The Women of Ecuador

The women of Ecuador sexualize themselves a lot. They wear very tight fitting clothes, the mandatory high heels and lots of makeup. They look like dominatrixes in their appearance, yet they walk with their heads lowered and their arms crossed on their chests in submission. At the bank the other day, two security guards were talking about a women standing in line who had super spiky heels on and a mini skirt barely covering her voluptuous forms. The guards were loudly commenting on her butt. Everyone could hear their comments. The woman looked very ill at ease. Men can and do say whatever they want out loud about women and the women take it. I haven’t heard a woman tell a man off as of yet. The women just put up with it or find it to be a compliment to receive this type of attention. It really stings me to find myself in this misogynist and anti-feminist place. Not many confident women in sneakers around here. I clash with my Dr Martens boots!

I think that the men feel emasculated around me because of my tattoos and sometimes they make little hushed comments. Absolutely every time that I spot one of those dickless idiots, I yell an insult which inevitably puts them in their place. People here don’t like to be put on the spot like that, it is one of the worst insults to them. I enjoy humiliating them like that.

Men wear a lot of branded clothing, drive fancy cars, you wonder where the money comes from to pay for all of this. Most of it unfortunately is credit. At some point the bubble is bound to burst. One thing that I find fascinating is that people here spend so much money on their appearance and to show off, instead of improving their living conditions which are horrid: leaky roofs, walls absolutely covered in black mold, no mosquito nets in malaria infested areas, dilapidated looking houses, etc. I personally would rather have a clean and functional home than a new phone or a pair of Diesel jeans. It’s scary just how far reaching and powerful the consumerist pull is.

Dealing with Cops in Quito

I have been dealing with the paperwork required to apply for an “Objecto Determinado” visa which allows one to apply for residency once one is in Bolivia. I can’t even begin to enumerate the countless agencies, offices and bureaus that I had to go through to get the process under way. It does not help that I am driving which means that I am crossing Peru and needing further documents for my dogs and the car in order to do so. At each place that I present myself people seem to be surprised by my endeavor; they don’t seem to have been in contact with a white tattooed woman driving across South America in her car with her 3 dogs! Since what I am attempting to do is a little bit of a novelty for some of these bureaucratic folks they give me a hard time, some even trying to dissuade me. If there’s one thing I can’t stand is a paternalistic attitude…

All week I have been dreadfully fighting the Quito traffic which is way worse than that of Los Angeles! The roads here are not built to handle the amount of cars that are circulating here. To alleviate it, they have a program called: “Pico y Placa” which I have learned about the hard way by dealing with two cops trying to impound my car. On specific days, drivers with a license plate with a specific last digit are not supposed to be driving inside the city during peek hours. My license plate number happened to fall on a Wednesday and there I was, not having a clue as to why I was being pulled over and asked to follow the cops in order to leave the car at some designated parking lot and pick it up the following day. Yeah right! With my 3 dogs with me, rushing for an appointment with an attorney I was certainly not going to do that! So I bribed! 100$ later I was free. Much more costly bribes than I expect to pay in Peru or Bolivia. From what I hear, Ecuador is on the very costly side. If anything else, it makes me practice my Spanish but the cost is steep.

Quito, Ecuador

Quito is an unbearable maze of cars, street peddlers, buses, one-way streets without names, disrespectful taxis. Think of a lawless chaotic New York city but without any street names or adequate traffic signs and with much narrower roads. The noise, air pollution and traffic congestion instantaneously manages to onset a major pang of anxiety in me.

I used to be a major party person, I traveled across Europe hopping from one rave party to the next. I have lived in various major city centers, navigated the nightlife pleasurably and somehow enjoyed the city life. Came an end to my capacity to enjoy cities. Maybe it’s the fact that the density and the car traffic of the urban sprawl has become too intense for anyone to maintain a sense of sanity or perhaps it is just a change in me, but I can’t handle the madness of living and navigating through the insanity anymore. My anxiety kicks in full force the moment I penetrate the belly of the urban monster.

I have to put up with this mess for about two weeks while I am getting my paperwork in order to drive to Bolivia. I have a European as well as a Canadian passport and can go to Bolivia as a tourist without a visa but since I am going to be applying for Bolivian residency when I get there, I am required to have a specific visa which will allow me to do so. This visa necessitates a lot of paperwork such as proof of financial solvency, letter of invitation from a Bolivian citizen, letter explaining what I plan to be doing there, proof of yellow fever shots. I am also bringing in my 3 dogs which means additional paperwork for them and also for the car. Then, because I am driving through Peru, I have to have specific paperwork for the car and dogs in order to cross the border. It’s not an enjoyable enterprise to be undergoing within the hell that is Quito but I don’t have a choice.

The biggest turn off about Quito is the lack of greenery. It’s all pavement and ramshackled bricks all around; nothing pretty to look at.

