Around 10:00am, 5 of us went down to check our respective emails. 3 of the 5 eventually left the internet place in search of food. While I was yet rapping away enthusiastically at my keyboard, Grace Bell, woman of the hour, arrived and announced her presence by shaking me by the shoulders and squawking horribly into the back of my head. I was very happy, as always, to see her. She, I and the other volunteer yet remaining in the internet place gabbed for a while before Grace returned to her room (where Talwaza Jason was hanging out sick) and I and the other volunteer went to meet the other 3 PCV’s at a restaurant. After eating, the 5 of us returned to Grace’s hotel room so that those of us preparing to leave Santo Domingo could pay Grace their last respects.

     We didn’t leave for San Miguel until about 2pm. I stopped in the market and got an 80 cent bunch of flowers because the Language Facilitators had tipped me off that EcuaMom told them I had not called or talked to her since leaving San Miguel and had thus terminated the relationship. We found San Miguel Jason’s EcuaSister walking through the market and looking like a little adult with make-up on (she attends cosmetology school). She asked what we were doing in town. I told her we had come to visit San Miguel and would be heading there in about half an hour. That seemed to have touched off a minor internal conflict in her. After a moment of vacillation, she told us she would ‘see us there then’ and she strode off briskly into the market.

     Talwaza Jason, Grace, Ela and I avoided the first “closed” bus leaving for San Miguel because it was way overloaded and about 20 degrees hotter inside than out. We took the 2nd bus, an open-air Ranchera instead. The Via Puerto Limon busses (the ones you take to get to San Miguel) were now parking in a different spot in the “mini terminal”. Talwaza Jason knew the bus driver and struck up conversation to inquire about this. He didn’t understand much of the answer he received, but reported that the driver told him “everything had changed” with the bus route since we had lived there. There were now fewer busses leaving for Puerto Limon.

     The ayudante attempted to charge Ela and I one dollar apiece to ride to San Miguel. Grace, who had just paid 50 cents for the same ride, laughed openly in his face and told him we knew what the price was to San Miguel because we used to live there. She mocked his weak-ass scam in loud Spanish not more than 2 feet from his face, which I punctuated with venomous commentary in English while glaring more or less straight ahead trying to contain my anger. In spite of this, the ayudante didn’t give up and leave. He stayed hunching over us, as if mocking him and cursing him for scum of the earth were somehow a prelude to us breaking down and paying him what we knew what not the correct prices. I constrained more than enough rage to do serious damage to the lowlife. Had he opened his mouth again, it would very likely have acquired a fist. His body hitting the roadside weeds at 45 mph has far less value to me than the one dollar he thought he could scam from people just because they were foreign. After a very generous grace period of about 10 seconds, I decided to precipitate an incident and turned a truly hateful and belligerent glare directly into his face at a distance of about 12 inches. He backed away and gave up, but not like someone who has at long last found a lick of horse sense, but like a piece of human excrement who had become bored. Welcome to wonderful Santo Domingo.

     En route, Grace and I exchanged giggles and confessed that we were nervous about going back to San Miguel, though we had no idea why that should have been. We stopped the bus and got off in front of Grace’s old house, but knew immediately from the front door being shut that no one was home. We turned up the street towards my old house. The town looked abandoned. There was no movement, save for Jaime, who was coming up the street with a basket of laundry he was taking to the women at the river. He lit up when he recognized us and asked what we were doing there. I told him we were visiting. I asked him where he was taking the laundry. When he was finished answering, there was nothing else really to say. Jaime excused himself and headed towards the river.

      Ela, Grace and I (Talwaza Jason had continued on to his old house in Talwaza ) approached the tienda window at EcuaMom’s house. EcuaDad was inside stocking a shelf. He turned slowly. We greeted him. He returned the greeting with absolutely no reaction, as if he had forgotten we didn’t still live there. He said EcuaMom had gone into Santo Domingo to shop. When we asked when she would be back, he gave us a typical Ecuadorian answer, imprecise to the point of absurdity: “Later this afternoon”- as if we might entertain the possibility that she was on a 2 or 3 day shopping bender. Then everyone just stood there saying nothing. Finally I raised the bunch of flowers I was holding and said I should probably stick them in water. EcuaDad nodded and slowly turned and disappeared into the house. I mused to my companions that this had all been a rather underwhelming homecoming. They agreed. It wasn’t at all weird to be back in San Miguel. It seemed that in some way, we too had forgotten we no longer lived there.

