My New Family.

I live with two amazing roomates and a host family here in Ecuador. The host family consists of a really nice mom, two spoiled, snotty boys (still fully supported by their parents) in their early thirties, and a bi-polar dad.

Our worst (from here on out the phrases, "we," "our," and so forth refer to my two roomates and I)nightmare is to hear the phrase "for example." If you ask him a simple question like where the nearest place to make copies is, well, you only do that once. He will go off about stories when he needed to copy papers, he'll become nosey about what you need copied and why, and he'll go off on about eleven "for examples" about other people that have needed to copy things in the past. I don't know if he will ever actually answer your question or not because I've never seen it get that far. He's always inturupted in about the second or third hour with a, "Oh, I see. Thank you very much, ok, I need to go now. Thanks."

On the other end of the spectrum, he will invent things that your agreed to or that you've said, like spending a saturday in the park with him. Then when we're ready to head out Saturday morning to go see some Pre-Inca Ruins he'll be all confused and angry that you're not going to spend the day with him and slam doors and refuse to speak to you for two days. Then the following monday he'll give you an hour lecture about keeping promises and not asking to have an escort in the park if you don't plan on following through. Then he'll move on to "for example," how they used to do all sorts of things with former volunteers, but they never kept their word either, and so they had to stop organizing activities like this.

He's also quite a perve. He's just always talking, in the words of a roomate, rubbish. He likes to tell the story of some former volunteers from Austria who liked to come to the breakfast table in their underwear, and he respected that. He respected their culture, and if we wanted to do the same, he would respect us as well. He's just such a gentleman. He also likes to talk about movies and books where old men hook up with young women. He also likes to talk about how women should always wear skirts and dresses and express their femininity. He also likes to tell the same joke over and over again. When talking about an unattractive girl he'll say, "She's a seven...with her blouse off." It's a wierd house.