the Amazon, Part 1

I am now on my way down the Napo River to the Amazon and Iquitos, the largest city in the world that is inaccessible by road, located in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. Once again, I was pleasantly but truly surprised at the way things turned out. I met Phil (a friend from La Hesperia who’s also traveling South America for a year so we decided to do part of our journey together) in Coca, a small town at the edge of the Amazon and the next morning, at 7:00, we boarded a large motorized canoe, together with some 50 or 60 other people, bags of rice, generators, baskets of fruits and boxes of chicks. Then, for 12 hours, we floated down the river towards Nueva Rocafuerte, the last town before the border with Peru. It was a wonderful ride. Much of it was passed in silence, watching the water and the jungle go by, with only an occasional, “wow! Look at that huge tree!” or “Did you see that butterfly? It just passed us! That must be a blow to the captain’s ego.” I started talking to a nun named Edith, who is twenty years old and grew up in Iquitos. First she entertained me with adventure stories of growing up on the doorstep of the jungle (and the dangers of man-eating wild pigs and electric eels), then we started talking about her religion and where she was going. She’s one of the “children of Israel”, which is a tiny Peruvian-based Christian sect based firmly in the Ten Commandments. She very nicely gave me a little booklet of the Ten Commandments and some psalms, and then invited Phil and me to join her and her sisters (as in, fellow nuns) at their mission about twenty minutes farther down the river from Nueva Rocafuerte for the weekend. We agreed, excited to get a taste of their life, and so the next morning, after a night in Nueva Rocafuerte, we set off.
We docked at a cluster of houses – I can’t really call it a town – and helped the sisters move their baggage into their stilted house. Then we spent most of the morning clearing land for a new church. It was a huge swath – two hectares by the end - because they said that this was going to be a huge town, as everyone who believed in the second coming of Jesus Christ and wanted to be saved would come here to join the community. Don’t worry, it wasn’t rainforest, it was old corn and rice and bushes, so we didn’t feel bad macheteing it.
We were done by lunch time – and good thing too, a month of no work meant huge blisters when I took up the machete again – and so we spent the afternoon talking and chewing on sugarcane. At 6, their Sabbath started, so we were invited to join them in the church. In general, it was a relatively normal church service, hymns, the Lord’s Prayer, a sermon with lots of references to biblical passages, etc. but there were a couple key differences. Firstly, they didn’t have a cross – they believed that it counted as a ‘false idol’ according to the 10 Commandments so instead they had a banner listing the Commandments and their derivations in the Bible – and they segregated men and women on different sides of the church so one side was filled with brightly colored veils and long skirts and the other filled with long unbound hair and beards. I was told the biblical references for those mandates, but I can’t remember them now. What struck me though, was the length – the service was 2.5 hours long, and it was the first of seven on the Sabbath – 6 and 11 pm, then 4, 7 and 11 am, then again at 2 and 5 pm. So we were woken up by a ringing bell at 11 and 4 and 6:30, though we managed to get out of attending all the services and instead spent the day relaxing by the riverside and exploring the jungle.
Phil made friends with one of the local kids and he showed us along a path in the jungle, pointing out orchids and bullet ants (So named for the amount of pain inflicted by one of their bites). It was just as interesting as any jungle tour, and free!
We attended their evening service and I played my violin along with their hymns (which were very repetitive so it was easy to learn). After dinner we sat in the house, listening to the rain fill the water barrels, and talking about religion. Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn Israelita (as they call themselves) but it was definitely interesting to hear their point of view on biblical and cultural and historical issues.

The next day we went back to Nueva Rocafuerte to get our exit stamps from Ecuador and provisions for the boat, and then were off back down the river to Peru. We’re now hanging out in Pantoja, the Peruvian border town, and the most idyllic place I have seen in a long while. They have sidewalks instead of streets (who needs cars?) which are lined with fruit trees, and palm frond-thatched houses with little grills out back to cook their food over open fires. They have electricity from 6-11 every evening, which very conveniently forces everyone out into the streets to socialize in the afternoon, since there’s nothing you can do inside and people sit by the river and talk or play games or exchange songs on the guitar.
There are quite a few other tourists here. Joining Phil and me on the boat will be an Argentinean couple, a Dutch couple, and a crazy Chilean graffiti artist. In the 3 days we’ve been here we’ve had great fun hanging out, especially with the “Suiso Loco” – the Swiss guy who is paddling down the Amazon to the Atlantic in his Biciboat – a paddle-house boat powered by his trusty bicycle. He’s been traveling for 5 years now, biking through the Middle East, guiding tours in Africa, and finally biking around the southern half of South America to get to Ecuador and start his Amazon journey. If you want to know more about his trip (vastly longer and more interesting than mine, i'm sure) he's at www.hervepuravida.com

Tomorrow morning we sail for Iquitos, 5 days of swinging in a hammock, talking to my fellow travelers, playing cards, and keeping an eye out for parrots and river dolphins.
But I'll tell more about that after I do it.

The Permaculture Workshop

16-11-09
My time in Pucara didn’t go exactly as planned. I started off teaching in the school, but didn’t like it. First of all, they didn’t need me. They had two teachers (for around 30 kids, aged 6-13) as well as a music, art, and gym teacher who came in once a week for specific classes, and another volunteer who had been there since June teaching English and helping with classes. I was utterly useless. Moreover, the week I started was the week of their exams, so I spent 5 days standing around watching the children cheat on their tests. The next two weeks were vacation, and I was out of a job.

Fortunately, I met Peter, an ex-Vermonter who has been living here for 11 years working with the people of Pucará and other villages on sustainable development projects through his NGO and, as if in answer to my prayers, he invited me to join a permaculture workshop he had organized. It was perfect. The workshop was three days per week for three weeks, taught by a Guatemalan permaculture expert and attended by Ecuadorian organic farmers who wanted to know more about this permaculture thing. (Permaculture, if you don't know yourself, is basically sustainable organic agriculture, working with and from nature, instead of against it). I had so much fun, and learned so much.

For example: the “border effect” is really useful – if, instead of thinking of a border as dividing, you think of it as uniting two different areas, you can take advantage of the diversity created there (i.e. at the foot of a mountain, you find mountain birds, valley birds, and some birds that only live in that niche). So when planning a garden, make as many borders as possible – canals, paths, etc. – and make them as curvy as possible: when have you ever seen a straight line in nature? That also uses space better- you can plant more carrots in a wavy line than a straight one. And the more carrots, the better.

