Divinity amidst pearls

El Capitan gave this tale in his summary storytelling style over a dinner of beans rice and pork/chicken and fried plantains; if I recall correctly he was trying to entice me into visiting the Amazon rainforests:
"So I paid this guy $45 to take me down the Amazon river where he left me off at a trailhead where he told me that if I followed it I would come upon a village where a bus routinely came through carrying canoes back upriver, then he bid me goodbye. I followed the trail to the village alright, which was empty except for an malnourished parrot. But fortunately the bar had some crackers and a bottle of rum which the parrot and i shared for two days until someone came by and i was able to get a ride upriver. I got back to the guy who left me off at that town and told him he was wrong. I hate backtracking."

While he was talking a man came in with a traditional harp and set it up on one of the restaurant's chairs, which prompted this story:
"I made a laser harp out of two way mirrors set in a top and bottom plank of wood. It was set up so that any one laser, there were three, could be interrupted with your finger and that would produce a particular note. Stroking through multiple lasers at the same time or in quick conjunction would produce the appropriate sounds. I only made it with three notes, but it is only limited by the number of two-way mirrors."
What? WHAT?! Where is this instrument?!?!?!?! Se la via de El Capitan.

Quito is a big city; we took the bus which El Capitan mentioned was actually progressing in that it had maps of the routes in the terminals and turnstiles you had to pay to go thru. Then on the busses themselves, there were digital signs telling the next stop. Which is just about when he turned to me and said "there goes the store we are looking for..." Walking from the bus stop back gave me a good taste of the traffic, literally, my throat started burning and as if I wasn't having enough trouble breathing the thin air my lungs felt even more stuffy and clogged.

Another interesting thing is that ATMs give out $20 bills but there is both a large counterfeiting issue and El Capitan has actually received some fakes from the ATMs; generally storekeepers just tear them right in half. Also most places don't accept 20's. I used two $10s at different places and both times they had to scrape for change. And he says that once we get out of Quito into the smaller towns $5 might not even be accepted, so we are storing away all our $1 and Sacajawea dollar coins, judging by their ubiquity seem to have been shipped en masse from the states; which makes cents because the front of the coin resembles the native Ecuadorians.