A David Lynch Kind of Day
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
When I get up in the morning, there’s a small dead gecko on the kitchen floor, ants swarming over the body. I find a broom and sweep it out the door, then go sit on the patio to eat my breakfast. A dead gecko before breakfast must be some kind of omen, right?
Later I shower, reach for my towel, & a giant roach crawls up my arm. Lee has to come kill it because I don’t have my contacts in yet, and I’m suddenly having a nervous breakdown.
We leave our apartment and walk down the hill to head into town. The road is a dirt track lined with wooden shacks, chickens, sad hungry kittens, & barky dogs. We walk along next to a garbage-choked gutter. Children play with a stick at the corner. It’s the full-on developing world scenario.
At the coffee shop by the beach, we sit down next to the older couple we chatted with yesterday, whose names are Israel and something—Liot? Maryam? Can’t remember. But they’re intense and energetic and 70 years old, and he lost one leg in Sidon, in the 80s, just above the knee. They’re overlanders, but they go home to Israel for about 4 months a year, & spend the rest in South America. I get the impression he’d like to see more of the world, but she insists on South America. I’m not sure why—she doesn’t like cities, or crowds, & seems uninterested in nature (they don’t hike, because of the prosthetic leg). As far as I can tell, she likes having pseudo indigenous experiences—like getting their van repaired, going on day tours, and hanging out in the coffee shop. Apparently (I was in the bathroom) she expressed surprise/disappointment to Lee that there are only foreigners & tourists in the coffee shop.
WTF? Locals don’t go to coffee shops & pay $2.50 for a cappuccino. THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE ELECTRICITY.
[Just to be clear, I highly approve of coffee shop sitting. But I am under no illusion that such behavior is in any way bringing me into contact with ‘the locals.’ It’s absolutely not.]
Anyway, we got sucked into a long chat with them yesterday (they told us all about a young woman they met at one point who was riding her bike all over South America with her boyfriend, although they broke up after a while, so now they give her donations occasionally for her ‘work with the Amazonas people.’ Uh-huh.), so today, when there was a young man & his wife & kid sitting with them, I thought perhaps we could avoid a super long chat. The guy & his wife or whatever turned out to be even weirder, which is saying something. They’re Belorussian, although his family moved to Australia after the Soviet Union broke up. The wife & 5 year old speak no English, so he held court while they sat on the sidelines. So awkward.
He told us all about the documentary film he’s making about one of the local guys who carries boxes of fish from the boats to the market. We heard the guy’s whole life story. Note: there’s no there there, & when something like that starts with “to make a long story short,” maybe go order another coffee. Or announce that your parasite’s acting up again, & just leave. I wouldn’t watch that documentary if you paid me.
He also suggested the old folks overland across Africa, then proceeded to explain just how badly they’d be robbed. Well all right then. Definitely advise the one-legged old folks to go where they’re most certain to be carjacked & probably killed.
Central Asia, he said, would be less dangerous, but the weather would suck. “It all depends,” he said, “how you want to die.”
Then he launches into a whole thing about how SE Asia doesn’t feel like an adventure anymore.
He’d never heard of Suriname, French Guiana, & Guyana (which the seniors loved, because indigenous people), & when we said we’d decided not to go there because it was too logistically difficult, he suggested we take the bus. When the older couple crossed the land border from Brazil, they had visa problems, coupled with the worst roads they’d ever encountered. Awesome. Sure, we’ll take the bus. What could possibly go wrong?
Whatever. I could feel his desire for a pissing contest crackling through the air, but Lee didn’t bite, or worse, blunder in, so we wrapped it up before too long & went to get lunch.
We sat down at a place called Aloha, which we’d been trying to go to for days, but it’s apparently only open for lunch on the weekends. Google really has no idea around here.
My fries were stone cold in the middle. That was suboptimal. Lee said he thought the young woman sitting outside had been at the same restaurant as us the day before; I couldn’t see her, which was fine, because I hadn’t been able to see her the day before either. Whatever. I’m just going to sit here and eat my barely-not-frozen fries and wait for a dog to walk in with a human hand in its mouth. That could 100% happen here, because dogs wander in and out of everywhere, all day long, then they bark all night.
