The Best Cheesecake in the World

I've found it!
It comes from a little bakery down near the central Cumbayá plaza called "Cassolette". OMG. It doesn't feel fattening or have a lot of sugar but is still incredibly creamy and delicious. The crust is perfect too, sturdy enough to stick to the cheesecake but crumbly and moist. And it can come with fruit on top. So far, I've only tried the one with blackberries on top and the one with passion fruit on top. I think I like the blackberry one better to be honest.
Mmmmm. Cheesecake. It is the only kind of cake I like (I hate cake) and even then it is technically not a cake. Well, there is one other kind of cake I'll eat, and that is my friend G's mother's chocolate cake (and I haven't had a piece since I was like 10). I won't eat anything else.
The other cheesecake I really like they don't make anymore. I used to get cheesecake from USFQ's "Ambrosia" bakery (also in Cumbayá) that had raspberries embedded inside the cheesecake. They made it really good because their sourness offsets the sweetness of the cheesecake itself so it created a nice balance. Too bad it is gone...

Categories: cassolette, cheesecake, chocolate cake

Luna

I finally got a cat! Yay! She's almost two months old and her name is Luna.
Naming her was a huge debate between my dad, my mom, and me. Originally I intended to call her Andromeda, but mom thought that was too long. So mom and I named her Frejya. Unfortunately my dad didn't like that one so we went through a name database and shortened it down to Eowyn, Ariel, Lillith, Norah, and Luna. She was actually named Eowyn for about 5 minutes before my dad decided that it was hard to pronounce (don't ask...the name is pretty phonetic) so it was between Ariel, Lillith, Norah, and Luna. Lillith was then the next choice but dad kept talking about how she sort of looked like Lillith from Frasier and Cheers, and the poor cat really didn't look like that Lillith. Then I thought she actually looked like a Luna and she did sort of remind me a bit of Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter...hehe...so it stuck. Her name ended up in Luna (although my dad goes around calling her Miss Fuzz Fuzz...again...don't ask) and we all love her very much.

Categories: cat, Luna

Playlist One

So, I've decided to have a playlist post every so often of the songs I'm currently listening to. I just listen to an eclectic variety of music, so I thought I'd share. It changes a lot with my mood and with what I'm doing since I usually listen to music when I'm working or trying to write. So here goes!

Playlist One:
(1) "Time" (Hans Zimmer) from the Inception soundtrack - So I haven't actually seen Inception yet, but I'm really dying to see it. It won't be out here in Quito for another 2 or 3 weeks, so that's a little irritating. Anyways, the track itself is great for when I'm writing and I actually used it for when I was meditating yesterday. It is sort of uplifting but with some nostalgic undertones. Right up my alley.

(2) "Death is the Road to Awe" (Clint Mansell) from The Fountain soundtrack. - I really enjoy Clint Mansell overall. He's one of my favorite film composers. Death is the Road to Awe is also one of my favorite pieces by him and a recent discovery. It helps me focus while writing business plans because it is quite cinematic, especially towards the end. I always imagine the trailer for the film I'm working on using the last minute or so of this piece.

(3) "Love the Way You Lie" (Eminem, feat. Rihanna) - Another recent discovery. It is really quite an interesting and intense song. I think what it is trying to communicate - painting the picture of an abusive relationship - is very powerful and really important that awareness of the subject is being raised. Also Eminem and Rihanna did a great job together.

(4) "Homesick" (Kings of Convenience) - I was feeling homesick for the Hudson Valley (which is what I sort of consider my home) and this somehow captured what I was feeling at the time. It's not the lyrics...I think it is more of the melody. Anyways, quite beautiful.

(5) "In Between" (Wouter Hamel) - Great vocals, jazzy...just overall fantastic.

(6) "To be Alone with You" (Sufjan Stevens) - Really love the lyrics, and I feel it is both romantic and a little sad. Although I've heard it is actually about Jesus...in any case, it is still beautiful and I'm trying to learn how to play it on my guitar.

(7) "Alejandro" (Lady GaGa) - Really, who doesn't love Lady GaGa at some level? I actually think she's really talented (I saw a video of her performing an acoustic version of Poker Face on YouTube...holy hell, man, the girl can sing and play the piano!) and I like that she's very vocal about what she stands for but in a good way (I saw her response to some hate protesters at one of her concerts in a very admirable way by asking her fans not to pay attention to those comments...check it out here). And while her music is pop-like, it is quite catchy and Alejandro is a great song to jive to while you're driving. :D Incidentally, I use "Bad Romance" as my wake-up alarm. It's great!