Or: agriculture should work in harmony with the lunar cycle. When the moon is waxing, energy and fluids in plants move upwards, while when it wanes, the energy sinks. So always plant seeds with the waxing moon – so it will create shoots – but transplant with the waning moon – so it develops roots.

Or: many times you can get nature to do your work for you. E.g. if you have chickens (and everyone here does) put them in an empty vegetable bed and they will clean it of seeds and insects while tilling the soil and fertilizing it with their nutrient-filled manure, and - voilá! You can plant in it again without having to do any of that yourself.

I don’t know about you, but I found it fascinating. We generally spent our mornings learning the theory behind permaculture, its principles and methods, and the afternoons putting them into practice: like making a circle of banana trees around a hole filled with branches and leaves to filter and use the “gray water” from the laundry/kitchen areas – every year you get a meter and a half of good compost, 21 bunches of bananas, and someplace to drain your dishwater. We also made ditches in the hill to collect rainwater and direct it into the soil, mandala gardens, and a seeding area. It was great fun.

The only problem was that many of the things I learned – like how to make a sustainable coffee forest with bananas and citrus trees to give shade – aren’t really applicable to Vermont. I was suddenly faced with how very unsustainable our life in New England is; everything we eat, even in the summer, is transported from California or farther. And even if we turn the field behind our house into a fully functional, diversified permaculture garden and canned and stored everything, we could still only produce a fraction of what we consume in a year. It almost makes one want to up and move down to the tropics where you can plant a lemon tree outside your kitchen window and never more have to worry about zest. Sure, these people don’t even have a word for “sledding”, but they’re a heck of a lot closer to sustainability than we will ever be. And they have really good fruit.  (Tangent alert!) My two favorite fruits right now are Guavas – like a huge (2 ft long) bean pod filled with shiny black seeds covered in a layer of soft white fuzz, you eat the fuzz and spit the seeds on the ground, hoping to plant a new tree – and Grenedillas – perhaps so named because they look like grenades, they’re a yellow fruit that has a hard shell you crack open to reveal hundreds of small seeds covered in clear, sweet pouches of juice, sort of like a pomegranate but better – I’m going to miss them when I leave here.

Oh, by the way, my plans have changed and I’m now not going to Colombia but straight to the Amazon and on into Peru, so if you never hear from me again, I was probably eaten by an anaconda or a jaguar or a school of piranhas or any of the other amazingly lethal things they have in the jungle. It’s going to be so exciting, hooray! :D

Goodbye La Hesperia, Hello Pucara!

This week I traveled north in Ecuador, past Quito, past the Equator (I’m in the northern hemisphere again! …it doesn’t feel any different.) and now I’m in a tiny town (50 houses or so) in the mountains called Pucara. I actually spent the first half of the week at a farm that’s the base camp of the program I’m doing, which was wonderful. The farm is much more productive than La Hesperia, and the volunteers there eat all their food fresh from the garden – the pre-dinner conversation goes something like, “there are a lot of carrots in the garden, we could get some onions too, and I think I saw some zucchini ready, oh, and we have all those potatoes from last week…ok, let’s go harvest them”. All this is in Spanish, of course, because, although there was only one Spanish-speaker among us (a guy from Spain) it’s the lingua franca, and even when I was talking to the American guy we spoke mostly in Spanish.

Tuesday was Harvest Day, and so we spent the morning picking all sorts of vegetables and washing them and tying them in bunches to sell, then in the afternoon we went out in a truck and sold them all, to specific clients and anyone who happened to see us stopped on the side of the road. Sitting in the back of a truck, the wind blowing my hair, crunching on a sweet, organic carrot from the bin…life couldn’t get better.

On Thursday I left for Pucara, where I’m going to spend the next three weeks. After a morning spent thinning carrots (and munching on the larger ones, straight out of the ground), we hopped on a bus that took us deep into the mountains, far from any sort of civilization. Tiny, twisty roads brought us down from the high Sierras and their rain-starved brown fields (it’s the end of the dry season and everyone’s praying for rain) to the cloud forest, where everything is lush and large-leafed, even though technically it’s the dry season here too. I alighted in a town with one and a half roads (I think the second one disappears after a short distance), one school, and one kiosk-like shop that also, thankfully, has a public telephone.

My host is named Emperatriz, and her house is basic but sweet. My room is cozy and the cinderblock walls are painted a cheery yellow, made more inviting by the bright light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a wire. There’s no electricity apart from the lights in the whole house though, so I have to find someplace else to charge my computer if I want to write anything. The kitchen is separate, with a dirt floor and a roof so low even I have to duck in order to not hit my head, but the food that comes off of the tiny stove more than makes up for it – it’s simple, but very, very good. Emperatriz has a few chickens that have the run of the yard and sleep in a tree nearby (I’ve never seen chickens in a tree before, but I guess they’re birds too…) and a cute 3-month-old pig and a couple guinea pigs. Everyone has chickens here. You can hear them all day, and they strut along the road like it’s their own (and considering the number of cars that come by, it very well could be). The roosters have crowing contests across town, especially at 4:30 -5:00 in the morning when they all get together for a grand chorus, but I’ve learned to sleep through it.

The other woman who’s taken me under her wing is Consuela, and she spent all Saturday morning teaching me to make empanadas – sweet, cheese-filled rolls – and telling me about life in Pucara and all the other volunteers who stayed with her and wrote to tell her how much they missed her empanadas.

On Monday I start teaching in the elementary school in earnest (I went on Friday but it was a bit of a fiasco, and I have higher hopes for Monday when, hopefully, I’ll know what I’m doing) and I’ll be here until the beginning of November, when I go off to Colombia to another organic farm.

