the dogs are restless

we have two dogs. they´re pretty big pups, one´s a mottled black and off-white while the other is more tan and brown. they live in the front yard/patio area and occasionally venture inside when they sneak in past someone with their hands full. the whole time i´ve been here no-one has taken them for a walk, although they stay pretty slim despite the seemingly endless supply of dogfood in their bowls.

anyway, they are guard dogs and that´s what they do - guard. i do not as much elicit an ear toss when i come up to the gate at the front of the house. other passerby however receive a deluge of barks that would peel paint and then make it cower in the corner. while this behaviour may be conducive to keeping undesirables out of the house, it also makes for the most unpleasant of sleeping conditions. the one dog (i don´t know his name... let´s call him sam) does the brunt of the patrols and lashes out with a barrage of barks at the slightest movement in the street. he continues the display until the offending individual is a good 100, 200 feet away, just for good measure. and, of course, he works shifts and therefore is just as likely to bellow in the middle of the night as the middle of the day.

there is another dog, a poodle, that lives across the street and whose owners have the strange and twisted habit of locking in the gated portion of their window ledge on the second floor. the dog doesn´t even have a turning radius of room and howls in a plaintive kind of wail for eons at a time until someone eventually rescues him. i haven´t met or seen these people but i hate them for doing such a thing to the poor dog.

i visited mall del sol today. decided that it´s only about a 20 minute walk away and in a very safe neighbourhood (read: rich) so i took off for a few hours. now, today was hot. very hot. a flashing sign along the road flashed 38 degrees as i passed and although that might be stretching it, it was still a scorcher. i passed a few interesting buildings along the way as well including the newly completed world trade center and the hilton colón.

World Trade Center

mall del sol is the biggest of the malls in the guayaquil area and one of the newest. it´s much like the average north american mall, but with a few more swanky stores thrown in. it also has a huge supermaxi that reminds me of hiper paiz in guatemala - like a walmart basically, one of the big ones with food and such. i walked around and stared at all the stuff that was there but didn´t buy anything. ecuador is not much of a bargain for most things. i had thought of a radio to plug into the wall so i wasn´t burning batteries all the time but nothing took my fancy.

that was about it though. i made my way back and have been relaxing for the better half of the day, enjoying the break before we get back to work tomorrow. oh yeah, in ecuador the second and third are holidays, and because monday was the first, they gave people that day off too.