EMPANADAS
Friday night a bunch of the IPSL girls (the service learning program i'm here with) went over to Hannah's house. She lives far north, which is closer to the bus station we needed to get to in the morning, and her mom was going to teach us how to make empanadas.
After cleaning my own room for an hour (it got reallll messy my host mom even asked me to please clean!) I headed over there, and her mom said she'd be back in 2 horaitos (2 hours) well, remember that this is Ecuador. I think it was more than 3 hours later she returned, and began making empanadas. It was awesome! But I definitely need to have her teach us a lot more times, and finally have her watch us do it without her doing anything because I really want to leave here knowing how to make them myself.
She mixed water and lime juice with flour, and separated the dough into little balls. Then you roll it out into a circle/oval, and put the mixture in-cheese, rice, and sometime to add color) Of course there's a lot of salt in there somewhere.
Then came the tricky part: closing the empanada. Hannah's host mom made beautiful works of art, mine came out looking like dinosaurs. You have to fold it over, and then pinch the ends together, pulling them out a bit to make sure it's all sealed because you don't want it to open up in the oil.
After it's all pulled away, you then have to do this special folding trick to give it that edge that all empanadas have. This is where I started making animals instead of Ecuadorian food. None of us could perfect it, but Susanna did find a nice spot in the corner of the kitchen away from everyone's watchful eyes, and it worked better for me over there too!
Hannah's host dad was there helping us too, encouraging us and saying "mejor!" (better)
I got teased for showing him my progress, but he enjoyed it.
We ate lots, and had delish tea too. Then it was time for bed.
Well, here's where the excitement began.
NEXT MORNING...
Hannah's house is pretty loud-I thought mine was bad, but because her bedroom is on the third floor she's pretty high up, and there's so much going on. Dogs, traffic, people, and this weird noise that sounds like a girl screaming every ten minutes. I'm not sure what it is.
Anyway, I woke up at 4:30 and stayed in the bathroom for 2 solid hours. Lovely.
After worrying a lot about whether or not I could make it through a two and a half hour bus ride, I decided that I didn't want to miss out on anything. I popped some Immodium, went to the bathroom a few more times, and headed out to grab a taxi to the bus station. Hannah lost her money, so that made for a bit of a nervous breakdown filled detour, but we arrive at the station, and found the other half of the group. Luckily, the bus wasn't leaving for another 20 minutes or so, so we had some extra time on our hands.
I still felt really sick and could barely talk without my body aching, so I just sat on a bench and waited for it to be time to go. On the bus, I sat by the window and tried to sleep, all the while being nervous I was going to need a bathroom and not be able to use one for a long time. My hands started getting itchy but I didn't notice too much because of how sick I felt. The bus stopped at one point to pay a toll, and there was a woman selling chifles outside-aka the best snack on earth. I was too sick to eat them, but my friends had been talking about them all morning since there weren't any at the bus station. Well, I bought some chifles through the window! and then found out that the bus driver waited to make sure the exchange was complete. Awesome!
We arrive in a little over 2 hours, and got off the bus. The hostal owner Claudia was waiting for us at the bus station, which by the way is only an office and an alley for the bus to park later.
Well, Claudia had a little 4x4 so some of us sat inside, and the rest held on from the outside! I would have been an adventurer, but since I wasn't sure what my body was going to do I decided to sit in the car. Well, I noticed that the itching that was spreading to my arms, legs, and back! Luckily, I never go anywhere without a mini Pharmacy, so I took some benadryl. We unpacked in the hostal, and wanted to start our day. We headed back into town to grab some food-everyone got mini pizzas and I ate some bread and gatorade. We were trying to decide who would do what first-between ziplining and horse back riding. I kind of wanted to do horses second, because I knew if I did them first my whole experience would be ruined because I would be so nervous about the zipline
I did the superman, which is when someone goes behind you and you lock your legs around their body, and then fly out! it was AWESOME! but again, scary at first haha. After, since it was just me and the man I came over with, we started chatting and he loves extreme sports but has only been doing this job for a year, which is the same for a few of the other men too. it was all well put together tho because the first one was pretty tranquil, and you didn't have to do anything. As you progressed, they got faster and longer, and you could do tricks like the superman or mariposa (upside down!) and you had to keep your hand behind you on the cable for balance/to slow down near the end. I'm so glad I did it! Oh and I got cable burn on my nose on the last one.
I tried to get pics of the girls as they came in on the last one, since they did that for us. Except that I thought an Asian man was my friend Susannah. oops! here she is for real...finally!
The horses weren't as fun, though. They aren't taken care of very well, and they were tired from the other half of our group. Mine was named Corazon (heard) and my friend Hannah had one that had gas in his name, which was a good idea since he kept farting. It was funny because the first time he farted was right after Zannah had commented on how measly he looked. Also, it was raining when we went, and our group had 5 so the guide had to walk the whole time, cutting the trip a half hour short. Plus, the whole ride was on a road, so we kept having to move over so cars and taxis could pass. It was nice going uphill and being able to breathe at the same though!
At night it rained a bunch, and we stayed in, chatted, and watched The Reader. Our hostal was sweeeet. it had a tv and Claudia brought us DVDs, it had a computer but it wasn't hooked up yet, and we slept in a big dormitory so we were all in one room together! Outside was a nice balcony with hammocks that I enjoyed Sunday afternoon before we left, and sometimes birds are nearby-but since I was sick I didn't get up early to look for them.
