At 4pm until about 7pm, I received a call from the States.

      In the afternoon, I tentatively rebegan reading Living Poor. At about 7:30pm, Julio, Julio’s dad El Chino, 2 neighbors named Sánchez and Agapito, respectively, and I met on Julio’s front porch to make our little chicken raising scam an official plan. As I cannot remember whether I have ever mentioned the chicken farm scam before, I shall proceed to (re)explain. Ehem. El Tambo, like many other towns in the peninsula, is a welfare case. There’s no rain here, no rivers, nothing grows and now the sole industry that has sustained the people- woodworking- is dying faster than the pepper plants in my cursed garden. Various governmental and non-governmental agencies have always made this area a pet cause and now the people, dysfunctional to begin with, expect periodic handouts. They will not lift a finger without a big freebie involved. Like anyone, they don’t respect anything that comes too easily. If you just throw them money, a bunch of stupid and contemptible things will happen and in short order all freebies will be squandered and everyone will be back to square one again: broke.

      I have thus far omitted even the possibility of seeking out free money. I want to see people getting their asses in gear with what little they have before I’m even going to think about soliciting grants for animal projects. When people have given me the excuse that they want to raise animals but don’t have the money (hint, hint. How about a freebie?), I tell them they may not have the money in this moment to buy a full blown chicken farm, but they can get the ball rolling in some form with what little they have. I always tell them that if they replaced all the Tambo natives in town with a bunch of Japanese people, in 5 years the place would be middle class. It’s called sacrifice and busting ass. Now, I don’t know if you begged, borrowed or stole, but I’ve seen your television and stereo. Where’d you get the money for those? You can damn sure come by money when you want to blast your hard-drinkin’ ass with cumbia music, but your hands are absolutely tied when it comes to investing in your family’s future, right? Sure.

      So I’ve been holding out, lurking about town with an eye peeled for potential workers to whom I might attach myself and boost to prosperity, like a talent agent hunting down the diamonds in Tambo’s rough. However, my approach, though a good one, has been misapplied here. For reasons I can’t really provide articulate explanations for, even the good and scrupulous people in Tambo have a big blank spot in their brain where a work ethic should be. It’s not that they understand and are just being lazy, nor is it exactly that they are simply clean slates desperately awaiting someone to write on them. It’s more complicated than that. Just as you cannot walk into a deposed dictator’s country and simply install a government (which makes me wonder just what in the hell kind of poly-sci they have been studying over at Yale), you can not simply walk into the campo of Ecuador and install a “healthy” business sense. A stable, legitimate government can only exist atop a foundation of certain factors, such as popular support, reasonable unemployment, and functioning infrastructure, to name just a few. Take a place like Haiti, utterly deficient in every factor that presupposes a stable government, and you’ll find the foundation is forever crumbling out from beneath the regime-of-the-moment. It seems to me that work ethic, as well as other concepts in the brain, function similarly. A “healthy” work ethic presupposes a foundation of concepts such as streamlining your operation, competitiveness among similar operations, investment and sacrifice. None of these concepts exist in this culture.

      Now, as long as I’m rambling way off the subject I started out talking about, lets take a look at the word “healthy”, which I’ve been using with respect to work ethic. We might arguably refer to Tambo’s work ethic as “sickly”, but in the interest of fairness, the other end of the spectrum is not necessarily “healthy”. Maybe teaching a “self-defense” class, such as Karate, ultimately produces more bullies than the number of people learning to defend themselves justifies. The world is increasingly globalizing, is it not? Every corporate behemoth using NAFTA to legally rape the continent has what we might call an unimpeachable work ethic, do they not? Every monster has its origin, but is the solution to heading off tomorrow’s monsters 'starving the people who may spawn monsters in order to save them from themselves'? I don’t know. But hey, buy a crash helmet and let’s pave a road to hell! We’re all worm food in the final tally anyway.

      So, getting back to the chicken farm plan. I’m bored and tired of being let down by Tambonians who do not believe in themselves and are never going to take the leap with what little they have to invest. I wanna see something happen here to give my mind something to entertain itself with and I almost don’t care anymore if we succeed or implode. One man’s success always comes at someone else’s expense anyway. Whether we fail, or whether we succeed by taking a share of the market away from distant chicken enterprises, the net gain is still pretty much zero, no? If I make that drama play out before my eyes, at least I’ll be entertained. I’m giving in and bringing freebies to Tambo. To hell with George Soros. Wait, I don’t know where that last sentence came from. Scratch that. That was the coffee talking. So, I asked Julio 'who did we know that we could trust and who would trust each other'? Who was neither corrupt, nor terminally selfish nor disagreeable? With whom might we form a group that could solicit money grants as a viable, functioning entity? He gave me 3 names. El Chino, Agapito and Sánchez. From the little I knew of them, I liked the choices.