      We let ourselves into the house, fairly certain that’s what EcuaDad would have communicated, had opening his mouth not turned out to be such a colossal burden that it never happened. After a long moment, EcuaDad shuffled out from the kitchen with an old paint can full of water, which he set on the floor. I plunked the flowers in dismissively.

      Before we could lay ourselves some tracks back out of the situation, EcuaDad invited us to sit down. We did. He then took a stab a conversation. It was still difficult to understand his Spanish, but within 3 seconds I had already matched the sum total of Spanish words I had understood from him during my whole time living in his house. EcuaDad was about as uncomfortable making conversation as we were enduring it.

      After about 20 minutes, we announced that we were going to go visit Grace’s house, though we had just checked upon our arrival and no one had been home. Thankfully, our charade had coincided perfectly with Grace’s EcuaFam walking up the street from wherever they had been. We left my porch and walked over to them. On the way, we encountered 5-year-old fireball, Karin, about to board a bus with her mom. She chirped my name with equal parts of surprise and thrill. I echoed her sentiments using my impersonation of her.

     As we were approaching, Grace’s EcuaMom broke out only the 2nd or 3rd genuine smile we had ever seen. Grace’s EcuaSister, Vivian, sprung excitedly among us doling out a lively version of a fairly formal EcuaGreeting. Just as this was happening, I saw a vehicle up the street pulling away and leaving EcuaMom standing in the street by her house. She was looking in our direction, as it was fairly obvious that something unusual was going on. Ela and I hiked up the street towards her.

     “Ingrate!” she shouted, when we were within shouting range.

      I wasn’t sure if she was at all serious. “Ohhhh, no, no, no!” I shouted back, for lack of any other response.

      “Why didn’t you return my call?”

      I had been anticipating this question and had been weighing a few potential responses. What came out of my mouth was more or less a surprise to me, as it happened to be the truth. “I didn’t call because I knew sooner or later I would come here in person”, I said. Even more surprising, that answer seemed to have satisfied her.

      The 3 of us entered the house and sat. The conversation was not without long gaps of silence, which are normal here, though tremendously uncomfortable, but at least I understood about 75% of what EcuaMom was saying when she wasn’t using weird ass colloquialisms. She ran off to the kitchen and brought both of us back orange batidas. With a sip, I reported that I hadn’t had a batida since I lived in that very house and was finding it a portal to a cache of memories. She laughed. We conversed about a number of insignificant topics. She asked if we were staying for dinner. I said we were. She asked, with what in retrospect I believe was hopefulness, if we were staying the night. I told her we were not. We had a hotel already.

      While we had been sitting there, we saw Grace and her EcuaFam pass by on their way to Micah’s EcuaMom’s. About 20 minutes later, Grace came back to where we were sitting and told us she had been sent to retrieve us. Ela and I went with her to Micah’s old place. Half the family was now living in a house across the street. Little Kristina was about to be sent to live with her mom in Quito for lack of funds to send her to school. The piglets I had helped castrate were now giant. The pet Guatusa had been killed. This was more change than I would have expected from one family in San Miguel in a decade. Little Kristina in Quito? Never in a million years.

      After being shown all their new farm animals and drinking a beer that Ela had accidentally accepted and then pawned off on me, we walked over to see San Miguel Jason’s old family. The EcuaMom of Jason’s house was as preoccupied with social etiquette as always and sent for a 2 liter of cola so we could all be offered a drink. Ela pawned this drink off on me as well and I switched it secretly for my empty glass when things had settled down and the whole room watching a Peruvian talk show that resembled Jerry Springer. The talk show guests screamed and fought with each other the whole show. I asked Jason’s EcuaMom if Peruvians were more bravo than Ecuadorians, as I had heard. She responded with uncharacteristic candor, saying that in her opinion, they were. However, she is Colombian. In Ecuador, Colombians have the reputation of being more open and friendly, fast-talking and make a lot of jokes.

