Leaving on a Jet Plane (don't know when I'll be back again)

What seemed to take forever is here. Just a day and a half until I lift off from Portland. Now at the last minute I am still thinking of things to do. Getting Mom and my sister ready for the winter is part of the prep. Getting myself kitted out for three months in a new culture is the rest. staying here, for you who are, is in a sense moving into a new place, the winter...lots to do prepairing for that cold country. I'll not be back til March, at the earliest, so Thanksgiving Day I put snow tires on the truck . Today I added 360 pounds of frozen traction sand over the rear axil. Thats what I want in the back when I head north from Portland in March. If I return in the summer no problem. For these trips I leave the truck at my daughter's house in Portland and getting up the hill from her back yard is a challenge.

Trying to anticipate what I might want down below the equator is difficult. Sandy (my host in Quito) says, "if you want it: bring it because here its unavailable or expensive" (caro). But there isn't room for everything. There is now a charge for EACH checked bag. Last year the first was free. I read in the NYT a few days ago that the airlines made $1.5 Billion ( Fifteen hundred million $) last year from baggage charges...As Homer Simpson would say, "Duh, do you think they will ever go back to free?", not in any universe I'll be inhabiting. Between the airlines and TSA !...don't get me started.

Hmmmmm think sheepish thoughts, Hmmmmm. I am Just getting ready for the screening. They look for angry people. Today's model citizen will be sheepish no matter how they're treated. As James Cagney famously said, "When you're slapped you'll take it and like it!" Anyway, I'll be there soon, and with red cheek.

Next post, the visa process. A game unto itself wherein "Jubilado" in Spanish is "retiree" or "Pensioner". The Pensioner visa will let me go back and forth as I wish...allowing me to maximize my interaction with the crazy wonderful TSA and their lovable friends, the airlines.

saludos (health)

Big feet in the fall

The fall is firmly established on this part of the Maine coast. About half the leaves are on the ground. The colors this year were OK but not spectacular. That seems to require luck, the wind, the sunshine, in those critical weeks of change. A noreaster removed lots of leaves from the trees last week. I got out a couple of times with the camera to document whats left.

My friend in Quito, the woman I will be renting from, is seeing the dentist today. I am trying to give spiritual support from 3500 miles away. When it comes to dental pain I can commisurate. Speaking of Dentistry and Ecuador. I have decided to cancel my $130 teeth cleaning scheduled for next month and doing it in Ecuador for $30. To save money and checkout the practice of that black art south of the equator. In the forums and blogs out of EC I've noticed only good reports about those who work in the mouths of others.

The days dwindle down to a precious few as Kurt Weil put it in 1939. About five and a half weeks until I am winging thru the hostile skies toward Quito. Still a bit of time for ordering new glasses and maybe sneakers. Time for guessing at what clothing will accomadate the several climates I might visit this winter. Light and heavy jacket, poncho, layers. I might get leather sandles down there. I need custom, having feet 17 wide. Thats fifty something European. I might leave the leather guy a plaster cast. Their jaws tend to drop on seeing my feet. After I'm gone they're sure it was just imagination. Pies muy GRANDE!! (very big feet) Yet at the convention of big feet, I can barely get accreditation and have to sit way in the back. Size seventeen is not considered much by some. Barely enough to get your foot in the door.

You can't go out and play till you finish your BLOG!!

I don't think I should have a blog. I started this one and I was hot to do it and I produced copy and graphics for a week....then lost interest. Its not like there is much happening. The clock counts down the days till I cram myself into an aircraft (three in a row actually) and speed thru the sky to America de Sur. Less than two months. So there isn't much to report. Trying to keep this on the subject declared at the beginning is tough. I gave myself permission in advance to drift off subject. Still, I try not to.