(8) "No Moon" (Elle Lefant) - I actually know the guys in this band. They went to college with me. Nijae was in a short play I directed sophomore year, Max is an acquaintance of mine (met through mutual friends). They're actually quite good! "No Moon" is my favorite of their songs, but I also like "Pulse" and "Runaways". You can listen to their music here.

(9) "Chicago" (Sufjan Stevens) - Yes, another selection from Sufjan Stevens. Not my fault he's good. There's also the fact that N got me into him lately. I can actually play "Chicago" on the guitar.

(10) "Breathe" (Alexi Murdoch) - Up until I got out of the funk, I listened to this one a lot because I felt it sort of captured the feeling of entrapment and the emotional overload that I had sort of been feeling before. I listened to it when I needed to remind myself that I need to remember to breathe and take things slowly as they come and not get overwhelmed.

Bonus:
Didgeridoo and Tibetan Singing Bowls (Music for Deep Meditation) is great music for deep mediation. Playing it in a room that has a nice echo in it makes it even more powerful. It is very relaxing but also allows you to focus on whatever you want to meditate on. I think that's key because a lot of the time you relax with the music but then can't really keep your focus on something and you fall asleep.

Categories: meditation, playlist, playlist one

Spiritual Detox

So I've been in a funk basically since I left college. For many many reasons that only my closest friends are privy to and that I don't want to go into detail in this blog. A few days ago someone told me something very true about one of these things that I didn't want to admit to myself. They told me, E, you don't need this, you want this very much. And if you stop tricking yourself into thinking that you need it, things will fall back into place and be where you want them to be. And they were right. I did some meditation yesterday to spiritually detox myself of this dependence.
I realize that this sounds like I was on drugs or something. I assure you, it is nothing like that. It's more of an emotional dependence on a person. But dependence on anything can be troublesome. To say "I can't live without this" is sort of ridiculous in most cases. There are three things you can't live without: food, water, and air. Everything else is more or less doesn't affect your physical existence. Being able to detach oneself from dependence on everything else is a good thing because more often than not it's not that you need something but want something really bad. Recognizing that you want something rather than need it empowers you and puts you on an even playing field with it because that which you are dependent on is no longer holding all the cards and pulling all the reigns. It puts you on equal footing and grants you a choice. It is also a good reminder of the transitional nature of the world. It is consistently changing, constantly in a flux.
Sometimes this is hard for me because I am a very passionate person and while that can lead me to make fantastic changes, and do fantastic things, it can also make me get stuck somewhere without the ability to advance...

Categories:

Favorites

My Favorites:

(1) Films: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Garden State
(2) Directors: Christopher Nolan, Wong Kar-Wai, Zhang Yimou
(3) Cities: Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Qingdao, China
(4) Books: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, anything by Roald Dahl, The Daodejing, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ficciones, Aura, Paradise Lost.
(5) Writers: Roald Dahl, Jorge Luis Borges
(6) Food: As much of a foodie as I am, there really is nothing better than a good grilled cheese sandwich.
(7) Drink: Coffee with milk (although I am a huge fan of cappuccinos). Water.
(8) Kind of clothes: coats and jackets. N can attest to the fact that I own too many. On the other hand, I own like 5 pairs of shoes (see what I mean when I say that I'm not terribly girly? I was born without the burning desire to buy as many shoes as possible that is definitely present in many of the girls I know...I don't mean to generalize, but yeah. Girls tend to really love shoes).
(9) Word: multichronotropic or quixotic. Can't decide.
(10) Restaurant: I like Noé Sushi Bar in Cumbayá, Quito, Ecuador or Twisted Soul in Poughkeepsie, NY, USA.
(11) Ice-cream flavor: taxo (it's a fruit...look it up) or mango.
(12) Juice: Carrot with ginger and a bit of orange or avocado-pineapple with a twist of lime

Categories:

