Turkey Day X2

I hope that everyone had as wonderful of a Thanksgiving weekend as I did. I was so blessed this year for Thanksgiving, despite being sad to be away from my family, I got to celebrate Thanksgiving twice, in addition to meeting up with a good friend from the States (hey DeAnn!) in Cuenca. Yes, I went to Cuenca again and it was just as awesome as I remembered.

I spent Thanksgiving Day at my mailstop [redacted southern Ecuadorian city here] to be with some PCV friends. Through the friend of a friend (gringos seem to find each no matter what), we ended up having dinner with a missionary group. The group was called SIM (Serving in Missions) and was composed of Americans, Australians, and Europeans. Even though the three of us PCVs were strangers, they were incredibly welcoming to us. We sang hymns, were told an interesting, if euphemistic, version of the Thanksgiving story, prayed (my dad would be proud) and then proceeded to eat yummy food. Stuffing! Turkey (ok, I didn’t eat the turkey since I am vegetarian)! Mashed potatoes! Cranberry sauce! Veggies! And delicious delicious green bean casserole. Yum…so what if we started “dinner” at 10am in the morning, maybe it’s an Evangelical thing. The pictures turned out really dark, apologies.

That afternoon, I took the 5-hour bus ride up to Cuenca to visit my friend DeAnn, who is from the States but not a Volunteer. I arrved at the Cuenca terminal at 10pm and was unable to get ahold of DeAnn. Everything turned out fine in the end, I spent the night at a Peace Corps hostel and met some other Volunteers. I saw Jefferson Perez again on Friday, when I went running in the park (we’re now homies. I kid). That afternoon, I met up with DeAnn and we went for a great meal at 4 Manos, a Swiss resturant in Cuenca. Later that night, we met up with some of her friends from the language school and had a great time playing foosball, knocking back a few (non-Pilsener) beers, and just having a wonderful, normal night out. Thank you Wunderbar!

Saturday was spent searching frantically for the mercado (market) and cooking in preparation for another Thanksgiving dinner, hosted by a volunteer in Cuenca. I made a quinoa dish with a broccoli and tomato paste sauce, which was quite lovely. DeAnn and I also took advantage of it being mango season here by whipping up some mango/strawberry/OJ smoothies. Yum! I was so proud of myself for making a healthy dish, then I got to the party and there were wonders such as: homemade Mac & Cheese, collard greens, mashed potatoes, a huge turkey, green beans, guacamole, and SIX boxes of Clos. Clos is the boxed wine of choice for PCVs, don’t laugh, it rocks. My friend who hosted the dinner is from the South and is an amazing cook. The turkey was roasted by an Argentinean friend who got the recipe…off of the Internet!

We shared this Thanksgiving dinner with a few Cuenca-area PCVs, as well a motley crew of Chileans, Ecuadorians, the afore-mentioned Argentinian and her Austrian partner. It was quite the multi-culti feast. It was a little tricky trying to explain, in Spanish, the origin of Thanksgiving, but we managed to explain the whole Pilgrims & Indians thing. We then went around the room and each person shared what they were thankful for. It was at this moment that I realized how blessed I am to be here and to have such wonderful friends and family around the world.

On Thanksgiving Day, I had had the chance to talk to many friends over the phone and it was wonderful just to hear everyone’s voices. I also stopped by the post office and to my surprise, received an enormous care package from a friend of mine who was a PCV in Ecuador several years ago. Books, magazines, candy, and a hand-written note – it was the best Thanksgiving present I could have asked for. Thanks, Alison.

Do you want to see how much ridiculously delicious food we ate? How did the Argentinean turkey turn out? Was there really homemade macaroni and cheese? Pictures here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

In my opinion, Thanksgiving is one of the best American holidays. This year, I am thankful for my wonderfuly family, awesome friends all over the world, and friends I have met in Peace Corps. I am thankful for my health and that I have a job I enjoy (most of the time) and find fulfilling. Most of all, I am thankful to be alive and to be able to experience new things everyday here in Ecuador!

Happy Turkey Day all!

No soy marinero, soy…cocinera?

Apologies for butchering Ritchie Valens’ lyrics, but these days, I feel like a cocinera (cook) much of the time. This is rather ironic, seeing as I neglected my poor kitchen for the last six (hectic) months before I left Seattle. I started out by making healthy salads with fresh produce from the market with my adopted family here, which they seemed to really enjoy. Then I started cooking with a woman in town who is my workout buddy. I managed to find the one person in Ecuador who also has an aversion to plates filled with pure carbs and seasoned with unhealthy quantities of salt (the amount of salt used in this country is unbelievable) and we cook healthy food together. Green salads, fruit salads, dishes with quinoa, pesto pasta (OK, so pasta is not the healthiest thing for you but I need my pesto fix), etc. I really can’t complain about my diet anymore. Hallelujah!