When I went to see my attorney to receive my resident card, there was an American woman in the office waiting to start her residency process. She informed me that she was going to Vilcabamba. I grinned inside. By the look of her I could tell that she would fit right in. She was probably in her late fifties, short grayish hair, she was wearing a jeans three-quarter length skirt with a matching jeans top. Her feet were clad in white running shoes from which stuck out some grayish socks that were pulled up way too high. She was loudly chewing gum and clapping her tongue and tiny bits of spittoon came out of her mouth when she spoke. Her eyes kept looking in all directions, she couldn’t keep her gaze fixed and her left eye was twitching uncontrollably. I am not kidding! I wish I have had the guts to take a picture…

I am afraid that since Quito is such a horrible place for me to be in, I won’t be spending any more time than absolutely necessary here and thus won’t be taking any pictures. Also, there just isn’t much to photograph, just like any big city, it is ugly and overbuilt.

Open-Minded Hosts

While dealing with my paperwork requirements in Quito, I am staying with a retired doctor and his wife about 30 minutes out of the city. I am renting a cabin that they have on the property. The doctor has spent about 50 years of his life in Europe and thus has a very modern outlook on life. Pretty much immediately he expressed to me his pro-abortion views, his anti-religious feelings, his fear for the growing problem of overpopulation especially in Ecuador where the population has more than doubled in the last 30 years. He is also a fervent advocate of vasectomies for men, he thinks that they should be mandatory for men who already have two children. I was very glad to hear that since it seems that often times the burden of sterilization is on women and the procedure being more complex and painful it is a deeply unreasonable way of doing things.

The doctor’s wife works for the environmental protection branch of the government. She is currently trying to have a law implemented that would force whoever cuts a tree to plant three others in return. I cross my fingers that the law passes which would make Ecuador a unique country in the fight against deforestation.

I am extremely happy to have landed amongst these environmentally inclined modern people. It is refreshing to be able to openly express my views and concerns as they relate to the environment or my experiences in Ecuador. Since they are both very forward in their thinking, I have taken the liberty to reveal to them my orientation. They were not at all shocked and even informed me that their next door neighbors are a couple of older lesbians who although they have not explicitly revealed their orientation, lead the life of a married couple and have been together for about 30 years. I hope that I get to meet them! They would be the first lesbians that I would meet in Ecuador.

Crucita Goodbye!

My hosts in Crucita ended up being nice. I am awfully quick to judge and my negativity is legendary. I am working on that. I need to find the balance between being a bright eyed, naive woman and being a pessimistic judgmental one. I guess being a tattooed dyke who often got teased at school as a kid, I came to be quickly on the defensive and on a constant lookout for things that can be against me. I need to find my balance.

The Jehovah witnesses, although having an impossibly different outlook on life as it relates to how one should lead their life, were nice to me. I knew and they knew that we were from very different planets, yet they managed to be courteous and pleasant overall. I was on their property after all, they could have asked me to leave. But they didn’t, they made an effort towards me and I did the same. Yes, our interactions seemed forced at times but overall I think that we all grew from the experience. I am generally a very outspoken and argumentative person when it comes to homosexuality, I like to make my rights known, I like to impose my sexual orientation on others, to be in their face. Especially when I was in my teens I used to love to provoke and shock people. Here, with these Jehovah witnesses I chose not to do that, instead I was calm and extremely polite, overly so perhaps, the goal being to show them that I am not the monster that their religion depicts me to be.

At the end of my stay, when we were parting, they gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. We all looked at one another and smiled cheerfully, at once relieved that the ordeal was over but I also hope to think that we were also genuinely respectful of one another.

My Hosts Turn Out To Be Jehovah Witnesses!

I am getting quite fed up of the beach and of the place where I am staying. As it turns out the owners here are Jehovah witnesses and our world views couldn’t be any different. I haven’t told them that I am a dyke but my full sleeve tattoo is filled with girls and other elements giving me away so they probably figured it out. I have noticed that the wife of the owner never interacted with me after the initial introduction and seemed to be avoiding me and then the husband informed me that they were Jehovah witnesses and even gave me a pamphlet. He is acting unnaturally nice towards me, as if it cost him to be interacting with me. They probably view my arrival as a strengthening ordeal sent to them by god in order to teach them about how close the world is to Armageddon. I must represent the mighty devil sent to tempt them into sin….

