South American Jaywalker: Fearless

Although I try to avoid jaywalking as much as I can in Panama, sometimes it’s just not possible. David is one of those times. It’s a city that I went to twice during my first month here. David is in the province of Chiriqui and it borders with Costa Rica. The first time I went I caught a lift to the beach and had my first chance to swim in the Pacific. The experience was a bit surreal because there was this little hut on the beach that was blasting a cello concerto by Hayden. Getting there was also interesting since the road required a 4x4 vehicle and we only had a 10 year old Nissan Sentra. There were definitely times where I felt the road bump up against my feet on the floor of the car. I also went to Boquete and did a tour of a coffee plant. I also did a supposedly “short” hike (actually 3 km each way on a shady trail) to a not so impressive water fall during which time I managed to unknowingly insult a one legged man from Iowa. There was a special flower and coffee fair going on in Boquete at the same time. I enjoyed the flowers, but was a bit coffee-ed out from my tour in the morning. I also learnt that 2008 is the FAO year of the potato!!! Anyway, the place turns into a bit of a mad house at night when the whole fair turns into a reggeaton dance ground with some serious base. At the hostel I was staying at I saw a posting for this indigenous cultural event that was happening the week afterwards. I decided to go, even though it’a a 14 hour round trip. The festival was a cultural showcase for the Ngome Bugle Indians who are the largest (and probably have the most diluted culture) of all indigenous groups in Panama. As I should have guessed, it took a while to get started. There were a couple of cool highlights. The first was a story written by one of the Ngome Bugle women. Talk about lost in translation. It was said first in Ngome Bugle, then translated into Spanish and then translated into English. I didn’t understand the Spanish and really didn’t understand the English. The story started out with a worthless husband leaving his wife and kids at home to go drink. From my experiences in Panama, this seems to be a recurring theme. The moral of the story ended up being something along the lines of don’t leave your children alone at home. The second was a game a traditional game organized by the men. This was something to watch in itself because they hadn’t really planned anything before. The stages of confusion, fighting over rules, team separation and then actually playing the game took about 20 min. Coming back on the bus was one of the coldest experiences of my life since they air condition the busses here like you wouldn’t believe. Sadly, the movies they show on busses here are not as bad as the ones in Ecuador. I have yet to Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean Claude Van Dam. The best part was that I got to wish my sister Elizabeth a happy birthday!! See quote below…

LAUREN: Hey Elizabeth, I called to wish you a happy birthday!
ELIZABETH: Oh, thanks Lauren.
LAUREN: But I don’t have too much time. My bus is leaving in a few minutes so I’m going to keep talking to you until I see it drive by. If I hang up abruptly it’s just because I’m chasing it down.
ELIZABETH: That is so ghetto.
LAUREN: The saddest part is, I’m not even lying.

6 Easy Steps to Carnaval

For all of you who were not able to celebrate Carnaval as they do in Panama (which is pretty much everybody), I have provided an easy checklist of items to make sure that you can recreate it yourselves.

1. Dress in bathing suit and skimpy clothes on top.
2. Find a small child’s blow up wading pool. Fill the pool with water. Poor dirt and garbage into the water. Leave it in the hot sun until it develops a funk
3. Get a water bottle. Fill this waterbottle with an alcohol of your choice. Remember: it must be something that you will still want to drink once it is very warm. My preferred option/the only thing I could afford was Clight juice powder mixed with water and vodka (doesn’t actually taste good, but it is consistently bad, so you know what you’re getting).
4. Get 15 of your closest friends to stand in the pool with you. You must be so close that you cannot move very well.
5. Get one of your friends outside of the pool to hold a pressure hose, another to blast generic reggae and dance music, another to put rum inside a water gun and another to stand next to you with an open can of beer.
6. Dance to music with all of your friends. Simultaneous to this drink from your water bottle and get pressure hosed. In between drinking from your waterbottle, have your friend with the beer poor it all over you and your friend with the water gun spray rum in your mouth.

And that my friends, is Carnaval.

This is a picture of a float during a night parade.