One of the Guys

So I went to this 4-year high school reunion thing last night because my friend W made me. My High School classmates spent the evening trying to get me drunk, I spent the evening giving inspirational speeches to them when they came over to tell me about their life struggles. I don't quite know how I feel about that. Anyways, my pants broke somewhere around 2 in the morning but W and Q (who was also there because W made her) insisted that I stay longer. Luckily, my sweater thing was one of those long cardigans that covered up the burst seams. Also, it was very dark so nobody really noticed. The thing is, I sort of immediately regretted the decision. Not because of my broken pants but because it became very apparent that not much had changed since High School in the dancing department. I'm not a bad dancer. I'm actually pretty good. It's just that there were 6 girls (including myself) and about 20 guys and all 20 guys were trying to dance with the 5 other girls and I was left to stand there on the dance floor alone. I thought to myself "F that! I went to a good school, I'm smart, and yes I'm a nerd, and I don't fit the Latin-American standard of beauty by a long shot but I'm done feeling like an outsider among my old high school classmates and feeling like the ugliest of my friends. I don't have to be here and I don't have to take this" so I was about to go call my dad to come pick me up (my parents are really nice that way...I don't go out to party very often so when I do they make sure I go and make sure to help me in any way possible) when I ran into another classmate in need of life advice. That took another 30 minutes. After he left, I glanced back at the dancefloor and the guys were still going at it...like five guys to a girl...I was like "great. That's freaking great". I went to this shady area in the back and I called my dad. It was around 3 am. I decided that I didn't want to go back out there because I was done. I was just done. I found a tree that had some forking branches pretty low to the ground and sat in them, waiting for dad to call so I could leave. It was nice, being alone for a bit in the shadows in a tree. It kind of reminded me of college, when N and I used to climb trees. We once went tree-climbing at night. I was scared out of my wits but it ended up being quite a nice experience. A strange peace came over me as I sat in the tree. It almost felt like being back there, in the Hudson valley....
After a few minutes I saw a shadow approaching from behind and I sort of bolted because I've found that if you sit around in trees in the dark by yourself you're thought of as being strange. And yes, I am strange, and proud of it. As I said before, I never fit the mold here, but I always passed. I was always good at passing (more on that later). And the thing is, if you're strange people say bizarre things about you. I heard a very good friend of mine from High School be called "special" because he was so radically different from everyone else in the school. Not different but special. The way the person said my friend was special sounded really derogatory when he said it. I was very upset because my friend is a very well-adjusted, brilliant, sweet man and yes, he's different because he comes from a different culture but he's also one of the most loyal friends I've had. I got upset that he was being described in that way, because I thought to myself...if this guy knew that I too had beliefs that were radically different from his own, that my idea of fun is having wine while playing Scrabble or talking about social constructs, that I'm a self-declared Star Wars nerd....I too would be special. And I'm better adjusted than him. But anyways, back to the shadow...
So I bolted from the tree back into the light. I didn't get far before someone said "E? What are you doing alone in the dark?" I turned and I thought that I was done hiding it. I'm just going to tell the truth, if they don't like it, they can deal. "I wanted to be alone for a while. So?"
He said "Hey, don't get defensive! I'm not attacking you. You just seemed sad, I wanted to see if you were alright."
"Yeah, I'm fine. I really just wanted to be alone. I'm waiting for my dad to pick me up."
Then a second guy shows up. He's this guy that I always thought was a bit of a dimwit, someone who I had very little respect for since he consistently made fun of how straight-edge I was back in High School. Anyways, the three of us got to talking and they figured out that being at the party was not something I had particularly wanted to do. And then the first guy said something quite wise to me: "Hey, look, you don't look very happy. And this whole face you put on here, the straight-edge, A+ thing...that isn't you anymore. Look, you're weird, and you know you're weird and you should just be weird and tell all the rest of them to f-off because trust me, if you do film, you're weird at some level. Just be who you are, and you'll go far. We all think so."And the guy who I thought was a dimwit before agreed with him.
And I just stood there...kind of flabbergasted. Because they're right.
That's the thing...back in college I had allowed myself to be that true weird E because back there, we celebrated our uniqueness, our weirdness. And every time I come back here, that sort of had to go into hiding. And they're right, I'm 21 and I should be able to be who I am without being afraid of not passing. So I told them that (in much simpler, less eloquent terms...) and then they started to talk about their sex lives (I don't remember how that conversation transitioned into that topic) in front of me. But not in the way guys usually talk about their sex lives to girls, they talked about them in the way they talk about them to other guys. This looked familiar...I was back to being "one of the guys". It felt somewhat refreshing in a way because I was no longer "that nerd girl". The thing is, I usually end up being that girl who is "one of the guys". Most of the time I don't mind it because I get along better with guys anyways and my chosen career is a male-dominated career so I'm used to becoming the girl who is "one of the guys". I mean, it doesn't mean that I'm some sort of tomboy but I've never been particularly girly in the traditional sense either. I came to terms with that in college. I didn't have to be girly to be a girl and that was that. On the other hand I started to think that maybe that's why my social life in high school sucked...maybe I was never really properly thought of as a girl and that's problematic too because even though I don't mind "being one of the guys", ultimately I am a girl and damn proud of being one.
Ah college...you've made me think of gender dichotomy everywhere I go.
Anyhow, I think that I have bigger things to worry about right now. My documentary is coming up fast and I need to do some serious fund-raising and location scouting. And my friend M is coming to visit in less than a month! I'm really excited! :D
Until later!