      Julio and I decided we would see what kinds of grants were available and then design a project around their requirements. We decided we would notify, but not call an official meeting of the 4 Ecuas and I until we had a fairly solid project design and a fairly solid understanding of what we needed to do to land the grant. Little by little, as information became available, we designed a project that appeared sound in theory. Julio had obviously been bringing the subject up in conversations he was having with the other 3 guys, but by the occasion of this our first meeting, said they effectively knew nothing and would need a complete explanation of what’s going on, beginning all the way back at fourscore and 7 years ago. Julio hid a smile when, as a pleasant shock to him, I gave just such a fanciful Ecuadorian-friendly speech. I had been anticipating this situation, and had made such a conscious effort to thwart my excessive natural terseness and starkness of manner and speech, that the repose in which I delivered my address was theatric in the extreme. In Ecuador, that’s a good thing.

      I had decided that something Moritz Thomsen had said in his book Living Poor was all too true: that this culture seeks to be dominated. Sure, some group is always protesting this or that outrage, but interpersonal “equality” is not really a value in this culture. Things are only equal here when people are flat broke, out of options and their house is falling in around them. That’s the picture of equality in Ecuador- equally screwed. “Rights” and social “equality” are not really viewed as being inextricably entwined. Anyone with a little bit of money or education in this country totally plays the role of upper-cruster. They feel like a higher quality breed of human than their fellow countrymen and it shows. And people respect this. Never mind that their money and education, by American standards, are negligible. The fact remains that if you try to portray yourself as equal to everyone else (as I have been doing) no one will ever follow your lead.

      I have encountered a certain personality type all too often throughout my life who for no apparent reason will repeatedly pick at you and make digs in an escalating fashion until you explode on them, dress them down savagely and backhand them into check. Then, as if having received what they were soliciting, they will kiss your ass. I don’t understand the mentality of people who require that you put them down before they can extend you respect, but something to this effect is a substantial facet of Ecuadorian (or perhaps Latin) culture.

      I said all the above to explain a little change in my policy regarding the people here. I know that my giving of such a large freebie in Tambo is going to shake things up around here like nothing I have done heretofore. In Tambo, money is god. The people here flip at the prospect of money the way that little cartoon chicken hawk used to flip at the word “chicken”. When people thought of me as a rich “equal”, they approached me the way a fox approaches an unguarded hen house. They thought the fact that I didn’t subjugate them meant that I was weak. They “knew” I had money and was connected to power, but since I was “defenseless”, they thought the best way to get themselves a piece of my money and power was to be sneaky and manipulative.

      Tambonians like me well enough as a kind of novelty and they fear me a little as being a tiny chip from that inconceivable place that blasts enemy countries off the map and flies unmanned spy drones, where skyscrapers blow up and filthy rich men buy and sell the whole planet- but on a basic human level, Tambonians do not respect me. Sure, most people here have fallen all over themselves trying to extend me their hospitality and would be flattered to catch my eye, but as I have refused to play up my superiority and am forever misstepping in social settings because I cannot understand anything being said when everyone talks all at the same time or are blasting cumbia music (which is always), I appear visibly unsure of myself. It may not make sense from an American’s perspective, but in spite of my being a coveted object here, I am also a big joke.

      Well, as far as I’m concerned, those days are about to end. When word gets around that the gringo has hooked up his neighbors with a few $1000 worth of chicken project, people are going to come running with every ploy in the book -from sucking up to guilt trips- to get themselves in on the next round of freebies they expect I’ll be doling out. But the person they will encounter then will no longer be playing the role of equal. I’ve sounded out the whole town in the year that I’ve lived here and I’m no longer overly interested in making any more new friends in the bunch. No one does anything of any interest to me here, nothing has changed since my arrival, and now I’m going to wipe a few smirks off the faces in town. If the rules of their game dictate that it’s either their dignity or mine, I should probably then warn someone that the coffee in my bloodstream is at a dangerous level these days and I’m no longer feeling generous.

      At our first chicken farm meeting, to my surprise, I didn’t even have to initiate such concepts as investment, NOT-plundering profits and growth. These guys were already on board and initiated discussion of such on their own. It appears we have selected our group members well. They seem to understand that this is their chance to break out of poverty, possibly forever.

      The 5 of us hanging out together on Julio’s porch, insofar as such a quiet evening had the potential for such, was a major spectacle. Anyone who happened past automatically turned and came straight over to see what was going on. Anyone who drifted out on to their porch to stretch and yawn in the night air, spotted us in the distance and started immediately in our direction. Arguably, it was a very conspicuous event. Although we have always been friendly towards each other, anyone familiar with the patterns of everyday life in this neighborhood would recognize the 5 of us hanging out together as a very rare event. The random people who joined the meeting began freely interjecting things and providing hypothetical problems that the project may face. They had a few valid points, but by and large they only served to draw our meeting out and cause chaos. Large episodes spent with everybody talking at the same time became more and more frequent. I was loosing track of what we were discussing, and from the snatches I caught, the event seemed to be drifting out of the logistical and into more social territories.