      Using the excuse of wanting to go see the river, which we had heard was very low from lack of rain, we made yet another exit. We actually did spend some time at the river before returning to EcuaMom’s. EcuaMom was waiting on her porch when we returned and commented pointedly on the whopping intermission we had taken from our visit to her. Our food was ready. The meal’s drink was some kind of cinnamony milk thing. I do not recall whether Ela pawned this drink off on me, but I would like to say for the record, that it is entirely possible.

      After dinner, we retired to the porch to await the return of the Peace Corps trainees presently living in San Miguel. We watched indifferently as what we would later discover was the last bus to Santo Domingo, passed by. The last bus heading to Puerto Limon dropped off the 4 Trainees in San Miguel and 3 of the 4 came to the front of EcuaDad’s tienda to converse enthusiastically with us about San Miguel, the Peace Corps and all things Life-in-Ecuador. It started becoming apparent that our ‘last bus out of Dodge’ was not coming. As the 6 of us conversed, I started flagging every passing truck heading in the direction of Santo Domingo. Eventually one stopped and Grace, Ela and I rode it well into Santo Domingo. From where the truck dropped us off, we took a cab to our hotel. From the hotel, we walked to Blue Dreams to eat again, and then walked to another nearby hotel where 2 other PCV’s were staying. The PCV we ended up finding there, John Varrier, was hard at work putting together a presentation he was giving to all the trainees the following day. We disturbed his peace, used up some of his office supplies being stupid, spilled coke all over the floor in front of his room and then abruptly left our big mess with heartfelt salutations and news that we were ‘outta here’.

      On the way out, I broke my own rule and ripped a big piece off a landscape plant that the hotel was probably hoping would become something of a showpiece. Up to this point, I had only been taking plants from areas that one couldn’t possibly notice their absence, or from places in which the plants were obviously neglected. I had been unsuccessfully pursuing the plant I took from John Varrier’s hotel using these self-imposed guidelines and had become a tick desperate. The 3 of us, plus one large branch of Euphorbia Trigona, strode the seedy streets of Santo Domingo back to the Sol de Plata hotel.

     When the Peace Corps nurses arrived, they had yet another volunteer with them already. This volunteer was responsible for an excess of vapid conversation and flaky viewpoints which caused me to regard her as a total waste of amino acids that the pigs of El Tambo could be using to fatten themselves up. I envisioned myself shoving her out the car door on multiple occasions or perhaps smacking her deftly upside the vacuum of her cranium with my outstretched palm. After the nurses stopped by a KFC on the outskirts of Santo Domingo for food for the road, we were off to Quito.

     We stopped in Conocoto outside of Quito at the beautiful home of one of the nurses in which one can sip coffee from a porch hammock overlooking a broad, well-inhabited valley. The nurses had been good for amusing conversation from the moment they picked us up in Santo Domingo and they continued this quality output through coffee on the porch high above Conocoto. In all honesty, they won back all the respect their so-called ‘medical expertise’ had caused me to lose for them in the past- and probably a lot more. Then all of us, minus one nurse, drove to the 2nd nurse’s house for a few minutes, where I fulfilled a vow I had randomly made to myself that morning to hold a baby before the end of the day. I have never made such a vow before and had not, to my knowledge, been in the position to hold a baby since arriving in the country. However, on this day, I randomly made and fulfilled this presumably unfulfillable vow to hold a baby. The baby didn’t have a whole lot to say, but she did explode into tears 10 seconds after I handed her off the motor-mouthed vapid twit. Ha. As if fate needed to give another sign: Ladies and Gentlemen, the true reincarnation of the Buddha.

     The nurse then took us to the Peace Corps headquarters. I dropped off papers, used internet and picked Julio up a bunch of books in Spanish to read. I encountered Debi Kerner, who told me that a high ranking member of the Peace Corps brass had spotted me while driving past Blue Dreams in Santo Domingo, had assumed I was AWOL (which I was not) and had muttered aloud that she was going to pretend she hadn’t seen me. Interesting, if unnecessary, no?