Lauren + Palm = Bad Lab Report

In January we took a field trip to Isla Barro Colorado, which is a famous island created when the canal area was flooded. I mentioned it in the first update I sent out. I'm told it was the first tropical nature reserve ever created. Our lab exercise was less than glamorous since it involved crawling on the rainforest floor to collect seeds from palm trees and avoid ticks. The most impressive thing on the island were probably the howler monkeys. When you first hear them, you're convinced that a really gruesome murder is taking place very close to you. Then, when you find out they're just monkeys you're convinced that they must be enormous, when they're really only small and cute. It does take some time to get used to the idea that something so small can make that much noise. They're kind of like small children that way. This is also where I went kayaking around with crocodiles. To be fair, I tried to use the canoe, which would have been safer, but after Rachel and I finally dragged it into the water (it was old and really really heavy), we found out it had a hole and then had to drag an even heavier canoe (now full of water) out of the lake. I'm pretty sure I took a couple of years off the life of my back. It was also a painful (literally) reminder that I have no upper body strength. I will stop abusing parentheses now and put captions on my pictures.

Note: My camera battery died on the boat ride to the island so I don't really have any pictures. To simulate being on the island imagine a tropical forest. Since that is pretty much all it was, this will suffice.

Bottom: Sunrise on the canal. We got on a bus at 5:00am to get to this place
Top: Crocodile!

Sloth: I iz not a sin

Parque Nacional Soberania is a national park about a 15min drive from my house. While it is a perfectly beautiful park, we have a complicated history since it is the site I did my individual project for my biology class. I based my project on plant identification not realizing that there are thousands of different plants present on the grounds. This fact, coupled with my lack of plant knowledge made this project long, arduous and completely inaccurate. On the positive side, I saw a really cool sloth and coaties there.

Top left: This is a crappy picture of the sloth I saw. It's at the bottom center of the picture and is upside down. Look hard. You'll see it.

Top right: Random lizard that was nice enough to pose for me

Bottom: Leaf cutter ants. They form these highways of leaf bits they carry on their backs.

My house...

This is a post dedicated to my house and where I live...

So, I live in Panama City on the outskirts in a place called Ciudad del Saber (that translates to city of knowledge). It's a nice place to live because it's safe, but kind of creepy because it is full of rich, white scientists and other professionals. I discovered the bakery awhile ago and now realize that it will be my financial downfall. Between the passion fruit juice and quesitos I don't even know how much money I've dropped there. It's also expensive. But delicious. Anyway, I live with 5 other roomates. Four are from McGill and one is Panamanian. The four girls from McGill are in this picture.

Some of the awesome things about my house include:

1. We have 6 giant chef knives and only one cutlery knive

2. We get FM Corazon on the radio

3. Our garlic press looks like it was made in the 1930s

4. I live within a 5 min walk of the bakery, school and my internship office

5. I am able to make biology jokes with my roomates (Ex. trying to find out if Louis Philipe is a niche, or guessing the trophic level of decomposing animals)

6. We live close to this awesome looking tree that must be hundreds of years old.

This is a picture of my house.

This is a picture of my room that I share with Nina.

An update?

So... I'm trying to become a better traveller and actually let people know what I am up to, as well as post pictures. I'm pretty late getting started, but hopefully within about a week I'll have posted all the places I've been to add some pictures. Wish me luck!

Manuel Lallemand (Brother to Manual Labor)

Tues. June 6th, 2006 -Thurs. June 8th, 2006 (Days 5-7)
I have discovered since coming here that the work you do in the mornings before walking to the village have absolutely nothing to do with conservation. Here is a list of some of the things I have done while here:

1. Clean mud out of a pool
2. Haul stones up a hill
3. Carve steps into the soil
4. Build paths of dirt
5. Weed gardens

I am in no way helping the rainforest. If anything I am providing free manual labor to do exactly the opposite. It breaks my little soil science heart to tear plants out of the ground that are currently preventing erosion of delicate tropical soil profiles. This project is supremely shady. Organic farm my ass. It´s a field that Anna and Sara cleared 2 weeks ago. I did not come to Ecuador to clean out a pool. I could have done that at Frankie´s old house if I really wanted. The work I have been doing has been topped only by the meat carving I did on Monday. Ewww...