      Then suddenly, Sánchez, who had surprised me by being “on my page” to a remarkable degree, turns to me and said “Alright then, it’s decided. We’ll be a group of 10.” Everyone turned and looked at me. It was late and most of my energy had waned during the long episode of disordered conversation. I sat there blinking, caught off guard by this sudden change of plans. 10 people? What in the hell had they been discussing? Surely the original 4 weren’t stupid enough to divide their project among 6 random passersby who had wandered up to our meeting out of curiosity. I half figured that this was just a relatively harmless manifestation of Tambo’s flawed approach to life and that the other 6 had no real interest in our group aside from participating in this one head count this one time, but we were talking about $1000’s of dollars potentially and I was not consenting to any kind of arrangements with anyone but the original 4. If the other 6 have any real interest in organizing and seeking grants, that’s a separate matter which we can discuss separately. Big, sloppy, disorganized, overly bureaucratic groups is how Tambonians have always approached matters. We were supposed to be a real group. Hadn’t we made it clear in the beginning of this meeting that we were seeking to avoid the mistakes habitually made in this town? Hadn’t we made it a point of underscoring the dynamic nature of small, streamlined groups?

      I told the group that I didn’t understand what had happened. Last I had heard, we were a group of 4. Everyone looked at me but no one said a word. A few people wore anxious expressions. Since no one wanted to shed a little light on that for me, I continued talking, deciding that instead of getting to the bottom of the matter, I would just squash it altogether. I told them there would only be money for 4 people. An uncomfortable silence followed that proclamation. After a moment, Julio began to speak about something unimportant and unrelated and soon everyone was talking all at the same time again. As it had been obvious that telling me the group was now 10 people had been meant as the final statement of the meeting, thus we were done discussing matters, I sat through everyone talking at the same time for a polite interval and then got up and wandered out to the bathroom. As I had hoped, this precipitated the break up of the meeting and when I returned, only El Chino remained probably too sleepy to walk home. I then went to bed.

      Sometime in the night, I rolled over and my arm, whose circulation had somehow been cut off to the point of total numbness, fell onto my chest with a thud. Alarmed and unaware it was my own arm, I shoved it wildly off of me and scrambled to sit up. A moment later, I realized my arm was asleep and inferred what had happened- but then something that may have been a full-blown hallucination took place. I felt a bat or perhaps the mouse that currently lives in my room, landing lightly on my chest. I slapped crazily at it and scrambled to get out of my mosquito net. As I threw one side of my mosquito net behind my head, I felt whatever had been on my chest fall to my lap, but a moment later it leapt back up to my chest. I swatted wildly all over blackness engulfing me and then heard a primal “AAUGHH!” fly out of my mouth, startling me into lucidity. I then sat on the edge of my bed listening to whether I could hear anyone else stirring in the house. I was more concerned at that moment with whether or not I had set the household into action running to save me than I was with whatever had been jumping on me. No one so much as rolled over in their beds. I assumed (erroneously or not, we shall never know) that there were never any animals jumping on me and that I was just confused from having been clubbed awake by my own appendage. I waited an extra long moment to make sure there was no movement of either man or beast anywhere in the house and then very quietly put myself back to bed.

      While I was eating my breakfast of plain semi-stale bread and instant coffee on the windowsill of the bedroom/living room /dining room, Julio strolled up to the window from outside, engrossed in a post card. Someone, who had lived in Tambo years ago and had immigrated to Italy a while back, sent a relative still living here a package full of filled out post cards. As no one here actually gets mail, the relative had to hand deliver each person their postcard.

      The picture on Julio’s postcard was of some attractively landscaped Italian street, which enraptured Julio to no end. He mostly stared at it in silence while tracing the picture slowly with his finger, but occasionally muttered phrases such as “Everyone has their own garden there… look at the flowers… this is… really cool …” He held the postcard out to his yard and looked back and forth between his yard and the postcard. Then he started scratching lines in the dirt with his foot saying, “Just like this…. we could fill the yard out to here with plants… everyone who passes by the yard will say ‘how beautiful’”

      The plant line Julio was indicating was all the way out to the center of his yard. I hate when Julio talks about filling his yard with plants like this. The local sense of aesthetics takes only volume of plants into account, not the design of their placement. To be fair, the family is genuinely enamored with their yard plants. I have never known anyone besides myself to stop in front of a plant and stare at it for 5 minutes. Now I’ve got a whole family who, individually or collectively visits each plant in the “garden” several times a day. This to me, is far more than I had ever anticipated fostering when I brought home that first plant to their barren yard. I remember noting their uneasiness about having a plant in their yard and thinking that I would have to give them a few months to get used to the idea before I brought a second plant home. After all, growing a plant for the hell of it- just because it’s cool- is not really a concept in this dusty pueblo. I have tried over the years to get the people I know to have a greater appreciation of plants, but this family’s subsequent infatuation with plants happened almost automatically. However, in Ohio, we make a distinction between “landscape” and “weed patch”. In Ohio, the whole world is green and the only way to differentiate your space is to order it. But in El Tambo, where the whole world is barren, a thick green clutter of plants in your space is differentiation enough. It is perhaps the ultimate audacity to throw in the harsh, dry face of their natural world. It is lush, what difference does order make? It pains me to admit that we are all equally right on this. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And I am the only one who will not be living the rest of my life here.

