Soccer on the Equator at 9348 Feet.

Had my first day off entirely to myself and went to go play some futbol with the locals. They were very intimidating with their official liga jerseys, matching socks and shoes, and needless to say, much better than the little kids we played with in the Galapagos (who were totally awesome).

But for some reason i was incredibly good! I don´t know what happened but i magically started playing the best soccer that i have ever played in my entire life. I was doing tricks and juggling around phenomenal players and doing diving headers towards the goal and scored one of the 4 goals that were made in the three hours we were playing, and assisted on the other! I am not trying to brag, but am just confused.

Anyway, i was very tired after this feat, went to bed at 6:30 pm and got up at 7 AM kinda confused that the whole night had gone by.

Before i played soccer and fell asleep yesterday though, i went and filmed at the "No More Child Labor" marathon por los Niños. I had figured that i would just get a little footage of the marathon to cut to during the documentary and so i only brought my camera with half its battery. When i got there though, i found out my one freind from working with the kids was organizing the whole thing and got it set up so that i could film from the back of a truck and follow the kids while they were jogging and therefore get some really terrific footage. Of course my camera just totally died THE VERY INSTANT THE STARTING PISTOL WAS FIRED!

I felt so bad and just had to pretend to film the rest of the marathon. I was really sad. It would have been really cool and good for the Doc.

One interesting note: When people see some guy in the back of a truck moving kind of slowly down the road they just hop in. Even while the guy driving the truck kept yelling at them and telling them the truck was just for me to film the marathon, more people just kept hopping on and refusing to leave even though i don´t know of anyway that they could have had any idea of where it was going. At our peak there were 14 men women and children cramped into the back of this little Pickup truck (including me). One lady ran up and just tossed her 3 year old in the back like this was the last spaceship to leave earth before the entire planet blew up. I didn´t stick around the truck at the end to see what happened to all these people who traveled with me.

One other note: Before the race i met a bunch of the kids i had been working with-Apparently i am easy to pick out from a large ecuadorian crowd. The starting point of the race was at the big famous lawn in front of the Basilica church, and every now-and-then some of the kids i knew would run up to me earnestly and drag me to a spot where we could see one of the tons of tour buses unloading, point towards the gringos unloading from the bus and ask, "¿es tu familia?"

My spanish was not nearly good enough to inform the kids that i was probably not related to all of the people coming off the tour busses just because they were otros gringos and this happened 4-5 time as other tour buses pulled into the area.