A Diamond Brocade with Chicken on the High Seas

It's Wednesday night. It's been raining since we woke up on Tuesday morning except for two brief pauses. During the first pause, Tuesday around noon, Maya, Jonah and I hopped the Ecovia to Rebecca's office and had lunch with her. The second pause in the deluge was today, while we were driving with Carmen, our landlady. It reminds me of the one time I was in Ireland. It rained the entire five days I was there except for the five hours I spent in a bus from Dublin to Galway.

Wednesday - We spent the early part of this morning playing restaurant. Jonah mixed our playing cards up in a bowl and served them as mud pies. After my tenth serving of mud pie, I asked him if he had made the pies himself - yeah. If there was mud in them - yeah. If there was sugar in them - yeah. How long they had to cook - without missing a beat - 30 hours.

Maya set up Jonah's room as a restaurant. She wanted to call the restaurant Gadsby's Tavern, which is the name of a Colonial-era tavern in Alexandria, and the site of one of her class trips. But we named it Jonah's Tavern instead. But it's still a fancy place, she said. Later, when Jonah sold out to Maya, we changed the name to Maya's Tavern. Depending on the owner, we hung a clothes hanger over the door knob with the appropriate homemade sign taped to it. Maya expanded the menu to include hot dogs and hamburgers. Mud pies were only for dessert. She made two menus so we didn't get confused.

At some point, Carmen stopped by unexpectedly before we got things together enough to go to the grocery. It wasn't as bad as when my college landlord used to stop by unexpectedly. Everyone had their clothes on, the bongs were put away, and the music was at an acceptable decibel. The only thing that was slightly out of the ordinary was that Jonah's frisbee and rubber ball were in the refrigerator.

Carmen picking us up today and chauffeuring us around proved to be a stroke of good fortune. We didn't get dropped back off here until close to four - enough time for the kids to goof around without driving me mad and for me to make tacos. The first place Carmen took us was to a house she is having renovated in a barrio called San Rafeal. San Rafeal is in a valley called the Valle de los Chillos - about 25 minutes drive from Quito. When Rebecca was looking for a place for us to live, we considered a few places in Sangolqui and Conocoto, which are in the Valle de los Chillos. So, it was good to get a picture of what we missed out on.

Carmen's house in San Rafeal was a dump. The entire development to which it is a part had weeds growing up through the streets and sidewalks, scattered piles of aged lumber and rusted and broken building materials, dusty windows, empty houses and driveways, and broken glass and other rubbish littered about. I think it was trying to be a ghost town. The kids had fun playing amid the rubble. They are very adaptable.

Seemingly, the only person alive in the place was the guy who was working on Carmen's place. It turns out the general contractor who was developing the complex split when he was halfway done. So everyone is putting their places together piece by piece. Carmen says the process has been going on for eight years.

The only other thing of note in San Rafeal occurred outside the gates to the un-development. There was a brown dog and a shorter, hairier dog, a poodle, I guess. The poodle was trying to mount the brown dog, but was probably half a foot shorter and, apparently, not well enough endowed to deliver the goods. As we drove away, the poodle had abandoned the doggy-style approach and moved around to the front. The brown dog seemed game.

After San Rafeal we went to a big mall in Conocoto. The kids had fun playing with the Little Tykes playground equipment that was set up for display in the toy store. I had fun listening to the 1980's era soundtrack blasting through the mall. I remember hearing Jesse's Girl, Cuts Like a Knife, and Walk Like an Egyptian. All that was missing was Video Killed the Radio Star.

Tuesday - After we ate lunch with Rebecca yesterday, Maya, Jonah and I went to the Museo Nacional del Banco Central del Ecuador, the premier museum in Quito. It cost 2 bucks to get in, and the kids were free, so I didn't care if we spent fifteen minutes there, and all of them in the bathroom. It was dry and I didn't feel like I was flushing money down the toilet.

It turns out that both kids really enjoyed the pre-Columbian ceramics and gold artifacts room and we spent about an hour there. In addition to hundreds of cisterns, bowls, and other implements (of which, we managed not to break any) this one big room had multiple scale models depicting life among the natives, with detailed hunting, farming, jungle and village scenes. It was pretty neat. Maya liked looking at the models and Jonah liked hanging on the railings that separated us from the models.

When Maya asked why one person in the village model was tied to the ground, I tried to explain the concept of sacrifice. I told her that some people believed in a being called God and that God was like Santa Claus. Even though you can't see God, God can see what you are doing and punishes you if you are bad and rewards you if you are good. The natives that used to live in Ecuador believed in God and believed that if you gave him things - people or animals, he would be happy and would do good things for the village. I had to make this up on the spot since I had forgotten what I had planned to tell Maya when she eventually asked me about God. Fortunately, she didn't ask me if I believe in God. I've also forgotten what I had practiced to tell her about that - and I think having to make that up too, and to have it sound as reasonable, would have been pushing my luck.

One thought about ceramic vessels. Some of them were shaped like men standing with an elongated tube like a penis for water to come through. Imagine drinking through that. It occurred to me that the native folks skilled in pottery probably made one of these every once in a while just as a goof. When the guy who made it brought it home, his wife was like, you can keep it in the basement, but we aren't using it when we have company. And the guy is like fine, but I want you to bury me with it. It's the equivalent of the modern day vulgar plastic novelty item where there's this fat guy, you pull down his pants, and a stream of water emits from a hole in the space where his penis is supposed to be. And centuries later, because the guy is buried with it, we think the Inca had some elaborate ritualistic purpose for these phallic water vessels. Like their wedding registries included items from the phallic china line. When really, it was just some guy being crude.

Anyway, the most impressive thing to Maya was the mummified remains of a female skeleton, complete with hair and burial garb. It reminded me of the skeletal bride from the movie "The Corpse Bride", but not as hot. Maya had to pee while we were looking at it, but wouldn't go until she was sure we would come right back there when she was done so she could look some more. She asked a few times if it was a girl. It was, according to the text on the display. There was some copper oxidation on the skull where her ears would have been and this indicates she was buried with earrings. Also, some of her dress was indicative of a gal.

The other thing that really intrigued Maya was a full scale model of a burial chamber. It included a guy all decked out in gold, with dozens of ceramic bowls, containers, etc, some of them filled with fake corn, fish, and one bowl filled to the brim with this porridge-like gruel. I explained to Maya that the bowls, gold, etc were real and the rest of the stuff was fake because you couldn't have real food in there on display because it would rot. That got me into explaining the whole re-birth in another world thing and why they needed all that stuff. Maya seemed like she was really engaged. After my two or three minute monologue, she's quiet, contemplative, and finally asks - what is the porridge made out of?

By the end of the first floor, the kids were done. But Maya didn't want to leave. We went through the second floor, which was mostly religious paintings, and we were all bored to tears. Jonah was all set to go, but Maya still didn't want to leave. The third floor had secular and colonial era art. To appease Maya and make it more interesting for Jonah, we agreed to make chicken noises for every painting that contained a chicken, wind in the sail noises for every painting with a boat in it, and put our hands to our cheeks and go "Ahhhh" for every painting that had a jewel in it.

The floor didn't have one painting that had a chicken, boat or jewel. What the hell kind of colonials were these people?