Writing my journal

It was a crisp, bright afternoon much like all others. It´s like that when you´re on the Ecuator - seasons are perk this country doesn´t enjoy. From the window of the internet cafe, I watched as buses made their way up the crowded street, past the racist restaurant signs and heavily armed security guards. As always, men hung out of the doors shouting the route and urging people to get on.

This is odd - surely if you want to get on the bus, you just will. The same happens in long distance coach terminals. It´s like if you went to the station back home and there were men behind desks grabbing you and shouting Crewe or Sheffield repeatedly, in case you were still undecided.

So anyway. Ecuador is well known as a great place to write your journal and I´d been waiting for this moment since I wrote the last entry, possibly before. The music, coming from a tape recorder on the desk of the woman administering the shop, was a mix of reggaeton, salsa and the occasional Bob Marley.

For security, I wrapped my bag around my leg like it tells you to do in the Lonely Planet. Breathing heavily from a combination of anticipation and altitude, I went first to the BBC website. This was an instinctive move; I knew better than to do email first, because I might forget to do BBC but I would never forget email. Or Facebook for that matter.

News first, because you wont forget Sport. Same thinking.

While conidering the perplexing ability of ex-footballers to write numerous lines of prose without actually saying anything, something caught my eye.

In the corner of the screen was the logo for MSN Messenger. - Let me see. You never know...

Boring. Almost nobody. Shit, I haven´t spoken to her in ages. Do they take it personally when you sign straight out like that? -

Thankfully, for the sake of my journal, email brought almost nothing save the usual eight offerings from the Graduate Recruitment Bureau encouraging me to sign up for a position in a tax company. I say almost nothing because there was also a second invitation to join ´Save Somerville Formal Hall on a Thursday´. It currently has 14 members.

I know that information because I could´t resist signing in, ostensibly to turn the invitation down. In reality I wasted 45 minutes looking at photos of a girl I haven´t seen since primary school.

And I didn´t even know there was a university in Grimsby.

As darkness fell (in about 3 minutes) outside, I focused my mind on the task in hand. I collected my thoughts before forgetting what I was doing and going back to the BBC website. I knew this was wrong, and so stared blankly at the Ñ key before trying once again to get the AT sign. This is never easy because it´s on the same key as both 2 and " so shift never works. In the end you sometimes have to copy and paste AT from a website. As I did this, Sean Paul came on the radio.

I thought to myself - this is what travel is all about. -

A group of teenage school-children bundled in and occupied most of the spare machines playing network games. At the back of the room I could make out the faint noise of a guy talking on the phone from whithin a calling booth. And, spectacularly, the girl next to me appeared to be having a video-phone conversation.

I wrote, and the words came out quickly. Without being able to explain why, I realised the experience was completely different from writing my journal in Peru or Bolivia or Argentina. Maybe it was the speed of the conection. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn´t watch videos on YouTube because FlashPlayer wasn´t installed.

After barely a few hours, I had finished my entry. I felt almost a sense of loss. I looked at the window at the bottom of the screen, which said $1.24. Then I walked slowly to the woman at the desk, and at the same time instinctively checked my valuables were still there in my money belt.

I said ´listo´, which means ready or clever but in this case ready. She said $1.24, except in words not numbers and in Spanish. This wasn´t a surprise, as I had already seen the amount on the screen.

I almost had the right change, but not quite. I had $1.21. When I realised this I wasn´t sure whether she´d prefer that or my $10 note because people are funny here about change so I showed her the coins and the note and let her decide. After a few moments she