Categories: high school, tree-climbing, weirdness

Tempus Fugit

Today is July 23, 2010. It has been exactly two months since I graduated from that " highly selective, residential, liberal arts college located in the heart of the Hudson Valley in New York State" and one month since I finally set foot back in Ecuadorian soil for the first time in six months. At the risk of sounding really cliched - tempus fugit, eh? The weird thing is that graduation also seems like forever ago. I think that's because I've been keeping very busy these past two months and particularly the last few weeks. Putting together budgets and business plans for two separate film projects is long and time consuming and stressful. Especially when you've never taken a business class in your life, and your knowledge on real-working mathematics and economics comes from an "Intro to Microeconomics" class I took way back in freshman year and quite frankly, don't quite know how I passed with a sound B. The people that have read my business plans say they're quite good - solid pieces of work for someone who has never really made one before. I take that as a good sign. They're not quite ready yet I suppose. They're being edited by actual investment professionals who happen to be blood-related to me so when those things come back to me on Monday, I'm hoping that I'll be able to have something quite killer to be able to present to potential investors.
But recently discovered that the business plans are not really the hard part about financing projects - the actual finding and convincing investors is the hard part of financing projects and it is the unfortunate phase I kind of find myself having to face right now. Oh, I'm sure I can do it, it's still a very frightening prospect to have to face. I guess I'm afraid I won't be taken seriously because (1) I am 21 years old, (2) I just graduated from college, and (3) I look like I'm 17. Seriously, I've had people congratulate me on my graduation from high school (because my parents, when introducing me to people, say "Oh this is our daughter, E, she just graduated" and neglect to mention that I graduated from College). I'm like...hmm...nope...did that four years ago! (Actually, I'm going to my graduating class's 4-year reunion tomorrow...another scary thought....) It also doesn't help that most people don't believe that my mother has a 21-year-old daughter because she looks a lot younger than she actually is too. Good genes I suppose...genes I'll be thanking when I reach my mother's age, but which right now are really irritating and sometimes prevent people from taking me seriously. I guess that's what I'm scared of - not being taken seriously, which is why my business plans have to be absolutely killer and knock people's socks off. Also, being an entrepreneur is scary in itself...I didn't think I would really become one until much later in life so sometimes I second-guess myself when I shouldn't.
On other subjects, my dad and I went out to eat at this new "oriental cusine" restaurant in Quito called "Zao (早)". One of my friends, G, said it was really good and I've been craving good Asian food since I left the States since the city doesn't have much to offer in the Asian food department. Oh, it has excellent sushi places though. Noé is my personal favorite and the one we always go to. They have really fresh seafood (you'd think that wouldn't be the case, with Quito being 8,000 ft above sea level) and the pricing is not bad at all. Four people will eat well there for $70-$80. Most sushi rolls don't go for more than $8 and they have premium ingredients. The other places where sushi is good in Quito are Sake and Tanoshii, but I've heard they're slightly pricier. But back to "Zao (早)". Upon arrival, the environment and atmosphere seemed really cool to me and upon looking at the menu, I thought that the concept was really good too. They had basic popular, mainstream dishes from different parts of Asia that had been altered slightly to make them a little more gourmet. I kinda wanted to eat everything on the menu. My dad an I agreed to order a bunch of dishes and share them (most of them were starters). We went with some siu mai, summer rolls, samosas, wonton soup (I can never eat it usually because it has pork! I was really excited!), and orange peel chicken. Unfortunately the food was unimpressive. It was ok, don't get me wrong...I definitely enjoyed the Orange Peel Chicken in particular and the summer rolls were pretty decent too, but they weren't exactly the best thing ever. To be fair, I'm very particular about Asian food in general and Chinese food in particular. Mainly because I was in China and the food in China was always fantastic. But last night's dinner was a bit too westernized and mainstreamed for my taste. Also, it didn't help that something I ate last night must have been either prepared with or on the same surface as pork because I definitely felt the allergic reaction coming on as we left. My dad thinks that it might have been the stock from the wonton soup. This makes me very sad because I thought I finally found a wonton soup I could safely eat. Darn.