      After lunch, I read Newsweeks until 3pm, then left for Santa Elena. I drained my bank account at the ATM in anticipation of the trip, had a photocopy made of a map of Quito’s old town, I printed my mammoth ‘to-do list’ off a disk and then hit my email. I returned home and read Newsweeks until dark. Then I showered, ate dinner and left for the TransEsmereldas bus station in Libertad. When I arrived at TransEsmereldas, I did not find Lorena, whom I had invited to come along with me.

      This trip to Quito had been on the radar for more than a month. I needed to pick up my passport for my trip home June 2nd and pick up, as well as turn in, various forms in the Quito office and talk with various unknown persons about project grants and financial aid deferments. I also needed to make a trip to Otavalo so as to maximize the use of an expensive flight home by filling out every possible request for Ecuadorian artisan and novelty purchase orders from people in Ohio. The Quito and Otavalo mission would require 2 days. I wanted to use the occasion of a fairly dry and boring “business trip” to Quito to take along someone from Tambo who could never have afforded to travel there themselves. The obvious choice was Julio, but, while hanging out at Lorena’s work one day with the actual trip way off in the murky future, I asked Lorena out of the blue if she wanted to go to Quito. I thought I was just needling her, as I always do. I expected she would role her eyes and I would laugh uproariously at her while she camouflaged her bewilderment at my sense of humor with a sidelong scowl. Instead, she jolted in her seat at my question and then fixed me with a cautious but ebullient gaze.

      “Are you serious?” she asked with widening eyes. I felt a wave of disappointment that my mouth was getting me into something that might preclude my taking Julio, but there would be more Quito trips and taking Lorena was just as good as taking Julio. Maybe better.

      “Yeah, I'm serious.”

      Something approximating astonishment swept Lorena’s face and she appeared for a moment to be watching a dream sequence floating in the air in front of her. She slowly sunk into her seatback, as if by the weight of the daydream and then, snapping out of it, clapped her hands, stamped her feet and began all manner of celebration from the center of her big fluffy chair.

      Now the trip was upon us. I decided that since Lorena was not waiting for me at the TransEsmereldas station, that I would not buy any tickets until the last moment or until she arrived. I hadn’t decided what I would do if she didn’t show up by the time the 8:30pm bus was pulling out. Lorena showed up with less than 10 minutes to spare but no bags in her hand. She asked me if her co-worker had been by yet because she was holding Lorena’s bag. I felt the burn of annoyance flooding my face. If it isn’t showing up at the last minute, its some other dumb ass thing like making the luggage unnecessarily involve 3rd parties who are obviously irresponsible enough to risk not catching the departing bus on time. Lorena had come straight from work just up the street, where the majority of her belongings stay because that is where she spends the majority of her week. Her co-worker was coming from her home in some other part of Libertad. Why couldn’t Lorena just have carried her own damn bag?

      8:30 pm came and went and Lorena and I stood there and watched the bus pull away. 5 or more minutes later, the co-worker arrived in a car driven by an unknown 4th party who was paid $1 and then drove away. Lorena’s co-worker and 2 of her seemingly innumerable kids then inexplicably stood there and waited with us until the 9:30 pm bus was ready to leave.

      No sooner had our 9:30pm bus left, than we were stopped immediately outside of Santa Elena by a police checkpoint, where there has never been a police checkpoint before. I had just finished warning Lorena that the police usually stop and empty the bus a few times along the way and not to worry; it’s routine. First all the men piled off the bus, followed immediately by all the women. Lorena and 3 other women automatically clustered together to talk the moment their feet hit the roadside. The women talked all through the search and even after we got back on the bus. I asked Lorena where she knew the other women from and she said that she didn’t know them. I laughed because she reminded me of Julio. Julio is so un-jaded and such a curious, small-towner-to-the-bone, that every time I get him out of Tambo, he’s so genuinely interested in everyone that he’s always striking up deep spontaneous friendships with people he’ll never see again.

      For the rest of the night, there were no more checkpoints. When the bus pulled into Santo Domingo’s bus station at about 4:30am to pick up more passengers, Lorena wanted to get out of the bus and stretch. Out on the pavement I made an extremely curious discovery- a smashed Arby’s cup. I have always made Arby’s one of the first places I ate at during my other 2 visits to the States because not only is it the bomb, but the quality of the meat is shocking in the extreme coming straight from Ecuador. The meat you find in Ecuador (as well as most other countries) is invariably hard and gnarled. Typically present in meat here are interesting, often unidentifiable biological thingies such as yellow lumps, springy veins and tendons, bone fragments or knots in the coarse muscle fibers. But Arby’s… oh my god. What is that stuff they put in their sandwiches? It surely isn’t meat. Your teeth can cut through a 2 inch pile of that heavenly substance like it was butter! My favorite thing to exclaim 5 times during every meal at Arby’s is to point to the profile of my half-eaten sandwich and yell “Kill a cow and just TRY to find that inside!”

