"Can You Hear Me Now?"

There were a lot of things I was looking forward to about coming to Ecuador. At the top of the list was escaping from technology. Although I don't have a cell phone here, I found out very quickly that avoiding them was going to be nearly impossible. On our first day in Ecuador, we took a tour of Quito, the capital.  I'm sure we looked like typical tourists, carrying our book bags and taking pictures of anything and everything.  Looking around, I noticed a group of school boys laughing at us. One pulled out his camera phone and started taking pictures of us... and made no attempt to be discreet about it. Later that day in a gift shop at the equator, the cashier's phone went off; it had a very obnoxious, poppy ringtone. Even though there were a quite a few customers in the shop, she proceeded to answer her phone and talk. I found that both surprising and rude. Later that week, there was a band playing in the restaurant at which we were eating lunch. After playing for about five minutes, the flute player walked out mid song to answer his cell phone.  A couple minutes later, he returned, picked up his flute, and continued playing... I couldn't help but laugh.  Finally, while we were on a bridge walk over the canopy in the Amazon, our tour guide was using his cell phone. He wasn't rude about it at all (we were all off having fun), but the fact that he was able to use a cell phone in the Amazon was just mind-blowing to me.  He later said the canopy bridges are where he gets the best reception.  It's ironic that with the spread of cell phones comes both a sense of interconnectedness and a sense of rude and annoying self-involvement. Regardless, the spread of cell phones to developing countries such as Ecuador is really quite amazing; the ability to pick up a phone in the Amazon and call a small, remote village many miles away is a convenience that was probably unimaginable 10 years ago.  Prior to cell phones, it could have taken days to relay a simple message between secluded villages. Because of this, cell phones are a perfect example globalization; they represent a shrinking of both time and space.