Happy Valentine´s Day!

February 12, 2009
Thursday, 8:54am
Cloudy, 55F
Sayausi, Cuenca


Kugel, Floods, and Slugs, Oh my!

Kugel
We’d like to take this opportunity to give you all a sneak peak into the daily events, trials, and tribulations of life in our apartment here in Sayausi. None of the following events are that extraordinary individually but looked at together paint a pretty accurate picture of what goes on in a typical week.

First, our apartment is pretty swanky for Peace Corps. It’s big, there’s furniture, and we even have appliances (which supplied the boxes that make up a significant percentage of our furniture). One of those uber swanky appliances is our stove. A real stove. Though after coming back from the states I realized our super fancy stove is actually super small as well. My mom gave me a really nice baking sheet over Christmas as they are difficult to find down here and the ones you can find are coated in tephlon, which with my tendency to burn things is not a good idea. I was so absolutely excited about this cooking sheet that it did not occur to me until I was back in Sayausi, in my apartment, looking at our stove, that the sheet might not fit in the stove.

I slowly approached the stove, pulled open the door, and tried to slide in the baking sheet. No luck. The baking sheet which would easily fit in any stove in the states with room to spare did not fit. I clanked and pushed and grunted, tilted, pulled, and gave up. The sheet did not fit. It was time for more drastic measures: Mike, a tool box, and a brick.

I sat down to watch as the lovely William and Sonoma baking sheet brought all the way from Arizona to the southern sierras of Ecuador was bent, banged, and sculpted to fit the dimensions of my mini-stove.

After several minutes of “reshaping” the baking sheet slid, with only minimal resistance, into the grooves within the oven meant to hold the oven racks. However, it works perfectly and aside from the small puncture wound received during some brick and nail maneuver it’s like the sheet was built for our oven…which I guess in a sense it was.

Anyway, so we have an oven small though it may be. And this allows for all sorts of tasty cookies and tasty experiments. One such experiment took place a few weeks ago when we and a friend from the coast decided to make kugel. Kugel: the food that somehow could be both dinner and dessert. Thanks to our tiny oven that could we made the noodley, cinnamony, cheesy, sugary dish and feasted until our hearts content…which with kugel comes after a relatively small portion.




Floods
During the same week our oven gave us kugel, the weather gave us something else: a flood in our very own 2nd floor apartment.

Since our arrival from the states Sayausi has been getting fairly regular thunder storms accompanied by huge downpours almost every afternoon. It’s actually rather impressive and I enjoyed watching the torrential letting of water from the clouds above, even though it meant a relatively large pool of water gathering in our laundry room (not a problem as that room is tiled and has a drain). In fact it was one afternoon when Mike didn’t go up to Cajas and we were both enjoying the weather spectacle from the safety of our apartment when somebody knocked on our door.

Our upstairs neighbors had come down to ask us if our apartment was taking on water.
We told them about the water in the back of our apartment and they said, “You’re going to get more. Come upstairs and look.”

We followed them up two flights of stairs to their apartment where it looked like someone had come in with a fire hose and soaked everything. There were buckets overflowing with water everywhere and a standing two inches of water covering the majority of their apartment. The only way out for the water was down, to our apartment. We raced back down the stairs to check the back of our apartment where the pool of water had doubled in size and we realized that water was also coming down and leaking through the ceiling in our bedroom.

We immediately started moving everything from our bedroom to the front of the apartment. Additionally, we began plotting with our neighbors about how to get the water from their apartment, and the vacant apartment right above us, out before it all leaked through. After a few minutes of intense brainstorming the answer came: brooms. Yes, brooms.

After gathering all the collective broom in the building everyone started sweeping the water out of the apartments and down the stairs to the front door of the building. We shut the door to our apartment, stuffed several towels in the space between the door and the floor, and listened as the indoor waterfall passed by our apartment and out on to the streets below. After about thirty minutes of an indoor water park most of the water had been moved out and we moved into the drying stage. For us, this meant moving all of the possibly damp clothes and furniture into drier places. For our neighbors it meant turning on all of the lights in the building, and leaving them on, for weeks. Yes, the lights in the upstairs apartment have been on for three weeks. We know that because in the hallway and in the laundry room the ceiling is made of clear glass tiles. So at night when it should be dark it is not (the tiles also gave us an interesting view on the water sweeping that took place earlier).

