The Matrix 2 was an erratic mixture of novel ideas and total crap- not unlike the life of Noah Webster. After the movie, we caught a bus up the coast to Montanita. We grabbed a killer hotel room with a loft and ocean view for 5 bucks per person. Then we went to a coffee shop to score actual brewed coffee (for only the 4th time since having arrived in Ecuador). For whatever reason, all the coffee in this country is instant. But take heart, within the next few days, I'm buying all the stuff necessary to make brewed coffee at home from Hipermarket. Then we gorged ourselves on pizza at a restaurant. That finally did it for us. We had eaten enough candy that day to kill a large mammal, we had torn up plates of mall food, large bags of popcorn, pizzas, and alas, though we still had a tentative eye on crepes up the street, we had finally reached our limit. Contented at last and giddy with preservatives, we strolled around Montanita. The town was about 80-90% gringo on this night and all of them appeared to be, for lack of a more delicate prose, thinking (or perhaps flying) outside of the box. Ela's all night bus ride, my having gotten up at 5:30 AM, full stomachs and a long day of walking, sun (at times) and excitement had taken its toll on our seasoned backsides. There was still much more we wanted to do. We lacked only the energy and stomach space, but not the will to reduce Montanita to ashes that night. But the beds, as it were, began calling louder than the crashing of the nearby surf.

      At a "corner" of the beach, which was formed by a perpendicular outcropping of cliff, pieces of live or possibly freshly dead coral were washing up on shore still attached to big pieces of oyster shell. We snagged one out of the foam and debris that looked like something a gift shop would sell and immediately named it 'The Stinky' as it possessed the scent of the ocean's upper lip. Then we played in the tidal pools. The seas kicked up a great deal and though no one was actually surfing in the huge waves, I could at last see what made Montanita the attraction it is. Some of the incoming thrusts of water traveled beneath the stone shoreline and exploded from the ground unexpectedly in wild geysers of saltwater 50 feet from the apparent ocean. We rounded a section of rocky cliff just to see what was beyond it and found a number of men fishing. To go beyond the fishermen with the tide and fury of the Pacific on the rise did not seem wise. Plus we had another movie we wanted to watch in Libertad, so we hiked back in the direction of Montanita proper. It looked as though if the tide continued to rise for another 2 or 3 hours, the fisherman would likely be cut off from the return path back from their rocky outcrops.

      Back in Montanita, we found our bus to Libertad waiting for us. When we arrived in Libertad, we first bought Ela's return ticket to Quito from TransEsmereldas and then continued on to the mall. We looted the dollar store and then played in Hipermarket until it was time for "Catch me if you Can" to begin. Since there had not been enough time to take another crack at the mall food in the food court, we bought oversized hot dogs at the movie theater. We gave the snack bar staff our bags to hold onto and then went into the movie. The movie, we were told, was 1 hour 40min long, which was perfect because Ela's bus would be leaving 45 minutes after the movie was scheduled to let out. However, the movie lasted 2 hours 10 minutes. We spent the final scenes of the movie squirming in our seats and then blasted out the theater doors at the first sign of credits with 15 minutes to get to the TransEsmereldas terminal and catch the bus to Quito. We jumped in a cab that was sitting out front and arrived at the bus station just as the first passenger- a man with no legs- was being helped into the bus. 10 minutes later, Ela climbed aboard and we finished our conversation through the bus window until I declared that the bus was taking way too long to depart and that trying to think of things to say when I was consistently unsure if I would be able to finish what I was saying was beginning to stress me out. We flashed our palms at each other and I went down to the beach to pee. I could hear the bus back up the street pulling away. It was rounding the corner out of site as I began my return ascent back up the street. It was 9:30 PM. I turned on my "touch me, and I'll kill you" walk and made my way home.

      The fact that I hadn't checked my email in 2 days was beginning to bother me, so I made a special trip into Santa Elena to use the internet, even though I had the whole day slated for studying pigs and Spanish. When I returned home, I was told Debi had called (the volunteer living in Libertad). This was very good news, as I had just sent an email not 1 hour before saying I wished she would hurry up and get back from her trip to the states so I would have someone else to hang out with. I called her back. She wanted to know if I was interested in hanging out. I told her we were in luck because my shoes were already on and we would not have to waste those seconds not hanging out. I hung up and headed up the street. From the street I heard the phone begin ringing. I lingered there to see if the phone was, by chance, for me. It was. Mike Lake was calling from the States, just as he had said he would in an email I had just read and had already forgotten about in the excitement. Our connection was terrible, but we could communicate. Come to think of it, it wasn't all that different from Julio and I conversing 3 feet away from each other at the dinner table. After the call, I rushed to the bus stop because I had told Debi to meet me at a place called '7 Corners' in 1/2 hour and 1/2 hour had already passed with me still in Tambo.