Today I thought about a large suitcase I need to buy. One with wheels. The one I got for the return from Madrid last year has one last trip in it....to the dump. It was cheap to begin with and the hop across the Atlantic March first pretty much sucked the remaining life out of it. So I will take it to the bolsa (baggage) Valhalla and bid it farewell. Then I will be at wallymart with a tape measure picking out another one. I think the dimensions for these things have changed often enough that the manufacturers haven't kept up. I don't want to risk being an inch over. I suspect that lots of people just eat the $50 here and $100 there oversize fee for an extra inch or an extra bag but my jaw would lock up. The airlines are sticking it Mr. Passenger enough as it is. I want to travel for what I paid. They can keep their F**king peanuts.

Walk south but carry a big stick?

Since I centered my attention on Ecuador I have participated in an expat blog (http://www.expatexchange.com/). Its regulars are expats of long standing in Ecuador. It gets lots of traffic from people about to go there or thinking about it. I was one of the latter but now I've bought the tickets ($724, Maine to Quito R/T) so it's serious. The forum is a skewed sample as just about all samples are. The most popular theme seems to be fear. Close behind that is money, then climate.

So the forum tends to fear (of crime), Money (cost of living) and climate (personal taste). If you don't factor in this "skew", this bias (overwhelmingly fear) you will get a inaccurate picture. Every view is subjective. So every answer and question is as well. Objective truth (surprise!) is not to be found. Everyone has an angle, contrived or innate. Sometimes it's commercial, nothing wrong with that. Usually it's to shore up a personal world view. The world (Ecuador) is out to get me or the world loves me. You can prove either view (to yourself anyway). But anyone bearing "Truth" somehow needs to convince others (like the truth can't stand alone?). The ones who think the world is out to get them show up briefly, feeling exposed maybe?. Those who are living this dream or those wanting to stay around.

The regulars will tell stories collected over the years of bad things that happened to tourists and other foreigners. They relate personal experience, crimes that were committed against them. Some strive to educate the new wannabe expat with these stories. Others argue that in their decades of experience they have never been afraid. Proponents of both these views advise caution and common sense. Paradise is apparently not to be found on Earth, in either hemisphere.

A statistical analysis (dubious because of data quality) seems to suggest that on average you will be just as safe in Ecuador as in the USA. "on average" covers a huge area.... big city or rural area?, do you fit in or stand out?, have you street savvy or are you clueless? In Maine the tourists are culturally clueless and to them I don't stand out. To the Mainers I am clearly from "away". In Ecuador I will be as inconspicuous as an elephant in a flea circus. So I will need to ramp up my situational awareness and work at reading the people around me. I think these skills have atrophied over the years. And then there is good luck. For that I'm thinking of a good luck charm. A walking stick maybe, with a really hard handle and a lanyard. Think of a traveling Buddhist monk or Little John, peaceable but ready. We shall see.

Fear and Crime, Here and There

The recent labor unrest in Ecuador seems to have excited a lot of the fear Gringos have of crime. Not all gringos but many vocal ones. A strike by police wanting to keep their perks is worried into a revolution. I would say this bidding up of events was because US citizens have such a tranquil existence...but it's not true. Plenty of the run of the mill human emotion spills over and onto the street here. Why should it seem more extreme when it happens elsewhere. Does it reinforce the perception that the world hates us?

Anyway, the president of Ecuador will survive this and the Ecuadorian government will deal with the law that prompted it. One government ratchets up the benefits given to its political base and the next government, unable to pay these perks, attempts to reduce them. Same situation was happening that week in Europe. Strikes over new labor laws in Spain.



Its Fall and what TECH to take

It is fall. It's the first day of fall 2010. Arguably the best season in New England. There are many warm days before we relinquish the land to winter. The air is dry and crisp, perfect for working out doors. Splitting and stacking fire wood and waving at passing tourists. The great buses full of what we call "Leaf Peepers" are on the highways. The "colors" sweep down from north and the leaves drop. The Peepers are driven up from the south. I encourage them to take the leaves when they go. Only a few do and those don't take enough. We still have too many to rake up. 