Otovalo!

Fri. June 9th, 2006 - Sun. June 11th, 2006 (Days 8-10)
I began today by travelling to Quito with Anna and Sara. Both of them are leaving today to continue travelling through Ecuador. I am trying not to think about what it will be like without them. Everything I own is wet and smells really, really bad. The first thing I did was find a laundromat and drop my clothes off.

In Ecuador, there are almost no self serve laundromats. People weigh your clothes, wash them, and charge you by the pound. People here are serious about their clothes. I then spent some much needed time on the internet catching up with people. I found out that while I was gone, people tried to blow up parliament. All of the exitement happens when I´m not at home.

At about 1:30 p.m. I met up with Sara, Anna and two tourists that had come to the cabins named Chealsy and Lindsay to watch the Ecuador - Poland game in a bar. I had to leave halfway through because I had decided to go to a town called Otovalo this weekend. Ecuador ended up winning and it was pretty much chaos in the capital city of Quito. The Ecuadorian jerseys are all yellow and the streets pretty much became a sea of yellow as far as the eye could see.

I arrived in Otovalo around 6:30 p.m. and walked to a hostal that had been recommended to me. It named Hostal Runa Pacha and is run entirely by this tiny man who doesn´t sleep and runs everywhere. It´s incredible. I was quickly ushered to a room. For $5 dollars a night, it wasn´t a bad deal. The room was clean (with the exception of some unidentifiable stains on the rug) and best of all it had hot water. After a week of rain and manual labor I was ready for a treat.

I went down to the lobby around 9:00p.m. to ask some the guy who ran the hostal some questions about what to visit. There I met a French couple who had been in Otovalo a couple of days. The woman was named Catherine and the man was named Seydou. We really hit it off and talked in the lobby for about an hour. We made plans to go see the three Saturday markets: the food market, the crafts market and the animal market.

The animal market is the first one to begin in the morning and was my favorite part of Otovalo. The indigenous communities from all around come to barter and trade their animals. The area that they hold it in is packed with sheep, cows, llamas and pigs. The costumes are really incredible. It´s quite the sight to watch two people battle it out over a $10 dollar difference in price of a cow. That starts around 6:00a.m. The next market is the crafts market, which is really geared towards tourists. It was fun none the less and I bought a bunch of gifts there as well. The third market is the food market where I bought apples, papaya and tomatoes to increase my vitamin intake.

Saturday night Catherine and Seydou decided to go see a coq fight in the local arena. I decided not to go. It´s probably a good thing, because it started 3 hours late and lasted for many hours into the night. Sunday I returned to Quito on the bus with Catherine and Seydou and we parted ways in Terminal Terrestre. It was so nice to talk to someone from another country and exchange stories. I think I´ve convinced them to come visit Canada, and now I have an invite to Paris (as if I needed a reason to go). It´s also a bit of a confidence booster to spend a lot of time with people who are perpetually giving you compliments.

I returned to the cabins on Sunday feeling a bit less homesick and very happy that I had a bunch of clean clothes to choose from.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Sun. June 11, 2006 (Day10)
"It was a dark and stormy night. I kicked the llama out of my bed and directly regretted it - that alkapeckaseltzer wool was warm. Outside my window the jewelers were beginning to chant - I did not look forward to the morning's ritual slaughter of the sacred condor and then carving the stairway to the American Express temple.... then there was Frankie who had run off with the chief's badass son and now was being held captive for ransom. I realized I had to dress and get to the clearing RV before zero dark thirty - Frankeez Mother was parachuting in at dawn with a team of crack business women commandos - I was to be the point gal and scout.... I briefly wondered why Mom had been so keen to send me here..... "

The beginnings of my New York Times Bestselling novel as written by Dr. Roman Johann Jarymowycz

Today I Killed a Cow and Beat Up His Friends

Mon. June 5th, 2006 (Day 4)
As a first day, this one was not exactly reassuring. Anna and Sara both had to return to Quito during the day because Sara´s passport had been stolen. The bus going to Quito leaves Las Tolas at 6:15 a.m. which means you need to leave the cabins around 5:00 a.m. if you want to be sure to catch the bus. I didn´t see them in the morning because they left really early.

