Settling in

I’ll be honest: when I was on the airplane, and I first saw the lights of Quito popping into sight below me, I had a very strong reaction. It was,

What have I done?

Especially in those first few days, my mental state saw a lot of pendulum-swings.

Initial descent into Quito…What have I done?

Drinking beers and cheering at the soccer game? I can do this!

Waking up from a nap at Nicole’s house and staring out her window at the ash plumes emanating from Cotopaxi Volcano…  What am I doing?

Successfully navigating a trip to the corner store to buy water and snacks all by myself? I can do this!

Now, as a seasoned “Quitena” of over a week, I’m feeling more consistently and confidently on the side of I’m doing it!

Mostly, I’m struck by how remarkably smooth the transition has been. 

I was thinking about Margi’s mom, who was telling me at my going-away-barbecue about her experience teaching abroad several decades ago, where she up and left to Ivory Coast with a backpack and a sleeping bag, with no way to contact her family except pen-and-paper letters, days and weeks apart…

Me, I had to suffer through an entire weekend without internet (ok fine, I was still able to use minimal internet through my Ecuadorian cell phone data plan.) But not to worry, because now I am connected, and I have at my disposal at least 5 different ways to chat, message, write and even speak face-to-pixelated-face! Naturally, once connected, I immediately video chatted Rika so we could catch up…Although, while I’m being honest, I suppose I’ll admit that we probably spent as much time making faces at each other through the computer screen and giggling as we did actually exchanging information about the status of our lives. Just like home!

So, anyway, technology definitely has made being far away feel a lot less so.

Another contributing factor to my feeling relatively at ease is that I have bonded quickly and strongly with the group of new arrivals I am entering with. There’s nothing like being plunked down in the middle of a tangle of foreign customs, culture, food, geography, language, and personal safety guidelines to fuse you together with the people who are trying to figure it out along side you.

Most of all, Nicole has paved the way for me like nothing else. Yesterday she took me to the MegaMaxi, which is kind of like a Super-Walmart, only I think not owned by an evil empire.  Grocery shopping in a new place for the first time can be incredibly overwhelming, especially in a huge store where you don’t know any of the brands, or where anything is supposed to be, or even what products you should expect to find, and you can’t really read the labels all that well. Plus, everything’s slightly different, like milk comes in bags, and eggs aren’t refrigerated, and there are fruits in the produce section I’ve never seen before and wouldn’t even begin to know how to eat, and you have to order cold cuts in grams, and you have to get a receipt con datos, with your name on it so you can deduct it from your taxes…

All this could have been very alarming for me (I mean, I tended to become disoriented back home even just going to the other drug store on the opposite end of town). BUT, yesterday, Nicole took me grocery shopping and essentially led me by the hand down the aisles of MegaMaxi and explained which are the good brands of ketchup here in Ecuador, and that I should buy Aunt Jemima syrup now, and lots of it, because they don’t always have it in stock. And she and told me what she usually buys and what she usually makes and what it goes well with. (Truthfully, I could have used this kind of a service back at home because I have been known to wander absently down even well-known supermarket aisles and emerge with but a few bare essentials, only to find my cupboards bare again within a matter of days.)

Now I am basking in the victorious relief of having managed to meet my basic needs in my new country. (Admittedly, this accomplishment is mostly thanks to the patient assistance of others.) Fridge is stocked, pantry organized, various and sundry household items purchased and put away, laundry is tumbling away right behind me, and best of all INTERNET HAS BEEN INSTALLED. I am back from the abyss!

Finding home

Many accomplishments in the last couple of days!

Work visa: check

Ecuadorian bank account: in progress

Ecuadorian cell phone: in progress

school campus tour: check

Health and safety presentation about all the different ways and circumstances in which I could become injured, ill, a crime victim, or dead while in Ecuador: check (a tad alarming, but also full of  practical and sensible advice)

And, most of all, signing for new apartment: check!

I have endless appreciation and gratitude for the welcome wagon provided by Colegio Americano. Clearly, they have done this all before, and know the right way to get things done. They’ve made it very easy for us.

