We arrived in Quito, Ecuador late Tuesday night. The flight was uneventful except for the fact that the domestic leg had no water. The flight attendants were offering to rinse people’s hands with gin after using the restroom once their wipes ran out.
We are staying in a beautiful hotel in the historic center of Quito. We’ll spend today exploring it. Yesterday though we took a long day’s tour of the Otavalo area. Otavalo itself is known for its colorful market. It didn’t disappoint. Probably true anywhere in the world one travels now, but we were constantly on the lookout for Chinese imitation “handicrafts”. Even though the vendor would state emphatically that the alpaca scarf we were admiring was woven by local women, there’d be a dozen of the same scarf in multiple stalls. Modern times.
We did stop at a weaving cooperative for a demonstration of loom weaving along with the different wools used and the natural products they use for dyes. A notable source was a bug found in cactus plants that when squashed, yields a lovely purple. Various compounds are used to then lighten or darken the color. The tapestries are beautiful and vibrant. As in Guatemala, it is the women who weave.
We visited the home/workshop of the Nanda Manachi family. They are world famous performers of Andean pan pipes in addition to actually making the pipes. It was impressive at how quickly our host made a pipe and then how expertly she was able to make beautiful music out of such a primitive instrument. We’ve had one at home for years and the only sound we can produce makes the cats run to the basement and hide.
And then of course there was the obligatory stop on the equator and the demonstrations of all the quasi-science of what happens when standing exactly on the equator. The problem is that as scientific measurements have advanced so has the accuracy of where the actual equator lies. You see former monuments standing at locations that represent past understandings of where the line lies. We tested an egg that is suppose to stand effortlessly on end, tried walking a straight line on the line with eyes closed, and then of course discussed that long standing myth of toilets spinning in the opposite direction from those in the northern hemisphere. I can’t walk a straight line with my eyes closed anywhere, I’ve seen magicians stand eggs on end not on the equator, and how toilets drain is a factor of which direction the water enters the tank. But fake science can be compelling and entertaining.
Lunch was an adventure in eating cuy—guinea pig—a dish that nobody is going to order again even though it tasted fine. It is served in all its glory, deep fried and laying belly down on one’s plate. We joked that the name of this post should be “Joni the Jew Gives Up Cuy for Lent”.
And of course, as all over the developing world the stay dogs and cats are abundant. A dog on a lease is a lucky dog indeed!