     Ela and I then took a cab to the Artisan Market across town because I had a few things to pick up before my trip home on October 3rd. However, when I found the market’s selection lacking and the vendors invasive, I quickly became irate and threw out the whole shopping plan into the toilet. Instead, we cabbed to the Arupo Hostel, the unofficial meeting place of all Peace Corps volunteers visiting Quito and not the place to go when already irate, as a large number of PCVs are a cliquey bunch of suburbanite gas bags. However, we found Grace, Talwaza Jason and 2 other tolerable PCVs there, which was a priceless score. Ela and I made plans with the lot of ‘em to meet at 8pm for beverages and then we hauled our 2 butts out to the Mariscol to eat small inexpensive pizzas until the hour of beverages was upon us. We all met at 8pm, and as the festivities commenced, I slipped out to grab a hotel room at a place called the Casa Olimpia a block away, which is slightly less expensive than the Arupo and does not cause one to wish death upon preachy suburban turds. The only room left was a fat, top floor penthouse flat with a full kitchen and large balcony, which I acquired at the normal rate of 6 dollars per person. It was great. The room was so large I could have done a gymnastics floor routine in its center. Regrettably, I used my last bit of energy descending to the street for an ice cream sandwich and ended up falling asleep too soon upon my return to enjoy the amenities.

     Ela and I stepped out to make photocopies for my English class tomorrow morning and bought my bus ticket home. When we returned, I borrowed $70 from Grace, who had just been given her “readjustment allowance” from the Peace Corps and was not in need of all of it as she was going home to live with her parents. I handed Ela $30 which would have to last her the rest of the month and kept $40 for myself. Then we all went out for Mediterranean food.

     By the time dinner was over, my bus was ready to leave. I gave Grace an unremarkable, permanent good bye and then Ela and I walked a few blocks to the TransEsmereldas bus station. We had been told when I bought my ticket, that there was only one bus heading to Salinas that night, which came as a surprise to us. When we arrived to catch that bus, we walked up to the bus with “Salinas” posted in the windshield and stood in front of it, as it was obviously not preparing to leave anytime soon. I was determined not to begin a 10½ hour bus ride one second early. A 90% empty bus sat across the parking lot facing the wrong way to leave. When the time to leave had long passed and I was still standing in front of the driverless bus, I pulled out my ticket and checked the bus number. It didn’t match the bus I was standing in front of. I asked the ayudantes what was up. They told me the other bus across the parking lot was supposed to have been mine and it had already left, but since it had to first stop at the main terminal in Quito, I should race the bus there in a cab.

      I immediately broke for a cab sitting nearby in the street. Ela followed in the distance at half my speed, as she was going to head back to the Arupo after my cab left. I stopped unexpectedly behind the cab and told her that if she felt like riding along with me to the terminal, I would pay for her cab home. She jumped in. We had after all been in the middle of a conversation. The cab driver pulled out without turning on his meter. I asked the price he intended to charge and then opened my door at his response, telling him to pull over. He lowered his price from $4 to $3, rendering it more or less fair, and off we went. Ela ordered him to drive quickly.

     We passed my TransEsmereldas bus en route to the terminal, but continued on in the taxi, as we were again in the middle of a conversation and would probably still be charged the same fee if we were to get out right there and flag down the bus which would then take us to the terminal just the same. At the station, we again had our conversation interrupted when my bus announced it was leaving. I had to board the very empty bus abruptly. Ela left. My bus then proceeded to sit for another 10 minutes.

     Someone had been sitting in my seat when I boarded (seat numbers are written on bus tickets), but as I am not someone who really cares which seat I get, I took another and did not disturb the person in my seat. However, the bus proceeded to 2 other TransEsmereldas stations that I never knew existed and picked up hordes of people who, like myself, had purchased tickets with seat numbers. Because the ticket holders were EcuaTicketholders and possessed nothing resembling my sense of courtesy, I was repeatedly kicked out of people’s seats. Finally, the bus was full and I was standing without a seat holding a ticket in my hand.

