Foreign Frustrations

When something frustrates you in your home country, you normally blame an individual, a restaurant, a bank, or some other company. But when you're in a foreign country and something frustrates you, I think you tend to blame the entire country.
There are some things here that frustrate Tesha and me, and we're trying not to blame all of Ecuador. The first thing to bother us is that pedestrians have no right of way whatsoever here. A couple weeks ago we almost got hit by a car when we were crossing the street at at stoplight, in a crosswalk, with the walk signal, when the driver was making a right turn. The driver, by the way, was a police officer in his police car (we stopped, not him). I immediately blamed the whole country - the Ecuadorian mountains, jungle, and all, but now I take it back. The law favors pedestrians; in fact, you'll go to jail immediately if you hit one, but I guess drivers know that pedestrians won't gamble the driver's jail sentence with their own lives. I've never blamed the USA for American drivers who aren't courteous to bike riders, but it's easy to blame Ecuador when I'm frustrated here.
Twice now I've opened a new stick of butter that was made, packaged and sold in Ecuador, and there has been a thin layer of paper from the wrapper that sticks to the butter. "Ahh! Curse the trees of Ecuador!" I've never blamed America when the Fruit Loops bag is so hard to open that you pull until it just splits down the middle all the way to the bottom.
Today I had to try hard not to be mad at Ecuador. Because some government agency in Ecuador wanted to be a pain and maybe make a little more money, Tesha and I are required to register ourselves with our visas now that we're in the country. (I thought that obtaining the visa registered us.) It's not that big of a deal, but it's annoying because we get sent from one agency to another and then back to the same one because of a lack of communications between the agencies. To make things worse, the worker at the Ecuadorian consulate in Los Angeles forgot to give me one of the documents that I need. So now we have to pay extra because "the law leaves no written exceptions that deal with our situation." In this case, I have to try extra hard not to blame all of the land in between Columbia and Peru, since the government is causing the frustration. As nice of a person as I try to be, I will admit that I had a hard time thinking nice thoughts about every Ecaudorian in a government uniform that I saw for the rest of the day.
A related frustration is that to get my Ecuadorian drivers license, I am supposed to get a document from some sort of notary public in the United States, saying that my California drivers license is legitamate. I want to ask Ecuador, "and then should I get a document saying that the document that legitamizes my license is legitamate, and then one that says that document is legitamate...," and so on. Honestly, what will probably end up happening is that the worker will act like there is nothing he can do until I hand him a 10 dollar bill along with my license and that will serve as my offcial document. It's very easy to blame all of Ecuador for the corruption and bribery that goes on here, when really it is just a small percentage of individuals to blame.

We're having a great time here; I just wanted to share this to remind travelers that if you're frustrated at a whole country, it's probably just becuase you're out of your comfort zone.
-Pete