Textiles and Beyond

The textile-and-tourist-goods section went on forever as well: rows and rows of weavings, tapestries, seed jewelry, silver, indigenous instruments, pottery, and more sweaters, ponchos, and tableclothes than I have ever seen in my entire life. Tiny woven change-purses sold for 50 cents each - my friend brought five to distribute as gifts when she returned to Holland. Jewelry started at $1 (before the bartering), hand knit alpaca sweaters at $10, and ponchos could be purchased for between $10 to$15. My money flew out of my hands. I bought 2 bracelets of tagua nut (totalling $3), a necklace, a tablecloth for my mom and a smaller one for myself, a poncho, a sweater, and a couple other gifts.








After lunch, my friend and I met up with two other students from the school - one who had come up from her volunteer project to see us for the day, and one who had already done Otavalo and didn't need so much time to shop. The four of us wandered around the market a little longer, and then headed out to see the Laguna de San Pablo, recommended in my Moon Guide as a good place to meander around for a day from town to town. We took a taxi and were dropped off in an small parking lot, empty save for a several stands selling textiles and jewelry, and an old women who came up to us for money. We walked down the highway, and after peering between a few concrete shacks at the lake beyond, we were waved into the backyard by a couple women sitting by the side of the street. We walked between the shacks and came face to face with a slender bull - who looked at us with disinterest and sauntered off to chew his cud. My friend Daan found some sheep to harrass, and we took pictures until the bull noticed us again and started jogging over to say hi.









Moving on, we came across an woman tending her pigs, some boys laying in a field, and a dead dog at the side of the road. When the sky threatened rain, we walked back to our parking lot, prepared to take shelter in the restaurant across the street, and waited for our taxi to return.

Up North

This weekend I crossed two big items off of my Ecuador must-do list: the Otavalo Textile Market, and Laguna Cuicocha.

My friend and I started our weekend in Otavalo on Friday night at a clean, friendly, $4/night hotel (with hot water!) and woke up at 7:00 am to hit the animal market. This was something from another time. Our hotel was only a five minute walk from the market, and after 3 minutes we began seeing Otavaleño men and women dragging pigs and piglets squealing up and down the street on the way too or from the market, and only a 5 minute walk from our hotel was the market, a large field with people and animals milling about in a sort of semi-controlled chaos. It had rained all afternoon and evening, and farm animals have never been great about controlling their bodily functions, so the market was a pit of mud, dung, feet, and hooves. Many of the women walked barefoot in the muck to protect their shoes.

Men and women of all ages held groups of pigs or goats at the end of short ropes, the buyers and sellers bartering at full force. We pushed through the crowd, stepping over ropes and running into several other wide-eyed gringos as we made our way to the other side of the field. As we chatted with a Otavaleño woman trying to sell us fajas and cintas (traditional woven hair-ties and belts), a large pig got loose and ran screaming through the crowd, dragging its rope and a short fencepost pulled from the ground. Once he was subdued, we climbed a short rise for a safer vantage of the entire market. To our right, we could see the pigs and goats we´d nearly tripped over, and to the left, cows, bulls, and a single llama pulled at their ropes. Behind us were several stands selling coffee, empanadas, chicken, and rice.

The women wore long, woolen wrap skirts in dark blue, green, grey, or black (and sometimes with pinstripes). Into their ankle lenth skirts they tucked satiny white shirts with ruffles and flounces as well as embroidery, sequins, or beading. Their hair was worn long and braided, tied back with a strip of colorful woven fabric, and many also wore wool shawls or ponchos around their shoulders, sometimes tied to hold a baby or a small child. Around their necks were stacks of gold colored beads, and the entire look would be topped off with old-fashioned fedora. On younger women, any of these items may or may not be replaced with jeans or a store-bought sweater. The men wore jeans and either black rubber galoshes or cowboy boots, and were as likely to wear a leather jacket as a dark wool poncho. They too wore their thick black hair long and braided, and went bare-headed or with a felt fedora or leather cowboy hat.