      I decided to kick the woman sitting in my seat out. I went to the first row, where a lively conversation was in full swing. The ayudante saw the ticket in my hand and asked what seat was mine. He saw that there were no seats and I was about to kick a woman out of mine. As that sort of goes against Ecuadorian pseudo-chivalry, the ayudante proceeded to collect everyone’s bus tickets in hopes of finding a male somewhere without a ticket. No such luck. The woman in my seat was the only one occupying a seat without a ticket. I felt bad about kicking her out for about 10 seconds until I discovered she was part of an obnoxious group of what were probably Colombians that had boarded without tickets (the others had done the typical female Latin American thing and flirted their way into the relative peace and spaciousness of the driver compartment of the bus). The woman took a seat on the floor and leaned herself against the Plexiglas wall dividing the driver compartment from the passengers.

      The sleep I made up for in the inexplicable lack of police checkpoints along the way, I lost again in the inexplicable lack of manners of Ecuadorians. It has always amazed me that anyone could so lack awareness of their surroundings that they could hold a conversation in a volume far exceeding what is necessary to make oneself audible in a bus full of sleeping people. But that is Ecuador. And if you are Ecuadorian and your child wakes up in the middle of the night and begins screaming into the air for no reason, do you clamp down a giant hand on its mouth and ask “What the hell is wrong with you, you poorly raised hell spawn?” No, of course not. You permit the pointless screaming as long as it persists. I really hate night busses.

      If my reception from the assortment of people at Julio’s house was warm but without enthusiasm, then the reception from my coffee maker was downright icy. It paid me the greatest disservice and abandoned me in my hour of need. I flipped the switch, the little red light came on, but no water did it heat, no life giving chemicals did it brew. The coffeemaker had been slowly dying for quite some time. I banged it with my hand. Nothing. I flipped the switch off and then on again. Nothing. I leapt up and ran a frustrated set of fingers through my hair then dropped down again and banged the machine rapidly on the cement floor. Nuttin’.

      After my shower, I had Susanna heat water on the stove so I could make coffee manually. Then I filled up a travel mug of coffee with every intention of drinking the remaining coffee in the pot before leaving, but Susanna had made the water extremely hot and it would need to do quite a bit of cooling down. I was already more than 1½ late for school, so I left with the little bit of coffee my 2nd rate EcuaMug could hold.

      At the school, I took the lid off the coffee mug to let it cool and also because it drips on your shirt when you drink with the stupid thing on. Someone had brought their 2 children to school and they were charging around the room like the hayseeds they were. I was convinced they would eventually spill my precious coffee, so I moved the mug from a table to the floor and put it close to a table leg for protection. Within 20 seconds, I had kicked over my own coffee mug and had lost every glorious drop on the filthy floor.

      After class I returned home and sat in front of my computer, but was falling asleep as I was worn out from teaching school on a crappy night’s rest. Nearby sat my lifeless coffeemaker. I shot it disgusted scowls. My attitude was heading directly south. My general loathing of people from the night before began to creep back. I was supposed to be headed to Playas at that moment to meet Micah. I had just enough time to get to Playas (2 hours away) by mid-afternoon and I would have to leave there again in the morning as that was when Micah was leaving. Assuming I lucked out and found Micah quickly, that would only leave a maximum of 9 hours of decent hanging out time, which I would be earning through at least 4 hours of round trip travel time. What’s more, I didn’t have the money to do anything once I got there. My lack of sleep was bound to make me worthless even if it were only Micah I was seeing, but this was a wedding for someone in the Peace Corps going on in Playas. There would be numerous very annoying volunteers which I was not willing to hang out with if Micah was unwilling to ditch the pack. No. That did it. I’m not going to Playas.

      I packed up my butt and headed to the mall to buy a new coffeemaker. It was not really a purchase I could afford, but it was something I would miss all day for the next 10 days (until I got paid again) if I didn’t strap myself to buy it. I had to force myself to go make this purchase or I would never recover from the abyss I was spiraling into. After I bought a coffeemaker, I popped into the mall internet to check my mail, but after a half hour of trying, could not remember what I had changed my hotmail password to a few days earlier in Quito. Very, very darkly I rose with a new coffeemaker under one arm and headed out to find a Tambo-bound bus.

