A Passage to Ecuador: Chapter 5
The part where I read Lolita
June 16
I got up around eight and put on my damp socks and shoes. I had slept the night at the hotel in Cuellaje, after arriving in town around nine in the evening following my trip to Lake Cuicocha. I hadn’t brought a change of clothes or bag with me, since I didn’t want to hike with any extra weight.
After paying the hotel manager eight dollars for stay, I left to find breakfast. I got a bottle of water and found a place offering “cappuccinos.” This joint was mostly an ice cream parlour, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was served what could more accurately have been described as a warm chocolate milkshake with a hint of coffee. I also ordered a waffle with Nutella. It was also served with strawberries, bananas, peach, the thickest whipped cream known to man, ice cream, and chocolate sauce. After my 700-calorie breakfast, I went back to the hotel to steal its wifi.
The view from the roof of the hotel in Cuellaje:
Once connected to wifi, I communicated with Edwin. We would meet at one in the afternoon to get lunch. In the meantime, I set off on a walk along the road to Peñaherrera (retracing the route my bus had taken the day prior). I continued listening Bob Wright’s The Evolution of God. Now Bob has gotten to the point where he’s trying to convince Americans to understand and empathize (cognitively, not emotionally) with Islamic terrorists. He’s also arguing that believing in electrons is the same as believing in an abstract “god” that set the universe in motion, designed the process of natural selection, and gave the universe its moral structure and directionality. This is because we can’t really conceive of electrons (they’re neither waves nor particles), we’ve never seen them, and some physicists say they don’t exist. It’s merely useful to posit their existence. They serve a theoretical purpose a bit like a “god of the gaps” except that positing their existence helps us understand other important things (which the god of the gaps doesn’t do).
Edwin and I were supposed to meet his friend Cristina to chat about Canada, but she was sick. I guess we’ll meet up next weekend. Edwin and I first bought some fish, and then headed to Patricia and Ned’s. They weren’t there, so we went looking for Ned. We gave him the fish, and then went to the Chinese restaurant. I had a spicy plate of noodles, veggies, and various kinds of meat. Edwin had fried shrimp, fried rice, and French fries. This combo (of meat, fried rice, and French fries) seemed to be what most people in the restaurant were eating. It was packed full of huge groups, and there was a line outside. Who knew Chinese food was such a hit in Intag?
Edwin and I talked about our families and where we were from. He had a meeting at 2:00, so I walked with him back to the parroquia office. There I ran into Ned and a new volunteer, Yair. Yair is 24 and from Israel. He’s on a five-month adventure across Latin America. He has very granola hipster vibes. We walked to a grenadilla farm and sat there, drinking wine and playing guitar for a while. He was a professional basketball player (a benchwarmer, admittedly) in Israel for a while, which somehow exempted him from military service, it seems. Or perhaps he was in the IDF but spent most of his time playing basketball. I didn’t quite understand. At one point he seemed to want to talk about Middle East politics, but I decided not to engage due to his ridiculously simplistic view of it all. He was super chill and nice aside from that.
After that I walked back to Cuellaje to buy some food at the market and get the bus, which would take me back to El Rosario, where I was staying. (I had to get back so I could teach classes the next, Monday.) I also started listening to Lolita. I bought some hornado, and while I was eating I must have missed the bus. So I paid a dude named René to drive me to El Rosario. He was super chill and said I spoke great Castellano, which was dope. I chilled on the farm for a while, and then had some soup and talked with Alva. She told me a super long story about a Spanish dude that came through El Rosario on his was to Piñán. She (and her sons, I think) hiked with him to Piñán through the night, and he was just a dunce who kept doing stupid things that were hilarious to her. He didn’t bring a flashlight, put his boots on the wrong feet, and carried water to drink in a boot. She also told me about how her son Lenin and his friend Guido once went to Piñán, and they took drinking water out of the stream polluted with cow dung instead of the large, clean river.
June 17
The kids are very restless on Mondays. We sang the national anthem, danced a bit, sang a song about pandas, and practiced the body parts (head, shoulders, knees, and toes) before starting class. I spent all my free time listening to Lolita. It’s engrossing and insane. Sometimes you can’t help but laugh at the oblivious repulsiveness of Humbert Humbert (a hilarious character, aside from the obvious issues). My version is read to me by some unlettered British brute (as H.H. might say), so I sometimes can’t understand what he’s saying. He pronounces “sexual” as “secsual.”
The neighbour’s goat followed me home, all the way to my room (it didn’t go in). The dogs (Benny and Bella) lost their minds, having never seen a goat intrude on their property before. But they didn’t attack it. Ramiro led it back to the neighbour’s place. Then we played pickle ball with her. She’s an old Alaskan lady, who spends a few months a year living here on her own.
June 18
The kids are getting a bit annoying; I don’t really know how to capture their attention or make them do their homework. Also the profe has taken to doing dancing classes in the room next to the one where I teach, and the wall separating the studious atmosphere of my class from the loud salsa music of the party happening in her room is very thin. (All this is in preparation for the various dance performances the kids will do on Dia de la Familia.)
I listened to a podcast with Bob Wright and Paul Bloom where they talked about AI and theories of language. I think Bob is right about AI not disproving the theory of language that stipulates we have a natural, built-in model for understanding and learning language. This is because AI has to “evolve,” through deep learning, to be able to learn language. LLMs have a multi-dimensional vectoral model for understanding words (every word falls on many spectrums between two extremes, which are the “dimensions”).
I had soup and empanadas for dinner. Ramiro and I talked for a while. I’ve decided to just speak English with him, which is great because he’s the only person I can speak English with. I’ve been getting linguistically exhausted.
I started Death in Gaza, the documentary.
June 19
I had a carrot omelet for breakfast, with a banana smoothie. We’re also drinking real, strong coffee now, instead of the instant stuff, thank god. (This is the coffee that Alva and I roasted and ground.) I listened to Lolita on my way to school. The children were better today, but teaching little kids is exhausting. After school, I walked home under a light drizzle, which was refreshing. The last third of Lolita is tedious and boring. I spent much of the afternoon roaming around listening to it. (First I had chicken, potatoes, rice, and avocado for lunch.) I can’t tell if Nabokov is really channeling his inner pretentious spiteful French pervert or if we wrote H.H. in such a convincing way that it’s painful to read H.H.’s inner thoughts. Also the British guy who read me the audiobook speaks awful French, so I can never understand what he’s saying when Vlad switches languages all of a sudden. Very frustrating. (Why would an author who’s writing in English even include full phrases in another language?)
If I had written the book, I would have had H.H. explain to the jury that Lolita died in some tragic way, with the subtle implication being that H.H. had killed her and was either an unreliable narrator or so sick that he had convinced himself that he didn’t do it. That would have been much more interesting.
Once I finished Lolita, I started writing an essay about justice, Gaza, cognitive bias, and all my favourite things to gripe about. (It turned into this brief history of Hamas.) I had dinner with Ramiro (the son) and Alva. We ate trout (which Lenin had caught, I think), a weird sweet tuber, rice, and tomatoes.