sundays

guayaquil basically takes a 24 hour nap each time sunday rolls around. most stores board up tight and lonely security officers hold vigil outside leering at anyone who happens to walk by.

i was bored - it rained all night and most of the morning and i just wasn't feeling up to trekking it to the terminal to go to the meeting in milagro. so i stuck around the house working on the computer and downloading music and the like. well, nancy and her daughter got back from their trip north so that made for a bit of background noise anyway. but i was still bored out of my skull and needed to get out of the house. i decided to head on over to urdesa and kill some time before it was late enough to make phonecalls back to canada.

i took the bus over there and got off at erica estrada, the main drag. urdesa is the upscale part of town, a stretch of estrada looks like it was stolen from a semi-trendy part of l.a. or something. the roads are paving stones with decorative patterns delineating parking spaces and turning lanes. the median is landscaped with rocks and flowers and sits a good two feet off the road. the sidewalks are wide and tiled with shiny new floodlights hanging overhead. the stores in urdesa, or at least this 4 block span, are eclectic and utterly hedonistic. upscale furniture stores compete for space with gyms, spas, restaurants and cafés. a couple of banks, one of which resembles a smaller version of the white house, complete the picture. the whole scene is dreamlike, especially when compared to the utter poverty that defines the south and north ends of the city.

anyway i began walking up the street, peering in stores and shops, avoiding the gaze of guards and cleaning staff. the whole place was eerily vacant of people. a few places were busy - like baskin robbins - but this was only on the inside, it appeared that no one was either leaving or entering, only milling about within the air conditioned confines. sundays are like that - people are starved for something to do and end up either milling about the parks or making their way to an ice cream place. i've spent a couple of sundays in the malecon salado but really it's just an awkward experience as the only places to sit are park benches without proper shading and the sun can be relentless, regardless of the day. reminds me of xela in guatemala - sundays were lost days, when the streets emptied and people spent the day recovering from the night before.