Good Friday in Quito

Yes, it's been a very long time since Easter (more specifically Good Friday) but I still haven't shared these photos with you and I truly want you to see the images of the day.

I recently learned that the procession that takes place through the streets of Quito is the second largest Good Friday procession in the world.  Wow--impressive.  Even more impressive are the sights the presented themselves that day.  There are two images that are almost haunting in their beauty.

Are these not the most amazing faces?  I just love both of them.

These fellows are called cucuruchos and there are hundreds if not thousands of them!  They have something to do with signifying penance.  I want to do a little more research but for now I'm just interested in getting the photos out to you.

I wish I could have gotten better photos but being in such a huge crowd made that nearly impossible.

There were dozens of men carrying crosses as Jesus did.  These were light and they carried the for three miles.  That's no small thing.

There were also floats carried by more penitents.  Again, they carried these for the whole three miles.

This is one of the largest crosses I saw.  It's almost impossible to see here but there are a couple of people helping him carry the cross.  Many of them have helpers but the men actually under the cross were obviously struggling under the weight.  We were much closer to the end than the beginning so no one was as fresh as they were a couple of hours before, when they first got started.

I don't know if you can see how old this man is but I would encourage you to enlarge the photo (just click on it) to get a feel for that.

Another of the floats.

This is a man portraying one of the thieves who was hung next to Jesus.

 I LOVE his face!

...and a final float.

It was an amazing day.  I still have photos to share but they're the odds and ends that didn't fit in with a specific day's theme.  Enjoy.

What a Beautiful Day

Yesterday was a fabulous day here in Cotacachi.  Of course, there are far more fabulous days here than there are challenging ones but yesterday seemed particularly good.

When the skies are clear (or almost clear) we get up to views of the mountains that are stunning.  I took this photo while pet sitting just a few blocks from home but you can see them from all over town. What a beautiful view!

Seniors in Ecuador

Something came up very recently that started lots of us thinking and I thought I'd share it with you and see what you think.

We have a man here in Cotacachi who is very, very ill.  In fact, he is likely in his last days.  He has no family we know of either here or in the States, is one a very low income, and (this is the very hardest) can't remember his PIN for his bank account so someone else could take his money out to get care for him.

People here, both friends of his and other concerned people, are cooking food for him and visiting with him for several hours a day, making sure he gets the correct meds, cleaning his sores, and helping him bathe.  We took up a collection for his rent for May.  Now what happens?  People will help care for him for quite a while but it's a difficult thing to do for any length of time, especially for people who have other things they do in their lives.  I can't help right now because I'm going to a pet sitting assignment tomorrow that is out of town and it would cost me money to get to and from and that's not in my budget--not to mention I would have to leave my little charges to their own devices while I was in town.

A friend who is very interested in this from the standpoint of being a nurse and thinking in the longer-range terms of what about the rest of us talked to me yesterday about what my plans are and whether or not I had considered these issues before coming here.  She told me she has talked to quite a few people who came here with the understanding that health care is free here.  Uh, sort of.

OK, first, here's my plan, part of it figured out before I got here and part of it as I have discovered more about what is and isn't available here.

Quito Market Trip

One of the high points of the trip was a quick trip through a neighborhood market.  This is the market Sarah generally goes to when she can.

We were driving down the street and all of a sudden, there it was, the beginning of the market.  The vendors set up all up and down the streets in this little neighborhood.  It's amazing.

Squash anyone?  There were trucks and displays of squashes this big and even bigger.  It appeared they would cut a few of them in half or even in quarters but it was still enough to feed a small army.

Textile work isn't all for women here.  In fact, when it comes to weaving and the fibers used in it, women spin but only men weave.  Here a man is doing mending or alterations, not sure which--maybe both.

More squash--oh, anyone want a pair of shoes?

These fish heads were the size of large dinner plates.  I would have gotten more photos but the fellow who was running the stand was furious with me for taking pictures.  I have no idea why.  Maybe he's in the witness protection program and thought I was taking his photo.  OK, he was just grumpy.

Crab legs anyone?

When I say you can get just about anything here, I'm not kidding.  Padlocks, knives, scissors, and other assorted items, all on this little cart.

As I said, I was in Quito for Santa Semana, Holy Week, and one of the traditions here is a dish called fanesca.  It's absolutely fabulous (I had some Sarah made herself) and I'll be looking for it up here next year.  At any rate, one of the things in fanesca is salted fish.  There were any number of stalls at the market selling salted fish when we were there.  This is just about the only time of the year they will be there.  Once Easter has passed, the fish disappear--who knows what happens to them.  I know one thing, they don't go to waste.

Are these not the loveliest chickens you've seen in a very long time?  They're huge.  Of course there are the feet and heads right out in front.

Ecuadorian tortillas are very different than any I've ever seen anywhere else.  I've only eaten them a few times--they don't seem to get any better with exposure.

Squash in the foreground, clothes in the background, pots and pans, plastic ware, and a little glass ware in the center.

I love the stacks of tomatoes.  That's one dollar's worth of tomatoes.  The bags of limes in the lower right-hand corner are a dollar as well.

Then we arrived at the street where all the live animals were sold.  There was quite a variety, starting with chicks,

moving on to adorable puppies,

cuy anyone?  That's a guinea pig.

There were lots of kittens (she brought them to market in the bag she's holding),

ducks, chickens, roosters, geese, more guinea pigs in the crate on the right, and chickens almost ready for the stove on the sidewalk.

