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Living in any 3rd world country is not for the faint of heart or the impatient. Especially it is not for those that despise laziness and stupidity unless your goal is to be a mass murderer which you will be driven to become after many years of living amongst these lazy and stupid people. Let me give you some examples. Today I went to a big clothing store to buy a shirt. The 20 year old saleswoman asked me how she could help me. I told her in Spanish that I was looking for a medium shirt. She immediately said that they didn't have any. I was shocked and demonstrated my feelings while looking around at the hundreds of shirts on hangers all around me and I said "you have no medium shirts?". She said no. I replied that "I will now find one and prove you wrong" and I walked away feeling mad and frustrated and insulted (because maybe she just didn't want to help me because I'm a gringo). As I was rummaging thru the shirts she walked up to me and asked if I was looking for a brand called Medium. With a flustered exasperated expression I sarcastically quipped "there is no such thing as a Medium brand!", wanting to end that sentence with "you fucking moron". She said "oh, well then yes we do have medium shirts". !!!**^^%% arghh! They do things so incredibly dumb that you think surely this has to be some pretense that they play as a joke on us who think they are all Neanderthals. Well, surprise of all surprises, it's not! They really are that stupid. They really are ignorant animals. This woman was not some dirty faced raggedy clothed street vendor. She was clean, clothed in the stores sales uniform, nicely groomed. I would of reported her unbelievable stupidity to the manager but I know that they have to pay workers a healthy sum by law when they fire them, whether or not the worker deserves to be fired, which is why they don't fire someone except for extreme reasons. This law is in place to force some kinda stability in the marketplace because otherwise there would be a huge constant worker turnover as the bosses desperately seek intelligent hard working employees (which are as rare as doodoo birds here). And they can't even grasp the concept of a waiting line. When I go to the post office and arrive with no one before me I start my business with the clerk and people will come into the office behind me. But they don't get behind me. One will nudge in on the right side and the next one will nudge in on the left side. I really want to give them a piece of my mind but it would be like trying to teach a 5 year old how to drive. They just aren't ready for learning civilized behavior. I'm hypoglycemic and when I'm waiting for food I do not ever let these people cut the line before me. I yell out "back to the end of the line buddy!" in a loud and threatening voice and they always cower and get back in line knowing I'm 2 seconds away from leaving an indention of my knuckles on their face. Oh, and have I mentioned that, in addition to their laziness and stupidity, they are all liars and actually pride themselves in a good lie when they get away with it? In a 1st world country ingeniousness, hard-working, good grades in school, etc are the reasons for feeling proud of yourself. Here they pride themselves in their ability to deceive. And when you catch them in a lie and point it out to them they continue with the same lie as if their persistence will magically make it true. The other day I went to a video store I don't normally visit to buy a pirated video CD. (they are all pirated and the government allows it.) I picked out two movies and asked if they were direct copies of the original CD or whether they were filmed by a video camera inside the movie theatre. She said only one of them was "original". I took it home and big surprise, it wasn't. Dumb people. They gain one dollar with a lie and lose a client that could of been the source of a hundred dollars over the course of one year. (I watch a movie that I buy locally almost every night.) I have been trying to buy locally as much as possible from feeling sorry for their poverty but when you realize that honesty, integrity, and trust are the basis for business you see how these people guarantee their own poverty by their lack of values. I have finally decided to stop buying videos locally and just get one or two on-line subscriptions for movies and TV shows. I'll just run the appropriate cable from my laptop to my TV to have a normal sized display. I used to be a patient and "nice" person, spiritual and all. Now I am losing it. Like so many other gringos I see that my original home was not so bad after all and I am looking for a way back. Come on down gringo, but be aware that year after year that splinter will just dig deeper underneath your fingernail until it becomes unbearable and you run screaming back thankful that your country will take you back before you went on a killing spree. In Cuenca there are huge absolutely enormous cathedrals. The story goes that the Spaniard priests made construction slaves out of the local natives to make them. So immediately you tend to feel sorry for the natives until you here the rest of the story combined with your own bad experiences with these people. The priests had no moral dilemma with making them slaves because they believed they were less than human as they saw their ignorance and brutality and how the men drank themselves to unconsciousness with strong alcoholic drinks. Also they knew of how the men often raped their own daughters, which still happens in the majority of families of indigenous people here. The priests said they "had no soul" which I think you will agree with after being here more than a year.
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