I have never had any dealings with Jehovah witnesses, in fact I never even bothered to open my door when they would knock on their week end door to door crusades. After learning that my hosts were of that religious denomination I looked it up on Wikipedia. Being a fervent atheist, I was shocked to realize that some people can hold such ridiculous and backwards beliefs. I am all about live and let live but when someone’s belief is that all homosexuals are demons to be put in the same category as pedophiles, I cringe and fume. I don’t understand people’s need for religion, I think it’s a need to not think, to be told what to think and do. With all the knowledge that we have about how religion is an invention of men in order to control other fellow men, how can one still pursue it? Why do people have the need to believe these dark small minded fairy tales? After all the massacres and wars that have been conducted in the name of religion, why can’t people move away from it and gain control of their own lives? We are masters of our own lives, and no supernatural little Jesus, who is an absurd invention, is going to guide you. Reading the bible and interpreting one’s life based on it, one might as well take Grimm’s fairy tales and live in accordance to their “truths”. I will most probably be ranting against religion in many more posts to come because it is an unfortunate illness here in South America. All kinds of evangelical groups come in brainwashing the poor and undereducated masses here, manipulating them with gifts and free meals. It is sad and oppressing.

I am also fed up with the empty days spent on the beach. I can’t relax, especially now that I am being watched as if I am the worst sinner, and the days seem long. I feel stagnated since I have tons of things to do in Quito to be able to get out of Ecuador. It feels like a big waste of time here. I am trying to look at my situation with humor: a lesbian amongst religious fanatics afraid of her! But it’s hard to not feel angry and disappointment at the state of things. In our day and age, with so much experience from history, with so much knowledge carved onto us in the blood of those who were massacred in the name of these manipulative beliefs, there are still so many small minded people out there pursuing this nonsense and judging other fellow human beings with their twisted and shallow myopic eyes. It makes me sick! It really goes to show how truly westernized I am. After leaving Poland when I was 10 I never had to deal with the insanity of religion. I have taken for granted the openness and atheism of the society that I found myself in while in Western Europe, Canada or the USA. When in Asia, Buddhism has been nothing but accepting of my sexual orientation and I never felt ostracized. Here I am in South America with a new mission of opening the eyes of the mobs of uneducated fanatics. I’ll take it on! I do think that I will be feeling better amongst the indigenous people whose traditions and beliefs are much more in accord with my own: respect of Mother Earth, communion with all life, a much more meditative and positive approach to life.

Manta, Ecuador

So I went to Manta today in order to get the car checked and get an oil change. The people that I am staying with referred me to someone in Manta. The car got supposedly fixed and the rattling sound that was audible went away while I was with the mechanic but about half an hour later when I was on the highway it started back again. Which means that I have wasted a whole day for nothing.

But hey I got to explore Manta. What a deception! The city is one big slum with stagnant water everywhere which breeds mosquitoes which in turn bring disease such as malaria and dengue fever. The town is dirty and smells like raw sewage. The beaches are filthy without much room to lay down because a lot of the beach is occupied by businesses from bus stations to noisy bars to tourist knick knacks to fish stands. Oh fish stands, great! So I thought but after looking at the dead fish laying there unrefrigerated, with bugs and flies squirming on it, the thick smell of decomposition all around at 100F heat, I got a little bit less excited.

Then come the tourists, lots of them. Skins burned orange from too much unprotected sun exposure, walking with their fancy Nikons around their necks, dressed in the classic safari garb consisting of polyester khaki shorts, matching tops, ridiculous expedition hats with their feet clad in socks inside Teva sandals, proudly carrying their loads of purchases. They are generally to be seen in the tourist spots around mainstream hotels and knick knack stands. It’s a shame for me to be associated with them.

I was trying to find a place to eat some good fish dishes but found that most of the restaurants were closed (it was 2pm) or the quality of their fish looked anything but appetizing. The smell upon entering the restaurant would be that of rotting fish. My dogs breaths smell fresher than that. Not where I would eat no matter how hungry. After spending about an hour looking for someplace to eat, I decided to give up my search and ended up eating… brace yourselves… canned fish with crackers! So here I am in a fishing town and I’m forced to eat canned fish. I was not happy.

Manta has a big expat/retirees population which keeps me utterly puzzled. Who in their right minds would choose to live there? It’s dirty, stinky, polluted, congested with traffic, without anything even remotely resembling a nice beach, with only one tiny patch of green nature which happens to be the central park of the town which sits on the main highway surrounded on all sides with major traffic, smog and trash. I don’t even understand why tourists choose to merely visit Manta but the thought of living there?!?! I could see some fancy houses sitting in the midst of slums, surrounded by the dirt and grit of the city and the envy and misery of their neighbors. Ok, so you have your nice mega house in the middle of screaming poverty! How well can that possibly make you feel? A white person with the most wealth in the whole town having servants and staff catering to you, I guess some people crave that: being singled out as the supposed success. I personally prefer being on equal footing with my neighbors or even better: make a difference by helping my neighbors either by giving them the opportunity for meaningful employment or giving them a hand with their housing construction and living surrounded by well cared for and protected nature. We can’t all have the same aspirations I suppose.

