Miscellaneous Shtuffs

I was going through my photos today, because I'm planning on posting several large posts soon about stuff that I've neglected to talk about but want to before I leave Ecuador, and I found a few random photos that I decided to put together in a mashup.

Just like American fast food business! In a land of three story KFC mega-complexes with their own guarded parking garages, I'm not surprised some places need to advertise more explicitly to keep up, especially since they're apparently trying to attract English-speaking customers.

This has happened more than once here: I've found multiple series of coins, minted well before I left the US, that I did not know existed. These were minted in 2007 and 2008 and like the Wampanoag Treaty series, I had never seen them before, revealing my near-100% complete reliance on credit cards in the States.

This is a fun story from the Galapagos. I came home to find my host family's 10-year-old grandkid in this shirt:

If you can't tell, it says "Svedka Adult Entertainment: Get More BANG for your Buck." Her mother had no idea what it meant but wasn't as surprised as I expected when she found out. Apparently this sort of thing has happened before. I asked her where she got it and it turns out, there's a woman who lives in the Galapagos whose father lives in Scandinavia somewhere. She goes to visit him about once a year and when she does, she brings back a ton of t-shirts to sell to locals for cheap, and apparently a decent chunk of the town has Svedka shirts now.

Speaking of things that are a little inappropriate, I still just can't get over the birth statue in the entrance to the university building.

Of all the nude statues around the building, this is the one that really makes me question the interior decorator's choices. Who thought that would make good decoration for a school building? Ew.

Here's something I've noticed in both my Galapagos family's kitchen and my new Quito family's kitchen: the abuse of non-stick pans. In the Galapagos, they have several pans and a plastic spatula that would work well for, say, cooking eggs, but instead they used a metal spoon and I ended up with little teflon flakes in my food.

Okay, back to the highlight of my time in the Galapagos: the elections. For some reason, I never put up a photo of the hilarious dancing vote mascots. My favorite is the excited ballot lady second from the left. The slogan says, "Give life to your vote." Ha ha ha... Seriously, I can't put into words just how thrilling the elections here were.

And here's a silly sign from Quito that I really like:

It's an advertisement for a private high school. "Here, we change the world."

Ecuadorian Hot Chocolate

Popcorn in soup was unexpected, but a charming surprise. This, on the other hand, is a custom I will never, ever be able to adopt.

That there is cheese and hot chocolate. It sounds innocent enough until you realize that the cheese goes in the hot chocolate until it's gooey and stringy, and then it's eaten out with a spoon. There's something about that that I just can't handle.

Weirdly enough, though, I love putting cheese in soup until it melts and gets all stringy and I can eat it out of the bowl in a glob. But there's just something about mixing the savory with the sweet in this context that really gets to me. Maybe the moral of the story is that I should put popcorn in my hot chocolate?