Don't Worry, Be Happy

I resisted titling this blog, "As Faro as the Eye Can See," for two reasons. First, it's a really bad pun. Second, I'm still trying to finish my paper, so I won't write much about Grupo Faro tonight. Maybe I'll recycle the title tomorrow when I have more time. It'll still be a bad pun, but consider yourself forewarned.

Instead, the title refers to the song playing at this, my latest Internet cafe of the day. The only available station to plug in my laptop was directly beneath the speaker (which is hidden by a hanging blue globe) so I can hear it very, very well. Don't Worry, Be Happy always makes me think of the seventh grade, when I more or less failed first sewing and then typing at Nobel Junior High before fleeing the country for a school in Chile. People would whistle it non-stop in the halls. Since I couldn't whistle (I still can't) I hummed it.

A few minutes ago, I stopped at a convenience store to buy a bottle of water and some chocolate for energy. The music there was traditionally Andean in style, relying heavily on a traditional flute called the quena. (It's worth clicking on the link to see not just the instrument but also a cute alpaca.) My friend Paula once bought a quena at a train station in Aguas Calientes, near Cuzco. Anyway, I was so dazed from paper-writing that my first thought on entering the store was, "Wow, they're playing musica Andina here!" Only afterward did it hit me that I was in the Andes and this made a certain sense.

I blame the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Specifically, its archives, which don't work very well. Some quick moments from the day before I dive back into them and into my third-to-last paper (ever?):

At the supermarket, the cashier asked me where I was from. I said, "Boston." About a quarter of the time this evokes a wistful sigh and John Kerry's name. This cashier, however, said, in very good English, "Boston! That's where Harvard is, yes?" I confirmed it, and he went on to explain that he would like to apply to Harvard for business school. We traded e-mail addresses.

I discovered that the tiny memo pad I grabbed on my way out the door to LAX contains all my notes from a trip Sasha and I took a few years ago to Kosovo. Maybe I'll type some of them up as a sort of retro-blog.

My cab fare to Grupo Faro was $1.87, and my bottle of water at the supermarket $0.18. I maintain that Ecuador did not dollarize the economy as much as it pennyized it.

At Grupo Faro HQ, which doubles as Orazio's and Eli's apartment, we dealt with a very slippery spatula, brainstormed ways to increase school attendance among Ecuadorian children, and debated whether shrimp scampi could survive ten days in the freezer. I also reheated some soup and earned that new civil servants in Ecuador make at most about $300 a year--and that's if they have connections.