Just Another Day in the Jungle

Here I am, about to leave La Hesperia and I feel like I’ve only just settled in. My blisters have just barely turned into calluses, I’ve finally gotten the hang of the machete (and I haven't chopped off a limb yet - yess!), and I’ve figured out how to make breakfast interesting (liven the oatmeal with a dollop of jam, for example, or convince the cooks to let you make butter so you have something for the bread). The huge-leafed plants and tall trees covered in spiky pineapple-like epiphytes feel comfortingly like home, and I know all the landmarks of the mile-long trek up the mountain from the road to the reserve. At the same time, I’m ready to go, ready to do something different, to really get to know Ecuadorians on their own terms. My next stop is Intag, a small town in the north of Ecuador where I’ll be staying with a host family and working with the community on their reforestation project.

But for now, I’m still at La Hesperia, and I’ll enjoy it for all it’s worth. And that’s certainly a lot.

Living on the equator gives me insight into the origins of many things I’ve taken for granted all my life. Like peanuts. I’ve always heard, “peanuts aren’t nuts, they’re legumes” but never really known what that meant. I had a vague picture of them growing on plants like beans or something…nothing of the sort. They’re roots! And the plants look like overgrown clover – I even pulled a few out thinking they were weeds before I learned my mistake.And bananas! Did you know they grow upside-down on the tree? They curve upwards in a big bunch…I guess so they’ll fall easier when they’re ripe. But when they’re ripe the whole tree dies and so to harvest bananas, all you have to do is chop the whole tree down with one swipe of your machete. My favorite plant is what is colloquially called ‘poor man’s hat’, but it could be called ‘poor man’s cape’ because its leaves are literally 3-4 ft long and at least 2 ft wide. It grows all over, and gets quite large. The best thing about it, though, is that it is very soft, and it’s incredibly satisfying to fell a gigantic tree with one backhanded machete stroke. Makes you love the machete.

Last weekend’s hike gave the waterfall hike a run for its money in terms of epic adventure. This one was called the Tiger Trail, after the family of pumas that live up on the mountain and use the trail for their own private highway (the Ecuadorians apparently don’t know the difference between pumas and tigers and lions – they use the words interchangeably). We even saw a puma hairball on the hike, though no tracks or (thank god) the pumas themselves. We hiked up and up and up and up the mountain, past the pastures, past the secondary forest, and into the primary cloud forest, all the while learning about the flora of the area. Like the tree called the Dragon’s Blood, which literally bleeds when you cut it, with a thick, red sap that oozes out of the cut just like blood from a finger-prick, but when you rub it on a cut or a blister it foams pale pink and heals the sore. There’s also a tree called the Suicide Tree, which drops little pellets on you if you try to cut it down, and they itch and sting for weeks with no cure.

The hike was beautiful but steep, and when we got into the primary forest it became overgrown as well, and we had to push vines out of our way to climb up the narrow path. Walter, the leader of our hike, told us that this was a trail made by the indigenous tribes to connect the coast with the mountains and the Amazon, and you could tell from the erosion of the trail – in parts the sides of the trail were above our heads. The way down was one long landslide, accompanied by shrieks as one after another of us felt the loose dirt give way under our rubber boots and we slithered down the path until we hit a root. Neither words nor pictures can do justice to the incline of that trail – it was nearly vertical at times and the soil was very sandy, so it fell apart at the slightest touch. All in all, the trip was fun and interesting but exhausting, especially since we had to walk down to the road as soon as we got back to catch a bus into Quito for the weekend.

Life at La Hesperia

After a week volunteering at the La Hesperia Biological Reserve, I’m ready for a relaxing weekend in the hammock.
The schedule is fairly simple – breakfast at 7:30, work from 8:30-12, lunch at 12:30, work from 2-5, dinner at 6, sleep sometime between 8 and 9:30. At first I was worried about getting up by 7:30, and laughed at going to bed at 8, but after only a day here it seemed natural: how could I stay up late when the crickets chirp so sleepily outside my window and it’s so very dark? (There are no stars here. The weather is consistently sunny and beautiful in the morning, cool and cloudy – but rarely rainy – in the afternoon, and overcast all night.) And how could I stay sleeping when the birds sing so brightly to accompany the morning sun? Normally I wake well before my 7:00 alarm.
Our tasks reflect the dual nature as organic farm and biological reserve. So far this week I’ve tied up tomato plants, spread manure, cleared weeds with a machete, filled soil bags for planting native trees, milked cows, walked the mule down the road to bring the day’s milk to the milk truck, and sat in the jungle looking for orchid bees. The bees here are amazing – they don’t sting, and they’re iridescent blue and green and gold with little yellow pompoms for antennae.
Tuesdays we stop work early to listen to a lecture about anything from the politics of Latin America to the variety in butterflies in the cloud forest. Wednesdays are the weekly soccer match between the volunteers and the staff. Fridays alternate – free, so we can travel on a 3-day weekend, or a hike. Today was a hike, and what an epic hike it was!

Just beyond the cow barn the cloud forest begins, and we began our hike by descending down a steep trail over, under and around jungle vines and huge-leafed trees. The trail was so steep half the time we were sliding through loose dirt rather than walking, trying not to land in the river far below. We finally got to the river in one piece (or rather 10 pieces, we were a fairly small group today) and started wading through the water in our big rubber boots –easier than making a trail of our own.
At one point we had to jump from a boulder into a calf-deep pool and everyone squealed as water sloshed into our boots. But that was the easy part. The river turned into a series of waterfalls, and one by one we strapped ourselves into harnesses and rappelled down the cliff next to the waterfall.

Or at least, that’s what we did for the first 2 waterfalls. At the third, our guide said something about ‘mas facil’(easier) and we found ourselves rappelling down through the waterfall into a deep pool and then wading out to the banks to wait for the rest of the group.

It was cold and wet and fantastically fun.
Over one of the waterfalls, we saw a pair of black eagles watching us – apparently we were right below their nest and they had eggs. In the last waterfall, our guide lost the machete underneath the torrent and tried diving to find it but didn’t succeed, so we’re down 1 machete (I’m not too sad about that. Machete clearing is hard work).
The way back was equally steep and no easy work for the lungs and legs, but we ended up just beyond the peanut field in time for a hearty, though late, lunch.

And now – the weekend! You’ll be able to find me in the hammock outside the volunteer house, reading and keeping an eye out for toucans and monkeys.

