Ecuador
I don’t understand the American vacation. The average employed worker has just over two weeks of paid vacation a year (statistics say 13 days, to be exact). So two and a half weeks would make a dandy little vacation but who actually takes all their vacation days at once? You have to take off at least eight or ten Fridays a year, right? You’re lucky if you even get a full week for a trip. We jealously criticize the European work ethic, where they work 30-hour weeks and get anywhere from one to two months of paid vacation. But it is only because we want what they have that we dislike them so much.
Of course, for me, I work in such a floundering industry that I currently get zero paid vacation days. My work schedule is prohibitive of even making a two-day trip home on the weekend when all my family is together. Instead I just get to join Sunday lunch before everyone heads back to wherever they call home. So taking a week-long vacation is doubly impractical because not only does it require money to travel, but that means a whole week of not getting paid. But sometimes you just have to gamble on the risk of not being able to pay a bill or two on time.
So when Luke asked me if I wanted to go to Ecuador during my spring break, I hesitated for only a moment before agreeing. With cheap flights, surely it wouldn’t cost any more than a week-long American roadtrip. Only a week or two prior, I had vowed never to leave the US again until I had visited more of it. I’ve only been to 14 states. Pathetic. I wanted to get that number up to 40 before I went overseas again. But the opportunity was here and it would have been foolish to pass it up over some idealistic travel rule.
I’m not sure what to write about my trip to Ecuador. Well, it was a week, so my naively ambitious notions of doing and seeing all kinds of thrilling things went mostly unrealized. A week gives you in reality two or three days for full-on adventure. I could have been there for three or four weeks. I loved it. I loved everything. I loved the mountains, I loved the people, I loved the simplicity of it all. I kept telling Andy I hated the long, bumpy bus rides, but by the end, even that wasn’t so bad. Really, I should have been there longer. I find myself looking for an excuse to go back.
My previous foreign travel had been limited to Europe, where I spent three months in England, with brief visits to Paris and Budapest. I had really enjoyed that, having studied European history in college. I thought that was right up my alley. But Ecuador was different. It was…better. There was something so unfamiliar about it that was incredibly attractive. We Americans feel a sort of bond with Europeans, perhaps because of our unattractive tendency towards ethnocentrism. Traveling in Europe is quite comfortable if you’re willing to face the relatively minor challenge of language differences. Going to Budapest on my own for five days was suddenly not in the slightest daunting to my British-tinted sensibilities. Few Hungarians speak English, but that was not about to stop me from getting around and having a good time. But travel in the poverty-stricken countries of South America is done without that safety net. And it has quite the appeal.
I feel a little silly. I feel like two weeks ago I was just another naive American, perfectly content in his first-world culture, feeling like my few months in Europe had given me some kind of “worldview” or “multi-cultural perspective.” I thought I had accomplished something every young American wanted, to “see the world” and have some kind of epiphany. That I had completed a major chapter in my life simply by being able to drop “when I was in Europe” into a conversation. And yet I went to work every day with people who have left their families in Ecuador to work in the US and I knew nothing about where they were from and what they left behind. Sure, Europe was nice and you might even argue that visiting Europe can help you gain a more complete picture of who you are as a European-American. But traveling to a country you have no connection with can be staggering to your once-comfortable notions of how the world really is. It does something that newspapers and documentaries can never quite manage. Riding on a bus, listening to a guy sell toothbrushes, catching sight of farmers tilling their tiny plot of ground next to their solitary raggedy cow, tasting the ambiguously flavored bread you bought through the bus window, all of that; it disturbs something in you.
When I was in Europe, I had quite a grand time. But when I left, I was quite happy to go back to the States and the comforts of home. I flatly ruled out the notion of living in Europe for any extended period of time (something I had once thought would be a clever idea). I had concluded that the only way I could ever tolerate European life was if I had ridiculous wads of cash to maintain the lifestyle that was more common to the New World. But I didn’t feel that way in Ecuador. Perhaps my disillusionment with life in Europe came from that ethnocentric perspective, where I kept comparing the tiny living space and lack of an automobile to what I had back home. I never made that comparison when I was in Ecuador. It was so strikingly different that I didn’t consider how living in Ecuador would be so unbearable for lack of my “one-ies” (as my friend Ben refers to first-world “problems”). Granted Europe was vastly more expensive and I had to tolerate it for an extended period of time, but I came back from South America convinced that I could go back and stay longer. A lot longer.
Like I said, I feel a little silly for coming to this realization at 25 and feeling a little impulsive about it all. It’s like when I ate raw beef for the first time (a mere five years ago maybe?) and then decided I would eat anything at least once, no matter how “strange.” Now I’m already brainstorming possibilities of how I might be able to have the time and finances to go back to Ecuador this year, or maybe even Bolivia or Peru. I’ve already told myself that when I finish school in the early spring of 2011, I’ll have a few months before I could start a teaching job, which might be ideal for a gig teaching English in Ecuador. But who knows, maybe in six months the novelty and childish enthusiasm will have worn off. Maybe I’ll again become obsessed with the notion of the Great American Roadtrip. And then I’ll just start ticking off state after state.