      Back at home, Susanna and I did an autopsy on my old coffeemaker. We found a wire that, due to malfunction or design flaw, was receiving more current than it was designed to carry and was black and fried out where it connected to another part. Susanna kept herself in stitches with cracks about how I drink so much coffee that I burned up a coffeemaker. At 4 or 5pm, Julio arrived back from working in Ancon and gave me a semi formal greeting, simultaneously justifying this greeting by saying ‘long time no see’, but also laughing at himself for having gotten formal with me for any reason. I broke out the books I had gotten him in Spanish. There was one on the Dollarization of Ecuador, one on how to score NGO cash for projects, one called ‘Development and Dignity’, and several on how to raise chickens and ostriches. He was blown away with all of his new reading material. Books are very expensive in Ecuador and intelligent books in Spanish can be very hard to come by.

      Later in the evening, while the family was off loafing in front of Merci’s tienda, I talked on the phone to the States, but my call got cut off repeatedly because the nearby repeater El Tambo uses was malfunctioning.

      You could definitely say that Ecuadorians do not share the same sense of aesthetics as do Americans. The ‘home paradigm’, for example, kept on file in the American brain seems to draw upon dollhouses for creative inspiration. We have fake shutters, trim around everything and “landscaping”. We unconsciously use landscaping to convey a sort of quaint, illusory context of being in nature, which, by extension, suggests autonomy because there is “countryside” separating us from our neighbors. All of this is to appease the concept of “home” we have all bought each other a subscription to.

      By contrast, in places like Ecuador, they rather value the interdependence of their neighborhoods and thus have no reason to erect symbolic barriers. Because they lack our imagination and thus the delusions we carry out, they do not feel compelled to imbue extra significance to what we might call their “ugly little shacks”. Utilitarianism prevails over aesthetics. For this reason, it had seemed to me that any and all enthusiasm about my gringo garden in this house was because it is a permanent graphic proclamation that a gringo not only lives in the House of Julio, but calls it home as well.

      So getting back to my extra plant: It was “extra” because I had already filled up what one could argue was the only functionless space along the side of the house. Any further to the left and I would plant directly on top of an underground electric cable. Any further to the right and I plant directly beneath a window from which family members like to eject mouths full of toothpaste foam and also through which neighbors like to stand and converse with people inside the house. Any further expansion of the garden would severely impair the utilitarianism of the house. So I was surprised when Julio looked at my drawing and announced that I should further disrupt the house’s utilitarianism by planting it between windows.

      I went outside and began the excavation of the hard ground immediately. 7 year old Ines responded immediately by coming out of her house pulling a toy dump truck by a string, with which she intended to haul away the stones I dug up. I made a big hole, refilled it with all the usual substrates and planted my final plant. It was the icing on the gringo gardencake.

      After lunch, I typed up an exam for one of my English classes and then trotted out to the side of the house to admire my plants. Upon my return trek across the front of the house, a head in a window in the house across the street called my name. Upon closer examination, the head turned out to be Lorena’s. She motioned me to the side of the house she was in and then came out a side door. Her hair was dyed cool-aid red and there was glitter pasted across her pool chalk eye shadow. Her lips wore blood red lipstick outlined in maroon. I could see how someone had been entertaining herself today.

      I told Lorena she looked very… um, colorful today. A rooster walked past at that moment. Before I could stop myself, I told her she and the rooster looked like twins. She didn’t realize how close to the bone that little comment was and assumed I was just talking about the color of her hair. After a while of my stunning wit and site gags next to a filthy pigpen, she invited me to her house “just for a second.” That’s where I spent the rest of the day. Visitors came and went from her house all day. Leaving would have been a little difficult under the circumstances, but I had no other really pressing activities and so didn’t try. Instead, I played cards and told stupid stories and sat in silence eating unsolicited plates of food.