      Was there an Arby’s in Ecuador now? There surely didn’t used to be. Or had the extremely unlikely happened and someone managed to cart a large Arby’s cup from a US airport, onto and off of their plane, and with their cup in one hand and suitcase in the other, proceed by cab to the Quito bus station, and finally the Santo Domingo bus station where at last the cup was pitched thoughtlessly on the ground? I don’t know, but if so, one of the very few people in this country that could be rattled to the very foundation by the cup’s discovery came right across that sucker before it had even been blackened by the ever present parking lot grime. If there was an Arby’s in this country, it would be in Quito.

      Lorena and I again boarded our bus and slipped out of Santo Domingo in a light night rain.

      As it was very early in the morning the sky was still clear, meaning we would be able to see the snow covered peak of whichever one of the 3 volcanoes one sees only very early in the morning south of Quito. When it appeared in all its majesty, I pointed it out to Lorena and told her we must be getting close to Quito. By her reaction, I'm guessing she had never seen a snow peaked volcano before. It was a spectacular view to have made one’s first.

      When we entered the never-ending sprawl of development surrounding Quito and progress was hampered, as it always is everywhere near Quito, Lorena fell back asleep. I nudged her awake when we got to Quito’s main terminal. With sleepy eyes and raised eyebrows, we descended into the formidable clamber and din of the station. I asked directions to the Trolly and we attempted to walk there, which, between Lorena’s short legs and the altitude, nearly made her lungs collapse. Arriving at the Trolly platform, we watched in horror as a Trolly car packed impossibly to the bursting point with people pulled up let a few more people squeeze in and then pulled away again. We watched several more of the same come and go and then just decided to walk to the Old Town- our first destination of the day. Luckily, it was a very short walk. I hadn’t understood that from the maps I had studied while planning this trip.

      We arrived at an old colonial square bustling with people. We looked very much like 2 wandering tourists trying to get their bearing, which is exactly what we were. This is not a good thing to broadcast in Quito’s old town. For a minute or 2 we came to the attention of a shady group of thugs loitering in the square. Lorena and I individually picked up on this and monitored their movements as they seemed to try to shadow us. However, it was obvious to them that we noticed them noticing us and the first time we took a blatant evasive measure, they simply walked away down the street.

      We found a You-are-Here tourist plaque and set off in the direction of the main plaza where the antique buildings occupied by government are. There we checked out an old, really cool church, which intensely interested Lorena. We got breakfast and hit 2 museums: the Museo de Arte y Historia (yeah, it was interesting, lots of very lifelike wax mannequins, but don’t go really far out of your way to see it) and the Casa de Sucre (also interesting, but also not worth greatly inconveniencing oneself to see, unless for some reason you’re in love with Antonio Bolívar, in which case you would want to see this place at all costs).

      Then Lorena and I boarded a Trolley and took it all the way across town to the area of the Peace Corps office. Lorena was as amused as she was unnerved by the Trolley ride. She nearly got flung to the floor the first several stops and starts, but after the crowd thinned out a little, we made our way to the spacious but bouncy area where the 2 trolley cars are connected together and we took off our backpacks and braced ourselves properly. When we got off the Trolley, I took Lorena to a globalized fast food chain in a big nearby building of restaurants and movie theaters so she could sit with the bags until I got done at the office. Then I rushed down the street and entered the Peace Corps office just as everyone was leaving for lunch. I caught my boss, Susanna Ricaurte in time, but probably ruined her lunch by making her miss the big Friday lunch everyone else had reconvened at. We’ll call that a little down payment on what I owe her for grounding me my first few months at my site, even though I disobeyed my supposed grounding at will.

      After about an hour and a half, I returned to pick up Lorena. I had been about a half hour longer than I told her I would be and still had not gotten most of what I need to do done, as everyone was at lunch. But Lorena had made life-long friends with a globalized fast food chain employee, so I didn’t really feel all that bad about having left her there. We went outside and hailed a cab. I asked the cab driver if he had ever heard of “Arby’s.” He thought that maybe he had but hadn’t the slightest clue where he may have seen that. This was worthless information. I told him to take us to Ch Farino’s, a pizza place, where we ate our brains out while a head cold I was developing that morning, probably from the recent air-conditioning incident in Santa Elena, gained momentum.

      Lorena had never seen parmegian cheese before. She picked up the shaker of parmegian on the table at Ch Farino’s and asked if it was powdered milk. This was exactly the kind of stuff I had wanted to bring a Tambonian with me to Quito for. I laughed and explained what it was, which puzzled her. I told her to smell it, with predictable results.

      “GAH! It smells like… good god! No, I wont try any.”

