A Day in Ecuador

Today was a very typical day for me. I do not start classes until May 2 and being new to the country I have no friends; this makes for lots and lots of free time. So I decided to take a trip downtown to pick up an envelope that had arrived in the mail.

Downtown Guayaquil is quite nice. I consider it to be a very clean and safe place, and not crowded at all. However, my time in South America has been largely spent in Caracas, Venezuela. A city so dirty, so crowded, so dangerous that it has the most murders of any city in the world. In fact, I recently found out that they won´t even report the exact numbers anymore, it´s just that bad. So it´s safe to say I have been tainted. What seems surprisingly clean and orderly to me would probably make the average gringo run to the nearest American embassy in a panic.

I got a ride downtown and was therefore able to avoid the hassle of taking a bus. Walking along the streets, I was able to pick up a nice snack of cheddar chips and a bottle of water. Total cost- .55 cents. After picking up my envelope some random guy on the street came up to me. At first I thought he was a beggar, judging by his ripped t-shirt and haggard appearance. Turns out he just wanted to talk. He had lived in the United States before and spoke a surprising amount of English. He figured- I´m a gringo, he´s lived in my country before, we should be friends! That´s how a lot of people are around here. Very friendly and talkative, I like that.

As I´m typing this I just realized he IS a beggar. He was eating a piece of bread out of a trash bag and when I asked him where he lived he said I could always find him around those particular streets, dodging the question. I now feel very dumb. Poor guy, he went from living in the Land of the Free to begging in the streets all day in the Land of the Very Angry Sun.

After the beggar I hopped on the Metro-Via bus which took me to the Terminal. For those of you who have never been down south the Terminal is always the place to find a bus to anywhere in the country. It took me a while to figure out how the system worked but I found my bus, paid my .25 cents, and hopped on. I was going to take the bus home but then I figured I would stop at an internet cafe, or ¨cyber¨as they are called here. Looking at the little box at the top of my screen I see that I owe almost $5. I have been here a long, long time. I wish I could just book out of here and not pay it. Sometimes having morals sucks.