This morning I saw this article in the Lawrence Journal World about the constitution Ecuadorians are voting on today. From the article:

Voters are expected to easily approve this chronically unstable nation’s 20th constitution today, expanding President Rafael Correa’s powers and letting the pugnacious leftist run for two more consecutive terms.

This sentence seems to suggest there is no debate going on in Ecuador which could not be further from the truth. While I was there a month ago the topic of the Constitution popped up at every function or gathering. What they are voting on isn’t a modification or tweak to their existing constitution, but a complete rewrite of their government, on paper at least.

The government they are voting on would be the most left wing government in existence. There are many socialist promises to the people, like that the government will pay for schooling for your children through the university. It’s socialist bent scares many people in the cities but makes it popular in more rural areas. Many of my relatives are fearful that the Correa government is cozying up to Hugo Chavez, and with provisions that allow him to remain in power for the next eight years if it passes they’re worried they will be powerless if this is a mistake.

It’s a very big day for Ecuador.

Since writing my earlier review of the Aiptek A-HD+ I have gone south of the Equator with it and back, and overall I would say it is a great camera for the money. From the large quantity of videos recently posted you can probably tell I was rarely without it the two weeks I was in Ecuador. The small size allowed me to carry it in the the pocket of my cargo pants, and I with only two four gigabyte SD cards it was able to hold four hours of 720p video. Not bad for a $150 camera!

The biggest issue I had with the camera was a lockup bug. I never identified what triggered it, but it manifested itself by the software never starting up when the LCD was opened. Instead the LCD backlight would come on but the screen remained black. When this happens the device will not suspend and will drain the battery if left unattended. The only way I could find to fix the camera when it entered this mode was to pull the battery – thankfully years of using Windows taught me to fix everything with a reboot. I had to leave the camera at home charging at crucial times twice because of this issue.

The first camcorder I ever used was a two piece system – a tube camera tethered to one half of the home VCR that strapped around the shoulder – so it was a joy to have such a light camera even if it felt like it was made by Fisher Price. Because there is no image stabilization mode the camera will pick up any hand jitter, and a number of my first shots were unusable because you could see every step I took on screen. I had to practice walking in order to pull off any sort of motion shot.

I was surprised how functional the digital zoom was. I’m used to digital zoom turning the image into a mess of blurry pixels, but the A-HD+ digital zoom looked very good at all but the most zoomed in levels. The zoom itself is incredibly choppy and looks terrible in playback. In editing I tried to cut any camera zooms from the final product, but when you’re shooting documentary style sometimes you can’t help it.

In outdoor light the camera image looks fantastic, but the image blows out easily.  The auto exposure swings wildly and can quickly take most of your subject to black based on how much sky is in the image, especially if you are shooting darker cityscapes against a bright sky. I found myself wishing I had some sort of exposure lock and back light compensation functionality, especially when shooting my Abuelita’s birthday at a church where most of the speakers had a giant window behind them.

In lower light you will need to turn on “night mode”, which slows down the exposure rate in order to get brighter images. It works, but the resulting images look both choppy and blotchy. I had to shoot my grandmother’s birthday party in night mode, and the results look like I downloaded it from youtube.

In reviews I read online people complained about the audio quality, but the quality never bothered me. Because the mic is on top it does pick up the camera operator better than the subject, which is bad when the operator has a hideous giggle.  I do wish it supported connecting a directional mic of some sort.

A four gigabyte SD card could hold 2 hours of 720p video, but the battery would probably die in about 45 minutes. Just a few sustained recordings of a couple of minutes could take it’s tole on the battery. I tended to shoot in ten to thirty second clips, and leave the camera in suspend in my pocket between shots. If you’ want to record continuously I’d recommend switching to CIF video, which could fit 11 hours of video at 320×240 @ 30 fps and burns a bit less battery.

It was nice that the camera was also an 8 megapixel camera too, complete with flash. I rarely had the correct white balance settings ready, as the camera would forget what you last set it to every time it went into suspend mode. Low light images seemed to either be blown out by the flash or blurry because the camera was compensating for the flash being turned off.

The lens has a macro mode, but the switch to enable it needs some sort of lock. Pulling the camera out of  my pocket was enough to flip the switch. A number of times I started filming and only when I zoomed in did I realize the camera was in macro mode, and other times I never realized it until I got home.

All that said, I bought the camera to record vacation videos and it did a fantastic job. Despite my complaints, it is a great camera to have when you have to be both a cinematographer and a participant in the activities. I still say if control over image quality is the highest concern than this camera is probably not what you’re looking for, but for general purpose video you can’t beat the price.