At one point someone started talking to us from downstairs and it was so strange...it was a woman who works at the hostal, asking if we wanted to go to a frog concert. so confusing. When we asked what she meant, she just said frogs, a concert-didn't really answer the question right? What made it worse was that while Susannah was trying to talk to her, the rest of us were just laughing hysterically. Finally Susannah went downstairs to try to figure it out, and the woman gave her a cell phone and said wait for Claudia to call it.
Apparently, it's a walk around a lake with a sip of wine. but it costs like 4 dollars and it was raining. no thanks! although it probably would have been cool...
Over the course of the weekend, I basically only ate Ritz crackers and drank gatorade.
So, we hung out in the hostal while it rained all around us, watched a movie, and went to sleep. I woke up nice and early again with an angry stomach, so instead of sitting on the porch watching the birds I sat in the bathroom, but luckily fell back asleep for a bit after that. We went down to eat breakfast, and there was delishhhh yogurt and fruit, but I was afraid to eat it so I just watched everyone else enjoy it. After that came eggs and bread with jam, and then I had some tea. Some people had hot milk with cocoa and sugar which seems to be pretty popular around here.
we wanted to go to the waterfalls, but weren't sure if we could handle trekking around in the mud after all the rain. Claudia said we wouldn't want to trudge around, but some man that I think is her husband was like you're in the cloud forest of course it always rains! you have to go it's beautiful.
We headed back in much less time than I thought it would take, but that’s okay because it’s always good to have extra time, especially since we had already bought our bus tickets home. The day before, girls had ziplined and were promised they would be back in time for their bus, and they got back to the office at the time their bus was leaving. Awesome.
Look what I found...a gypsy hotel!
We decided to rock the waterfalls-who cares if it’s muddy? We came to Mindo to see cool stuff and go on adventures! Claudia called us a Truck for a taxi, and we first headed to town aka one main street to go to the bus station aka bus office to buy tickets home. We were some serious lucky ducks because they had the exact number of tickets we needed left on the 2pm bus back to Quito!
We continued on our way to the waterfalls-with a dog literally sprinting up in front of the car the whole way! The road is pretty narrow, curvy, and uphill and even though we’re still in pretty high alitude this dog meant business. He made us nervous sometimes because we were scared the driver might not see him, but nothing happened.
To get to the waterfalls, we had to ride across the forest in a cable car. Now, I don’t just mean any cable car. I mean one that moves as you’re getting on and off it, has 2 benches on either side, but fits 5 people so someone has to stand, goes really really fast, and one of the workers rode on the outside of it, his feet under the bench, holding on to the top. It was really amazing but really scary, speeding way over the trees like that. If we hadn’t ziplined the day before I probably would have shit my pants.
We got to the other side, and the man told us our options-one way you could see a bunch of waterfalls in a shorter amount of time, and the other way you could see one waterfall but it was a long walk. We opted for the more for less, since we were short on time. The walk itself was an interesting adventure. While we waited for the cable car to return with our friends, we saw a monkey tail swaying in the trees! Even though we didn’t see the whole body, it was still really cool seeing a monkey in the jungle, instead of in a zoo.
We slipped and slid all over the place, and I was really happy that I had my hiking-ish boots with me. It really came in handy to be dressed in my quick drying clothes too because it was hot and the trees were still wet with rain. Needless to say I’m glad that my family took me shopping for jungle gear before I came!
We kept doing downhill, which always makes me nervous about returning uphill. At times it was pretty steep, and at other times the drop off to the side was a little nerve wracking. We found our first small waterfall, and then found some more-and needed to cross over very scary looking bridges. We were starting to run out of time, but after one bridge we saw that if we crossed back over and walked a bit, we could get to a bigger waterfall. We obviously did this, but that bridge was even longer and it swayed much much more! It was beautiful, and if we had more time I would have loved to find the rest of the falls, and swim in the water-it would have been so nice to rinse off all that sweat from scrambling around on the paths!
We headed back in much less time than I thought it would take, but that’s okay because it’s always good to have extra time, especially since we had already bought our bus tickets home. The day before, girls had ziplined and were promised they would be back in time for their bus, and they got back to the office at the time their bus was leaving. Awesome.
We headed back towards town, and had to choose which Butterfly conservatory we wanted to go to-apparently there’s a bigger one on the way back, closer to the falls, but then it’s farther away from town. There’s one right in town that we could walk back to the hostal from, but it’s smaller. Some of us wanted to go to the bigger one, so we stopped there, and then everyone decided to just stay together-I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one who wanted the bigger place. I love butterflies and it’s no fun when you go to a tiny, hot, stuffy room.
I don’t know if everyone else enjoyed it as much as me but I loved it! A butterfly landed on me, of course J and we saw all of the caterpillars lined up in rows and suck to the wooden rows with pins. My camera was being nice to me for almost the whole time we were there so I got some good close ups.
On the way back, some girls walked to the hostal but I was exhausted and still wasn’t feeling well so the rest of us took the taxi back. It was a bumpy ride, but we had fun riding in the back of the pickup. We packed up, and hung out on the porch in hammocks waiting for the other girls. It was a nice, relaxing break before the bus ride home.
so cool about the empanadas...my friend allison is really good at making guava and cream cheese empanadas when we're home...delish
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