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Field Notes Issue Number 1
Oct. 5th, 2004 01:48 pmQuito: very beautiful. The New Town is very colorful and there is a lot of public art. Lots of green, too, trees are planted and protected well. I am greatly bemused by little tree sprouts, like 4 or 5 inches tall, enclosed in a metal wire pen that goes up to my shoulders. The old town is very majestic in that colonial architecture way, and there are cobbled streets up and down the ample hills. At night these white becolumned buildings are lit up with intense purple or green light, giving the whole thing a ghostly feel. When you are in a large square in front of the large St. Francis cathedral, you can look up on the mountains and see the huge statue of the Virgin tower over the tiny lights that indicate houses on the slopes.
This website has some nice images (although the Old Town gets represented more and better than the very bright and urban New Town).
http://www.ecuador365.com/quito2.html
I have been taking pictures, but due to the retarded situation with my computer, I do not foresee any opportunity to upload them before I get to San Francisco next month.
Computer Situation: There is not an Apple computer to be found in the entire country. IBM monopoly isn´t a hyperbolic figure of speech here. Pictures are one thing, the bigger problem is that my paper, unfinished as it were, the one that I am presenting at the AAAs, has to be emailed to the panel organizers by Oct. 15th. I have internet access on the many PCs in the many cybercafes. I have the paper on my G4 powerbook. I have a Lexar drive that is not compatible with any PCs. I have no way to get my Mac connected to the internet. I feel like I am in a bad logic problem, the kind that made me flunk the logic section on my GREs. I didn´t have the solutions then and I don't have a solution now.
Other things: I found a room in this, like, boarding house. Very old style. There are little things that remind me of my Soviet childhood (like the old kind of gas stoves, the ones you have to turn on by holding the match up to the gas and the old little cars, you know, the ones that look like they have a hump, that the new VW bugs emulate, lined up on the street, in every color), which makes me ponder the subtle metonymic discursive strategies when narrating The Third World and The Past. Really, it´s about the level of technology and the mode of production. Look at me. First I start spouting second wave feminist rhetoric, and then Marxist catchphrases. My adviser would be so proud of me.
Remembering my last visit to Ecuador, where I was forced to subsist for two months on instant coffee with powdered milk, that that was on the good days, I brought my French Press with me. Coffee seems to help with the headache from the high altitude, and my gasping for air episodes seem to go down by 30% every day. It´s not like suffocating, it´s more like, when you are walking into a strong wind, and you have a hard time breathing because it is blowing so hard. Hopefully it will go away soon.
I also want to sleep often and eat a lot. Hopefully this is not some sort of retrocolonial laziness that strikes anthropologists in Exotic Lands. Probably it´s just the exhaustion of the last year finally desublimated.
This website has some nice images (although the Old Town gets represented more and better than the very bright and urban New Town).
http://www.ecuador365.com/quito2.html
I have been taking pictures, but due to the retarded situation with my computer, I do not foresee any opportunity to upload them before I get to San Francisco next month.
Computer Situation: There is not an Apple computer to be found in the entire country. IBM monopoly isn´t a hyperbolic figure of speech here. Pictures are one thing, the bigger problem is that my paper, unfinished as it were, the one that I am presenting at the AAAs, has to be emailed to the panel organizers by Oct. 15th. I have internet access on the many PCs in the many cybercafes. I have the paper on my G4 powerbook. I have a Lexar drive that is not compatible with any PCs. I have no way to get my Mac connected to the internet. I feel like I am in a bad logic problem, the kind that made me flunk the logic section on my GREs. I didn´t have the solutions then and I don't have a solution now.
Other things: I found a room in this, like, boarding house. Very old style. There are little things that remind me of my Soviet childhood (like the old kind of gas stoves, the ones you have to turn on by holding the match up to the gas and the old little cars, you know, the ones that look like they have a hump, that the new VW bugs emulate, lined up on the street, in every color), which makes me ponder the subtle metonymic discursive strategies when narrating The Third World and The Past. Really, it´s about the level of technology and the mode of production. Look at me. First I start spouting second wave feminist rhetoric, and then Marxist catchphrases. My adviser would be so proud of me.
Remembering my last visit to Ecuador, where I was forced to subsist for two months on instant coffee with powdered milk, that that was on the good days, I brought my French Press with me. Coffee seems to help with the headache from the high altitude, and my gasping for air episodes seem to go down by 30% every day. It´s not like suffocating, it´s more like, when you are walking into a strong wind, and you have a hard time breathing because it is blowing so hard. Hopefully it will go away soon.
I also want to sleep often and eat a lot. Hopefully this is not some sort of retrocolonial laziness that strikes anthropologists in Exotic Lands. Probably it´s just the exhaustion of the last year finally desublimated.
