DIE! Sincerely, Your Phone Company.

I don’t have a whole lot in the way of major events to keep you all up to date on…but I learned from my recent hiatus that my blog is missed when it goes on vacation! So I shall post more of my daily life for your entertainment. As boring as it is to me, I suppose it’s novel for anyone in a different country.

Let’s start with the mystery of the pipe-men. When I arrived in Quito, there was one guy who hung around on a street corner nearby, on my walk between home and the Ecovía stop. He had a small backpack and a pipe with a spigot. He never did anything as far as I could see, just sat on the kneewall at the edge of the sidewalk and watched people go by, always with pipe and spigot in hand.

After a little while, maybe a couple of weeks, he was joined by another guy, also with a backpack, pipe, and spigot. Soon the two of them were joined by a third backpacked man, but this one had a paint roller. Now, three and a half months later, there are twelve of them in the space of one block, most backpacked and all wielding either a pipe-and-spigot assembly or a paint roller. I have still never seen them do anything I would catorize as either active or useful. They just hang out, talk to each other, hold their spigots (yeah, that didn’t sound like I wanted it to), and always stare at me as I walk by. I have to wonder, if I come back here to visit in a year or two, how many will there be by then? Will they have launched a hostile takeover of Jipijapa?

The other amusement that comes immediately to mind is that I was just told to die by my phone company. No, there was no typo in that sentence. I received a text message about half an hour ago from Movistar, my cell phone service company, containing the following: “Muerete! pero de risa! Diviertete escuchando cachos el primero es GRATIS!RESPONDE este mensaje con la letra S y escucha un cacho por semana.” (All grammatical errors original to Movistar, not me.) This translates to, “Die! but of laughter! Amuse yourself listening to jokes the first is FREE!RESPOND this message with the letter S and listen to a joke every week.”

Only in Ecuador would my phone company, who I regularly pay money to, tell me to die.