My Abuelita’s birthday was on Saturday, August 30th. This was what Myrna’s family and my family had come down for. It was a big day; a Photographer came to take pictures for the local newspaper, there was a mass at Church for my Grandmother, and then there was a party at the Yacht Club. For the party my Aunts had ordered candies from candy makers from around Ecuador. All of my Aunts had dresses made from the same fabric (though my Mom made hers by herself).

Up until the day of the party there were certain surprises. During the trip my cousin Toty called me to say that all of the cousins were making contributions for la Hora Loca, a special surprise for the party. I asked Ivan Jose to explain to me what the Hora Loca was and got a perfectly succinct explanation that I didn’t understand as my spanish wasn’t very good. They were only looking for $15, so Chris and I made our contributions and figured we would be surprised. Then about three days before the party my Aunt Nena informed me casually that I was going to have to give a reading at the Church, but it was okay because they would give me a paper to read. I had to explain to her my site-reading Spanish skills are on par with a three year old, and I’d need in writing what I had to say in advance. This was pretty typical for the trip: crucial pieces of information would be given to us almost past the point where they could be useful. Sometimes I was amazed anything ran smoothly in the country.

All of my Aunts (and my Grandmother) had to go to the salon to have their hair and nails done. My Dad and Walter had a nice game of chess that Walter won.

While we were waiting we got a call from my sister, who had given birth to a baby boy! Jacob Kollars shares his birthday with his great grandmothers. It was quite the talk of the party. At one point I joked with my Mom “Wow, Grandma looks 80 and you look like a grandmother!”

Like all things in Ecuador things fell behind schedule. We all left around 4:55 for a five o’clock Mass but it was okay because Priest was late too (people ask me what time zone I was in, and I have to explain that the clocks were on Central time but everything else was in Ecuadorian time). While they had told me I had to do a reading, they neither told me when my reading was or that I was going to go first. That’s my family for you.

The party began at nine o’clock, so of course we got there at nine to set up. We put out the candy and the cake, and each table got a bottle of whiskey. People began to show up around nine forty five. The master of ceremonies was a relation of Judy’s who kept things moving smoothly. At one point all of my Aunts and Uncles came out with their children, and I video taped as my parents came out without me. Thankfully I jumped in line and the MC covered it up without missing a beat.

It was a gala affair, with Mariachis serenading my Abuelita one moment and my cousin Rosemary doing a Flamenco dance for her the next.  The highlight was the Hora Loca. It kicked off with these circus dressed kids running onto the dance floor with flags and baloons and pulling everybody onto the dance floor with them. They handed everyone baloons and masks and beads and basically encouraged chaos for the next hour.

The party ended around four in the morning. The next day I woke up around ten to find my ninety year old Abuelita making breakfast for us. I’m betting I’ll be down for her one hundredth birthday in ten years.

One morning my uncle Paco took my Dad and I for a walk on the beach at 5:30 in the morning.  Even though it was dark, there were about one hundred people walking along  Murciélago beach that morning. As people would pass by they would say hello to my uncle, see how he was doing, and wish him well as he passed by. It was as if he was the Godfather, or El Rey (the king).

Paco was a big guy and he had a big personality; he eats big, he drinks Johnny Walker Red, and he lives big. Most of my family wondered why he would go on these morning walks when he never seemed to lose weight, and he would reply “I can’t help it if there is always good food to eat!”.

He could also be a big goofball. The Tuesday before the party my Aunt Myrna and her family flew in from Los Angeles. It was also Paco and Judy’s Thirty First wedding anniversary, which of course in Ecuador means “party”. (Few things don’t mean “party” in Ecuador. It’s a fun country). Judy cooked up a storm and there was plenty of drinking and dancing, but the night belonged to Paco.

My aunts Lina and Nena and Nena’s son Ivan Jose lived with my Abuelita in her house. Lina worked as a schoolteacher, but Nena stayed at home with Abuelita. This made my Abuelita’s house a convenient place for my cousins and aunts to leave their kids during the day. Mariana’s children Steven and Nando were on vacation from school and Lina Maria’s son Franklin Fernando was three years old and wasn’t in school yet, so all of them were usually over on weekdays. Thankfully Ivan Jose was also on vacation too and helped with the babysitting duty.

Often babysittings was like this

Or like this

But more often it was like this

Or like this

Since Belen’s father Franklin was having a get together for our family on Sunday, after our night out with Belen we slept at his house. Not that there was much sleep to be had; we got to their house at 5 am, were up at 9 for breakfast, and guests were there at 11. My Grandmother, aunt Lina, aunt Nena and her son, and aunt Mariana’s family were all there. Like any sort of Ecuadorian get together, there was an incredible amount of food and beer and dancing. It was a bad time to be recovering from stomach issues.

