Ecuador Realities

So some of the realities of Ecuador are starting to sink in. I took our rent money to the landlady and asked her if we had received our electric bill yet. She reached into her desk and pulled out the bill and handed it to me. I was shocked. In the States we are used to a $300-$400 electric bill during the summer months. Of course, here in the mountains the weather stays the same pretty much year round. There are no air conditioners or heating systems, they just aren't needed. Our consumption of electricity is lighting, the electric shower heads, refrigerator, toaster oven, coffee maker, computers, and phone chargers.

So you can imagine my surprise to see that our electric bill for the month was $5.30. I reached in my pocket and paid the bill. I reminded Lorie that we will at some point have to refill our propane tank that is used for cooking. We have started saving up the $2.50 needed to do that. In order to get that refilled though we have to listen for the daily gas truck as it travels thru town. It plays a catchy tune that lets us know to take the empty tank down to the street and wait for them to stop. We hand them our empty tank and $2.50 and they give us a full tank. We can save a $1.00 if we want to drive the tank to the refill station....but without a car it would end us costing us more with the taxi fare.

Yes it is quite different and a lot less complicated life here. We did have our first scheduled power outage Sunday morning. I say scheduled but we didn't find out about it till it went out. It made for an interesting morning but nothing was missed, we could still boil water for coffee and the croissants from the bakery never tasted so good.