So our apartment has dried out and things have returned to normal except for the perpetual light all day and all night that emanates from the apartment of above.



Sweeping the flood away...


Slugs
There are no biting, malaria ridden mosquitoes in Sayausi. There are no poisonous snakes lurking in dark corners. There are no flesh eating parasites or dangerous predators. No, what we have do deal with are slow moving insects, slow moving spiders, and the slowest of the slow moving; slugs.

After every rain (which is every day) some slimy slug wiggles his way into our apartment. I am not sure why or what they have in mind but the come in nonetheless (maybe it’s the smell of kugel and other baked treat that draws them in). Mike was initially in charge of slug control as I dealt more with the slow moving spiders. However, one morning that all changed and I took over as slug buster. The events of that morning were captured on film.

This film may not be appropriate for slugs or other slimy creatures.



Recreation, First Aid Education, and Ecochallenger Biathlon-ation

Hike
Not surprisingly we went for another hike in Cajas. We’ve been doing some high altitude training…more on that in the next blog post.

Featuring the flowers of Cajas... (double click to enlarge the image)


...and Mike walking in the almohadilla...


...and Mary walking in the almohadilla


Back Country First Aid
Every month the park guards at Cajas have a day long meeting. During this day there is an informational meeting and then some sort of activity (like picking trash out of one of the many lakes in Cajas) or some sort of class.

For the January meeting Mike and I were going to be in charge of planning a backcountry first aid class for the park guards (in case anyone forgot we are both Wilderness EMTs and as such are qualified to give such a course…at least in Ecuador). And it looked like we were going to give the class until the day before we were supposed to give the class. Mike got extremely last minute confirmation from the Cruz Azul (a kind volunteer mountain rescue group in Cuenca) that they could come up to give the class. As such our class was postponed and we were assigned to be facilitators for the Cruz Azul class.

The class took place after the extremely boring meeting during which I read, a perk of not actually having a formal relationship with the park, and Mike had to pay attention or at least look like he was. After the two and a half hour meeting Cruz Azul took over.

Their presentation was interesting, the park guards seemed to enjoy it (especially the parts with ropes and harnesses), and other than the fact they got some medical information completely wrong and demonstrated a maneuver for a spinal injury that made my stomach flip and in real life would likely inflict serious damage to the patient, it went really well. We’ll definitely have to re-address a few details in the class that we will give to the guards but we got a really tasty free lunch at the end of it all and that makes almost anything worth it.



A glimpse of the class in action...


The Ecochallenger
Every year Cajas, in partnership with an organization in Cuenca, has an extreme biathlon through the park. It is called the Inganan, which roughly translated means the Trail of the Inca, since some of the course goes along the Inca Trail (although less this year since Mike had the route changed for conservation reasons).

The course begins with an hour and a half straight uphill bike ride and ends with a 20k run through the hills of Cajas. I don’t think there is any way to describe the extremeness of the hills in Cajas nor the extremeness of doing either of those two activities on their own at up to 14,000ft above sea level (think Pikes Peak without the snowcap). Thankfully, we were not competing in the race. We were a backcountry checkpoint on the trail and medical assistance should anything go wrong on the running part of the race.

However, to get to the checkpoint we had to hike in an hour and a half (at a pace I did not think I was, or should be, capable of) and hike out three hours crisscrossing the hillsides for lost racers (of which there would have been many more if we hadn’t been at our checkpoint waving my giant yellow raincoat in an attempt to lead the racers in the right direction up the valley). Needless to say even though we were not in the race we were tired at the end of it and gobbled up the sanduches they were handing out at the finish line, followed by a fried trout lunch complements of the race organizers.
Here is the website for the event: www.ecochallenger.blogspot.com



Valentine´s Day
In case you didn´t already know Valentine´s Day, even though it falls on a Saturday this year, is a perfectly valid excuse for not going to work or school today (Thursday) or tomorrow (Friday). Here, in Ecudaor the Dia de Amor y Amistad is more of a several day celebration. So, enjoy the ¨festival¨ of San Valentin and eat some candy hearts for us!