Odds and ends

A bunch of random stories, facts, and weird occurances from my travels, in no particular order (some may be repeats from earlier blog entries, but I can't remember what I did and didn't write about already)...

-So there are some weird breeds of dogs here. What prompts me to write about this first above any other strange stories is that this morning,while eating breakfast at a way too expensive restaurant in Aguas Calientes, Rachel and I realized that the entire town of A.C. is populated by a really odd type of mutt. They must have all come from the same male or female. The dogs are all long and skinny like dachshunds, have the face of a pug/pekingese, and some have the curly hair and coloring of a cocker spaniel. Some of them are incredibly ugly and look like aliens, but others seem to have gotten all the cute genes.

-Nobody has change here. Not in Ecuador, not in Peru, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that it's the same in every other Latin American country. Today alone we had to apologize to 4 different businesses because we didn't have anything smaller than a 20 or 50 sole bill (about $10.40 and $25.60). And this is when we only needed about 6-10 soles back in change. At the restaurant we had dessert at tonight, the poor chef grabbed my 20 sole bill and began to run back and forth between all the businesses in the street to see if someone had 7 soles in change... all the while wearing his white uniform and tall chef's hat. I apologized, but what am I to do when the ATM only gives me 50 and 100 sole bills? (I don't even want to think about how I am going to manage to get my four 100 sole bills changed in the next few days when I run out of smaller bills... haha.)

-Comments of the day:
¨OH... MY... GOD!¨as Rachel and I walked past a teenager on the street corner.
¨Hey baby, you need some dinner?¨as I walked past a restaurant.

-Everything has the word ¨turistico¨in it... and it´s considered a good thing here. Restaurant turistico, Bus turistico, Clothing shop turistico. I guess it's higher quality when it´s ¨touristy¨so the locals here think that tourists want to go to a place that´s blantantly labeled ¨tourist spot!¨. Not quite.

-Hassidic Jews are everywhere... standing on a street corner, walking on a hill in the middle of the Peruvian countryside, strolling through the bus station in Quito.