A television reality show should definitely be created about our “buddies,” who are the colleagues and Quitenos helping us find apartments.  I can see the show’s tag line… “3 buddies. 9 gringos. 4 days to find affordable, safe, convenient apartments suitable for all of them!” After lunch yesterday our restaurant table became a command center, with all three of them on the phone, taking calls, making appointments, strategizing… I have a 4 o’clock appointment for a 2 bedroom in Batan Alto!…  Who wants to see the one bedroom suite in Guapulo?…  This one has a terrace but it doesn’t take pets… Make it 2:30 so we can pass by the one that belongs to my cousin’s nephew on Gonzalez Suarez first… Do you want to see that one if I get him to lower the price?… I already have a call in to him, he was my neighbor for 17 years…

All three of them have been so accommodating and patient and persistent, driving us to and fro all across the city in their own cars, translating, orienting us to the different neighborhoods, showing us where the best places are to go for groceries and home goods and school supplies. And I’m pretty sure they are volunteering.

Thanks to Nicole’s advance footwork, I got a head start looking at apartments. (She asked for “the list” ahead of time, in which the school compiles all of their contacts who currently have apartments for rent, and identified the ones within walking distance of her house) And, just sayin’, I’m pretty sure I got the best one.

My favorite part of my apartment is my landlady! Her name is Berthita. She retired from teaching at Colegio Americano after something like 42 years, and my apartment is right next door to hers. I’m told that she is sometimes referred to as la abuelita del colegio, or the grandma of the school.  She also happened to be Nicole’s husband’s kindergarten teacher, and co-taught with my apartment-search buddy. 

Berthita is so kind and lovely and lively… both of the apartments she rents are full of original artwork made by her, and today after my colleague-to-be Sara signed for the other apartment, we dropped Berthita off at her senior citizens’ tropical dance class! Other people have offered her more money to rent her apartments, but she reserved them for people from the school, with referencias, whom she knew would be coming. That's the kind of person she is... she's not looking for income, she's looking for neighbors.  Also, her Spanish is very clean and precise and comprehensible, so I felt victorious when she taught me about all the different keys and appliances and bills in Spanish and I understood everything!

My other favorite part of my apartment is everything!  It’s half a block from Carolina park, which is Quito’s central park, and it's right next to the road they close off on Sundays for walking and biking. It’s four blocks from the shopping center. And, it is so much nicer and larger and newer than any apartment I’ve ever had in New York, for half the price. It’s on the 10th floor of a brand new building, with a view of Pichincha mountain. There’s a washer and dryer in the apartment, and it has a rooftop terrace. And, for any Yertle the Safety Turtles that might be reading this, it has a guard outside, two main entrance doors that need an electronic key card to enter, and a reinforced safety door to the apartment. 

Here are some photos so you can see for yourself!

August 16, 2015: How to Arrive in Quito

If you ever decide to pick up and move to another country, I strongly recommend doing it this way:

What you want to do is, station a really good friend of yours down there a couple of years beforehand. Go and visit them once or twice, get the lay of the land, do some sightseeing.

Then, once this friend has had time to settle in, pave the way, find all the best spots for fresh juice, ceviche, plantain pizza etc. etc., give them a ring and have them hook you up with a job interview for a sweet position in your target country. Once all the paperwork is sorted out, this friend can pick you up at the airport, bring you to her home, feed you a welcome dinner of fondue and champagne, introduce you to her dog, show you the neighborhood, and help you find an apartment, all within 24 hours of arriving in the country.

Not only should your friend be fully bilingual, it would also be helpful if she has already gone through the cultural transition a couple times and knows how to translate for you and intervene on your behalf and provide safety and city-navigation tips in a way that is helpful and funny and not condescending. She will also have a good sense of when it is time to go back to her house, post up on the couch and chill out with some home renovation reality shows (in English.)

As an added advantage, make sure your friend is married to a local. Then, they can bring you over to the family’s house some Saturday afternoon to meet the cousins and friends and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews, and you can have a beautiful home-cooked meal with them. (The family will be totally cool with the fact that, although you can indicate your general understanding of what is said in Spanish through appropriately timed smiles and nods, for all practical purposes, you are essentially a mute, other than to say hola, si, no, gracias, and ciao. And even though you’ll still feel much too timid to actually try to converse in any meaningful way, the family will still be super duper nice to you and make you feel welcome, and not make you feel as if you are intellectually challenged.)