After the animal market, we dropped off a couple things at our hostel and made our way to the textile market. It was about 8:00 am, and up and down every street vendors were setting up their stalls and pitching their wares. The Saturday market had taken over the entire town, and we had absolutely no idea where to begin. We headed away from the center of town, hoping to find an outer edge of the market. The farther we walked, the more the market seemed to be geared towards locals rather than tourists. We came across stands selling heaps of identical black high tops or the flat white espadrilles favored by the Otaveleño women, and stalls selling nothing but plastic containers or other household goods. Every now and then, a vendor would walk by announcing his wares: "papel higiénico," (toilet paper) or any number of other hygienic or household products. Once we reached the produce section, we turned around and headed for the textiles - the center of the market, geared more towards tourists (or, entirely towards tourists) - to spend our hard earned cash.

Coming Soon:

• The Textile Market
  
• Laguna Cuicocha
  
• Cárcel de las Mujeres

Morning Health Bath

The hostal I stayed at in Baños (Hostal Plantas y Blanco) featured "morning health bath" as one of its services, and on our second morning there, my friends and I decided to try it. We woke up early and donned our bathing suits, expecting a sauna or steam room, or maybe a hot tub with water piped in from Baños' prolilific hot springs.

We arrived as scheduled, and after hanging our towels and outerwear in the changing room, we were led into a concrete and tile room lined with several wooden stalls. Each stall was less than one meter square at the base, and rose to a height of about four feet. Within each was an adjustable seat, and had a hinged wooden door reaching from the floor to the top of the stall. After we had each taken a place in a stall, our "technician" (assistant? guide? health bath guru?) showed us each how to adjust the steam vent and shut us into our individual boxes. At the top of each door was an additional wooden panel with a half-circular cut-out for your neck, and these were slid back so we were completely enclosed in our personal steamrooms, only our heads sticking out as though detatched from our bodies.

After about 5 minutes of poaching, I started to wonder how exactly I was going to last the 40 minutes alotted for the "health bath" without getting bored. My friends, although less than 2 meters away, were out of my line of site, so we couldnt even make faces at eachother or raise our eyebrows the strange contraptions we´d found ourselves in. Suddenly, the technician was up and out of his stall, and releasing us from ours. We were led to a series of running faucets near the floor, each releasing a steady stream of icy water into a plastic bowl, dousing a folded towl. The technician demonstrated how we should use the towls to rinse - first up one leg, then the next, progressing to both legs, both arms, and the back. Just before our teeth began to chatter, the faucets were turned off and we were led back to our cells. We repeated this process three more times, but after the third, our technician led us each to a small tiled tub, slightly less than a meter square. The tub dipped to about 8 or 10 inches deep in the middle, curving up in the front and back. We were each seated in a tub - full of the icy water we were becoming accustomed to, and shown to massage our stomachs just so. After a few minutes, the technician returned, splashed us each with the icy water for 30 seconds or so, and let us back to our boxes.

After cooking for a few more minutes, we returned to the plastic bowls, repeated the rinsing process, and this time had our plastic bowls dumped over our heads before returning to our cells. Finally, after five more minutes of poaching, we were released from our boxes one at a time and hosed down - maybe even pressure washed - with what may have been a recommissioned garden hose and sprayer. Finished with our "spa treatment," we changed clothes and floated off to breakfast.

Hardcore

Just to prove how hardcore I am, I went running yesterday - at an altitude of 2,850 meters (9,300 feet) - in the pouring rain.

When I first arrived in Quito, it was difficult to walk more than a mile or two without wanting to rest. I was tired all the time - although maybe that was my cold talking. Now, I only feel the altitude when running or hiking (although I still go to bed by 10:00 p.m. every night) and every time is slightly less painful than the last.