Categories: business plan, chinese food, graduation, Wonton soup

Nostalgia

I'm feeling somewhat nostalgic today. I was reading J and D's blogs and it got me thinking about how much I miss being up in the Hudson Valley. Quito (and Ecuador) is really a beautiful place, somewhere that is definitely worth visiting at least once in your life. I love the mountains here. I missed them while I was abroad. But I think I like the landscape of the Hudson Valley more in general. I miss the trees and the creeks that run through campus. And the ducks. And the heron that lived in the woods behind our house. I wish I had been brave enough to be able to cross the log over the creek alone without N's help. I wish I could lay in the dandelion-filled grass clearing deep in the college's farm. I miss the fall leaves that turn such beautifully vivid shades of red and orange and yellow. I miss listening to "Alice's Restaurant" while driving to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving with N's family. I miss the snow and the cold bite of the winter wind and warm apple pie made from Hudson Valley apples. I miss having hot tea in the winter while huddling on the sofa with a book. I miss playing guitar out in the fresh grass in the Spring. I miss drinking coffee from Adam's or the Cubbyhole. I miss tasty Tuesdays from Twisted Soul. I miss the heirloom tomatoes at the farmer's market and the midnight strolls around Sunset lake. I miss playing Scrabble and Parcheesi over a few glasses of wine on Friday nights. I miss the long discussions on social constructs or the evolution of languages. And I miss my friends. Dearly.
Over the past four years, the Hudson Valley became home for me and I'm sad that I won't be back for more than a visit for at least a year. I think that once I have enough money, I'm going to find a place there to settle down permanently. I think I'd like living a quiet life in the Hudson Valley as I think that I'm going to need a safe haven to decompress in between film gigs.
But until then, I'll admire the mountains from my window. They really are quite breathtaking.

Categories:

Danny and Maggie

A few hours ago, as I took a break from writing a very lengthy business plan for a film project I'm working on, two of my family's dogs (Danny and Maggie - short for Daniel and Magdalena) walked into the dining room where I was working and decided to be cute so I took some pictures. They look especially cute and fluffy today because they were taken to the groomers where they were bathed and dried. Danny in particular looks like a big fluffball.They're both still puppies, and I actually didn't meet Danny until about a month ago when I came back from Amsterdam. Maggie, our Akita, was a Christmas gift from my grandmother to my 17-year-old brother L and me. She looked like a little bear cub when we got her and was one of the most adorable puppies ever. Now she's still cute, still looks like a bear, but likes to licks your toes, ride in the front seat of the car, thinks my slippers are rabbits she's hunted (she's snuck into my room several times and carried them away), and also doesn't really think she's a dog at times (especially when riding in the car...she refuses to go in the trunk with Danny or Frodo). Danny on the other hand plays dumb but is actually really smart. He goes around with this quizzical "huh???" sort of look on his face all the time that makes him look like he's very confused. He's very sly when he breaks the rules and often is a tattletale when Maggie's doing something she's not supposed to (like eating another one of mom's plants). He barks really loudly when she's doing something she's not supposed to... Also, when he eats, half of the kibble that goes into his mouth ends up somewhere on the floor one meter radius around him. It's really funny to watch him eat, with the little balls of kibble ricochetting out of his mouth like little projectiles - with his face still showing his "Huh???" look. Danny was given to my dad sometime in February and my Dad, being an old softie who always wanted a sheepdog, said ok. Maggie and Danny are quite a team...together they've chewed up all the plants in the garden (including the very hot peppers we were growing) and parts of my dad's car (oh nothing major, just the rubber flaps that used to hang before the wheels). But they're cute and we love them very much and hope that they'll stop chewing stuff soon so that we can replant those peppers.