Ideally, your good friends/hosts/native guides could also take you to the Sunday soccer game and teach you how to cheer like a local (hint: it involves a lot of profanity). And then maybe they can finish out the weekend for you with an outdoor world music concert with a view of Quito’s many mountainsides all lit up at night, and top it all off with consumption of a delicious fried dough product dipped in honey.

Anyway, I’m not saying you have to do it this way if you decide to move to another country. I’m just saying that so far, this way is working well.

August 15, 2015: First Impressions

Things that are, like, a little bit different in Ecuador:

1. Twilight lasts all of 10 minutes, and the sun sets at 6:30 every single night, no matter the season, since we are so close to the equator.

2. Toilet paper doesn’t go in the toilet. It goes in a little garbage can next to the toilet.

3. City smells: Sure, there’s bus exhaust, but there’s also a Eucalyptus grove right next to the highway, and a fresh, earthy smell after an afternoon rain that kind of reminded me of sage or cinnamon.

4. The altitude. Quito is 9,000-some-odd feet above sea level. Therefore, even a paltry amount of walking leaves me breathless and a little lightheaded with my heart racing, even though I am accustomed to walking quite a bit (but way down at sea level, poor limp-lunged, oxygen-guzzling NYC low-lander)

5. There’s an active volcano nearby that is currently, um… ashing?  I don’t want to say “erupting” for fear of alarming my dear readers. I’ve been reassured that, despite my Hollywood action movie-style visions of red-hot magma pouring down the streets and consuming everything in its path, the biggest effects we are likely to experience here in Quito are some haziness and reduced visibility.

August 13, 2015

Endings, Beginnings, and Last Times.

Alan was sitting on my roommate’s couch in my nearly empty living room. The movers had already whisked away my personal belongings, down all four flights and into the rainy Tuesday morning to be brought to a storage place somewhere in the Bronx.  All that was left in the room was Jessy’s couch and TV.  My scraggly houseplants were already in foster care with my mom. My old Ikea dining chairs had been sold on Craigslist. Over the course of the summer so far, all of my possessions had been pulled out, evaluated, then either packed away, given away, or thrown away. The apartment was doing that hollow, echoey thing that apartments do when devoid of furniture. It didn’t really seem like my home any more without all my stuff in it… just kind of a big empty box with a glossy wooden floor, and a few faint traces of my three years there: The floor scuffed up by my bed frame, the marks on the wall in the place where I would park my bike. 

I was washing dishes for the last time in that apartment. On a whim, Alan turned on Reading Rainbow  and the episode happened to be about endings and beginnings, and about how one thing leads to another, and about ending up where you started. It got me thinking about how many times I had washed dishes looking out that 4th floor kitchen window, and how the view had changed. 

In the beginning, the view was an ugly, squat brick building with a discarded sofa in back, deteriorating as weeks went by and the weather got worse. Then one day, all of a sudden, the entire building was demolished while Jessy and I were away at work and the view became a pile of rubble. Soon after, the construction started. To the tune of jackhammers and steam shovels, the site was excavated and turned into a giant pit. By moving day, they had started putting in the beams and foundation and pouring concrete and putting in the other things that rest underneath new buildings. 

The new building’s origin and evolution sort of mirrored some things about my life:

 At first, the old one was just there, because that’s where it always had been. Present, but unremarkable. And then, one day, someone decided that maybe they could put something better in there. And they probably thought about it for a while, and they probably had to get the proper permits and make a plan and talk to some architects and see if it could really work… and that's how it came to be that I was washing the dishes and looked out the window, and the building was gone! Just like that. I hadn’t known the time before that it was to be my last view of that unremarkable building. 

(A lot of times, when it’s the last time you are doing something, you don’t realize it’s the last time until later. For example, I didn’t know last September that it would be my last year teaching Social Studies at PS89.)

Over time, like the owner of the building outside my kitchen window, I looked around at my life, which had been feeling unremarkable*, and said to myself, maybe there could be something different here?  