      When the pizza came, I enthusiastically doused a slice with parmegian, which peaked Lorena’s curiosity. When she saw I didn’t die, she tried a dab and admitted it was pretty good. She did not, however, agree with the oregano I doused my slice with next. She was familiar with oregano, but said she only liked it with fish soup. For my part, I laughed at her. She’s an unmitigated campesina. Lorena had not heard of Salami before, which is what I ordered on the pizza because pepperoni is uncommon here. She bit into a piece of pizza tentatively. When in the past I had told her that Ecuadorians don’t like pizza, Lorena maintained that she had had pizza once and while she did not love it, she was far from hating it. Upon seeing this pizza, she told me the other pizza she had eaten was very different and she described something resembling quiche. I told her it doesn’t sound like pizza she ate, but what we had in front of us was bona fide pizza and was delicious in the extreme. I then laughed and laughed at Lorena, who was trying to eat pizza with great dignity and nonchalance. I don’t care who you are, if you are raised on an even remotely consistent diet, when someone throws you a dietary curve, you will be weirded out. This rule applies to EVERYONE who is not raised on a diverse diet. And it doesn’t take a big twist in the ingredients to weird people out. Pizza is just different enough that pretty much all Ecuadorians raised on an Ecua-style diet do not really like it.

      Lorena asked me what I thought was so funny. I told her that for the last year I have had to sit with whole tables of people laughing and making a federal case out of any variation in the way I eat verses the way they eat because, as every good Ecuadorian knows, there is only one way to do absolutely everything in the entire universe. Lorena has not been innocent of this particular transgression and I told her that I was now going to sit there and enjoy watching her fall prey to what she and every other Ecuadorian has always intimated makes one a freak of nature. Lorena tried to eat her pizza defiantly, but I stayed amused to the very end, when I busted her trying to eat her last piece of pizza with the 2 Salami pieces removed and a guilty expression on her face. And of course, I laughed openly at her for it.

      I had also ordered a big dish of lasagna. Lorena made no real attempt to disguise her revulsion at the lasagna. Cheese in this country is “campo cheese”- period. It is a durable white goat cheese that looks like a slice of brain, it does not really melt well and it is not generally even heated when eaten. Melted mozzarella, if you are a campesina, looks disgusting. So is very much “wetness” in one’s food, such as tomato sauce in lasagna. Lorena waited until I chopped a chunk out of the dish and then lunged in to do an autopsy in the hole I left. She carefully identified every ingredient in the lasagna and then very reluctantly tried a small bite. She claimed it was the sauce that tasted funny to her (but it could have been any part of it) and declined to eat any more. She said she had eaten lasagna before, but it was dry and bland (like most EcuaFood).

      From Ch Farinos, we walked down the street to Megamaxi, a giant supermarket where I had some shopping to do. I added Kleenexes to my shopping list, as my nose had become a nonstop river of watery snot and was rubbed raw by the napkins and toilet paper I was blowing my nose into. Then we cabbed back to the Peace Corps office. I asked the cab driver if he had ever heard of “Arby’s”. He had not. This time I just left Lorena sitting out in front of the office while I ran in and half assed took care of my business for about 30 minutes. When I came out, I wavered back and forth between taking the 50 cent trolley or a 3 dollar taxi to the main terminal. But, as it was rush hour, my nose was running like a river, catching the trolley would entail a lot more walking than hailing a cab and that we were 3 hours behind schedule, I opted for the cab. The cab’s meter was broken or perhaps rigged and rang up money too quickly. The normally $3 ride turned out to cost $5.

      We jumped aboard an empty bus to Otavalo (for whatever reason, only tourists catch the Otavalo bus at the station. The rest flag it down en route in the streets) and were almost immediately on our way to super slow ass progress inching our way out of Quito. We hit Otavalo about 2 hours later and got right into a hotel room without any trouble (which is why I had been trying to get to Otavalo 3 hours earlier. Sometimes the hotels fill up with tourists the day before the big market day). Upon arrival in the hotel, I went straight to bed. Lorena showered and then watched television until an unknown hour.

      Outside, it was immediately apparent that the outfit was a bigger mistake than even I had imagined. Everyone, from shocked young girls to leering men of all ages, stopped dead in the middle of whatever they were doing to stare at Lorena. It bothered me greatly and I kept walking and did not stop to look at any merchandise. We circled the outside of the entire main square of the market while I tried to calm down. Finally I announced that I needed breakfast and hissed in fury when I could not find a particular restaurant I thought we were near. Lorena was troubled and asked what was wrong with me and said I wasn’t acting like myself. I told her that I was in fact acting like myself, unfortunately. She said that no, I normally make non-stop jokes and laugh about everything and that my present behavior was certainly out of character (Note to future biographers: give up. I'm worse than bi-polar. I’ve got more poles than Warsaw. Even I no longer know who I am).