Categories: Danny, Maggie

Zero Latitude Foodie

Hi!
So, I'm new to the whole blogging thing. Well, I tried it once and it didn't quite pan out very well mostly because I started right before I went to a really intensive language program in Qingdao, China in the summer of 2008 and the program kinda left me with no free time and then I forgot altogether because of the amount of work I had to do junior year of college. But now that I graduated, and am sort of on my own schedule (I'm self-employed), I figure that I should at least try. I recently was told that a good friend of mine had also started a blog to keep in touch with friends that were sort of scattered around the globe. And I also found out that another friend of mine also had a blog and so I thought that might be a good idea to start one too since (1) I travel a lot anyways, (2) Quito is kind of an exciting place overall, (3) I'm doing really exciting work right now.
So what's with the title? Well, the word Multichronotropic is one of my favorite words ever (right after quixotic). I found it in a film theory essay I came across while writing my Latin American Cinema final paper two years ago. It is an adjective and it describes something that has multiple times and spaces. Besides describing some of the more edgy productions of Latin American Cinema that boast intransitivity and the artistic acknowledgment of multiple diegesis, I think it describes the process and the experience of traveling and living...having experienced different places at different times.
If you haven't already guessed, I majored in Film and Chinese while in college.
As for avocados...well, my friends' blogs both have a fruit in the title: Mangoes Off the Balcony, and Pineapple Tacos, and keeping in that same line I thought avocados might do the trick.
Yes, avocados are fruits. They're actually technically very large berries. And I like them very much, which is good because we eat them a lot in Ecuador...with salad, with soup, with chips, by themselves...and also one of the houses I used to live in (we moved around a lot in Quito when I was growing up) had a really great avocado tree that had these fantastic avocados year-round. My dogs had problems with it though! They ate too many of the ones that fell off of the tree and got really fat, but on the plus side, their fur was really beautiful while they ate them. But in the end, avocados are just a really versatile food overall. My favorite recipe involving them is Avocado-Pineapple juice. It sounds a little gross, but it's actually really good and really healthy for you.
I'm a bit of a foodie I guess. Not my fault. My dad is one too. He was the head of the Culinary Institute at an important university here like ten years ago. He didn't have any sort of professional culinary training, but he fought really hard to gain everybody's respect there and now he's good friends with a lot of chefs in the city and a lot of other foodies. He left the post long ago, but he's still a big foodie and hangs out with a lot of foodie friends. This usually results in the family eating a lot of good food regularly. I guess I couldn't avoid it.
My foodie-ness was also cemented in my being during my last year of college. You see, I lived with a group of 5 absolutely wonderful people who all shared the same goal: eating well, eating healthy, eating together, eating sustainably, and eating cheap. We also ate vegetarian, but mostly because 2 of us were free-range vegetarians (and free-range meat is even more expensive than regular meat), 2 of us (M and Me) couldn't eat pork (for different reasons), and we all thought meat was too expensive for our budget. We occasionally splurged for fish, but that went to my friend J's epic fish tacos on select Fridays throughout the semester. So we got really creative. I'm actually surprised at how well we ate for our budget. Whoever says that you are destined to eat badly as a college student is dead wrong. The six of us ate like kings for $220 per week altogether (and that included some wine (boxed, but not bad!) and beer and a few other little luxuries we allowed ourselves - like goat cheese). All of it was seasonal, and we never got any sort of processed food (only canned tomatoes, beans, and tuna) and if we ate junk food, we made it ourselves and tried to keep it as healthy as we could. We made our own bread every now and then (J decided to make it his goal to learn how to make good bread...we did not mind him using us as experimental tasters, not one bit...that stuff was fantastic), we tapped the trees behind our house in the spring and made our own maple syrup, and towards the end of the year, we had a meal that had been entirely foraged from the surrounding areas (it included some really fantastic morels that my best friend N had found lurking in the forest during one of his walks). So being a foodie is kind of in my blood by now.
Food in general has been a troubling subject for me throughout my life. I've always been a bit on the chubbier side and so I've been on every diet imaginable. Going to college and really taking control of what I eat has really helped me amend my relationship with food in general. I found that eating a healthy meal and regular exercise is really the key to being fit and energetic. I know everyone tells you that, but it really is true. I became a free-range vegetarian halfway through my freshman year and that helped me rethink the way I think about food and what I put into my body. I suddenly had to worry about getting enough protein, and not overcompensating with carbohydrates. I actually think that my biggest accomplishment was ending my war against carbohydrates in general. I learned how to eat healthy. Having to cook my own food senior year made me think about what to buy, what was worth spending money on, what was healthy for me and for the environment. But being a vegetarian also taught me how to make healthy food taste good. Why should being a vegetarian mean that I have to eat tasteless rabbit food? So I learned how to enjoy food and how to still have it be healthy.
Other than a foodie, I'm also a filmmaker. An independent one. I'm in the process of establishing my own production company (with two friends of mine: one from college, one from high school) and right now I'm working on producing a few projects that I'm planning to shoot within the next 8 months. Eventually I want to direct my own film.
I also like to travel and I like to travel a lot. I have an app on my facebook page that shows where I've been. It tells me that I've been to like 8% of the world. I think that's quite an accomplishment considering I'm only 21 years old. However, I feel that there's still so much more that I want to see and so many more places that I want to go to. My next few big trips involve going back to China, to visit a friend of mine who will be in Xi'an in the spring. The problem is, I only have enough airline miles to get there but not to come back. That might be a problem...hehe. After that, I'm taking a road trip down South America next year with my best friend N and maybe my cousin. We'll be driving from Quito, Ecuador to Ushuaia, Argentina in my car. I'm really looking forward to that because we've been planning that trip basically since N and I met Freshman year. But that's still a year away.
But now I should really get back to work. Self-employment is hard...
Until next time!
Many greetings from Zero Degrees Latitude!

