Burros and PB&J

So no Cuenca yet. I went to the bus station to check out the departure times and these two Ecuadorian policemen started talking about me and laughing. I wanted to ask them, ¨Que? Nunca ven una mujer antes? (translation: What? You´ve never seen a woman before?)¨ followed by a few words I won´t write. But instead, I just left pissed off. I´ve never really had much of a problem with cops, but when they act like asses and feel like they can behave that way and get away with it just because they´re cops, well, that´s just tacky.

So I did a good thing today. I ran into Alejandro (the Colombian salsa dancer; salsa dancer does not equate with being gay here) on the street after the incident with the fuzz and he invited me to go hiking. It´s a beautiful day in Baños so I packed a lunch, hee, hee. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with some weird orange cookies. PB&J is not known in these here parts. He had never had one before. Ah, HA! Blackberry jam, creamy peanut butter, 7 grain bread with salted peanuts stuck in the middle...he loved it! Who knew that PB&J hadn´t made it to South America?! Sure, it´s nice to be the one experiencing new things, foods, sights, but it´s also pretty to cool to be able to share some of your own culture while abroad. I asked him about the organ hunting thing too. He´d never heard about it before. He got upset. Oops. Maybe Ecuadorians don´t tell you to your face what they actually think about you and ¨your people.¨ I can only imagine what they must say about mine, especially being on the US dollar and all. I saw a cartoon in yesterday´s paper. Bush was in a bed, under the covers, with dream clouds about his head. In the clouds there was a map of the world and the whole world was covered in stars & stripes. The caption read: Bush´s Utopia. Kind of an oxymoron, eh?