Otovalo!

Fri. June 9th, 2006 - Sun. June 11th, 2006 (Days 8-10)
I began today by travelling to Quito with Anna and Sara. Both of them are leaving today to continue travelling through Ecuador. I am trying not to think about what it will be like without them. Everything I own is wet and smells really, really bad. The first thing I did was find a laundromat and drop my clothes off.

In Ecuador, there are almost no self serve laundromats. People weigh your clothes, wash them, and charge you by the pound. People here are serious about their clothes. I then spent some much needed time on the internet catching up with people. I found out that while I was gone, people tried to blow up parliament. All of the exitement happens when I´m not at home.

At about 1:30 p.m. I met up with Sara, Anna and two tourists that had come to the cabins named Chealsy and Lindsay to watch the Ecuador - Poland game in a bar. I had to leave halfway through because I had decided to go to a town called Otovalo this weekend. Ecuador ended up winning and it was pretty much chaos in the capital city of Quito. The Ecuadorian jerseys are all yellow and the streets pretty much became a sea of yellow as far as the eye could see.

I arrived in Otovalo around 6:30 p.m. and walked to a hostal that had been recommended to me. It named Hostal Runa Pacha and is run entirely by this tiny man who doesn´t sleep and runs everywhere. It´s incredible. I was quickly ushered to a room. For $5 dollars a night, it wasn´t a bad deal. The room was clean (with the exception of some unidentifiable stains on the rug) and best of all it had hot water. After a week of rain and manual labor I was ready for a treat.

I went down to the lobby around 9:00p.m. to ask some the guy who ran the hostal some questions about what to visit. There I met a French couple who had been in Otovalo a couple of days. The woman was named Catherine and the man was named Seydou. We really hit it off and talked in the lobby for about an hour. We made plans to go see the three Saturday markets: the food market, the crafts market and the animal market.

The animal market is the first one to begin in the morning and was my favorite part of Otovalo. The indigenous communities from all around come to barter and trade their animals. The area that they hold it in is packed with sheep, cows, llamas and pigs. The costumes are really incredible. It´s quite the sight to watch two people battle it out over a $10 dollar difference in price of a cow. That starts around 6:00a.m. The next market is the crafts market, which is really geared towards tourists. It was fun none the less and I bought a bunch of gifts there as well. The third market is the food market where I bought apples, papaya and tomatoes to increase my vitamin intake.

Saturday night Catherine and Seydou decided to go see a coq fight in the local arena. I decided not to go. It´s probably a good thing, because it started 3 hours late and lasted for many hours into the night. Sunday I returned to Quito on the bus with Catherine and Seydou and we parted ways in Terminal Terrestre. It was so nice to talk to someone from another country and exchange stories. I think I´ve convinced them to come visit Canada, and now I have an invite to Paris (as if I needed a reason to go). It´s also a bit of a confidence booster to spend a lot of time with people who are perpetually giving you compliments.

I returned to the cabins on Sunday feeling a bit less homesick and very happy that I had a bunch of clean clothes to choose from.