This is a Double Blog Kind of Day

Today was supposed to be Ecuador therapy day (if you read the last post you can see why I needed it).  Step 1.  sleep in and go nowhere - check.  Step 2.  Air all my complaints regarding Ecuador online to friends, family and anyone who will listen via the blog - check.  Step 3.  Go for a nice stress relieving run - had a little trouble with this one.  First of all, running in Ecuador is not in general very stress reducing.  There's an almost intolerable amount of pollution to contend with.  There are dogs ready and poised to chase you down.  The sun is extremely intense.  There are random holes you could lose a good sized child in to dodge.  And of course the pedestrian NEVER has the right of way.  One must stay absolutely positively alert to avoid danger of all kinds while running.  And one must never lose themselves to a song on the I-pod or zone out in any way for fear of losing one's life.  That being said, if you can believe it, running, especially for a gringa, gets especially interesting this week - Carnival Week (for a complete explanation of Carnival, please see http://clevelandersincuenca.blogspot.com/ paragraph 4 - Jordanne is much better at explaining these things than me.)  Basically Carnival is a week long Mardi Gras.  It's Loco!  And the main event is water ballons.  At any given time you can be pegged by a water balloon, a bucket of water, a water hose and sometimes worse.  Things will just continue to get worse as the week progresses, in fact service is even cancelled for the 4 main days of Carnival which will officially start Saturday.  Back to running.  So, I'm out, taking my "stress-reducing" run, one foot in front of the other, jamming to Franz Ferdinand when in an instant my butt is stinging and soaking.  I screamed something out, whipped around and gave the stink-eye to every innocent bystander in sight but there is not a guilty party to be seen.  That's the worst part.  These water-balloon-toting evil geniuses appear out of nowhere and are gone in an instant.  It was probably some kids in a truck with a really good aim.  I spent a few minutes wet and mad but then I realized it's not actually that big of a deal.  Next time the I-pod will just have to go in a ziplock bag.