School is over for the day, and I have a depressing stack of papers to grade. So it is another "Grade Date" with the wife, which is fine by me. For the moment, though, I have foregone the act of grading and instead I'm checking out the crowd. This is mostly forced on me since my laptop battery is low and the only table close to an available outlet is a wobbly thing that would make reading and marking papers to be pure torture.
I am sitting in the food court of "Mall del Sol" in Guayaquil, Ecuador, a modern mall that in many ways looks like something right out of the USA catalog. Down the way is a Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, Taco Bell and Burger King. Behind me is a McDonald's and an entrance to a Tony Roma's. Over by the corner I can see just a corner of the local theater's Cinemark sign. Thankfully, these altars to American fast food hegemony are surrounded by more local establishments like Comida Tipica Nacional and Pinguino.
There are other differences too. There is a massive widescreen monitor here that is showing the live soccer finale for the Europa League. The people are dressed very similarly to their Norteamericano cousins still have much different racial mixes - lots of Latinos and Mestizos but not a single African (too poor to come to a mall like this) for instance.
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