The home of the caretaker Francisco and his family is a the top of a hill and the cabins are at the bottom. I went up for breakfast around 7:00 a.m. As predicted by Anna and Sara my breakfast was a big glass of milk straight from the cows that are milked in the morning and fried dough that you dip in sugar. I could practically feel my arteries clogging. I wasn´t really able to drink the milk and I only managed to eat a few pieces of dough because I could feel my stomach becoming very angry.

The night before I had been instructed to give some medicine to Francisco for the cows. I asked this morning how the cows were doing and was rather surprised by the answer. He told me that one of the cows died this morning. I asked him what he wanted to do about it and I received no answer. What Francisco did do was reach for his machete and tell me to follow him.

At this point I was becoming a bit worried. I don´t consider myself a paranoid woman, but being led into the jungle by a man I don´t know, who is carrying a machete, made me rather nervous. He led me down to the bottom of this really steep hill to where this cow´s body was wedged in a really awkward position underneath this log. I asked Francisco why the cow had died and he replied that it had gotten sick and couldn´t walk straight. To this day I still don´t know if the cow died because it was sick or because it fell because it was sick. I feel it is important to note that I was served this meat for the next three days and when I said I didn´t think it was a good idea to eat the meat of a sick cow, everyone pretended not to hear me.

I then helped lug the body from under the log and tie it up with rope to surrounding trees. Francisco then began to skin it and cut the meat off of the body. At this point, the rest of the ten cows had come to gather around us. One of the cows began making really angry mooing noises. Soon the others joined in. I think the cows thought that we had killed it or something. While Francisco was cutting meat off of the dead cow the others began to inch forward Francisco was forced to keep shooing them away. Half way through, Francisco left to go get more bags for the meat. I was actually afraid one would charge me or something and I said as much to Francisco, so he gave me a stick and told me to hit any of the cows that came too close.

Francisco came back a few minutes later with more bags and his wife and kids. Apparently, butchering a dead cow is a family affair in Ecuador. Together they cut most of the meat off of the cow. My job was to hold the carcas in place while they cut the meat. At this point the animal had no skin and its muscles were covered in this bubbly white stuff, which I got all over my hands.

The cows had died with its eyes open. I tried to close them more than once, but it didn´t work. I spent the morning being watched by its dead, dead eyes.

I have no idea what I am doing here.

Welcome to the Andes!

I have finally created my blog and will be putting up group postings about once a week when I return to the capital city. Right now I will be posting events from past days so anyone who is interested can catch up on the happenings...

Sun. June 4th, 2006 (Day 3)
Today was my first full day in Quito. I woke up and went in search of a bank because neither my VISA nor my bank card worked at the ATM close to where I stayed Saturday night. I soon found out that the entire city shuts down on Sundays and it is pretty much impossible to change traveller´s cheques or even get money out. At the end of the day, I still had not found a bank that would except either of my cards. At 4:30 I took the bus that goes to the village, called Las Tolas, where I will be living. It is a rather alarming 2 and a half hour drive through the mountains that is done half on paved roads and half on windy dirt roads. On the bus I met two other volunteers from England who had been volunteering for 3 weeks already and were staying for another week. While on the bus ride Anna and Sara told some rather alarming things:

1. No organic farm exists where I will be living (the point of me going to Ecuador was to work on an organic farm)
2. My mornings would be comprised exclusively of meaningless manual labor (ie. finishing the pool that is on the property)
3. Most of the food is either fried or made with lots of milk (I dislike both)
4. My cabin has no electricity
5. After the first week is over, Anna and Sara will be leaving and I will be alone for the next five weeks to dig dirt out of a pool and live in a cabin that is an hour hike in the rainforest from the nearest village (of 300 people) and has no electricity

When I actually arrived in the village I was seriously questioning both my choice to come to South America alone and my choice to do a volunteer project instead of only travelling.

I then proceeded to hike the hour walk to the cabins. Under normal circumstances, this walk would be very pleasant. With my huge backpack on my back walking around the Andes after dark was not something I would classify as a good experience. By the time I got to the cabins I was sweating like a mad woman and very, very worried.