And I thought about it for a while, and I talked if over with my people and started to formulate a plan… and one fateful day in December, I sent my resume to Nicole in Ecuador, to submit to the American School of Quito. That was my demolition day. I began to knock down the life I knew in favor of a new one I imagined.**

So, endings, beginnings, and last times... I washed the dishes for the last time as I prepared to do many things for the first time. l looked at the beginnings of a new building being constructed as I prepared to construct a new life in Ecuador for a couple of years.

All this seemed somehow related to the word carved above the entrance to my building…PROGRESS.

Progress. I always knew the apartment on Astoria Boulevard wasn’t a permanent home for me. It was pretty clearly a temporary resting place, with its weirdly pentagonal kitchen, and the backwards faucets, and the postage stamp of a bathroom and the slanted floors, and the unadjustable steam heat from the radiators that would suffocate from October to May, and the closet door that didn’t quite fit the frame. Even the neighboring storefronts, though they grew comforting in their familiarity, were unglamorous, and gave off an air of “good enough for now.”  There was Lupe’s deli with its ripped awning, Jerry’s Beauty Cage, now closed, and the dress shop that rarely saw any customers walk through its doors (other than older, vaguely gangster-y seeming gentlemen.)

Despite all this, it was still a good apartment. It might not have looked like much, or been in a particularly trendy part of the neighborhood, but it was an important place in its own way. A place for me to perch, gather strength, save up, and figure out what I wanted to try for next. Eventually, it would be time to move on. Make progress.

Now here I am, following a dream.  So far, following my dreams has felt like fairly mundane work. I am discovering that while actualizing dreams, you still have to listen to awful music in a loop while on hold, delete spam emails, get stuck in traffic, pay for overpriced airport sandwiches. You still have to wash dishes…But I guess that is what is meant by making a dream a reality. It’s not as if all of a sudden the clouds will turn to cotton candy and the whole world will burst into song. I’m still doing mundane things, but I’m doing them in pursuit of something I’ve wanted… Something new, an adventure, a challenge, a new perspective, a new framework for seeing the world around me. You don’t mind doing the work of life if you believe you’re doing it for something worthwhile.  

__________________________________________________________________________

* Family, friends, and loved ones:  YOU have always been remarkable. That is not the part of my life to which I am referring.

**Again, dearest friends and family and loved ones who are reading this, let me clarify that in no way do I mean to imply that I am demolishing my relationships with you and the lives we have been loving and living together. Those are permanent and immovable and always at my core no matter what. It was more my working life that needed renovation.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

It’s hard not to get excited about new beginnings.  The age-old question:  How different will I become? What of me will stay the same?

With 3 decades of living under my belt, I know enough to know that I cannot predict those changes… Will I become the type of person who flosses every day?  Who wakes up early to exercise? Who cooks healthful meals full of antioxidants on Sundays and individually packages them to be consumed throughout the week? Someone who knows which foods have antioxidants?

Teachers know that the time before the school year starts is the most hopeful, the most filled with resolve. It is the time when all things seem possible. Every new year has the potential to be the best year ever (even the ones that turn out to be the worst.) Mercifully, we don’t know ahead of time which it will be, otherwise we might not persevere…

I know enough to separate my hopes, aspirations and elaborate, Stand and Deliver-type fantasies from my realistic predictions of how life will be. But I also know that, realistically, this year is going to be special.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The night before I leave New York,  the moon will be 0.82% full and waning. I looked it up on a phases of the moon calendar.  

The night I arrive in Ecuador there will be a new moon. What are the chances?

Last Friday, when I arrived in Philly for my final family weekend before I move to a different continent for two years, there was an actual blue moon, which, I learned, has nothing to do with the color, but is when there are two full moons that fall within the same month.  

The next night, as we were camping on the Chesapeake Bay after a day of sailing and cracking crabs, the moon was missing just a sliver, but still plenty bright to illuminate the neighboring cornfield and make the water sparkle as we swam in the middle of the night.

And last night, as Alan and I rode a night bus back to New York, that same moon was looming large and orange over the skyline, rusty and round and just a tiny bit slimmer than it had been the night before. It is waning. So is my time left in New York, my home. The moon, it seems, has become my countdown calendar, a lunar version of an old-fashioned hourglass. When this moon dwindles away and the new moon appears, I will start my new life in Ecuador.