      We found a restaurant and took a table. I fidgeted distractedly with my menu while Lorena eyed me warily. When the waiter appeared unexpectedly, I rashly ordered salchipapas (hacked up hot dogs on french fries) and then stared past Lorena out the window at the market. It took me a very long time to calm down to the point where I could hold a conversation. Then I noticed a ripped seam on Lorena’s shirt that someone had sewn shut and I knew that the outfit was borrowed, not new. I told Lorena I would be right back. I ran around the corner to the hotel and came back wearing a coat overtop the long sleeve shirt I had been wearing. I found that Lorena had made yet another life long friend with a particularly free-wheeling indigenous woman, who, if I had to liken her personality to someone famous, would say Goldie Hawn. As we finished breakfast, I casually took off my long sleeve shirt and handed it to Lorena. Without any explanation, I told her to put it on. She did not want to. I was not open to debate. I told her that the people here are not used to this kind of dress and I cannot shop while these openly leering dirtbags make me want to smash out their brown teeth. She consented to wearing the shirt, but carried it with her outside hoping I would change my mind. Then she put on my shirt and was immediately indistinguishable among the darkly dressed, bundled up minions at Otavalo that morning.

      We then set out shopping. We shopped until about 3 pm, making several trips back to the hotel to dump stuff off and get the hotel staff to let us occupy our room after check out time. When we finished shopping, I pulled out my map of Ecuador and refigured some travel times. I had been thinking it would be better to very casually make our way down to Quito and then take a night bus to Baños (our next stop), but now I figured we could easily get to Baños in time to get a hotel room and still be able hang out in town for the evening. I had not bought as much at Otavalo as I had planned to and thus had cash to spare for hotels and hanging out, thus sleeping another night on a bus would not be necessary (actually, I had miscalculated the length of the trip as well. It would have been a short night’s sleep).

      We scrambled to get our things together and then rushed out to the Otavalo bus terminal. We caught a bus to Quito, then Ambato, then Baños. We arrived in Baños at about 10pm and though there was still time to go into town, it was drizzling and I was shivering violently from the cold and being sick. Plus I was dead tired. Although it seemed way too cold in my estimation for anyone to even be thinking about showering, true to the coastal preoccupation with bathing, Lorena dutifully disappeared into the bathroom carrying a towel. I shivered beneath a thick pile of blankets for a very long time and then dropped off to sleep.

      I had not remembered Baños as being so Ecua. I had recalled there being lots of gringos and it having a pretty agreeable vibe to hang out it. But today, perhaps because it was the weekend, the streets were overrun with pure Ecuadorians and Cumbias blasted loudly from several places in town. After breakfast, we attempted to check out the big church in town, which to me is worth seeing because it is exceptionally tacky, but it was filled with people to the point being nearly impenetrable. I'm bad at guessing crowd numbers, but I would say there were 1000 or more people in and around the church. It was madness and wiped one of the main activities off a day we had only reluctantly begun. All the streets and parks were teeming with Ecuas as well.

      I pointed out a scraggly waterfall at the far edge of town and we walked over to it. The bottom of waterfall was crawling with Ecuadorians taking each other’s pictures. It was not even an attractive end to a scraggly waterfall. Different contraptions had been tacked all over the rock wall to divert water for various reasons, including, but not limited to, no reason whatsoever. I tolerated this for a while for Lorena’s sake, but around the 6th or 7th picture she wanted taken of the ugly little waterfall, I sternly refused and said we should go check out of the hotel as it was now noon.

      On the way to the hotel, we passed by and adventure touring business that rented bikes. Before it had turned out to be such a crappy day, renting bikes was what I had planned to do. We walked in and talked to the guy. I asked about the road between Baños and Puyo, which is downhill almost the entire way and goes from the cold flanks of a volcano (Baños) to the warm jungle at the edge of the Amazon basin(Puyo). I had already studied up on it, but the guy went into a detailed pitch about the things one encounters along the way. I told the guy we needed to check out of our room and perhaps we’d be back. Outside I asked Lorena if she wanted to rent bikes. She was game.

      I had arranged with the hotel manager yesterday that we would have somewhere to store our stuff after check out time because we would not be leaving town until 7pm or later. We returned to rent bikes and then headed downhill out of town. I will have to use my words sparingly to describe the bike trip, lest I taint its grandeur. It’s a must. It’s easy if you are in anything resembling decent health and the road takes you through matchless scenery. You often share the road with traffic, but there is plenty of room and there aren’t that many cars anyway. Many times, the road for cars goes into a tunnel in the mountain, but bikers and pedestrians must continue on a path that goes the long way around the outside edge of the mountain. The best scenery is invariably at these places. The automobiles are totally missing out by ducking into a tunnel. And since there is no traffic to contend with once the cars are diverted into a tunnel, you can clown around all you want looking out over great gorges where huge waterfalls are crashing off the distant green cliffs. At one point, a small waterfall even falls onto the bike path. We stopped and played in it. One tunnel said ‘No Pedestrians’ but didn’t have an alternative path, so Lorena and I waited until no cars were coming and then blazed into the tunnel at top speed. There should have been enough room in the tunnel for cars to get past us- if they saw us- but luckily no cars came before we were out the other end. We passed a crowd of people watching bungee jumpers jumping from a bridge and stopped to watch.