New Friends

My first full day in Ecuador, two people offered to be my friend. I had gone back to my hostel for dinner around 8:00 pm, not wanting to be out wandering around Quito any later. The hostel restaurant was busy, and it took about an hour to get my food and another hour to get the check, but I had my guidebook and took the time to plan out my must-sees for Ecuador. From time to time, the waiter stopped by, briefly, to chat. He had lived in the US - partially in Washington DC - and spoke English.

After I had finished my meal and was waiting for the check, an Ecuadorian woman in her early twenties sat down as though I'd known her forever and started talking as though she wanted to be my new best friend. She peppered me with questions and lamented about her life. Where was I from? She lives here. She's sorry, but her heart hearts. Why? "Mi vida." Her best friend is from Holland, do I have any other Ecuadorian friends? Oh, she's the first? Here's a picture of her best friend from Holland. She's from the coast - I should call her sometime and she'll take me there. I should teach her English, and she'll help me with my Spanish.

This was all covered mostly in Spanish, with her occasionally attempting to speak in broken English and me continuously begging her to repeat what she said, again, and slower. Finally, she ran out of things to say, and gave me her phone number. I gave her my email address, and she left, saying she would be waiting for my call.

After my new best friend left, the waiter came by to see what I was doing later that evening, after he got off work. I told him I couldn't make it out that night, but we met the next day for lunch. He looked like a young, Latino version of Dr. Dreamy, but he turned out to be one of the most annoying people I've had to spend an afternoon with. He quizzed me about religion, bragged about the times he'd been arrested in the United States, and every so often he would break out with some radio-announcer type catch phrase in the middle of a sentence or conversation. I won't be calling him anytime soon, and I decided not to call my other new best friend either - I don't think she was quite all there.

* * * * *

Lest it be thought that I'm too negative, whiney, or simply incapable of keeping friends, let me reassure you that you will soon find several posts about the fantastic friends I've made at school and the adventures we've taken in the last several weeks. In addition, I apologize for the long delays between posts lately (hey, if I just hang out in the internet cafe all day, I won't have anything to write about) and I promise several new updates this week and next.

Parents

The problem with traveling with parents (or maybe just with my parents), is that through their worries and precautions you discover so many more things to be afraid of. My dad won't touch an uncooked vegetable from the time he lands in a developing country until his plane touches down on first-world soil. They carry IV bags and an IV in case bad food poisoning or a stomach bug causes life threatening dehydration.

And then there are the tropical diseases they know everything about. Consider Chagas' disease. (1) Present throughout much of South and Central America, Chagas is caused by a parasite (typanosoma cruzi) transmitted by the nocturnal "kissing bug" (so called because it usually bites near the mouth). The "kissing bug" is found mostly in coastal areas, and often lives in the thatched roofs of rural huts. After dropping from the roof during the night, the bug bites a person´s face, drinks a bit of blood, and defecates in or near the open wound. (2) The parasite, present in the feces of an infected bug, then enters the bloodstream through the open bite wound or through mucous membranes such as the eyes or mouth. The likelyhood of infection is increased when the sleeping person scratches or rubs the infected feces into the eyes, mouth, or bite wound. (3)

During the acute phase of Chagas´disease, lasting for a few weeks or monthes after infection, one of two things may happen: you may be completely symptom free, or you may have a variety of symptoms, ranging from mild to severe, including - but not limited to - nausia, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, headaches, etc. The symptoms usually fade away on their own. Unpleasant, yes, but the chronic phase, during which you have about a 30 percent chance of developing the following complications, is what you should worry about. Cardiac complications of Chagas' disease may include an enlarged heart, changes to your heart rate or rhythm, heart failure, or cardiac arrest. Intestinal compications may include an enlarged esophagas or colon. (3)

Of course, also widespread in parts of Latin America - and present on other continents as well - is leishmaniasis. Also a parasite, Leioshmaniasis is transmitted by sand flies. There are two types. Cutaneous leishmaniasis, which affects the skin, and visceral leishmaniasis, which affets the internal organs.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis causes skin sores, appearing within a few weeks or months of infection. The sores may or may not be painful, and may change in size and appearance over time, often appearing with a raised edge surrounding a central pit or craer, and may be covered with a scab. If left untreated, the skin sores will eventually heal, although this may take months or years and leave considerable scarring. Rarely, untreated cutaneous leishmaniasis may spread to the nose or mouth, causing additional sores on the mucous membranes (mucosal leishmaniasis).

