Back in town

I am experiencing a reverse culture shock. I'm dazed by the traffic, the shops, the variety of goods on offer, the sophistication of city life including a perfect perm by an American hair stylist who lives here and uses American hair products.

Cuenca is noisy during the day and quiet at night (except for the cockerel next door that I hoped the neighbours would have eaten by now). The jungle is the opposite: it is at night that nature comes alive. At first, I couldn't sleep much at all. The wooden cabin felt exposed. Although it is covered by wooden planks behind the bed, more than half of the oval shaped structure would be completely open if it wasn't for the mosquito nets. 

As a result, you can hear everything: the rats, the bats, the frogs, the night birds and the howler monkeys that sound like a wind machine at five in the morning. The bats can get quite fierce. I remember how one night two of them started not just swishing around the room (which was scary enough), but actually fighting, so that drops of blood landed on top of the canopy of my bed. I am quite sure that a whole family of bats lives right on the other side of the cabin behind the headboard. 

It could be mice or rats, but I am happier assuming they aren't. Getting into the cabin is a challenge as well, as wild bees are buzzing around: it looks like some of them are nestling in the door frame. In the evening, when I turn on the light, I find tiny lizards and small frogs hanging onto the mosquito netting, moths and butterflies are flapping around. I hate cockroaches but I have become resigned to their presence and routinely check my slippers for the odd scorpion.

The air is humid, and even though the sun shines fiercely during the day, come morning and all your clothes are damp. It feels exactly like when you didn't have time to dry your stuff and still have to put them on after a good spin. However, your clothes are soon dry and you actually wish they were still wet. I take a shower two or three times a day. The water in the bathroom is not even lukewarm (the solar panels need replacing, but the new ones are stuck with the customs authorities in Guayaquil), so I often hang up one of the solar showers when I want to wash my hair. 

So, back in Cuenca, it is a treat that I can have a hot shower anytime I like. I am also enjoying my bread. In the jungle there was none, or only for the guests and I didn't want to be treated differently from the staff with whom I had the meals in the staff dining room. I have just had a cholesterol test and I think the diet without bread, butter, milk and cheese, a lot less potatoes and sugar will probably prolong my life if I can stick with it when I return.

Still, it was a bit of a challenge at the beginning to have a cooked breakfast of rice and chicken or plantain and beef at 6 in the morning. But I get up early, often before 5 am as my cabin is next to the one that houses the kitchen. I can hear the chef on duty prepare our meal and the food for the guests who might be taking a picnic lunch on one of their outings. So by the time I wander over to the staff canteen, I'm quite hungry.

"Jó reggelt. Hogy aludtál?" says the chef, Joffre. In Hungarian. Right in the middle of the jungle. He is from Quito (not an Achuar), but he used to work in London where he got to know his Hungarian wife, Boglarka, who now teaches English in the capital city. When we set up the English classes, Joffre decided he didn't need any, but could he have some Hungarian classes with me? I didn't mind at all, so we had good fun when, as a role play exercise, he went shopping for rétes (Hungarian strudel) in Tatabánya where his in-laws live and chose ten of the "meggyes-mákos" (the ones with sour cherry and poppy seed filling). 

All of us are trying to improve our language skills. Joffre often corrects my Spanish (he is the only one who has the confidence to do so), while I'm relentlessly flexible when holding English classes at 7 in the morning or at 8 in the evening to go through grammar structures that are surely very different from Quichua and Achuar. I already know that in Achuar, just like in Hungarian, you don't use the plural form once you have mentioned the number. What's the point, when "two" or "three" already marks that it's more than one...

At the high school too, we did a bit of revision before I left and I gave all my students enough homework to do for the three weeks while I'm away. Among others, I compiled a vocabulary of all the words we learnt asking the students to translate them into Spanish and Achuar. In one of my classes we actually started filling in the columns together. "I'm going to ask you to be my Achuar teachers when I come back", I told them and suddenly everybody got very excited about the prospect. So we started practising some Achuar straight away.

The words "boat" and "community" were both long and tricky to pronounce. Raul pinched his ear between his thumb and index finger and leaned forward saying: "Otra vez, teacher". "Once again, teacher." The gesture and the intonation was exactly like mine.

Sure enough, they have learnt something from me already.