Day 2 of Porta Lopez

Today we went on an expedition to Isla de la Plata (Isle of Silver, so named because all the bird poop on the cliffs shines like silver in bright sunlight or full moonlight). It’s also called “poor man’s Galapagos” because it has similar wildlife (though not nearly as diverse) and is a heck of a lot cheaper. We took an hour boat ride there, bouncing and rocking over high waves that almost made me sick. When we got there, I met two interesting people – one named Anika (or rather, Anneka) and one alumna of Middlebury College! She was in our tour group, so we spent the day getting to know each other, reminiscing about our school, talking about life after college, and admiring the island. It was so cool to find a Midd grad in such a remote place! Small world. This tour was also in Spanish (though they promised an English-speaking tour guide) so once again I translated everything for my new friends. Fortunately or unfortunately, this time there were a lot of other people who spoke Spanish and English better than me, so I had people to help me with the words I didn’t know (like a baby bird’s downy feathers and tree sap) but also had people to correct me if I got anything wrong, so this translation project was a bit more stressful.

The tour was great though – we met dozens of Blue-Footed Boobies, and I say ‘met’ because they’ve been protected for so long that they don’t mind human presence at all and build their nests in the paths and walk right up to you on their bright blue feet.

I learned lots of interesting things about them, like that they take a different mate every year, but the females return to the same nest their whole lives: one home, many boyfriends. And that their feet get brighter blue with age, starting out white as babies and ending up a bright cerulean blue, like the Caribbean Sea in sunlight. I’ve fallen in love with their blue feet and wide, yellow, quizzical eyes. There were lots of other birds there, but none as cool as the Blue-Footed Boobies.

Then we went snorkeling in the coral at the foot of the island and I saw two blue polka-dotted fish, one bright blue flat fish with a yellow tail, a puffer fish, and lots of little yellow and purple striped fish. (like my official scientific names?) We went hunting for whales after that, to see them for the last time here before they migrated south to Antarctica for the…summer. They were amazing, (as whales always are) huge and majestic and playful…we first saw a pod of about six, then later, on our way back, we saw a mother and her baby. The mother was placidly swimming along while the baby did jumps and flips out of the water, playing in the air. It was so much fun to watch him.

That night we went out for smoothies on the beach and the waiter asked if we could dance. Only I said yes, so the next salsa song, we went up to the wooden platform and started dancing. He soon handed me off to his friend, who was a great dancer, and we danced for at least an hour, him giving me tips on how to show more “sexualidad” in my dancing every once in a while between spins. It was perfect, everything I had dreamed of, coming to Latin America and finding a random guy who would teach me salsa while showing off on the dance floor. I was so happy.

Impromptu trip to the Pacific

My first day at La Hesperia didn’t really count.

I got up super early in order to take the first bus out of Quito and then spent the next two hours staring out the window at the changing landscape. First I saw Quito, which felt strange to me, because it smelled like Mexico but looked like India. I had trouble wrapping my mind around that, how every brightly painted garage door and every box-like, multi-storeyed, and equally colorful house brought back visions of remote towns in the Himalayas. I don’t know if the architecture is characteristic of the altitude, the climate, or the socio-economic level, but there are strange similarities.

Once I left the city, I saw the farmland, which looked like a picturesque Vermont landscape stretched out onto steep mountains. Even the cows were the same, except here, they ate grass on 45^o slopes instead of the flat farmland I’m used to. Then, as we descended partway down the mountains, the vegetation grew denser and we hurtled along winding roads overlooking cliffs and jungle.

The bus dropped me off on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and I began my mile-long climb up the mountain to the reserve. The walk was interesting and exciting, but it went on…and on…and on…

I finally found the volunteer house and lots of nice, helpful volunteers who showed me around, gave me lunch, and told me that this was actually one of their Long Weekends, when everyone leaves the reserve to travel Ecuador. I was invited on a trip to see the whales on the southern coast of Ecuador, so only a few hours after arriving, I was off down the mountain again, back to up Quito, and then on a 12-hour night bus that dropped us off in a small, sleepy port town at 6:30 am.

Fortunately our hostel was ready for us, and we had a lovely breakfast of fresh fruit and rolls before starting our explorations. Today we went to the dry forest national park and the beaches and a town built on an archeological site. The dry forest was strange – it looked like winter but felt like summer, because here the deciduous trees lose their leaves in summer when it’s dry, rather than the winter when it’s cold. It was still beautiful, though grey, and the beaches and the water were especially marvelous. We watched pelicans diving for fish and sand crabs scuttle across the beach and splashed in the water ourselves for a bit before hiking back and making our way to the village. They had a small museum there, and a guided tour of the museum and the town, which was great, except it was in Spanish. I understood it fine, but my three companions (two from Germany and one from the UK) didn’t understand any Spanish, so I became unofficial interpreter for the group, with the guide kindly stopping every few sentences for me to translate. The tour was very interesting, about the civilization that lived here around the time of the Incas and what they knew about it, which wasn’t much because the funding for the research had run out a few years ago and all they can do now is maintain the site as best they can.

South of the Equator

Wow. It's been a long time since I've seen this blog. But I figured that since I was voyaging again, I should resurrect it to let people know how/what I'm doing this year (writing individual emails just takes too much time when you're timing yourself at an internet café).

My first day south of the equator went better than I had worried it would on the flight from Burlington. I watched the Green Mountains disappear beneath the clouds and imagined scenarios of my Spanish completely failing me and not being able to communicate, or being kidnapped by a taxi driver, or not being able to find the office I was supposed to go to...
No such luck.
I arrived without mishap and with multiple short but successful conversations in Spanish along the way. I checked into the office of La Hesperia, the biological station where I'll be spending the next month, arranged everything that needed arranging and spent the rest of the day exploring Quito. I didn't actually see any particularly touristy spots in the city, but I figure I'll have plenty of chances later.
The US's imperialism towards its southern neighbors has never been so apparent to me before. It's eerie. I can understand the outlets being the same, but the currency? It's so weird to see the US dollar everywhere. I've never been in a foreign country and not had to deal with exchange rates before. On the one hand it's really convenient, but on the other hand, there's no automatic discount, which is disappointing.
 
I'll sign off here, this was just to prove that the blog and I still exist.

