Las Mujeres Son Malvadas

We arrived home last night, tired and hungry, after a six-hour layover in Houston. Have you ever been to the airport in Houston? My god, that airport. Why is there nothing to eat there that wouldn't be out of place in a fourth-rate mall food court? We canvassed the entire place just looking for something that wasn't deep-fried in lard, dropped on the floor, and then deep-fried again for good measure, and the closest we came was some tacky Mexican-themed joint where we winced as the nuked Kraft Singles squished out of the seams of our quesadillas. God knows, I'm not exactly the healthiest of eaters or anything, but could you not just give me the option of a salad, Houston airport? Just the hint of one?

There is so much to say about Ecuador that I'm not even sure where to start---and 10pm on a Monday night doesn't seem the right time to be starting it either. Suffice to say, we had an absolutely brilliant time, and if you haven't been on vacation this year yet, I highly recommend you do. By day three, we were both like "more? there's still more of this to go?" as it occured to us that we still had another six whole days of excitement ahead of us, a whole six days of SOMEONE ELSE MAKING THE BED.

I took eleven million pictures, of course, and Sean took about sixty million, so between us you should be able to get a fairly accurate portrayal of what Ecuador looks like, or at least what Ecuador looks like with us in it. We visited Quito, Banos, Cuenca, and the Otavalo region, and I've only uploaded my pictures from Quito so far; if you're interested, they're here. Do be warned, they're pretty much the most boring ones from the whole trip---nothing against Quito, of course, I'm just kind of a crappy photographer---so the rest should be a whole lot better. Which is to say, they might actually have some color in them, rather than just being a whole series of different shades of gray.

I shall tell you some proper Ecuadorian stories at some point later---hopefully a point at which I've actually unpacked, rather than just spilling the entire contents of my backpack on the bedroom floor and wading, quite literally, through it---but I'll leave you with something which will surely give you the same little frisson of pleasure (or rather deep, intense pain masquerading as pleasure) as it gave me. Guess what I should see when I turned the television on in the hotel room the first night we arrived?

Oh no, they didn't.

Oh yes, they did.

Apparently, Ecuador is in need of some Secret Bachelor Tuesday recaps of its own. I know just the girl.