Joy costs $15 an hour

Ambato, or at least the part of it where I’m staying is at 2710m and I do have to keep stopping to take a deep breath. I guess I just need a week or two to get the red blood cells up to muster.

This morning, we went into town to the shopping mall to visit Mr Joy with Tom and the children. Mr Joy is an indoor play centre, including soft play for younger children. It’s on the top floor of the shopping centre and is expensive even by UK standards at $15 for an hour for two children and two adults (only one of which could go on the slides – that was me). It seems soft play is very much for the middle class here, not so in UK if Big Sky is anything to go by.

Again, there were lots of attendants. Each themed area had its own attendant and unlike the UK, there were lots of dressing-up clothes and outfits. The Princess Palace had a rail full of Disney dresses and the soft play area had police and firemen’s outfits. Julia really liked the rainbow slide, which involved a long flight of steps and was something of a challenge for grandad who was struggling with the altitude. Perhaps a dozen trips up the rainbow slide is just what I need to get acclimatised. We left after an hour, but it turned out that because Lucy has Mr Joy membership (oddly, it’s only $1 to join) you can get an extra hour for $1. I’m not sure I’d have lasted another hour on the rainbow slide.

In the afternoon, we went back to the mall to go shopping with Lucy and Julia. There’s a large supermarket just like any you’d see in the UK, but with a slightly smaller booze section. The sort of Chilean red that we’d buy for a fiver in the UK would be $15 here.

The car park has special places for pregnant women and for old people as well as the usual disabled slots. If there were old people places in Sainsbury’s, they’d need to dedicate half the car park for them. I wanted to buy a card for Margaret’s birthday. I was assured that sending mail from Ecuador is much more reliable than sending it to Ecuador, so I thought I’d give it a go. Cards are not a big thing in Ecuador (you’d tend to visit someone on their birthday, also the internal post is useless) so the supermarket doesn’t have a big section. As it happened, the few they had were removed for a back-to-school promotion.

An assistant said there was a Hallmark card shop in the mall, so while Lucy queued at the till (a special till for pregnant women) I went to hunt for a card. Where Hallmark had been, there was a black curtain, so no joy. There was a large bookshop but that didn’t have any cards.

At the supermarket, you can pack your shopping into bags in your trolley and a man will push it down to your car and lift them into your boot.