snow angels in ashtrays

that's how i feel right about now. we went out last night, andy, his friend, julia (a german working with an architect in town and staying with nancy), and i. i was slipping out for a run at 9:15, the best time of day because it's less hot and often a wind is whipping up to cool you off, and ran into nancy who mentioned that we were going out at 10. well, 10 turned to 11 before andy showed up, and then we played guitar and chatted a bit before venturing out.

bars in guayaquil, those in the "safe" parts of town are very expensive. for most the cover is at least 10 bucks, and sometimes this includes a free drink or two, and sometimes it doesn't. as we were driving around last night we saw a few trendy places where you can't get in unless you fork over a whopping 30 bucks and this does not include imbibations. and the places are packed, loads of semi-dressed teens and twenty-somethings waiting in line, chatting on their cellphones and drowning themselves in second hand smoke. one of the trendiest places is this strip called kennedy mall - a handful of bars each with the requisite inflatable beer bottle facing the street (more of a pedestrian walkway, with cordoned areas to prevent cars from taking out dozens of drunken patrons), each with a crazy cover charge. we drove up to it, made an awkward u-turn amidst the throngs and then high-tailed it out of there.

the thing was, julia wanted to dance and while us gents were lukewarm on the idea we wished to appease her (you don't want to anger the germans...). so we drove the length of the (safe parts of the) city looking for a discoteca in which i would not have to sell my liver to afford the cover charge (and then have to stick to drinking orange juice).

earlier we had dropped by a party in a rich part of town to hang out with some friends of andy. the place was huge and beautiful, if a little too starkly white, but the pool and foosball tables were nice touches, the fireplace in the living room slightly out of place (a fireplace... in guayaquil?). but the patio was throbbing with people as the music churned out the slow-paced dance grooves that everyone seems to love here (salsa, merengue, cumbia...?, not the music of the kids here).

so we're driving, and finally julia concedes that finding a discoteca, both safe and cheap, is not in the cards. we end up hitting a pool joint overlooking a sideroad in urdesa. it's a nice place, very unassuming and reminiscent of anything back home. the tables are threadworn, the cues bent at oblique angles, but the beer is cold and cheap. we play for an hour and a half, down a jug of beer and the total is 6 bucks. the sucky part is that all three of them smoke, andy's friend like the world is ending in ten minutes. julia wasn't going to smoke because she has this wicked cough but was talked into it within, oh, about three minutes. the pool place was a cloud forest of marlboros. i had to swish my pool cue in front of me, breaking up the fog, to align my shot. a lot of people smoke here, especially amongst us ecoclubers. you would think that people interested in issues of ecology and health wouldn't smoke, but you would be sorely and utterly wrong.