I'm back!

I haven't updated my blog in a while- sorry! I was gone to Vinces in Los Ríos, and I came back to Quito only to immediately come down with a high fever. I didn't have internet access in Vinces, but I did have my computer, so I typed up a blog entry while I was in my hotel room there. Here it is:

I’m back in Vinces, although there’s no internet so I probably won’t be able to post this until I’m back in Quito. Vinces, although previously known as the Paris of Ecuador, seems like it should now be known as The Town Eternally Under Construction. There are a few remnants of European architecture, but I’m staying in the downtown area, and it seems less colonial, although I won’t say modern. All of the buildings are just concrete structures, and the roads are a mix of pavement, sand, and gravel. I want to like Vinces because I’ll be here a bit for my thesis research, but the truth is, for now I find it ugly and no one is particularly friendly. I’ve tried to be particularly cheery and friendly especially because I’m clearly not only not from Vinces, but here it’s probably obvious that I’m a foreigner too. Unfortunately, everyone seems to be either shocked that there’s a foreign visitor or just generally unfriendly and of few words. I should add that this isn’t true of the people that I’m working with on my thesis- they’re friendly, talkative, and I don’t have any complaints about them.

I’m staying at what seems to be the nicest hotel in Vinces (as recommended by the cocoa commercialization general manager who I’ve been working with). To give you an idea of what Vinces is like, the nicest hotel in the entire town costs $12/night, doesn’t have hot water, and has a sign that is sponsored by Pilsner, the national beer. I will note, however, that there is air conditioning in the room and TV (with cable!) which makes it much more comfortable, so I guess we all have different ideas of what makes luxury.

This is also my first time to Vinces by myself. The first time I came and met everyone at the cocoa centro de acopio, or collection center for the co-op. From there, we all hopped into someone’s pickup truck, and we all went out for lunch together and they took me back to Guayaquil in the truck. This time, I was told that the meeting tomorrow would start in the morning, and because it’s a 55 minute flight to Guayaquil (or 8-9 hour bus ride) and then a 3 hour bus ride to Vinces, I wanted to get here tonight to make sure that I would be able to get to the meeting on time. It’s a good thing I confirmed the meeting time (if my time in Latin America has taught me one thing, it’s never to trust that plans will remain the same), and I was told that it has changed to 11am. So I definitely could have flown here tomorrow and saved myself the $12 hotel stay, but I guess there’s more adventure this way. (*Editor’s note: I arrived at the centro de acopio at 11am, and waited for THREE HOURS for my contact to show up. So obviously, while I’ve learned to confirm plans, I have yet to develop a true Ecuadorian sense of time- that is, that three hours late is no big deal.)

Travelling by myself here with no one to meet me also means that I had to eat a meal by myself. I’ve eaten plenty of meals sola in my house or in a communal kitchen at a hostel, but usually at hostels I meet other friends and if I go out to eat, I go out with them. Here, I don’t know anybody and there’s no communal space, so I ended up going to a restaurant by myself, something I can’t remember having done before.

There are definitely restaurants in Ecuador that have menus where you can pick what you want to eat, but generally more popular restaurants have set meals that you pay between $1.50 and $3 to eat. Tonight I went to a place like this and ordered the merienda, or the snack (because lunch is the big meal in Ecuador, and I arrived around 6pm). The merienda seemed a lot like a set lunch meal. Most set lunches come with a soup, a juice or drink of sorts, and rice, meat, and either a salad-y thing or menestra- a soup-y stewed bean dish. This merienda came with one of my favorite Ecuadorian soups, one that I first tried at a little booth outside of the local school in Bua when I was volunteering. I haven’t tried recreating it because it’s not exactly high cuisine- it’s basically a buttery, milky broth with pasta and buttery fresh cheese chunks swimming around. There are no vegetables, although mine tonight came with potatoes (!) too. For my mail meal I got about 2.5 cups (not exaggerating!) of cooked white rice, a pinto-like bean menestra, patacones (smashed and fried plantains), and a fried egg (I asked for that instead of the meat). So basically my meal was a lot of carbs, two proteins, and no veggies. That seems about right.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with some Italian cocoa buyers and hopefully will get to see the terms of agreement set up in their contract. (*Editor's note: I was told I was meeting with Italian cocoa buyers. Three hours after I was supposed to meet them, I was told that they were studying to become pastry chefs and that they would hopefully someday buy cocoa from Vinces. When I actually met them, I realized that they were twenty year old Italian Slow Food university gastronomic science students who had nothing to do with cocoa, and were here on a trip to learn about food production in Ecuador.)

I took a "taxi" to get to the centro de acopio from the "downtown" of Vinces (the centro is outside of town- Vinces is otherwise walkable) and took a few pictures of the town. Those are coming up in an upcoming post!