We arrived in Quito, Ecuador, late Tuesday night. The flight was uneventful except that the domestic leg had no water. The flight attendants offered 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 emphatically stated that the alpaca scarf we were admiring was woven by local women, there were a dozen of the same scarves in multiple stalls. Modern times.
We did stop at a weaving cooperative for a demonstration of loom weaving, along with the different wools and natural dyes they use. A notable source was a bug found in cactus plants that, when squashed, yields a lovely purple. Various compounds are used to 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 panpipes in addition to actually making the pipes. It was impressive how quickly our host made a pipe and then how expertly she played beautiful music on it. 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 supposed to stand effortlessly on end, walked a straight line with eyes closed, and then discussed the 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 depends on 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 lying 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 in much of the developing world, stray dogs and cats are abundant. A dog on a lease is a lucky dog indeed!
