¡Que viva Michigan! (En el Ecuador, pero.)

Frequently you see or hear things here that make you unable to keep a straight face. Sometimes it’s because it is just so unusual (for you), like a random dancing monkey, or a family of four (with one sleeping child included) on a single motorcycle, or a poodle riding on the handlebars of a seventy-year-old man’s bike, with his tongue sticking out like he had his head out a car window (the dog, not the man). Or maybe you hear from your taxi driver that he had to quit his former profession as a welder, due to it having damaged his vision too much to see well anymore (as he is careening you through heavy traffic in the mountainsides of Quito). Lo que sea.

Other times though, the things that make you smile are out of sheer familiarity, within the context of a not-so-familiar place.

I guess that the man in the U of M leather jacket didn’t shock me too much. They are a Big 10 team, after all, with plenty of merchandise to spread all over the world. But still, even in the fairly cosmopolitan provincial capital, it is a bit strange. American football is not televised here at all, and so it made me wonder whether he even knew what a Wolverine (or a Michigan) was.

HOWEVER, as I was coming home from working the other evening, I got stuck behind a bus (with no time to pass, not in my terms, anyway) and started to get impatient. And then I looked up to see this. There truly is a reason for (almost) everything, as it turns out. Yes, that is correct: the biggest and most ostentatious of the decals that he has on the bus is of the Saginaw Eagles, of all things.* I couldn’t stop laughing, for whatever reason. And so, that puts you to thinking: How did he even end up with that particular decal? Does he have family there? (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t seem to remember there being a large Ecuadorian immigrant population in that (or any) part of Michigan.) Alternately, was there a huge boatload of hockey/other sport paraphernalia “lost” on its way to Saginaw, and unloaded at the Guayaquil port, only to end up somewhere on the back of a bus in (literally) the middle of Ecuador? I imagine a bunch of adolescent males in Saginaw, melancholy over not being able to trod out their fanaticism on the back of their lowered, black-lit-from-the-bottom Hondas, because the merch ended up on a side-road off the Panamerican. This makes me laugh even harder.

It also seems that Stephen Colbert has to be culpable here, somehow.**



*The other decals, in case you don’t read Spanish, proclaim things like “Don’t follow me, I’m lost”, “Danger: Cheater’s Zone”, “The Immortal” and “Just because I’m really friendly, they call me a womanizer”.

**Yes, we could likely recognize this as yet another form of branding in the so-called “3rd World”, or of exoticism, or as any number of other things involving class and race and power, but (and I apologize for this in advance) it is simply funnier to think of dudes in baseball caps in (lower) Northern Michigan, pining for their Eagles gear. And of course, the very happy bus-driver that ended up with it instead, in rural Ecuador. Don’t you think so?