      Back at Debi's house, I was showed how to make an omelet - complete with diced peppers and tomatoes. She was amused by my near total ignorance of all things culinary, but was downright astounded when I didn't know the difference between margarine and butter. Anyway, 'Operation: Omelet' was a big success and was sent off to the great beyond with 2 comely pieces of buttered toast, not unlike the crucifixion of Jesus, I might suggest.

      I grabbed a bus into Libertad to pick up a few things, such as an extra special coffee cup for my brand new coffee maker, and also more spray foam (Editors note: If, unlike American spray foam, EcuaSprayfoam didn't suck, the first can would have finished the job). I checked my mail and then went home to finish spraying foam around the bottle of Espiritu del Ecuador.

      Julio arrived back from his overnighter at the Plan International conference. While he ate dinner, he was telling me Plan International showed a film about African kids dying of perfectly treatable illnesses. I was nodding and responding inanely until I realized it had affected him deeply and he was seeking out a person he fancied deep enough and worldly enough to grasp the significance of his experience and perhaps even help him process it. Julio has a 6th grade education and lives in El Tambo. Mind you that he is 42 years old and is seeing starving and dying African kids for the first time. He wasn't even sure if they were Africans, but had been inclined to believe so because they were black and "poorer than people in Ecuador.' He stared at the edge of the table and reported the movie had made him very sad. There wasn't really much I could say. After a very long silence wherein Julio only chewed his food and stared at hi plate, I slipped away to my room to eat junk food.

      I called Debi to report a few items of interest and then set out to write the night away. Julio and family soon entered my room to marvel at the sprayfoamed box. Julio was unresponsive to the bits of trivia concerning the box which his family deemed bizarre and proffered liberally, but was mesmerized by the foam itself, which he had discovered was a polyurethane. Julio uses polyurethane on the furniture he builds. That his lifelong companion, polyurethane, could suddenly turn up in so alien a form blew his mind. The whole family poked at the foam and for unknown reasons, bit into the stray pieces of foam I had plucked off the cardboard where my spraying had been careless.

      Soon Julio joined the fun as a crowd of men I had never seen before stood nearby and leaned in to see the box. Julio explained the purpose of the box as if he were narratoring an exhibit at a museum of natural history. I let him pretend as though he were a central figure in the project because it deflected all the questions that otherwise would have been my distraction. At breakfast, all the talk was about the bottle of Espiritu. The whole family plus a neighbor packed into the room we eat in to hear Julio talking about the plan to mail the bottle to the U.S., plus the amazing costs involved in doing so. I retrieved the bottle and removed it from its box. Everyone crowded in. Each side of the square bottle had a paragraph written in either French, English, German or Spanish and the box featured pictures from Ecuador's major cities. They could not get enough mileage out of it all. When the room cleared and only Julio and I were left, we sat talking at the table for a very long time. One topic of potential interest was the possibility of Ivan returning with me to the states in 2 years to attempt to make money to send home to the family. I told him that the work visa is the hardest part and if he could score that, I could help him figure out the system and get settled in.

      After breakfast, I wrote until lunch. During lunch, Debi called to say she would be stopping by soon to learn how to play soccer. I had told her 2 days earlier that Tambo plays hardcore soccer everyday and that when she stopped by Sunday, they could show her what the game was about. After lunch, Julio and I continued talking our butts off at the table. I was just getting to the good part of one of my favorite stories about turning my car sideways at 100mph between LA and Vegas, when we heard Julio's dogs trying to kill Debi. We went out and brought her inside for a tour of the house. She lives in the middle of a city of more than 100,000 people and was taken aback to discover I live in "the CAMPO campo", as she put it, and marveled at the peninsulas unequal distribution of wealth

      A real soccer game in nearby Prosperidad had everyone that would have been playing soccer in front of my house tied up elsewhere, so Julio, Debi and I took the soccer game upon ourselves. However, on top of sucking ridiculously, we winded ourselves in minutes and had to run into the house when the malevolent sun stepped out from behind its cloud cover and nearly vaporized our already wilted and desperately panting frames. After consuming mass quantities of water and making repeated remarks about how our respective spring chickenhoods had been lost, we did the standard walking tour of El Tambo. Then Debi left and I went back to writing.