Bus rides are good for contemplating things like that. 

I’ve also been contemplating the nature of good-byes.  

I’ve become a fan of the short good-bye.  As I left my family at the barbecue, it was likely the last time I’ll see my mom and dad and sisters for a while - maybe 4 months, maybe 10. But we had a bus to catch, which wouldn’t wait for sentimental notions, so there were quick hugs and kisses and well-wishes, a bottle of wine tucked into my bag (a symbolic gift from my dad because of the mountains on the label), then into the car and off to the station.

I like short good-byes because they are forward-looking. They recognize the unknowability of the future and embrace it. They help you charge ahead.

I have some very dear friends who tend to embrace long, if not lugubrious, good-byes (you know who you are!), with lots of hugging and exclaiming and thanking and planning when to meet again and promising to write or call or text. And I totally get that, too - it’s a way of showing gratitude, of letting people you care about know that you have valued the time you spent together, of showing appreciation for what they bring to your life, vocalizing the tenderness we feel when letting go, even temporarily, of people that we love. 

But there’s something appealing about a short good-bye. A short good-bye is about looking ahead, not backwards. It’s about getting on with it! It’s knowing that you’ll meet again if and when the universe decrees it. The short good-bye works best when you’re secure in knowing that the people you are leaving know how much they are loved, and that you’ll always be in touch in whatever ways you can be, and that you will continue loving them just as fiercely from afar. It’s a ripping-off-the-band-aid scenario…onward, towards the new adventure! Let’s see what life has to offer! What lies around the bend!? Every beginning is an end, and every end a beginning…

So with that in mind…

Bye!

Friday, June 12, 2015

There is a certain way the school smells sometimes in June.  (Not the sweaty kids smell, or rotting garbage, or bus exhaust, although those are not unfamiliar in June.) It’s something unique, not unpleasant, but hard to place…  It’s a summertime morning smell, perhaps the pores of the 100-year-old wood opening up underneath the varnish from the heat and humidity. Not a bad smell. Not musty exactly, but kind of an old-fashioned smell.

I wonder if I’ll miss that smell, and all the quirks and peccadilloes of PS89 and the life I’ve led in Queens. The school’s summer smell is one that I will forever associate with the patchwork tapestry of images and sounds that make up my memories of school… blue-uniformed kids with red ties and big backpacks being dropped off in the morning, some nestled in the handlebars of daddy’s bike, some on foot pulling along little brothers and sisters and cousins by the hand, some tumbling out of the yellow school bus, sleep-eyed as they are herded into their two straight lines. Parents paused right before their kids walk through the arrival doors to give kisses or blessings and the sign of the cross, or instructions in English or Spanish or Chinese or Bengali to be a good girl or boy, listen to the teacher, work hard.  Then the kids turn and enter the maw of the looming giant.

Will I miss the familiar imposing red brick walls that have surrounded my working life for the past 8 years, 4 stories tall and 2 deep? The tall windows reach towards high ceilings in rooms that were built before it seemed necessary to have more than 2 electrical outlets.  The school smell will always remind me of the rooms that sizzle with the untamable blast of dry steam heat from ancient radiators in winter; that transform from dry deserts into tropical saunas in late May and June.  (There is a a brief respite of comfortable climate in the spring, brought about by the long metal poles that push the windows open at the top.)

My life has been lined with shiny linoleum squares in the hallways, where the kids like to play “don’t step on the red ones,” despite the teachers’ supplications to please just walk like regular human beings. 

I know the details of the school in the intimate way that comes from spending the better part of a decade of your weekday working hours there. I know it the way you come to know a lover’s freckles and ticklish spots and gray hairs…I know the perpetually crooked window shades, the light switches put in by people who seemed to think all teachers would be a minimum of 6 feet tall. 

I know how many water bugs are likely to come crawling out when you first open the big closet down in the cafeteria. (Between 1 and 5)

I know which windows the pigeons like to come in, and in which classroom they one time built a nest (211). 

