There's No Crying in Ecuador

After my last trip outside of Ambato to Quilotoa, I was reminded of how many cool things there are pretty close to where I live that I still haven't visited yet. This past weekend I asked around to find out what there was to do in a day trip and I learned about an intriguing train that runs through a nearby city. This past week also marked the end of my second semester at SECAP as I look forward to two weeks of vacation before starting my final semester here in Ecuador.


A Series of Unfortunate Events

Right behind my house in Ambato there is a set of unused train tracks that are beat up and overgrown with grass and weeds. My host brother told me a couple of weeks ago that a train used to pass through a large portion of Ecuador, and the now defunct tracks out back were once a part of that line. He said that since the trains didn't pass very often, when one came through Ambato all the kids in the neighborhood would hear it rumbling by and run to the tracks to wave at the passengers looking out. At some point during that conversation he mentioned that there are still some parts of the line functioning, and the most visited section leaves from the nearby city of Riobamba.

I did more research about the train and learned that the Riobamba section runs for several hours and culminates in an interesting stretch of track known as La Nariz del Diablo (the devil's nose). La Nariz del Diablo is a section of track which requires the train to reverse directions several times to zig-zag down a particularly steep section of a mountain. Additionally, I read from various sources that the train that leaves from Riobamba is famous because passengers are permitted to sit on top of the train for the duration of the ride as it passes through beautiful mountain scenery that includes great views of some of the area's prominent volcanoes. Some of the words I saw associated with the train ride included: exhilarating, hair-raising, and thrilling (remember these adjectives, because they will be necessary to contrast with reality to understand the extent of my disappointment later in the story).

When I found myself with nothing to do last Saturday, I remembered the train and convinced some of my friends to go to Riobamba with me and spend the night so we could buy tickets to get a good seat on top of the train that would be leaving the next morning at 7am.

(Aside: I've said many times that Ambato is a great place to live and I am very happy I ended up working here. With that being said, Ambato is the ugliest real city I have seen in Ecuador yet. Since Riobamba is only an hour away, I expected it to be a smaller and less impressive version of Ambato. It was small like I expected, but when we walked around I was surprised to see that the streets were very alive and the buildings were noticeably nicer than what we typically see here in Ambato.)

When we got off the bus and headed to our hotel, I walked into what appeared to be the train station (judging by the tracks leading out of the building) to try to buy tickets. It was there that our expectations for the trip started their sharp spiral downward into disappointment. I asked a guy who worked there where we buy tickets and he said a word I didn't understand. He repeated it and what I took away from the conversation was that we needed to buy tickets at "Alausí" and something about a bus. I assumed that the bus station in Riobamba was called Alausí and that the train now left from there instead of the old station.

I went to the reception desk at the hotel we were staying at to find out where exactly in Riobamba the Alausí station was and how we could get there. She was visibly stunned by how misinformed my question was and then set me straight. She told me that Alausí is the name of a city an hour and a half away from Riobamba, and we had to go there to get the train now. I looked on a map in the lobby, and it turned out Alausí was pretty much the end of the line and the train ride would only be about an hour descent and return through La Nariz del Diablo instead of a four hour journey through the mountains.

Alausí: Quichua for "not a bus terminal in Riobamba"

I thought, whatever, as long as we get to ride on top of a train down a mountain named after a body part of the devil I'll feel like I got the experience I set out for. Unfortunately, even that small desire was crushed when I asked the woman what time we would need to get to Alausí to get tickets to ride on top, and she told me that they no longer let passengers ride on top. The reason? Two years ago a cable came too close to the top of the train and decapitated two Japanese tourists. Yikes.

When traveling, things don't always go according to plan. What separates the traveling babies from the traveling pros is being able to make the best of whatever you've got to work with. After breaking the very disappointing news to my friends who I had convinced to come with me, I was very pleased to see that no one made as much as a disappointed groan; everyone agreed we should continue with the modified trip. That's what I'm talking about.

I was further impressed with two of my American friends who met us in Riobamba much later because they missed their bus stop at Riobamba and ended up stranded at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, and my Ecuadorian friend who couldn't stay the night in Riobamba so she took a bus at 4:00am to meet us on the bus to Alausí for our compromised trip. Uh, can you say "Champ Wagon"?

Ari was not pleased

The next day we took the bus to Alausí and walked to the train station only to find out that (I can't make this stuff up) tickets for the train had already been sold out. At that point the group got really upset and we tried to get on the train anyway. We argued in English, Spanish, and even resorted to more childish methods such as pulling papers out of the "pick a number" distributor in the office, all to no avail.

After a few minutes of moping, our group pulled it together and yet again made the best out of the situation. We couldn't ride the train down the tracks, but there was no reason why we couldn't just walk down them, so that's exactly what we did. We got to see all the same scenery as the people on the train and we were outside already so we could take as many pictures as we wanted. The only slightly scary part was hopping off the tracks when we heard a train coming.

If I keep botching transportation on trips like Quilotoa and Alausí every weekend, my quads are gonna get huge.

At the end of the tracks we ate lunch then started working on how to get back up to Alausí. We ended up hiring some guy with a pickup truck to bring us to a major road where we could catch a bus back to Ambato.