A Hell-Heaven-Hell sandwitch

These two weeks have been a hell-heaven-hell sandwitch.
Music has always been my easiest class. Stefano, the teacher, doesn't really teach much, and we don't really bother going to class all that often...it's just not worth it. I knew that all our work would be due at the end of March, and I prepared for it, really. We had to do 3 compositions and 3 solo performance pieces and I finished one and a half of the compositions over the summer and I've been working on the solo performance pieces all year. But I wasn't ready when, 2 days before the deadline that none of us were really paying attention to, Stefano told us not only did we HAVE to have everything in, but it had to be recorded by others and formatted correctly before the deadline. We started to worry, but he said no - you can do it until April 5th, don't worry. Even though that was still way too soon, it was better, until we found out (almost by accident) that because Stefano was going to America on Saturday morning (our deadline was Friday) he had to hand in our grades to the administration on Friday. And he did...he handed in grades for work that we hadn't done, that he hadn't seen, and the admin sent it off to the IB. When the admin found out that he'd falsified grades (through a conversation that went, "so when is the final deadline?" "what do you mean? I already have your grades." "what!? but we haven't done them yet!" "what?!" etc.) everything went into an uproar and we music students locked ourselves into the music rooms for literally 12 hours each day for a week to get everything done and recorded by the time Stefano came back so he could sign our papers and send it off (for real, this time). I got it done, and after a night where I didn't go to bed until 6 am, I handed it in. It was so freeing, the feeling of existing in the real world again... and then came long weekend, which was bellissima, made everything much better.
we went to Slovenia to go camping on the beach. There are no beaches in Slovenia, apparently, only slabs of concrete, but we had a wonderful time anyway. 6 girls doing nothing for 4 days, lying in the sun on the grass, on the pier, talking, playing the guitar and making up songs, playing games that we thought we'd outgrown in 5th grade. Easter was wonderful, we bought colorful candies and hid them around the campsite and had an Easter Candy Hunt. After the hell of the previous week, it was incredibly relaxing. I relished every moment of it, like I relished the first taste of chocolate after 40 days (I had been doing Lent as I had done Ramadan last year, and I didn't eat sugar for 40 days. phew! that was HARD!). It was one of my favorite long weekends ever, just for the pure joy of being, and being relaxed.


(by the way, this is called a UWC picture - for some reason they have pictures like this on all the material, and we laugh and give them more material for their brochures)

When I cam back, however, I had to pay for my relaxation. I had an important essay to do in 4 days, and I should have been working on it over the weekend when I was relaxing. So for the next 4 days I sequestered myself in my room, studying books and researching and writing like mad. This hell was much more enjoyable than the last one, however, because I was writing my essay on The Lord of the Rings, and the research of it was what I love to do anyway - read and watch The Lord of the Rings. And yesterday I handed in the final product, of which I am very proud.
And now? I'm free forever. No more work due for the IB, ever. Nothing but the exams, for which I am now studying (3 weeks!). But until they come, I will completely enjoy my beautiful life in Duino, paradise on earth.

Project Week - Moscow

A Day of Travel

Our project week started in the pale light of pre-dawn, our sleepy eyes blinking as we rolled our suitcases to the bus stop. Our flight was at 7:00 am, so we woke at 4:30 am to catch the bust at 5:00, just to be safe. The journey was uneventful and fun, we spent a few hours in Rome, then on to Moscow. It was amazing to look out the plane window at Russia - after a winter of no snow, there was snow everywhere, and it was so flat! coming from Vermont to Italy I'd forgotten that there were places that were truly flat...but it was flat as far as I could see, and the city was a small blotch on the white snow.

Despite our worries, we got through Passport control without difficulty and were met by Danil, Heloisa’s friend, and Tatosha, our Russian third year, at the entrance. They took us to our hostel, a beautiful place behind one of the only two catholic cathedrals in Moscow.

A Day of Exploration

Our first trip was, of course, to the Red Square. It was a beautiful day, and St Basil’s Cathedral was spectacular in the cold sunlight. We went inside and marveled at the decorations – many of us had never seen an orthodox cathedral before, and the icons were truly spectacular.

Then we went to the shopping center nearby to have lunch, where we met Danil again, and he took some of us to see Arbat, the most famous street in Moscow. We couldn't figure out why at first, it wasn't that different from all the other streets, until I realized that it was like Times Square in NYC - it's an icon of the city, a place to pin your heart, even though it's not actually much more spectacular than the rest of the city.

That evening, we all went to Danil’s school to meet his friends. Despite the language barrier, we had a wonderful time talking, and then Danil got out his guitar and they all sang their favorite Russian songs for us. We enjoyed it immensely.

A Day of Success

Today we went to our first official activity of the Project: a bilingual Italian-Russian school, where we gave a presentation about UWC and they gave a presentation about Russia, and then we had tea and chatted in Italian. The students were very nice and we had a lot of fun talking to them about the differences between our schools and countries.

We went straight from that to the orphanage. We were worried that the orphans, being only slightly younger than us (15-17-years-old) wouldn’t respond well to our games and activities, but we were completely mistaken. They loved it: they played our childish games with almost more energy than us. When we had finished, they invited us to tea, with sweets that they had made themselves, and we tried to communicate through the few Russian speakers in our group and the even fewer English speakers in theirs.

Elated at our success, we went out to an underground bar in the center of Moscow. It was a beautiful bar, with a jazz band playing and a wonderfully cozy atmosphere. I felt so at home there, if I lived in Moscow, I would go there every night.

A Day of Trials

This was the hardest day of the week for most of us.

We were scheduled to prepare and deliver meals to homeless in the evening, but we ended up spending all the time talking to the women who organized the relief work, and didn’t prepare any of the food at all. We went to help deliver it as well, but there were too many of us and not enough to do, so most of us ended up standing around looking at the homeless people come to get the tea and sandwiches we offered. We felt like spectators to their pain, and unable to help in any real way. But it also brought out how important work like this was, and sparked a will to help similarly in our home countries.

A Day of Beauty

We went to the Tritikovska Museum of Art in the morning. It was a wonderful museum, the artwork is spectacular, wall after wall covered in marvelous paintings, each one worthy of hours of study by itself, but unfortunately we had only 2 hours to see the whole museum, so we rushed around trying to absorb everything before we had to leave.

