DAY 17: For the past week and a half, I had fallen into a routine in which I'd wake up, shower and have breakfast with Arne and Blanca. Things were different this morning. It was Arne's last day in the house, since he was planning to move to his friend's place a couple of days before he starting work in a hospital the following week.

Since Arne didn't have school, he was in no rush at breakfast -- nor was Blanca because she wasn't going to school either. As a teacher, she and all of her fellow teachers across the country, were on strike. They were sick and tired of only making ten dollars a day.

I've realized that although Ecuador uses the US Dollar, everything is about 20%-25% the price that it is in the States. For example, a private room in a hostel in Quito is about eight bucks a night. Multiply that by five and it's forty, which sounds about right for what it is. Cab fare from the airport into town is six bucks; multiply that by five and it's thirty. A 32 oz. beer at this bar we always go to is $1.12; multiply that by five and its some number that I can't do in my head because I suck at math and went to art school.

By this rationale, Blanca made just fifty bucks a day in American standards, which is still pretty shitty when you have to deal with annoying kids all day. Blanca almost spit out her tea when I told her minimum wage in America was over five bucks per hour.

I LEFT MY GERMAN BROTHER IN HIS BEDROOM (picture above) and walked to school without a compadre for the first time since I began living at the house. However, it was also my last time, because it was my tenth day in my ten-day crash course.

My tutor Rosa and I went over more verbs conjugated in the past tense and I felt pretty good having had a grasp on it. I was feeling really confident in my Spanish -- until I asked about the difference between para and por, which put my brain in a mind twister again. (Both words mean "for," but are used differently depending on the context.)

For my final "exam," I simply had to -- with no help from Rosa or a dictionary -- write a message in the school's guestbook. I wrote:

Cuando estuve perdido en Quito hace dos semanas,
quise apprender Español y encontré la escuela Beraca.
Con mi profesora Rosa, aprendí muchos palabras que
voy a trater no olvidar...pero depende de las cervezas!

¡Muchos gracias Beraca y Rosa!

It was a tad more polite than what I had written in my homework the day before: "¡Hasta la vista, puta!"

IN THE AFTERNOON I grabbed a quick shawarma for a buck -- that's five bucks if you can do that math in your head (I used a calculator) -- and went back to school for a quick last game of Cuarenta. Then I met up with Arne and his friend Jurgen and we hopped in a cab to Cinemark, a couple of miles away. Cinemark is just like your average American big multiplex theater -- video games, popcorn, soda -- but with one major difference: a ticket is just $2.60. I couldn't even imagine what a matinee price was.

While almost all movies that are exported from Hollywood into other countries aren't released until months after the US release, producer Joel Silver promised a worldwide release date of the third installment of the Matrix trilogy. Posters for "Matrix Revoluciones" were everywhere with its tagline "Todo lo que tiene un inicio tiene un fin" ("Everything that has a beginning has an end.") Just about every teenager that just got out of school was there. I fit right in.

"It's gonna be in English right?" I asked Arne as we sat in the theater as the advertising slides ran.

"Yes, it has to be. I think of all Latin America has films in English with Spanish undertitles. That's how it was in Mexico when I saw Snatch."

The previews began, the first one being for Disney's latest soon-to-flop animated picture Brother Bear. To my surprise, it was entirely dubbed in Spanish.

"Uh, it's in Spanish," I pointed out to Arne.

"Ja, that's weird."

I knew I took had just completed a crash course in Spanish, but I wasn't sure I was ready to sit through an entire movie dubbed in it. The only thing I probably would have picked on would be "¡Señor Anderson!"

The trailer for S.W.A.T. came on, in English with Spanish subtitles, which was a pleasant surprise. I thought perhaps they only dubbed the animated movies in Spanish, but then came the trailer for El Retorno del Rey (Return of the King, the third installment of El Señor de los Anillos). It was entirely dubbed in Spanish with voices that closely matched those of Gandalf, Samwise and Gollum.

The green ripple of the Warner Bros. studio lot appeared and zoomed out to the WB logo. I had no idea what I was in store for until the main title sequence began. Sure enough -- and luckily for us -- The Matrix was in English with Spanish subtitles. However, most of the dialogue consisted of simple, deadpan one-liners using the verb "believe," that I probably could have figured it out had it been dubbed anyway.

Allow me to digress for a bit with my comments on Matrix Revoluciones without giving it away. I enjoyed it. In fact, I thought it was much better than the second one; it didn't rely on kung-fu or that 360° Bullet-Time "Matrix Effect" as much as Reloaded. Instead, it relied on good ol' fashioned war action, with an amazing edge-of-your-seat sequence of machines vs. mechs. Sure the dialogue was pretty lame, and the love story was unmistakenly written by a guy, but it in the end, it was definitely worth at least the $2.60 I spent on it.

THE GERMAN GUYS AND I took a cab back to GringoLand for happy hour. Well, at a buck a beer, it's always happy hour. Afterwards, Arne went his separate way to his new place while I went back to Blanca's. Arne's room had been cleaned out already, and I was an only son. Arne missed out though, because for dinner we had nice big juicy steaks.

Later on, I ran into Navid in an internet cafe. He was busy involved in a cybersex four-way chatroom on Yahoo! Messenger, and just for the cafe's hourly rate of just ninety cents. Even if that translates to $4.50 in the US, that still ain't bad.