When the truck arrived there was already an unfriendly dog in the back where we were going to sit. We fed it some bread and it calmed down, but I still sat as far away from it as I could in the back of the bed. That was a good idea until we started bumping around and I realized that the car was beat up and the door latch probably wasn't in good enough condition to handle someone's full body weight slamming against the door.  For safety, I latched onto an unwilling Ariana's arm. If that door opened I was either being saved or bringing someone down with me.

Me, Ari, Lis, and Will. You can't see in this picture, but we were in fact riding in the back of a truck.

Amanda fears nothing

I have been in Ecuador long enough now that catching rides in the back of a stranger's truck is no longer a novelty. However, this particular truck ride took a turn for the ridiculous when two kids jumped on the back of the truck with live crabs in their hands. Dead crabs freak me out enough, so I was very uncomfortable the entire time they were waving crustaceans in my face. Soon after they jumped on the truck and we started moving again, the dog fell off and it was the funniest thing I had seen in months. Everyone started screaming that the dog had fallen off to alert the driver to stop the car, and one of the kids grabbed the dog and threw it on top of my legs. The dog was flipping out a little when one of the kids dropped a crab on me, then I started freaking out and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of the situation. It was a new twist on the usual Ecuadorian truck bed ride for me.

The zig-zag in the mountain is La Nariz del Diablo. (Not pictured: El Codo del Diablo)

Another funny thing that kept happening throughout the trip was people asking my Ecuadorian friend Lis what tour company she was with, because that's really the only plausible explanation for one Ecua rolling with a group of six gringos.

Even though nothing went according to plan on this trip, we still had fun footing it and it turned out to be a memorable weekend for other reasons. Since the trip was my idea, I'm crossing my fingers that the numerous malfunctions we experienced will exempt me from having to plan any more group trips in the future.

School's Out

This Thursday was the end of my second semester teaching English at SECAP. I can say with confidence that this semester I was much more organized and I was better in front of my classes than I was last semester. This semester I had about half as many students as I had last time, and I was surprised by how different it is teaching a group of 11 students compared to a group of 24. Having fewer students means they are easier to handle as a group and everyone gets more chances to talk and participate in class, but it also means that there is much less energy in the room to begin with. The first semester my goal was getting everyone to focus their energy on the task at hand, whereas this past semester I found myself needing to get the class riled up at the start so they were awake and willing to participate.

This semester I was also much stricter about attendance, something that was a problem my last module. Round two I made two tardies equal one absence, and eight absences an automatic fail. I felt like kind of a jerk on Thursday failing two students with passing grades in the class because they missed too many classes, but I have learned that leeway on things that sometimes seem trivial (like being a minute late to class) shows students that they can do whatever they want. If you want to teach English like a boss, sometimes you've got to lay down the law.

Another thing I am learning the more I teach is that teaching a foreign language is much more than teaching students how to translate their ideas into English. Someone's ability to be good at using a foreign language (particularly writing) is dependent on their ability to use their own language. For instance, writing is not something that is intuitive by any means. Good writing is hard work even in the writer's mother tongue, so when a student doesn't understand the principles of adequate writing in his own language, he has incredible difficulty writing acceptable English. This is particularly frustrating in regards to punctuation. The majority of my students don't know how to put together sentences, and their essays usually end up looking more like long lists of sentence fragments or a page of loosely connected ideas strung together with commas. Of course, that is not to say that bad writing is exclusive to Spanish speakers; it is mostly due to the terrible writing I have seen in the English language that makes me believe that I could be a writer back home if I don't ever get into med school.

Butter Me Up

I have seen students in the States try to butter their teachers up with the hope of getting something in return—usually a grade—but they always try to be subtle about it so that the teacher doesn't realize what is happening (because no Embryology professor wants to believe that she gave a student a better grade because he gave her a disc with a fetus design on it). My students try to win brownie points from me sometimes, but it is never even close to subtle and it is always embarrassingly shameless.

In one of my classes this past week a student came in early and handed me a box of cookies. When I was three cookies in, she jumped to the point and asked me if she could leave because she had to do something with her family. I felt like I had been used, but the cookies were so delicious that I let her go and finished the box in disgrace at being so easily manipulated.

Another student who had cooked dinner for the entire class one night failed due to absences. On Thursday when I was giving out the grades the entire class was essentially staging a protest in the classroom trying to convince me to pass her, and she tried to make me feel guilty by saying, "But teacher, I cooked you dinner!" I'm proud to say that I didn't let that one go, but it was ridiculous to see a 26 year old woman trying to argue that point.

A funny student of mine had seen somewhere on T.V. that students in the States give apples to their teachers. He was failing at one point late in the semester, and I heard him joke to his classmates that he was going to bring the teacher a watermelon to save his grade (bigger fruit means bigger points, right?). Since he passed the class he never did bring me that watermelon, but next semester I might trick him into thinking he is failing to see if he actually does it.

Break

I have two weeks off now before I begin my third and final semester teaching here in Ecuador. I am planning to visit the last parts of Ecuador that I am interested in seeing before I return to the States, namely cities in the south like Loja, Vilcabamba, and Machala. Ecuador is a small country, but there are certainly a lot of cool little places to see. I can't say that teaching is my calling in life, but I also can't complain about the vacation time.

Teacher Traveler

I recently wrote an article for a teaching traveling website called teachingtraveling.com. If you are at all interested in teaching abroad there are a lot of interesting articles on the site, and you can check out my piece here.