On the third floor of the house is Franklin’s gym. There he has a treadmill, a eliptical runner, and many self-built pieces of equipment for sit ups and bench presses. I got roped into a bench press contest with Frederico and Franklin. In a family of personalities, I would say Franklin is the weird one. He is boisterous and excited most of the times I saw him, but not in the same way as the rest. I know having three daughters didn’t make him that way because he was like that when I was in Ecuador the last time. In fact of all the family members I remember from my last visit in 1985, he was the one who had changed the least. His hair was still jet black and un-kept, and he was still very fun, and still very weird.

While Manta has grown a lot since my Mom lived there it is not a large city, so it surprised me a little that there was a night club strip in the city limits. Located on Flavio Alfaro street, there are a number of night clubs and bars that girls and guys flock to on Friday and Saturday night. The traffic along the street at night is bumper to bumper as the twenty-something set drives up the street to see their friends, continue to the Plaza Del Sol strip mall, and turn around to do it all over again. Saturday night our cousin Belen took my brother and I out on a night on the town.

Being a nerdy computer programmer, I wasn’t sure if the things that surprised me were because I’m not cool enough to go to dance clubs in the US or that they really are different in Ecuador. For starters, dance clubs don’t even open their doors until 11 pm. Second, instead of ordering individual drinks it is more common to buy a bottle of whiskey at the bar for your table. The whiskey comes with tonic water and ice which you mix with your drink. I frequently added more water to my drink while no one was looking just so I could keep up with my cousin and her friends.

Somewhere in the middle of the night I noticed Belen hadn’t returned from the bathroom, and looking around I saw her dancing with another girl. I went over to see who she was, and when I got there Belen somehow managed to get her friend and I to start dancing together. And thats when I found out she was borrachita (totally drunk). It was pretty obvious; when I tried to spin her she would almost fall over backwards. Then the song “Dormir Juntitos” came on and she grabbed me and pulled my face against hers making me crouch down as she was about a 8 inches shorter. It wasn’t so much dancing as steering her out of the way on a packed dance floor. Meanwhile she was rubbing her hands all over me, and at one point told Belen “I think your cousin likes me!” I managed to get away by sitting with my Belen and her friends, and when we saw her a half hour later she was passed out at a table.

Dance clubs also don’t close at 2 am as I’m used to, and honestly I’m not sure when they close because by 4 am I was ready to go.

There was never any itinerary for what we would be doing while in Manta. We would get calls, sometimes minutes before, asking us if we wanted to go one place or another. Rarely did we ever know what we would be doing on a given night, and the first Friday we were in town we were actually triple booked: my Aunt Lina wanted to see the Casino, my cousin wanted to take my brother and I clubbing, and my uncle Paco wanted to take our family out on a Karaoke boat. In the end, the Karaoke boat won.

The Karaoke boat was a party boat at the Yacht Club that had a DJ, Karaoke, and alcohol. My uncle brought his daughter Judy Elena and many of his co-workers from the Mazda dealership. Being my uncle he made most of my family sing. I’m not about to humiliate the rest of my family, but I have no issues humiliating myself:

My cousin Judy Elena was able to get her dad’s pickup for the day and took my Dad, Brother, cousin Ivan Jose, and me to Montecristi. When Ecuador voted to draft a new constitution for the country, they built an assembly hall for drafting the constitution in the mountain overlooking Montecristi. The draft constitution is to be voted on at the end of September.

The day after our arrival my brother and I took Ivan Jose to see “El Caballero De La Noche” at the Manta Shopping Center. A few years back some developers built an American style mall in the middle of Manta that the locals refer to as Shopping, as in “Lets go to movie theater at Shopping“. It is an eerie replica of an American mall, from the Diesel clothing stores to the American 80′s pop playing in the background. On the other hand the men with guns in outlook posts around the parking lot are different.

Growing up I never spoke Spanish at home and on the trip I was constantly being reminded that my Spanish was so bad I could never pass for a local. At the ticket counter I asked for three tickets, and the girl looked at me puzzled and said in Spanish “You know it’s only in Spanish right? It won’t be in English.” I said yes but let me see it anyways, paid for all three of us – $9 total! – and we were off.

The funny thing is that they did a better job with the “Batman” voice in the dubbed version. In the US version Christain Bale sounds like he has a cold, but in Spanish Batman sounds like Optimus Prime.