Then a very fat American man came & sat down at another outside table, along with a much older woman who seemed quite unstable on her feet. After a while, a young American woman (Really? I haven’t seen another American since we got here, and now today they’re popping out of the woodwork) walked by, & stopped & talked to them. She was quite loud, so we heard all about how she’s a missionary, has been riding a bicycle through Central America for 2.5 years, to 10 countries, & is continuing on south from here. (Okay: why do missionaries feel compelled to convert CHRISTIANS to Christianity????) She finally left, thank goodness, but then it got worse when a guy set up a speaker in the entrance & started singing. I asked for the bill so we could get the hell out of there.
But by the time we paid, he had finished singing, so for some reason, Lee felt compelled to stop & chat with the poor woman who’d been at the restaurant the day before, which she definitely had been. She’s Irish, training English teachers over in Montanito. She loves Puerto Lopez, & comes as often as she can. Puerto Lopez has everything! Even a proper grocery store & a great market! Okay—maybe if you’re from Ireland? I mean, it’s fine if you like shrimp, but otherwise the food is abysmal. All those “fresh juice” bars, down by the beach? They’re serving Tang. I bought cocoa powder the other day that literally has wood fibers in it. I made woody brownies. They were not my finest brownies, but when you’re eating your feelings, needs must.
While we were standing there talking to her, the elderly woman from the next table finished her cigarette and came over & said “Hi, I’m Pam,” and just jumped right in. She and her son (who is at least my age) are staying at the Victor Hugo Hotel, they’ve been living in Cuenca for 6 years, but they came here to check it out, & they loooooove it, it’s so tranquillo, so they’re gonna switch from their 2-bedroom at the Victor Hugo & get 2 one-bedrooms, & figure out whether they want to buy land, or build, or rent, or what. She had the deep, throaty voice of an old woman who’s been smoking for 60 or 70 years, and a very bad bowl cut. Later Lee wanted to know if she was male or female. She looked like Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van, or at the beginning of the 1st Exotic Marigold movie, seriously haggard & elderly. The son came over as well, scratching his beefy arms like crazy & sweating buckets.
Me? I’m still just waiting for that dog to run by with the human hand in its mouth. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.
They left, saying they were going to the grocery store.
We were planning to go to the grocery as well, so we decided to take the long way around, giving them time to go & get out. [I will go to great lengths to avoid having to chat in the grocery store—any grocery store—up to and including hiding out in an Ecuadorian fishing village.]
But about a block down the street, the missionary walked up to us, asking if we were American, & wanted to know if there was somewhere ‘safe’ she could get something to eat. She’d gone in somewhere, ordered, then gone to the bathroom, only to discover they had no water in the bathroom sink, so she freaked out and left (really? You’ve been in Latin America for two & a half years, & you think every restaurant you’ve been in had running water? Seriously?). Lee tells her to come with us, & we’ll show her some places that haven’t made us sick (yet).
She immediately launches into her routine about her missionary work, spreading yada, yada.
At this point, I realize she has a substantial goiter on the left side of her throat. I think, honey, maybe you should just go back to New York & get that checked out. Lack of sanitation in Puerto Lopez might be the least of your problems.
We walk her down the block and around the corner, to where some sort of construction has dug the ‘street’ into a giant mud puddle, & point her toward the pizza place, which appears to be open. She asks if we’d like to make a donation. I look around at the squalor of this village, here in nowheresville Ecuador, where people live in shacks that are made of plywood and cardboard, & mangy dogs lie around all day in the rutted dirt that passes for streets, while children wander barefoot, and I say, in my most spineless southernese, “No, not today, thanks.”
We did indeed run into Pam & her son at the grocery store. I had run out of tolerance for weird at that point, and while I couldn’t make myself be straight-up rude, I think I did manage to sound brusque. I certainly wasn’t sorority-girl chatty—I was busy looking for baking soda. I never did find it, which is unfortunate, because I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies, with wood flecks. I need to do some serious emotional eating.
Take care,
Lisa
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