We went to have lunch with Olga, the head of the Russian national committee. It was wonderful – by far the best food we had the whole week and a very interesting conversation with Olga and Tatosha’s mother about the national committee and Tatosha’s mother’s ecotourism business.

That evening we went to the orphanage again, and had another fun time playing games. We had learned from the last session, and we had more active games this time, with the orphans running around and laughing, then they suggested a game and we all played until the end of the session.

A Day of Contrast

We woke up early to get to another school at 9:00. This school was very different from the other school we went to: it was the elite school where all the richest students in Moscow went. We went to talk to two classes, an English class of 16-year-old students and an Italian class of students ranging from 8 to 13-years-old. We were shocked at the life these kids led, their minds occupied with fashion and material goods. We had forgotten that at UWC we were the exception, not the rule, and it was a rude awakening to the real world.

In the afternoon, we saw the other end of the economic spectrum: we went to a homeless shelter to do art activities. It was a wonderful experience, much better than our other encounter with homeless people. We finger-painted, one of us with one homeless person, making paintings about spring, and communicating without words through the colors on the paper.

They loved it, and afterwards asked us again and again to come back. A summation of the day: we preferred the downtrodden to the elite.

A Day of Culture

In the morning we went to see the Kremlin, though the weather was less than desirable: rain and slush made it very hard to walk the streets. After wandering around the Red Square, trying to find the way in, we asked two guards on horseback and got directions to the real entrance. The cathedrals we saw were spectacular, every speck of them covered in frescoes and icons, so similar and so different to the churches of Italy.

We spent the afternoon in the orphanage for the last time. We had a huge party, sang songs for each other, and Vivian taught us all how to make Chinese lanterns. We were so sad to say goodbye, but we told them about UWC and invited them to apply, so hopefully UWC and the orphanage will have a great long-lasting relationship.

That night we went to the Red Square again, to see it by night. It was awe-inspiring, despite the rain, and we stayed there for a while, just gazing at our surroundings. Sarah, my prima, was taking pictures like mad, it became a running joke of the project week.

A Day of Conversations

We spent all morning in school 136, having tea and talking about our impressions of Russia and their impressions of Italy. The Italian teacher took us out to lunch in a beautiful ethnic restaurant and then to the cheap shopping haven of Moscow, where we got souvenirs and presents for all our friends. I got a blue fur hat, which is sooooo warm and cozy and wonderful. Umberto got his desired Russian army cap, and then we switched, just to make life interesting. :)

A Day of Delays

In the morning, Olga and two other people from the national committee came to talk, and we discussed the role of the national committee, how they operated, and what we expected from them in general. Then we were off…well, sort of. The flight was delayed due to bad weather, and by the time we got to Rome our connecting flight had already left. So Alitalia paid for our stay in a wonderful 4 star hotel and we got back to Duino the next morning, safe and sound.

What a trip! Thanks to everyone who helped to make it possible, there were some days when we weren't sure we would be able to go, but we pulled through, and it was very much worth it. Thanks!

Philanthropy

We had a wonderful International Affairs presentation today. Normally they're fairly interesting but overall you forget about them somewhere around 15 minutes later. But this was really great. The man was the chief executive of The Institute of Philanthropy in London (but he's a New Yorker) and my co-year invited him to speak to us. He was a great presenter, probably because he makes a living out of it, teaching "high net-worth individuals" how to give their money away wisely.
It was wonderful to hear a man speaking about the kind of life that every UWC student should have, but I've never actually seen in practice. His is the life that I wouldn't mind living, doing something good for the world while traveling and not doing too badly money-wise either. He said he woke up every morning glad to go to work, and the main payment for his work was the feeling of having truly helped someone.
We had a great discussion in the evening, 15ish people came to talk to him about philanthropy and the social, political, economic and philisophical issues surrounding it - the idea of treating cause rather than effect, or the welfare state, or the role of government or the UN...
I'm inspired. I now know that the kind of life I want actually does exist, and if I play my cards right, I could actually end up following my wildest dreams.

English Native Speaker Week

Finally, after almost two years, my National Week came.
It was fantastic, the best week I've had in the College, which is saying a lot.
Since I've been waiting for it for so long, I took a very active role in the week - heavily involved in almost everything that happened, which was a lot.
This was our schedule:
Every day, every meal, we had a different genre of music in the cafeteria, which I organized (I have so much music on my laptop now, it's unbelievable). Everything from Reggae to 80s to Indie to Celtic to Jazz to Classic Rock to 90s Pop... now that we don't have music anymore I feel like something's missing, it was really nice, especially the Jazz day - it created such a nice atmosphere...
Monday was the Introductory skit, when we all got up in Assembly and presented the program for the week - Disney style. We made a movie of all of us being Disney characters to introduce a part of the week - Lumier (the candle guy from Beauty and the Beast) introduced the taster session, Pocahontas introduced the poetry session, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd (ok, they're not Disney, I know) introduced Saturday Morning Cartoons, and I, as Cinderella, introduced the Prom - Infomercial style. It was hilarious, the costumes we managed to get together and the acts themselves; we were laughing ourselves senseless.
Tuesday was the Poetry Session, which I organized. It was truly beautiful, it went better than I could have hoped. Coffee House style, we had everyone snapping politely to our poetry rather than clapping, and we read everything from Shakespearean sonnets to e. e. cummings to Green Eggs and Ham. I was very proud - I'd never organized something completely alone and had it come out well before, so it was a personal milestone.
Wednesday was the Taster Session, for which I cooked
5 bowls of Jello (ok, so "cook" is a relative term...)
3 apple pies
50 some-odd veggie burgers
2 bowls of mashed potatoes
2 Hawaiian pizzas
30 PB&J sandwiches
and oversaw the roasting of 4 bags worth of s'mores

and that was only one person's contribution, imagine the whole ensemble...
I'd brought burger king crowns for everyone, so all the Native Speakers wore crowns. We had music playing, and after eating we all danced and danced, playing limbo and jumping on tables...great fun.
Oh, also on Wednesday we had a Hockey Tournament and a presentation on the Group of 7 - the major artists of Canada.

Thursday was our "down day" so we only had two things going on - the Movie (American Beauty - totally depressing. I'd never seen it before.) and a Highland Dance session.
We spent the whole day practising for the show on Friday.

