Happiness is riding in the back of a pick-up truck

The best part of this weekend was sitting in the back of a pick-up truck taxi, climbing a seemingly endless cobblestone road up into the mountains near Otavalo. I was wedged in happily with half a dozen other gringos and our hiking packs, bumping along and peering down over the cliff into the valley to see the patches of varying shades of green and brown farms, dotted with cows and sheep and simple farmsteads nestled at the bottom.

Friday was Guayaquil Day, commemorating the beginning of the independence movement in this part of the world. We had a day off of school, and happily, a couple of colleagues organized a trip to Otavalo, a market town about two hours north of Quito.  We stayed at a lodge/hostel called La Luna way up high in the mountains, with hammocks strung along the porch and a fireplace in every room, and several happy hostel dogs roaming around and schmoozing graciously with the guests.

Our destination for the first day of our trip was the lake at Mojanda for a hike. The landscape there was surreal. At 12,000 feet, the air was thin and cool and the vegetation shrubby. Everything was quite dry, even though it's next to a lake. It was a gray day, but bright, and it matched the color palette of the surrounding territory: cold colors, with grays and browns and pale sagey greens. The lake was surrounded by dark, sharp-edged, protruding mountain peaks whose profiles seemed to say, "don't mess with me."

The first part of the trail had us traipsing along a narrow path through monster-sized grass up to our waists. We turned left at a giant craggy boulder, and the path turned into a dry dirt road where we kicked up dust that coated our hair and clogged our nostrils.  Enormous spiky plants taller than a tall human lined the steep edges of the path. The whole area had a prehistoric feel, like a forgotten land. It was totally silent, except for the sounds we made ourselves. It would have seemed totally within the bounds of reason for a pterodactyl to have come screeching along over the horizon.

The road actually led down to a little hostel at the far side of the lake, where, conveniently, there was a little open-air cafeteria. (That's my kind of hike - one with a snack bar at the other end!) We ordered typical Ecuadorian food that seemed fitting with the day's Jurassic feel -- we ate choclo, which is a species of corn that has enormous kernels that are kind of starchy and not actually sweet. It was served with ava, which look like gray, oversized lima beans, a boiled potato, another root vegetable that I'd never seen before that maybe was kind of like a parsnip, and topped off with some satisfyingly squishy rectangles of fresh cheese. (Naturally, we also doused everything with aji, which is the tangy Ecuadorian chili sauce.) It was a hearty and authentic-feeling meal.

The following day's adventure was a trip to the market at Otavalo, which spreads out on Saturdays through blocks upon blocks of the city's center. The market is known for all kinds of beautiful hand-made goods, especially textiles like alpaca blankets and sweaters and ponchos. Alpaca is amazing, because it's just as warm as wool, but like 10,000 times softer. It got really chilly up there in the mountains at night, so just about all of us came back from the market with soft new sweaters or blankets or scarves.

The market is a beautiful and colorful place, with vendors selling beaded jewelry, painted bowls, pillowcases, tablecloths, and a million other things. On the far end you can find the "food court," with women wearing indigenous clothing selling heaping piles of beans and grains from burlap bags, and if you're hungry you can go over and get a slice of the roasted pig on a spit, with a tomato in its mouth and peppers in its ears. You could wander endlessly among the stands, taking in the colors and sounds and trying to use your very best Spanish to negotiate a fair price.

At the end of each day of our long weekend, we made our way back to La Luna, a blissful and quiet paradise of relaxation. It basically felt like summer camp, because I was there with a group of about 20 friends that I truly enjoyed being around, and we slept in bunkbeds six or seven to a room and shared the bathrooms and just hung out. There was a cozy living room with pillows and another fireplace and board games, and wherever you wandered you would find a group of people to talk to, or read next to, or play board games with, or order beers for.

I got to talking with some of the other gringo teachers who have been here a little longer. They expressed how great it is to always have new people coming into the community to make friends with, but also how how bittersweet it is to constantly have people moving on. That's just the way it is, but that doesn't make it easy. One said in an endearingly tongue-in-cheek way, "When you're abroad, your friends become your family," acknowledging that this is at once very corny and very true.

 It's an odd thing to be so delighted and happy with your surroundings and the people who surround you, and at the same time also missing the other people and places that you adore.  Being in a beautiful natural setting and living communally, I couldn't help but draw comparisons with Latvian camp. At the same time as I was enjoying the adventure and surprise of exploring a beautiful new mountain I'd never seen before, I found myself missing the well-trodden trails and coniferous forests of the Catskills. All these new crazy-looking plants are cool, but fir trees feel like home. I love my gaggle of new friends, but in different ways than I do the ones back home that I've known for decades.

The feeling of missing someone or something is also a little odd because it's not always totally logical. Of course I expected to miss my family and my friends and my boyfriend, but this weekend I also found myself missing loved ones that I won't be able to see when I go home for Christmas... my grandpa, our childhood dog Niks, my cousin Alfred, and my Uncle John. I guess when missing people is a part of daily life, your heart doesn't distinguish between those you will see again and those you won't.

That seems to be the challenge and also the satisfaction of this new life... letting new people into my life, and also letting myself love the people of my past. Leaving room to think about home, but also allowing myself to think of my apartment in Quito as home. Letting myself feel a twinge of homesickness sometimes, but not letting it overshadow fun and excitement of new places and the thrill of pick-up truck rides. Remembering truthfully that life in New York had downs as well as ups, as does life here. Enjoying my washing machine and my new alpaca poncho as much as I would be enjoying bagels and the Mets back home.

Before I left New York lots of people told me to “enjoy every minute” and things along those lines.  But Leslie Spangler, when she took us boating in the Chesapeake, told me instead to “embrace every moment,”  and that’s the advice I’ve chosen to try to follow, because it leaves room for a wider and more complex array of sentiments. I can be having fun and have an awesome weekend and be thrilled with my new friends, and still miss my old friends. I can fill my eyes with the gorgeous pale green mountain scenes, full of high-altitude shrubbery and cows in the road and and find them stunning and beautiful. And at the same time I can still be loyal to the rounder, lower, darker green but also stunning Catskill mountains of my youth. I can love my apartment but hate being trapped in in at night. I can be excited but also unsure. I can love Quito while missing New York. I can accept and even welcome these conflicting feelings, knowing they are all part of the experience, part of my story.