Blog Post #3

Today my favorite experience was the bus ride.  We got to go through the Andes and see some spectacular sights.  It was another opportunity to experience the landscape.  The Andes are huge and you cannot understand this until you take a half an hour just to get to the bottom of the mountain.  As well as some beautiful things, we saw many disturbing things which include the large masses of concrete that are there to save highways and decrease erosions.  Finally, though, the bus brought us to new towns and places that seem to have a different culture than even Quito.  The bus ride was the most interesting for me which made it my favorite experience.

Between all our experiences with indigenous place and people, I really have begun to appreciate what is seen as a lot and a little.  I felt the most guilty when I was purchasing things.  Just as David stressed on the bus, often $1 is a lot to most of the people.  In some ways, it was annoying how persistent people were to get us to buy things.  However, taking a step back from my perspective, I saw that most of these people needed the money.  For many of them, the work they put into their products was of a far higher value than what they charged.  When we ate, the place that we ate in was beautiful.  I could see so much care and detail that was put into the building.  At the same however, I could help but feel that this place was very poor compared to what we are often used to.  The sheer amount of food that was served too us was enormous.  As I ate and struggled consuming my food I forgot how fortunate we really were to be consuming such foods.  This especially stuck out to me when we discussed cuy with our host family.  We of course were not so fond of the cuy, but our host family did not share the same feelings.  Today I gained a lot of perspective on what is considered a lot or a little whether it is in quantity or value.

I mentioned a few ethnocentric feelings in my two prior answers.  The thing I am struggling with the most is the driving.  The only way that I see it right now is crazy.  America driving habits are so passive compared to all the drivers here.  Instead of feet being a comfortable distance between vehicles, here drivers often within inches of each other.  The easiest way that I can imagine that I would be able to get over these ethnocentric thoughts and feelings would be to drive myself.  I would be able to appreciate why things are the way that they are most effectively this way.  Seeing as this most likely will not happen, I believe that more riding in vehicles and immersion into the culture and life of the city will be the ways that I will change these views

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