      We eventually came to a hefty waterfall called Manto de la Novia. We stopped and stared at it for a while, and then noticed a swinging wood footpath bridging the gap from our side of the river gorge to the other. We locked up our bikes, found our way down to the footbridge and crossed it. A woman on the other side takes 50 cents per person, and then you are free to try and approach the falls. The waterfall hits the bottom with an immense force and the whole general vicinity of the falls is raining water droplets. Lorena and I pulled out the rubber ponchos we had been loaned at the place where we rented the bikes and inched forward towards the fall’s splashdown. A blast of wind and horizontal water spray jets out violently in every direction from the force of the water impacting the river. Lorena gave up at the point where the water spray was merely like a thunderstorm, but I inched forward until I was in a hurricane, pressing down on my hood to keep it from blasting off my head and unable to really open my eyes. The uninterrupted roar of the falls ripped through my ears and the water spray stung as it blasted my face. And I was not even within 10 feet of where I had hoped to peer down at the actual contact of falls and river. It was futile, but I kept trying a little longer than perhaps a more sensible person might. When I returned to where Lorena was, my pants, unprotected by the poncho, were soaked. A boy and girl heading up the path towards us stopped, looked at me, exchanged a few words without taking their eyes off me and then turned around in unison and headed back. Lorena and I climbed a trail to a higher spot alongside to the waterfall, but it served only for photo ops. After the hurricane it was all pretty anticlimactic.

      We continued on bike down the highway, but Lorena was spent. I told her we could stop at the next town we came to and catch a bus back to Baños, which she was very much in favor of, but I think her brain was offline from overexertion. When the next town came, Lorena, who was 70 feet in front of me, neither turned her head to take note of the town nor so much as touched her brakes as we blazed through it. We were coasting downhill at a higher rate of speed than anyone could peddle, so I did not catch up to her until we were once again way back out in the middle of nowhere. It is not necessary to be in a town in order to catch busses, but as you may have a good wait, it is much better to have food and beverage at your disposal. I got Lorena stopped at the next little settlement we came to. Lorena asked me if I thought a particular house was a tienda. I told her no, but that right behind her was a tienda. Her brain was offline and she couldn’t figure out where I was referring to.

      “Where? Further down the road?”

      “No, Lorena, directly behind you.”

      “You mean we passed it?”

      “No, I mean it’s right behind you, I'm looking at it.”

      Lorena turned around and looked directly at the tienda behind her. Turning back to me she asked, “Where?”

      “You just looked at it. A red Coca Cola sign… 20 people standing in front of it staring at us….” The 20 people in front of the tienda who had dropped what they were doing to stare at us was the reason I didn’t just point to it outrightly. They didn’t mean anything by staring at us; everyone in this country just has a staring problem. They live slow lives utterly without deviation and any little unexpected thing you make happen is probably the most interesting thing to happen to them all day. Since standing around gaping at someone is not considered obnoxious or ridiculously invasive here, every last person in the campo has the mother of all staring problems. The thing I cant understand is how they keep such a vacant gaze up for so long. It’s not a gaze that betrays even a hint of thought process going on behind it, like it might if someone were, say, watching a group of thugs moving up the street towards them or perhaps like if Lorena passed by them inappropriately dressed. It’s amazing that there exist human beings who can stare on and on like that without ever concluding anything about what they’re seeing and moving on to subsequent sentiments such as confusion, fear, interest, astonishment or anything at all. It’s like the look squirrels give you when they fix you with the shiny black bead of their profile as you pass by them in a park.

      “I don’t see it” Lorena said, leaning to the side in order to peer intently past me.

      “No, Lorena! There!” I jutted my lower lip towards the tienda behind her and trembled wildly with mock strain. Jutting your lower lip at objects is a legitimate way to indicate things here. I have never seriously indicated anything in this manner except for when I wished to be absurd. Then I stood and looked at Lorena as she responded with several more incoherent misses. It was troubling to witness. Had I really pushed the poor girl that hard? It was not at all like her to be so confused and helpless. I then just pointed out the tienda and we walked our bikes over to it. Lorena bought 2 cokes, passed one to me and voraciously consumed the other. I told her that the setting sun and infrequency of passing busses was worrying me so I was going to get started flagging one down. For about ½ hour I waited, flagging 2 busses who wouldn’t stop (probably because of our bikes). The third one stopped. As I passed the bikes up to the ayudante who had climbed to the roof of the bus, Lorena wandered out of the tienda with the snack food equivalent of cheezy poofs and didn’t seem at first to realize the giant bus there or that we were leaving.

      We climbed aboard the bus and rode it slowly uphill in the dark for what seemed like too long a time. Back in Baños, we returned our bikes, picked up our stuff at the hotel and grabbed a bus to Ambato. From Ambato, we took a bus straight through the night to Libertad. There were no police checkpoints.