      When writing, or doing anything else in my room, I keep my wooden shutters closed to keep bored people in the street from starting conversations with me and also to prevent my door from blowing open, which is the neighborhood's signal that I am available to hang out. When I first moved into this room, people were still coming to my window trying to buy bread, as Julio used to make bread in what is now my room and sell said bread through the aforementioned window. But now, that was all weeks in the past, so I threw open my windows to see if it could be possible to have them open without attracting invasive neighbors. 15 minutes later, 2 girls propped themselves in my window and called "a ver", the standard way to announce your presence at tiendas (sort of like a verbal doorbell). From my bed, where I was sitting and writing, I told them there was no bread made right this second. Then they asked for a second product. I was unaware Julio sold any other products so I referred them to Julio who was out in back of the house. 1 girl went to find Julio while the other girl waited patiently for her still propped in my window and looking about my room.

      I was sitting on a bed in a bedroom, which in no way still resembled a bakery. I smiled and told the patient, if mildly puzzled girl that the bakery was now a "dormitorio". She asked if I had moved into said dormitorio and what I was doing living in El Tambo. I asked her if she had been raised in El Tambo because her Spanish was so well enunciated, I had no trouble understanding her. When girl #2 returned, she found us knee deep in conversation. After a while, they asked me if I wanted to go "pasiando" with them, a term more or less meaning "to drift about on foot, killing time, looking to see what, if anything, is going on in town". This was perfect as I had recently been on my own case for not yet knowing enough locals, due to my disinterest in playing soccer and EcuaDancing. I consented and we left that very moment.

      We drifted all around town. We stopped without explanation at several tiendas where the girls bought me snacks. When it got dark around 7pm- dinner time- we headed back in the direction of their house, which was on the way to my house. I assumed I was dropping them off, as it was time for all of us to eat. They stepped up on a porch and motioned me to follow them through the door. That's when I realized it was the same porch from which I had received a barrage of cat calls 1 week earlier. Then I noticed that one of the girls was wearing perfume and dressed far too nicely for pasiando in El Tambo. Yep, they had pulled off their bread buying scam perfectly.

      Inside, the 4 of us (we had picked up more girls along the way) were joined by a 5th. The 5 of us sat down in wooden chairs without cushions and tried unsuccessfully to find something to talk about. At some point, someone finally hit pay dirt and the conversation took off. Every one scooted in closer. Someone suggested we put the radio on. Knowing it goes over so well with locals, I ripped off Debi's gig at the radio station and translated the words to popular songs, which they have only ever heard in English. Soon, the station was flipped to a station pumping out cumbia. Someone suggested we dance. I told them that not only had I no clue how to EcuaDance, but that I also had no idea why anyone would even want to because it was the same step repeated infinitely while its stone faced practitioners stare off into space. They all laughed and then the dressed up/perfumed girl, called Lorena, asked if I wanted to learn to cumbia. I lied that I would on some other occasion, unspecified but surely floating somewhere out there in the future.

      During the next few minutes I rethought my position. I was not going to be able to dodge EcuaDancing for the next 2 years. I might as well just bite the bullet and figure out how it's done, and now, tucked away discreetly in a house with willing teachers, was a perfect time. When something vaguely resembling a 2nd invitation revisited the conversation, I rose to my feet with feigned indifference and said, "Bailamos, pues."

      It took me about 3 seconds to realize cumbia is not at all as easy as it looks. My teachers said, "here, this is all you do" and launched into something that, shall we say, looked way, way less stupid than what I had seen at EcuaDances. They were definitely workin' it. I racked my brain trying to remember the trick for resisting sirens outlined in The Odyssey and then just attempted to replicate what I was seeing, praying that a strange wind would blow through the room and throw the radio to the floor, smashing it. Not only did I look ridiculous EcuaDancing, but a heretofore undiscovered peanut gallery peeking through the front window was on hand to express their full appreciation of said ridiculousness with enormous gales of laughter. Yes, this was all entertainment of incalculable value and the evidence suggested it was only getting funnier with each passing minute.