Reflections on the Beach

I am definitely not much of a beach girl. I like the ocean, the smell of it, the breeze, the infinite vastness of it but after a couple of days I get bored. I start missing the greenness, the lushness, the life of the trees. The beach is just sand. Funny because I like the desert which could be considered as just sand. To me though the desert represents a meditative spiritual state, a confrontation with oneself. I most probably feel that way because of the solitude that the desert offers, the beach is not quiet, there is the sound of the waves crashing and there’s also always human life because a beach is rarely completely isolate.

Beach life here in Crucita is definitely relaxing, not much is happening, the beat of life is lazy and repetitive. For some it is paradise, but for me it is thankfully just a wait station, a necessary short stop.

I also don’t find myself all excited because I see bikini girls out and about. I have never found that the sight of a girl scantily clad made me more interested in her or more sexually excited for that matter. I really get turned on by faces, beautiful expressive faces are what I find myself drawn to. The body type is not important to me, I like all sizes: long or short, thin or built are equally attractive to me, I am a physically active person and tend to like the same in my partners. Hair color, eyes color are totally irrelevant to me and I often wonder why some people make a big deal out of these completely superficial attributes. An expressive, awakened, unique face stands out in a crowd while body types are redundant.

While by the beach I am taking the time to just do nothing, lounge around, eat fish, read and prepare for the upcoming administrative hurdle that will come soon enough when I reach the capital.

Mosquito Hell

Little mosquito is there not, a beauty in you that I simply can’t spot?

What is the use of mosquitoes? What good do they do? Besides spreading disease and causing so much suffering, is there a utility for their existence? Oh how I wish that they were feeding off something else besides my blood.

It is hard now that I am back to mosquito elevations again. They bite me all over all day and in the evening they are deadly. I can be indoors, under a mosquito net and they will find their way to me. I love the tropical climate but boy do I hate mosquitoes! They make my life so miserable! I am literally covered in bites from head to toe. And I am not the zen type who calmly nurtures their bites, I am the scratch till it bleeds and forms a wound type. I take pleasure in assuaging my need to scratch and I do it relentlessly. Then I regret it because I end up covered in wounds, which is not very attractive to the eye. Ideally, someone would pass a light feather on my bites and give me some gentle respite from my agony.

I do not use DEET because it is toxic and causes a failure in the central nervous system if used frequently. I generally use essential oils of citronella, eucalyptus and tea tree mixed with water and sprayed on myself and reapplied every 1 and a half hours and that works fine. The problem is that I do not have these wonderful oils with me right now. I will have to seek alternatives to DEET that are not toxic if I am unable to find my beloved essential oils.

Oh mosquitoes, dear mosquitoes can I will you out of my life? Please disappear and give me some respite!

Crucita, Ecuador

Beautiful cabin rental right on the ocean. After a drive of 12 hours from Vilcabamba, I have finally made it to Crucita, a small fishermen town about 40 minutes north of Manta.

The drive was tiring but the road conditions were good. The worst part was skirting Guayaquil. Passing by dozens of gated communities with identical oversized row houses with no yards or greenery, located right on top of slums and shanty towns. A very depressing sight! Fighting traffic and competitive drivers with very little skill or knowledge of driving.

Arriving to the cabin that I am renting from a wonderful couple who both speak English, I was relieved because for a change there were no negative surprises. I found the cabin on Airbnb and it is exactly as described on the site. I am so glad that the place is clean, quiet and has good Internet which I boost by plugging in my own Linksys router to the main system. There are some things that are totally useful to bring when traveling and a router is one of them. I don’t need a phone because I can use the free Internet phone either through Google Voice or Skype.

I pretty much have the beach for myself, and the weather is so hot that it is nice to take a solitary swim in the ocean. Of course my dream would be to have my girl with me, to cuddle and make out in the salty water, throwing one another into the waves, licking the salt off our skins.

I went into the center of town to eat and found a nice little place by the beach serving delicious ceviches. The boy who took my order and served me the food must have been about 9 years old. He explained me the menu, brought me my plates and condiments, cleaned my table after I was done. All the while, what seemed like his father, sat reading a newspaper. Would it be better for that boy to be in school or to be working for his parents business? The boy looked happy, he had a wide healthy grin.

I was looking at all the young people on the beach, surfing, swimming, playing. They weren’t going to school, in fact I haven’t seen a school in the town. I was wondering what it would be like to have been born in that context, with none of the obligations of modern society, no schools, no careers, no major consumerist ambitions. Just fishing, picking coconuts, enjoying the ocean, laying in a hammock when the day is at its hottest. Who would I have been by now?

Is there a girl out there on that beach who is dreaming of another one like her, with a passion for her sex? Is she pursuing her desires or is she simply submitting to her fate? Accepting reluctantly the societal obligations of an unhappy marriage with kids? I wonder… as I look around me trying to spot my fellow lesbians.