Friday was the show - wow, so cool. We got everyone to dress up as famous Native Speaker Couples...everyone from Superman/Wonder Woman

to Bert/Ernie to Romeo/Juliet to Barbie/Ken to Harry/Ginny. The teachers were all famous villains - Lord Voldemort, Ursula, Jafar, Darth Vader, etc.
Everyone dressed up - I think we got the most people to dress up ever, we were so happy to see them come into the room all excited for our show.
The show was great. I participated in a Formal Apology, where we apologized for Barbie, the SATs, McDonald's, Reality TV, and an illogical measuring system. Britain apologized for the Spice Girls, their spelling system, and their "bastard child, America". Canada apologized for beating everyone at Hockey (which pissed off the nordics, you can be sure), and having too much land and not enough people. We finished with me saying, "On behalf of the USA, I should apologize for... um. that whole ... world domination thing..." and I ran off the stage. The rest of them stayed on, laughing at me, until Canada turned to Britain - "what are YOU laughing at?" :)

I also did "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story, the Politically Correct Red Riding Hood, and a "Speak Like an English Native Speaker" session, where we taught a volunteer to say "Hey y'all, innit like hella goin man, eh-izzle?" which to any native speaker makes perfect sense. right?

Saturday morning we woke up early to cook pancakes for Saturday Morning Cartoons - we watched Loony Tunes and The Emperor's New Groove while eating huge quantities of pancakes and maple syrup. (thank god I still have some left!)

And Saturday night was Prom - wow! it went so well. We spent all afternoon decorating and getting ready, Palazzina Dayroom has never looked so good. We had chips and punch (which we told everyone was spiked), an Official Photographer, and Prom King and Queen, drawn from a lottery. It was the greatest party UWC has ever seen. Full Stop. (as they say in british english - help! I'm being corrupted!) we had soooooooo much fun.

And that was it. The week was over. it was so sad to leave - it had been like a mini-vacation, none of the school rules applied to us - no curfew, no homework, no activities or social service, nothing but national week. it was so relaxing to be stressing out about something that didn't have anything to do with school.
And everyone said it was the best week ever. (or, if their pride couldn't take it, the best...except theirs) Success!!!

Look at that, I've spent way too much time writing. Now I really must study for the trial exams coming up next week. good bye.

PS Hey look! they've put our videos on YouTube! you can check them out at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x11Nglpvug and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqroN-k3UEY

Rome

I've given up trying to write everything amazing about this place in detail - if I try, I'll never even start. So I'll try to give a brief overview of life here before I remember all the things I have to do and feel to guilty to continue.
World Cultures is the best class in the world. What other class will take you on field trips to Venice, Ravenna, and Rome? We went to Rome 2 weeks ago for 4 days, studying ancient Roman archiatecture, early Christian mosaics, the High Renaissance (Michelangelo & Raphael), and Baroque/Neo-Classicism. It was a huge overdose of awe - I couldn't think afterwards, my mind was reeling from too much art. How do you choose between Bernini's Rape of Persephone:
So real you can see his strong fingers digging into her flesh, feel her terror and despair, his bestial triumph, at the moment when they cross the border into the underworld and he knows he has her for good...
and the ceiling of Il Gesu,
where the painted angels come out of the frame onto the gilded ceiling, bursting open the roof and spilling sunlight onto the congregation inside?
How do you compare the spectacular beauty of a sunset over the city-scape of Rome:

with the ancient majesty of the ruins of the Forum?

How can I convey the wonder of that trip?

I give up.

The next week was - though it seems impossible - even better.

African-Middle Eastern Week

My last national week ever. It's so sad, because the next National Week is my own, so I won't get to participate in it. It was fabulous though, a great week to end on.
It started out with a phenomenal poetry session - the best I've ever seen. They brought blankets and pillows into the lecture room and created a warm and cozy atmosphere, and served Turkish tea, and then started reciting the most amazing poetry - so powerful, so full of emotion, so beautiful... and they did something no one else has done before: they sang some of their poems, and the combination of music and poetry was gorgeous.
The taster session was great as well, it rivaled the Italian one, because though it didn't have as much food it had much more varied and exotic foods that made up for it.

And they had Arabic/African music playing, so after eating we all danced and danced:

(The Israelis have the craziest hair ever, especially when they dance!)


The next day we had the "chill-out session" when we relaxed, drank tea, smoked nargille, got massages and face masks, and generally calmed down.
And then the show. Oh so much fun.
I was partnered with Honza, and we went as a camel:

There were some other really great costumes as well:

Marco as an African Warrior


Ridhima and Joe as street beggars


Eduardo as a Jew :)


I participated in the show, doing a skit with Nevin on the cultural differences between America and Palestine. e.g. How she literally drinks Tabasco sauce, and is shocked at short skirts, how I'm not allowed to touch the Koran and how (the crowning glory of the show) we dress differently to go swimming. She came out in a full body suit, looking like a deep-sea diver, and I came out in a bikini (in front of the whole school! AAAH!). It was fun, though I got teased mercilessly afterwards.
The skits were funny, the dances were beautiful, the raps were great. And there was one really profound dance/sketch that was serious; when four people came on stage representing four major issues: Julie as a drug addict, Eitan as a prisoner, Ansally as a prostitute, and Elroy as a disabled person.

It was really touching because it reminded us that the problems that we always hear about in African and the Middle East are actually universal, that everything they have, we have as well, but to a lesser extent.

On a more upbeat note, the next week is Native Speaker Week, the one I've been waiting for since Balkan Week, oh so long ago! I'm so excited for it, we have such a great group and such fabulous ideas, it will be the best week ever!!!!

EE Show

Friday was the EE show for which we were all very excited. We kept seeing first years doing strange things around Duino, hearing loud music coming from the basement, coming up on conversations that stopped as soon as we got there, and other tell-tale signs of an upcoming show.
Our invitations were interesting - mine was, "the hairiest hair model", for example, and some others were, "The Most Colorful Butterfly", "The Scariest Mummy", "The Most Romantic Boy"
(that's Nyamka, who does a surprisingly good impression of a romantic boy...) etc. Toni (Finland) was "The Strongest Vodka", of course:

I had a violin lesson so I didn't have much time to prepare a costume, but I cornrowed half my hair and then made a row of buns in the middle and left the rest down. Slightly uncomfortable in the crowded room, but whatever.
Their show was great (not better than ours though, we still have the UWC record for greatest EE show ever :) haha) the theme was "GuinnEEs Book of World Records", hence the costumes.
They had a lot of songs with changed lyrics, like "Let It Be" turned into, "The EE" (as in, "there will be an essay, the EE....") and such, and some crazy record stuff, like a competition between a first year, a second year, and a teacher to eat the most pasta, drink water the fastest, peel an apple without breaking the skin and transport a raw egg from one bowl to another using chopsticks.