(okay, I'm a few seconds to the north if you want to be exact...geez)

Categories: avocados, China, foodie, multichronotropic, Quito, vegetarian

Post-Grad Woes

I graduated two months ago (say it isn't so!) from a "highly selective, residential, liberal arts college located in the heart of the Hudson Valley in New York State" (anyone want to take a guess at that one?) and, like most of us unfortunate members of the class of 2010 of any college found myself jobless and adrift in the world. I made my way to Amsterdam to visit my aunt for a while, hoping to find some bearings. I sat in the Leidseplein, drank many pints of Strongbow, walked from the Zeedijk back to the Oud Zuid, went to see Van Gogh again, ate too many Dutch fries, wore a ridiculous orange wig at my cousin Bas's behest while watching The Netherlands play soccer in the world cup, and then hopped on a plane back to Quito in order to defend my screenplay in front of a committee in hopes of winning an $8000 grant. That's where I am now. Grantless, and certainly penniless but maybe not jobless.
Well, sort of. So here goes everything.

"Andean Galaxy" by E (September 2011)

The photo in the header is the view from Café Mosaico at Ichimbía in Quito on a clear, crisp late summer night. A lovely view of the endless sprawling lights of the city against the Andes. In the horizon, note the presence of the Virgen del Panecillo, (a huge statue of the Virgin Mary that kindly watches over the city) and the lights of the domed copulas of the colonial city center.

Taken with the iPhone 4 camera with the NightCamera app.

"Andean Dawn" by E (February 2011)

The photo in the header is the view from my window in Quito right before dawn. It is one of my favorite sights. The sun creeps in behind the Andes, turning the sky into an array of purple, then pink, then orange, then yellow light as the fog slowly lifts up towards the sky. The lights scattered around the valley are slowly extinguished as the dawn grows. On clear summer days, in the absence of fog, you can see a few of the Snow-Capped mountains looming in the distance. It is always the perfect beginning of a new day.

"No Words Necessary" by E (April 2011)

The photo in the header are my two very good friends M and S as they were taking in some fresh air and discussing the latest news on the New York Rangers (they´re both Hockey fans). But despite the banality of what was really going on, I like the essence of the picture that reflects two good friends sharing a moment as Spring slowly creeps back into the landscape in Burlington, Vermont.

Taken with the iPhone 4 camera.

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