It was a fantastic summer by all accounts.  The summer of 2009 was awful. It was damp and sunless and gardens suffered. The dampness brought a blight that infected potatoes and tomatoes. The same scourge that sent the Irish across the sea a hundred and sixty years ago. At the end of that year I crossed the sea as well, to Madrid. I thought Madrid's winter would be mild. I understood from the web that it would be winter but tolerable. Just reaching the mid 30's at night then warming to 65F during the day. Sunny and dry. It wasn't like that. It was the wettest, coldest winter Madrid had seen in 50 years. All of Europe set records for winter's discomfort. The train that passed under the English Channel froze up and didn't run. Airplanes sat on tarmac aprons and didn't fly. I decided this winter would be different, for me anyway.


I am taking a lot of technology with me to Ecuador. A laptop computer, a page scanner, camera, MP3 player, Ebook, batteries and a charger. I could go cold turkey for three months. I don't know what I would gain by doing that. Less crap to haul thru airports and streets? Would my character improve? I'd find plenty to do. But I wouldn't listen to Spanish language broadcasts and lessons on internet radio. I wouldn't be able to listen to all the old BBC comedies I like. The great novels I want to write wouldn't be typed. This blog and others would have to wait for my visit to an internet cafe. There are substitutes for all this. The camera and scanner I'd take to support the web page(s), scanning drawings of things real and things imagined. Photos of Ecuador and the people I meet. There are programs on the laptop to let me manipulate the images and scanned drawings. I'll limit the stuff I do take. I'll not take anything I can't afford to have grow legs and walk off. If everything did suddenly disappear I could be content with a pad of paper and a couple of pens. With that I could write those great stories and accounts. A pad and drawing pens would be enough to render scenes of the towns and mountains. The story could be told in ink, as was done hundreds of years ago.

The new book

I love to read. Reading has been my education. All my life I have read books and collected books. I have hauled tons of books (I'm sure its been tons) as I've moved from place to place. I have haunted book stores. The titles that wouldn't sell, the remaindered books on the tables in front of the store, I've bought so many of them.

Now that I work less or don't have to work I'm reading even more. Up until the last decade or so I could take enough books when I traveled to keep me reading until I was home again. Not any more. The friendly skies have turned greedy and every pound beyond the essentials must be paid for. Also, every pound of baggage has to be pulled and pushed and now rolled on tiny little brittle plastic wheels thru the hells called terminals.

Modern electronics to the rescue. The flash memory is the star of semiconductors. It has gone beyond the wildest expectations anyone had for it thirty years ago when it was first introduced. Together with the microcomputer it has enabled something called the "Ebook". The "book" will never die but it will no longer be ink on paper. The ebook pictured cost me about $100 a month ago. I got it from J&R in NYC and I love it. There are tens of thousands of books available on the web for free so content is not a problem. It takes the same 2 Gig SD flash sticks my FujiFilm camera uses. Same batteries too, rechargeable AA NiMh (two sets of 4). Text is loaded into it simply as files transferred to a (virtual) hard drive.

Hundreds of five pound novels can be stored on one SD flash drive. These SDs are $6 each. So I'll truly have a half ton of books (or more) when I fly. A black day for the English language book stores frequented by tourists and expats the world over.

So what is loaded now? Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game and The Shadow of the Wind (in Spanish and English). Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the First Circle. The complete works of Vladimir Nabokov. The complete works of Raymond Chandler. The complete works of John Cheever. Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths. Hesse - Magister Ludi. Kafka - The Castle. Mann - Doctor Faustus. Marquez - In Evil Hour and Memories of my melancholy Putas. Saramago - Seeing.

Thats just some of the stuff I have recently loaded into it. I've already gone thru everything P.K.Dick ever published and a ton of Science Fiction from the pulps of the 50's, stuff I was weaned on - the reading that hooked me for life.

Bringing the theme full circle, when I am waiting in the terminals on my way to and from Ecuador, I'll not be bored. In line or on plastic seating I will be with Solzhenitsyn in a Soviet prison camp or following Carlos Zafon thu the streets of Barcelona.