I know the incessant, repeated, saccharine chime of the ice cream truck floating in on warmer afternoons.  

I know the homemade vendor carts, transformed from grocery carts, selling churros in winter, ices in summer, and a range of healthful donuts and chips and candies in between. 

I came to know, (and feel a certain type of distant affection for) the trannies congregating at the Roosevelt Avenue Dunkin Donuts early in the morning as they concluded their nocturnal activities, unapologetically boasting fishnet stockings, sky-high heels, and sassy attitudes. 

I was privy to the way that daylight would break upon the changing of the guard, as the teachers poured in from Long Island and Manhattan and other parts of Queens.We would arrive for our “shift” in Jackson Heights and the ladies of the night, our foils on the graveyard shift, would depart, scattering to unnamed corners of the neighborhood.  

I was a member of an exclusive set of people, those who wake up before dawn. I rode the subway next to construction workers, nurses, and those with no homes to go to or leave from. We’d ride in sleepy camaraderie, clutching our coffees and glaring at those who occasionally broke the unwritten code of silence governing the use public transportation before 7am.

I came to expect the way the sun would shine directly in your eyes coming down Gleane street at certain times of the year, blinding you for the last block as you trudged towards school. I became adept at avoiding frozen dog poop on the sidewalk in winter, or uneven pavement that would catch you off guard. I watched the slow crumble and decay of the abandoned house in the middle of the block.

The little bits of my morning routine will not be the same this year. Erin’s white car will not pull up outside my building on bad weather days. We won’t hold our breath and say a prayer while merging onto the BQE, watching for potholes and imprudent drivers. I won’t hear her daily Dunkin Donuts coffee order: medium Hazelnut, skim milk, two Splenda. Those routines seemed immovable and permanent at the time. But like all things in life, they are not.

My daily sights won’t be the same, nor will the daily sounds. I’ll be exchanging the thick Queens accents of the school aides for Ecuadorian ones. Part of me is going to miss those

big open vowels.  (Open the do-ah! What’s that on the floo-ah? And my personal favorite, the Queens pronunciation of the Hispanic name Jorge: Hoe-ah-hay)

I’ll be far away from the people and places and things I’ve known for the entirety of my adult life. Yet I’m looking forward to piecing together a new collage, finding the quirks, collecting bits and pieces of daily life across the world, of knowing a new city, discovering a new school, finding a new routine.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

It used to be just a secret in my soul, something I’d whisper to myself in the darkness of winter to let myself imagine that change is possible, that maybe I wouldn’t live out the rest of my days and then die, a shriveled old lady, feebly pushing my blue Social Studies cart up and down the checkered linoleum hallways of PS89.

Maybe? Could I? Will I? Should I?

In time, it became clear to me that I probably would. 

Then it was a secret I’d shared with just a few people. It became a smile, a whisper, a knowing glance, a voice lowered down to its most confidential tones.

Last week my travel itinerary arrived in my Inbox.

I told my bosses at work. 

Now I’ve begun the strange process of seizing the day, of taking stock of my life here in New York, and beginning to sort in my mind: What will I bring with me? What will I leave behind?

A New York City rainbow: The brown faces of children staring out the window of the seven train, illuminated by the glowing green and purple in the light of the circular subway sign, framed against the backdrop of yellow and orange old-school subway seats. 

The twinkling of lights many stories up as I leave Manhattan and cross into Queens, catching up with car traffic as I coast down the long side of the Queensboro bridge bike lane.  The darkness of the water. The whooshing of traffic on my right side, compared to the silence of the water far down on my left. The steady squeaks and creaks from my bicycle as it sheds its winter-long stationary status, kind of like my knees. 

I will exchange these well-trodden paths for new and unfamiliar ones. If my footsteps followed me, they would break fresh soil in August. 

February 2015

Things I will not miss about New York:

-My shower, whose temperature fluctuates only between Dragon’s Breath and Ice Bucket Challenge.

-Carrying my bicycle up four flights of stairs to my apartment

-Wet socks from winter weather

-Grumpy people

-Rushing

-Sweating inside my winter coat while riding the subway

Things I will miss about New York:

-my friends

-my family

-pizza

-knowing my way around

-being a native speaker of the language