Grace came over for lunch. I always tell everyone how well I eat at my house, but when they take me up on a visit and we tell EcuaMom to plan for a guest, she tries to get all fancy and the food turns disgusting to a degree commensurate with how much she wants to impress the guest. Today's meal featured a thick, latex rubber cow part atop a pile of rice and green beans. I smuggled my latex rubber cow part out of the house and grace ripped hers apart and placed half on my plate so it looked like we had each eaten to our fill. We wanted to go to Santo Domingo, but there is some kind of bus strike going on and it didn't seem like a good idea.

      The Animal Production brass stopped by to get my top 3 picks for my future site. I had picked 3 places high in the Andes in indigenous communities. They looked at my choices and laughed. Apparently everyone else was choosing those exact same places. They asked me a few questions and tried to get me interested in the places no one else wanted. One place they billed as being very near “the nicest beach in Ecuador and arguably the nicest beach in South America.” I told them I was not a beach person. I wanted to get out of the constant heat and see mountains and do a bunch of exotic indigenous stuff. I sent them packing with that. They went up to Talwaza to talk to Sara with the intention of picking up our Spanish teacher on the way back through San Miguel because no busses were running due to the strike. During that interim, I rethought my position. Why vie with everyone for a few limited places, only to risk getting placed randomly elsewhere, when I could simply choose the beach site and know for certain that failing everything else, I could play in the waves and at least control where I end up spending the next 2 years?

Micah is going south almost to Peru,
Jason (San Miguel) is going to the Galapagos,
Grace is headed a few hours south of Quito in volcano land
and I am off to El Tambo near the coast.

      If you look due west of Guayaquil, you will see a peninsula jutting out into the ocean. El Tambo is on the middle of that peninsula. It's a few minutes away from a number of different beaches and tourist areas, but el Tambo itself is a weed patch. When I told EquaMom where my site was, her eyes almost blew out of her skull. She told me one of her kids vacationed there once and thought it was heaven. My Spanish was having a fluent episode so I told her where everyone else is bound for and we discussed their predicaments from every angle. Then she began fishing for evidence that she was the best host in town. Pleased with my answers, she ran off to make me spaghetti, as she had heard me last night praising the spaghetti Grace and Micah had made. Now she fancies it to be some kind of gringo treat, which wouldn't be a bad thing if her concept of “spaghetti” wasn't limited to plain noodles.

     Some Peace Corps brass stopped by our class today and tried to tell us they just wanted to come by to see how we were doing. Of course they never actually asked how we were doing and then I saw them whisking a large scale into their car that they were borrowing from Micah's family. I left class abruptly at 2:00 PM when my patience with the “facilitator” ran out.

      I hit the floor as the moth made clumsy sweeps across my room. I grabbed a pair of underwear from the laundry and repeatedly threw it at him as hard as I could. He failed to get significantly tangled up in the tumbling wad of boxer shorts, as my simpleton's mind had envisioned, but I finally cornered him in the bathroom and did him in with a flip flop. He later became a big protein snack for my baby chicks.

      I practiced my tech demo to an imaginary audience until 7:00 AM. All the tech demo judges showed up at 8:00 AM. Micah went first, demonstrating how to plant trees. Then Grace enlightened us on the benefits of beginning your seedlings in a box, as opposed to planting seeds directly in the ground. Then I spoke about why chickens are better off in coops. Then Jason gave the elementary school across the street a talk on why it is not ok to throw trash all over your town. He then set the school kids to work picking up trash. Afterwards, using various excuses, everyone skirted out and left me alone with the Spanish teacher for hours.

      Then we all slipped down the road to a cattle farm. The cows needed injections of a substance that gets rid of both internal and external parasites. The cows were crammed into a corral, looking much like a 40 car pile up on the Autobahn, and pushed and crapped on each other and bucked. One got a horn ripped off. We all gave injections with a short but very fat needle. The cows were uncooperative. Then we were shown how to rope and pull down a cow campo style.

      Moving right along, we slipped further still down the highway to San Miguel to castrate all of Micah's piglets. I got myself into the mix there. There's no trick to it. Find 'em, cut 'em, pop 'em out, pull on 'em until the cords snap. And that concluded our final stop on the Tour de Torment, and since it was only 1:00 PM, I headed into Santo Domingo to upload pictures on the internet for a few hours.

      When the bus came, it was as packed as it physically could have been. The aisle was jammed with people from front to back and a dense wad of insane men hung out the open door. Every time the bus stopped, the plug of men jumped out, sometimes I as well, and eventually the doorway would produce a frazzled fat woman who would toddle down the steps. Then the Ayudante (money collector), would yell “GO” and we would all dive for the open door as the bus began rolling forward again. No one was especially put out by the conditions of the bus. On the contrary, those of us in the heat of battle were fairly amused and the rest of the bus was either tolerant or amused to a lesser degree by the fiasco taking place.

      In Santo Domingo, I shuffled into an internet place at 10:30 AM and shuffled back out at 6:00 PM. It only took the computer geek at the counter 45 seconds and 17 glances at the clock to figure out that that was 7.5 hours and thus 7.5 dollars. The bus ride home took more than an hour. When I climbed in around 6:15, a number of bus company workers were howling with laughter in the front of the bus and debating something completely stupid. I watched their unflagging amusement and was at long last convinced that for all their money, Americans are not happier people. The average Ecuadorian is short on brains and long on free time. They spend that free time loafing together and endlessly satisfying their simple minds with cretinous musings. It doesn't matter that their houses may be falling down around them because no one notices. Sure, our money buys us comfort, but with that comfort comes heightened sensitivity to discomfort. When averaged over a lifetime, I don't believe the comfort of money to be an advantage. We pay a high price to be rich.