I’ve also been cooking in the hospital. Since I work in the hospital on Monday mornings, the hospital administrator asked me to help the kitchen staff out in planning the staff and patient menus. I began by going over the weekly menu and suggesting how the cook could introduce more nutritional variety into the patients’ diets (“Wait, you mean I shouldn’t serve potato soup and then rice with yuca as a second dish?” “Um, probably not.”) I ended up showing them how to make some healthy recipes that used local ingredients. For example, I whipped up an easy spinach-tomato-scrambled egg dish that amazed the kitchen staff. You would have thought that I had cooked a 5-course meal, not a basic breakfast food. Same thing when I made a carrot and celery soup. The kicker was when I made a chef salad and dressed it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (which I had to travel 2.5 hours away to buy). They thought it was the bee’s knees.

I felt pretty good about it, but also weird because in the States, I don’t consider myself much of a cook. I think there is something about being in Peace Corps that makes you obsessed with food. For example, I’ll be with other PCVs and after we’ve eaten breakfast we’ll already start talking about what we want to eat for lunch. We constantly think/talk/obsess about food. Maybe it’s because we’re deprived of the sheer variety of foods that we take for granted in the US (i.e. why doesn’t the rest of the world believe in peanut butter?). I used to complain that I didn’t want to drive from Fremont to Wallingford for Chinese food. I don’t know what I miss more, the food at Rocking Wok or enjoying dinner with my friends…

“Shake ‘em on down”

Big happenings in my area of the world. Last night, we had another earthquake, the second since I arrived in September. This earthquake happened around 10:05 pm EST and was stronger and lasted longer than the previous one. According to the US Geological Survey, the magnitude of the quake was 6.8. No one was hurt in my part of the world, although it was a little frightening, especially after the big 7.7 earthquake that hit Chile on Monday.

In Peace Corps news, recently 4 volunteers have ET’d (Early Terminated) their service in PC/Ecuador. One of the girls was from my Omnibus 98 and a good friend of mine, which makes it especially sad. Since two other girls from my Omnibus have ET’d since Swearing-In, that brings us down to 42 volunteers. Three people have ET’d in the past week from Omnibus 97, one girl, one dude, and another dude who is getting married to an Ecuadorian. With the addition of these three, that means at least 12 volunteers have left from 97, which just entered the country in February.

ET’ing is a big deal, and probably something that every Peace Corps Volunteer thinks about once in awhile, but certainly not something to be taken lightly. I wish these former PCVs the best of luck in their future endeavors!

Halloween in Cuenca 2007

So, the big Peace Corps bash of the of the year occurs at Halloween and takes place in the beautiful Ecuadorian city of Cuenca. It was a great time to catch up with friends from my Omnibus (98 woot!) and to meet other PCVs. What do you get when you mix 120 volunteers in disfraces (costumes) gathered in one hostel, Jungle Juice, 20 jabas of Pilsener, and a luge? Suffice to say, we had a great time.

Having been an exchange student in Ecuador when I was a junior in college, I’ve seen much of the country, including the Galapagos Islands. The city of Cuenca, however, I had never visited and I quickly fell in love with it. Cuenca is a beautiful city in Southern Ecuador with charming colonial architecture, a lovely river, great museums, and a thriving art scene. While in Cuenca, we ate at a delicious Colombian restaurant where I discovered that Colombian food is as delicious as Ecua-food is not (sorry to those who love Ecua-food). There were arepas, cafe con chocolate, and amazing guacamole. How can the food just one country over be so amazing? We also hit up this great vegetarian restaurant that I could happily eat at any day of the week. Yum!

Cuenca is also known for being the home of Jefferson Perez, the world record-holder in racewalking and the only Ecuadorian ever to win an Olympic gold medal. My exciting story from Halloween is that while jogging in el Parque de La Madre, my friend and I saw Jefferson Perez in person, training! It helped that there’s an enormous statue of Perez in the park, and that he is skinny with enormous thighs. And that was my Halloween claim to fame.

 

 

It was a wonderful few days, although I did vomit out the window on the bus ride home from Cuenca. But for me, that was about par for the course. Returning to my site was kind of a shock, mainly because it hit me that I was all alone, and I had to return to speaking Spanish 24/7. After being with other Peace Corps friends, speaking English, and eating good food for a few days, it was really tough to adjust back to life in-site.