Good Good Good Good Good Good

November came, and I was out of money. My debit card was eaten by a machine in Huaraz, Peru, because I took a few seconds longer than I should have in putting my newly-collected money away; my final Soles were spent in Trujillo, buying a High School Musical III movie ticket and subsequent fast-food dinner for a professional salsa dancer with two-feet-long eyelashes. And so I crossed the Peruvian border into Ecuador in a strange state of temporary poverty, toting a loaf of bread and jar of pineapple jam that would serve as my next two meals, hoping that I would not have to break into my emergency fifty-dollar bill until I got to Vilcabamba -- where I would be working on an organic farm and thus be devoid of expenses for a time, as well where I would be meeting back up again with Nate and the gang and and perhaps borrowing enough money to keep going afterwards.

As it happened, the $50 needed to be pulled out sooner than I thought. I arrived in the nighttime in Loja (the biggest city in the province containing Vilcabamba) bus station and had just enough to check my e-mail, get the number of my CouchSurfer for the night, and give him a call. Well . . . actually, I had ten cents less than what I needed, and the phonebooth cashier wasn´t about to break my fifty for a seventy-cent chat. So I gave my first IOU in Loja, Ecuador, just minutes after I arrived. And it was not my last. My next challenge was to find a taxi driver who would take me to meet my CouchSurfer (a man named John that had an immensely heavy accent I could barely understand over the phone) at an English school where he teaches; the first three cabs turned me down out-of-hand, but the third let me in for long enough to beg. And that´s what I did. He said it was a counterfeit bill; I told him No, It´s From The Freaking United States Of America, My Mother Gave It To Me And My Mother Is A Good Woman And I Have Absolutely No Money To My Name Except For This, So Please God Believe Me And Just Break It. He then told me there is a tax for breaking large bills at the bank, so I told him I´d pay six dollars for the ride even though I know it only costs three (I found out later that a buck was pretty standard). I was against the wall. I was scared senseless and exhilarated, I had to make this sale. I begged him to trust me. And, egged on by a fat tip, he eventually did.

And that´s how my relationship with Loja, Ecuador, began. It turns out John´s accent was Nigerian, and John turned out to be the first of a long string of kind and invigorating people I met in that little city that made me not want to leave. So . . . I didn´t. I was introduced to a man named Diego, who owns an English school called the Canadian House Center, and the day after I arrived in Loja I was offered a job teaching English until the end of the month. Partially out of desire, partially out of necessity, I had been handed the opportunity to feel what it is like to live in a South American city, and to earn my keep at the same time.

What followed was a bizarre and beautiful month, educational in all of the traditional as well as in all the esoteric kind of ways, full of machismo and libido and Spanish slang and subtle Gringo fetishizations. And a new way of thinking about travel, for me . . . namely, that traveling for the sake of Staying can be infinitely more complex and gratifying than the compacted vista-collecting of the traditional backpacker trails. I felt the rush of teaching, of having a classful of people nodding in a way that you know they actually understand . . . I made a new close friend, a true friend, one who says things like ´´I´m gonna take the Mick out of you´´ and ´´You should flog that´´ and will freestyle British-style one moment and talk with me about cultural discrepencies and White Guys Thinking Too Much the next . . . I started singing along to the more popular Ecuadorian dance numbers, even if their choruses didn´t have more than five or six different words in them . . . I felt like I made a life for myself, with all of the necessary friends and interests and activities attached.

Then I had to leave, of course. I gave the phonebooth cashier at the bus station fifty cents on my way out (interest included), donned my backpack awkwardly once again, and went up to Quito to spend a final three days with Nate. It was my swan song with the Spanish language (f0r now), and a month of lessons had made my companion a capable conversationalist. My Adios For Now came after we watched a long movie about the whole world going blind, which made my contacts very dry and thus made me thing more optimistically about the benefits of such a thing happening.

Things are different now. I feel at home, but in a different home, with a different language and with family I have never had the opportunity to really know beforehand. I´m in Brazil -- São Paulo for now, Rio de Janeiro later -- until the middle of the month. Things changed drastically, again, predictably and with varying degrees of sadness and interestingness. The distinctness of this place deserves more words than I can give it right now . . . for my mind is still back in my little South American hometown, sweet tiny Loja, and my memories mimic my students as they mimic my own kneejerk response to a correctly-answered question in class: Good Good Good Good Good Good (et al)

Snippets of tales to come. A picture of my Loja boys to leave on: John on the left, James (my freestyling British companion) on the right . . .