      "You should be moving your hips" one girl said, judiciously studying my rigid hips. A second girl ordered her to assist me. The first girl complied and grabbed my waist firmly, forcing alien movements upon it. An explosion of laughter burst through the front window.

      "Good," the second girl decreed, moving forward and seizing herself one hip and my left hand, "now just follow through with this". I lost sight of my feet and my view of the room began jostling. Another burst of laughter came through the front window. Someone was thrown through the front door and almost fell to the floor. He scrambled to his feet in hysterics and raced back outside. A moment later, a second set of legs appeared in the doorway, visibly resisting being pushed in by unknown assailants. The girls ordered me to ignore all of that. Another burst of laughter came in through the window, followed by several disembodied sets of arms fighting with each other to move the curtain aside.

      After what felt like an eternity, the song ended and we all sat down. I told them that that hadn't been the 30 second long songs they play at the dances. They laughed and agreed that it was not. Unexpectedly, another song came blaring across the radio. I turned and saw a startled little girl with her had on the tuner looking back at me. Very dryly, the sitting girls said, "Ok, now you dance", and settled back in their chairs to spectate. Their mouths fell open in response to what I did. They looked at each other, then back at me, then back at each other.

      "Yeah," one of them said.

      "Yeah?" I asked.

      "Yeah!" she repeated, turning to the other girl.

      "Yeah?" I asked the other girl.

      "Yeah!" she answered, "Like that!"

      I let a few moments pass before echoing, "Like this?"

      The first girl answered for the second girl "Yes! Like that! You're doing it!" Then the girls exchanged another round of surprised expressions and looked back at me. I looked back at them. They looked at me looking back at them. I cumbiaed.

      Unnerved by the silence I again queried "Like this?"

      "Yes!" they answered in unison, "Like that!" They were quite satisfied with themselves. I had no idea what I was doing. I was afraid to take my eyes off the girls for fear that I would loose whatever I had going that they were so approving of. Scattered laughter from various locations came in through the front window. The girls rose and moved in. For what felt like another eternity, we all cumbiaed. Another unexplained burst of laughter came in from the peanut gallery. One of the girls, in almost a whisper, said, "Ignore them."

      I was ignoring them.

      A few minutes after Ecuadorian Bandstand ended, I announced that I was going home. Lorena asked if I could stay for just a moment longer. I said I could. She ran off into another room. I sat down. What she used that extra moment for was to prepare me a full meal. I sat alone at a table eating. When I finished eating, the girls ate. They asked if I could stay one more extra moment. I should have learned my lesson, but didn't. I said I could. They ran away and did the all dishes. Then they said they were ready to take me home.

      Being the only gringo in town and only one of a handful of gringos in the entire peninsula has earned me undue popularity. Julio's family is in no way oblivious to this fact, as people have made no attempt to be at all discreet with their opinions. This popularity Julio's family does not attribute to supply and demand, but to an inherent quality of my Gringodom. Thus it only confirmed something to them when I went off with a gringa for 2 days, came home and immediately left with another gringa and again didn't return for 2 days. Julio's family let a polite grace period elapse before they began making jokes about what a little gigolo I was. I explained to them with great patience that 'North Americans' are very laid back. Whereas if an Ecuadoriano left for 2 days with an Ecuadoriana it would almost certainly mean hanky panky was afoot, for North Americans, this was not necessarily so. I don't know if they were not entirely convinced of my candor or if making their jokes was just too much fun. The flow of jokes slowed significantly but did not stop. My point here, is that it was now 11pm and I had been missing since 5pm. Surely the family had found my absence at dinner odd, especially as I know no one in town and had not announced I was going into Libertad. In light of my gigolo status, I had to think about how I was going to convincingly downplay what I had been up to for the past 6 hours.

      When I and 3 girls stepped out of the house together, we ran smack into Julio's very pleasantly surprised family on their way back from their usual Sunday night activity of sitting in front of Susanna's sister's tienda. Busted. So much for retiring my reputation.

      Back at Julio's house, I did not even attempt to pull the family's minds out of the gutter. "What were we doing in there? Dancing." For Julio's family, this was too good to be true. They nearly fell out of their chairs.

      "You were dancing?!"

      "Yep."

      "And weren't those the same girls who yelled cat calls at you last week from their front porch?"

      "I have no idea."