Visceral leishmaniasis usually appears withing months (and occasionally years) of infection, and may cause fever, weight loss, and an enlarged spleen and liver. Left untreated, visceral leishmaniasis can be fatal.

* * *

My parents flew home two days before I came to Ecuador, but they left me with their legacy (and their prescriptions). The quantity and variety of "just in case" medication I'm carrying is enough to give me nightmares. I have three types of antibiotics: Cipro, one for skin infections or infected cuts, and one to take if I get, for instance, pneumonia. I have two types of anti-nausia pills, two types of anti-malarial pills, antibacterial gel AND wipes in case of minor injury, band-aids, vitamins, and probiotic pills to replenish my intestinal flora when the antibiotic wipes it out. (Okay, the probiotics and the vitamins were my idea, but still.)

Of course, my first day in Ecuador I woke up with a cold, and nothing to do about it except compain. But if it turns into pneumonia, I´m set.

Sources:

1. Dad, M.D.

2. Moon Handbooks Ecuador. Julian Smith, 2005. Page 410

3. Chagas´Disease. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease
Control and Information; Division of Parasitic Diseases.

4. Leishmania Infection. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease
Control and Information; Division of Parasitic Diseases.

The Way I Roll

I woke up at 4:30 am to catch a too-early shuttle to the airport in Managua. I arrived at the crack of dawn, grabbed coffee and a snack (I still had 3 hours before take-off), and went to check in for my 8:50 flight to Quito. Right away, an airline employee guarding the line told me to come back at a quarter to seven - they weren´t yet serving my flight.

I went back to the food court, had another cup of coffee and a second breakfast, and started planning my time in Ecuador. I wanted to head strait up north, to Ibarra, after landing. I figured I would have plenty of time in the next three months to explore Quito - I should see something different before school started.

At 6:55, I returned to check in for my flight. This time, the man guarding the line glanced at my reservation and sent me strait to Ticketing. Confused, I stood in line for a few minues, and then returned to stammer in broken Spanish that I already had a ticket, I needed to check in. Only then does somebody bother to tell me that my flight has been cancelled. Because that´s the way I roll.

The last three times I´ve flown, I´ve had either a cancelled flight or a missed connection. Returning home from Mexico on New Year´s Eve, my connecting flight from Houston to DC was cancelled, and I´d been rescheduled on an earlier flight - one that would leave Houston two hours before I arrived. I ended up spending New Year´s Eve alone in a hotel room. On my way to Nicaragua, I sat on an airplane in Baltimore for over an hour while it was de-iced, then sprinted across the entirity of the Atlanta airport to arrive at my gate two minutes after boarding was closed. Did they hold the flight two extra minutes? I can dream. They re-routed me through Miami, six hours later, where I almost missed another connection. I arrived in Managua exactly 7 hours late, and completely frazzled.

However, unlike the usual cancelled flight experience - where they reroute you, give you a barely sufficent meal voucher, and release you to airport purgatory - LACSA rerouted me and drove me to the Best Western across the street. There, I had a buffet breakfast with a variety of tropical fruit, a buffet lunch with a large selection of comida tipica, not to mention free internet access and a complimentery 3 minute international phone call. After eating breakfast and checking my email, I swam laps in the pool and laid in the sun until lunchtime, and then returned to the airport for my rescheduled flight. (Continental, Delta, are you listening?)

Of course, when I got to the airport and checked in with the airline I'd been switched to (COPA) they informed me that I would be flying standby, as they had a full flight and their own customers were a priority. Nevertheless, I got on the plane and arrived in Quito at 9:45 that night. Too late to hop a bus for Ibarra, but my hotel had hot water, and what more can you ask for, really?