They had a great skit about the EE (Evil Essay) tormenting us poor second years who would rather be partying or drinking coffee. They/we finally defeat him by finishing the essay on time and have a great big party. Yay!

But now Axel, the Swede who played the Evil Essay, freaks me out - anyone would if he looked like that!

There were also some very sweet skits, like the paper dance where they came onstage holding pieces of paper to form out sentences like:

And at the very end they all came on stage with the name of their EE friend taped to their...ahem...bottom and invited us onto the stage to dance and hug and congratulate.
this is my EE friend (Lorenzo) and me:

They also made fantastic cake for us, which was a wonderful idea and I need to find the recipe because it was insanely good, even the tiny piece that I got and shared with my EE friend.

And afterwards Lorenzo took me to Old Castle for the first time. By strange coincidence he happened to be present at the conversation early in the year when I said, "I've never been to Old Castle, so now I want to make it a special occasion - I think I'll get my EE friend to take me when I finish my EE." So after the show he said, "So, are you ready to go to Old Castle?" I was so surprised that he knew what I was going to say before I said it!
But Old Castle was fantastic, so beautiful and ancient - it's 11th century they say - to think that we had this in Duino all this time and I'd never known...
So the EE show was fantastic, in all its elements, I love our Primi!!!!!

Vienna

Last weekend was 'Long Weekend'’, our 4-day vacation. After much trial and tribulation, manindecisionns and revisions, and a lot of looking at flight/train ticket prices, we decided to go to Vienna for three days. The group consisted of: Vanessa, Nidhi and me (the Weird Sisters)

and our first-year male companions, Nidhi's primo, Shashank, Vanessa'’s boyfriend, Bar (Israel), and my adopted primo, Lorenzo.

When we got to Vienna, we met up with my co-year, Leah, and Andrea from Brazil. So this is all of us:

We had a fabulous time. We left Saturday evening and took the night train to Vienna. We didn't get much sleep, but that was mostly our own fault, as we stayed up most of the night talking and laughing and watching a movie. When we got there, we made our way to our hostel, the Blue Corridor (you can imagine why I chose itJ), deposited our bags, and went out to explore Vienna. We went to the Schonbrunn palace of the Hapsburg emperorsgapedawped at beautiful rooms and paintings while listening to the commentary on headphones, enjoying making a running commentary on the commentary in whispers.

Then we went to the Stefansdom Cathedral, the cathedral I had marveled at last year when I went with Street Performance. If anything, it was more awe-inspiring and more beautiful than before. We sat there and looked around and talked about the art like good Art History/World Cultures students, pointing out the differences between the gothic and baroque styles and how it differed from the renaissance style of the Venetian churches we had just seen and generally feeling very educated and prouourselves. Then.Then we went to meet Leah and Andrea at the Opera house. When we finally got there, after walking around the entire city of Vienna looking for the Opera (it turns out that the first building we found was actually the correct one, but we didn't recognize it from the back, so we walked all around the rest of the city to finally come back and realize our mistake), we sat in line for tickets again, this time for Carmen. After 2 hours we ended up with almost exactly the same spots as last time, which was really cool. The opera itself was fantastic. I love Carmen! All the music is fantastic, even the minor melodies, and the performance was awesome. The sets so real you couldn'’t tell where the stage ended and the backdrop ended, the costumes were of brightly colored swirly gypsy skirts and Toreador capes, and the actors that you into the story without even needing the subtitles on the screens on our seats.

The next day we went to the National Treasury, an amazing collection of insanely expensive stuff, from beautifully embroidered cloaks to ornately carved reliquaries to portraits of the Emperors and their families. My favorite was the huge sapphire, cut in such a way to reflect as much light as possible:

In the afternoon, we split up:– some to the Freud museum, some to go shopping, and Lorenzo, Shashank and I to go to the Kunst Historische Museum. When we got there, Shashank learned two new words in German: "Montag Geschlossen" (Closed Mondays). Aahrg! We sat and fumed for a while, but then decided to go enjoy our day somewhere else. And you know what? we had so much more fun than we would have had if we'd gone into the museum.

If I write it down, it'll sound dumb - we walked around Vienna, laughing about German, we almost went into an Italian church until we realized we lived in Italy, we sat on the steps of the Parliament building, we walked around a garden somewhere, and we went to an Esperanto museum. You may think that an Esperanto museum is about the dumbest place imaginable, especially when it's one small room that documents the history of a well-intentioned but useless language, but it was so much fun!! Lorenzo and I could basically understand the signs in Esperanto if we worked together, and we played pakman with Esperanto grammar and had fun with the interactive maps of where Esperanto conferences were being held around the world. They had to kick us out when they closed, and we walked to the meeting place planning a Project Week to learn Esperanto in a host family somewhere far away.

All together again, we went out to dinner at a bar called "The Centimeter" and had a wonderful dinner that came in a wheelbarrow which we all ate out of. Before we ate, Lorenzo proposed a toast, and said, "To the person who helped organize this trip and made it a wonderful weekend, to a great friend, and a great EE friend, Anika." I was so surprised, Lorenzo was my EE friend? I squealed and jumped up to run around the table and hug him. Suddenly it all made sense, the fact that he never wrote long letters was explained by the fact that I already knew everything he might write, having stayed in his house at the beginning of the summer while getting my visa. And having a face to put to those wonderful gifts he gave me was so nice!

Then we packed up and got on the train, sadly leaving Vienna behind. Once again, we stayed up all night talking, and when we got back to Duino we slept all day. Or rather, I slept half the day and spent the other half of the day feeling sorry for myself and wishing I was back in Vienna. But long weekend was over, and I had other things to look forward to...like the EE show!