. The guide told me that hybrids might be able to be produced that way, but that the hybrids, in turn, would be sterile and not be able to produce offspring of their own.

Fittingly, considering his history, Lonesome George was the most miserable looking creature I have ever witnessed.

Sympathizing with the 150 year old virgin.

Besides the giant tortoises, we saw a ton of other plants and animals that are only found in the Galápagos. It is really interesting that a lot of the biology on the islands is found nowhere else, but besides that fact they are otherwise largely unextraordinary. I could imagine seeing most of the animals and plants I saw on the Galápagos in the United States because most of them look like regular plants and animals, but in reality they are almost all very unique species that have been isolated for so long that they can no longer breed with similar species from where they originated before migrating to the islands.

I also found out that there are species endemic to particular islands in the archipelago. Because I only visited two islands while I was there, I missed out on seeing a few cool animals like the Galápagos penguin and the blue-footed booby. Although, if seeing a baby sea lion brought back my tortured childhood fantasy of Pokémon being real, maybe it was a good thing for my adult psychological development that I didn't see these guys in person.

If I was only in charge of the Galápagos Islands, I could make it my own, real life Safari Zone...


You Know What I Mean

Something that drives me nuts in Ecuador is when I say something correctly in Spanish, but people act like they have no idea what I am talking about. I say enough stupid, incomprehensible things in Spanish that I like to get responses that signal comprehension when I actually say something correctly.

Yesterday I went to the bank to pick up my ATM card. I walked up to the woman at the desk and told her that I had created an account with the bank already and was there to pick up my "card." She then replied with "what card?"

What card? Seriously? What card could I possibly be talking about in a bank except an ATM card.

"Yeah, I'm actually looking for a 'Happy Birthday Grandpa' card, where do you keep those."
"This one! (*pulls Ace of Clubs out of sleeve*) Was this your card?"
"I left my hologram Pikachu around here somewhere, would you mind helping me look for it?"


I finally explained that I wanted the card that would allow me to withdraw money from my account, and twenty minutes later she came out with it. One good thing to come from this experience was that while I was waiting for her to get my card, I had the best Snake game of my life. I defy anyone reading this who has Snake Xenzia on his phone to try and beat my score of 6,256. It was a beast snake.

Vaca

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not the best planner in the world, so I still have little clue as to how I will be spending the rest of my vacation. I have off until Jan. 10th, so I am considering meeting friends in Peru or Chile, or maybe just bouncing around Ecuador to see some things I haven't yet.

The only thing I am certain that I will do during my vacation is make a copy of a grammar book to use for my class. The school I teach at doesn't have a syllabus or books for its students, and I found out last semester that makes it very difficult to be a teacher or student. I am determined to get a bunch of books, break every copyright law ever written, and take the best from all of them to make the greatest English grammar book ever created by a WorldTeach volunteer in Ecuador.