Turkey anyone?

Roosters by the bag.

Bunnies by the dozen--this one was sharing his temporary home with a few ducklings.

It was quite a sight.  It was easier to see and take pictures if I didn't think about where all of these little guys were going to end up.  I was fine with ducks, geese, turkeys, chickens, and such but it got a little tougher with some of the animals we think of as domestic pets.  I can stay in denial and think about them becoming pets but there's part of me that knows it isn't so, at least not for the majority of them.  Ah well, different lands, different cultures.  Sometimes it's easier to accept the culture than others but it just is what it is.

More to come, of course.  There will be at least one more museum and another church in the future.  I really love this stuff.

At the Middle of the Earth

One of our days in Quito took us to latitude 0.  There are two locations to visit--the first is the one originally designated as 0 latitude.  The French figured out where it was in 1736.  GPS established the actual location within sight of the first one.  It's pretty amazing when you consider how hard it must have been back then to try to figure it out.

At any rate, I went to the new one.  It's not nearly as impressive as the old one (which I will definitely go visit someday) but it's funky and fun and I'm a big fan of funky and fun.

They had a ton of these fabulous pots.  Some of them are burial urns.  They put the bones of the dead person in them.  Some of them were for water or other things--I was never sure which was which but since I wasn't going to use them, it didn't matter.

The bright yellow sign in the middle of the photo is a lovely set for taking pictures.  It's at the beginning of the tour.

Nothing special--I just loved the look and the colors.

The guy who operates this loom was on a break when I took this picture.  I really love some of these weavings.  It's very traditional to show indigenous people from the back rather than the front.  It's not like they feel a camera will steal their souls or anything, they are just very private.  The lower right shows a condor.  There's a condor park around here--it's on my list of things to see one of these days.  Maybe one of the people I know who is coming here for a vacation will want to go up there with me.

One good reason not to go to the Amazon--those are typical spiders.  They were bigger than my whole hand spread out.  I don't freak out over spiders anymore but that doesn't mean I like them.

The steps to making a shrunken head.  They have a real one on display.  Charming.

Always a good fashion statement for the discriminating Amazonian tribesman.  I've been assured they don't do that anymore.  I'm not positive I believe it but I know they don't do it indiscriminately.  They only use(d) it as a form of severe punishment for committing capital crimes.

I didn't know there were totem poles down here but there are--in all kinds of different styles.  This one is similar to the ones on Easter Island.

Tall ones, short ones, skinny ones, fat ones

This one is carved from a single tree.  I love it...almost as much as..

...this one.  I wish I could have gotten a little closer to this one.  It's amazing.

All these carved eggs are here for a reason.  One of the things you are supposed to be able to do at 0 latitude is balance an egg on end...

...and sure enough, you can!  This egg is balanced on a nail head.  They also demonstrated water swirling clockwise above the equator and counter-clockwise south of the equator.  It was pretty impressive.

This is an actual building moved here from its original site.  It was built in 1875 out of mud, straw, and wood.  The thatch on the roof is replaced periodically but that's all.  I love this kind of thing.

It was a fun day.  Next up, another museum--of course.

Quito Museums and Churches

We went to lots of museums and churches on a couple of different days.  It was great fun.

Enjoy the photos:

This is one of the huge churches in the old part of town.  This is one of the side areas--it's not even the main altar.  Wow!

Another one of the side areas in the church.  Take a look at the pews.  This is what they look like in all the churches, from the little ones to the giant cathedrals.

There's the altar--oh my.  It's quite spectacular.

A close-up from the picture above.  There are two circular places to either side of the flowers at the very bottom of the photo.  That's where the priest stands.  I wanted to point that out because the scale is so hard to grasp with something this huge.

On to the museums.  We went to two of them this first day and for the life of me I can't remember the name of either one of them.  The first one is in what was once a private home.  Rich people used to own lots of pre-Columbian art (and other eras that I don't know the names of) and then the government decided that if it wasn't in a museum, you couldn't have bunches of it anymore.  OK, not exactly technical or probably even accurate but there were people who owned art that they needed to do something with and some of them donated it to museums and others turned their homes into museums.  The first is one of those.  It was absolutely amazing.  I have so many more photos that I didn't include but I figured you were going to be bored to tears as it is, so I kept it to a minimum.

I loved these "owl" guys.  This is very, very old carving and I just think they're cute.

I loved the "rubber stamps" they used for inking fabric and such.  You may want to enlarge this one a little to see some of the details.

The thing attached to the board in the back is a drop spindle for spinning thread.  In front of that are some kind of decorative needle.  I wish I could remember what the use was but it doesn't really matter--just the fact that they made such delicate things that were so beautiful is pretty fabulous.  In the front are needles and a button on the left and on the right are preserved pieces of woven fabric. The weaving was amazingly fine and lovely.

Nose rings aren't new but these take the whole concept a little further than what I've seen recently. The one on the top is the most amazing. That little part in the very center where there appears to be a kind of cut out is the part that went inside the nostrils.  That sucker is huge!

Ceramics

More ceramics (I love this kind of stuff)

Family life depicted in sculpture.

Here's a little guy wearing one of those nose rings I was talking about earlier--we got nothing on these guys.

This is pounded solid gold.  I know it may look like a bracelet but it's large enough to put around someone's waist.

Lots of reflection going on here but this is a two-story vertical garden outside the museum's windows.  It was spectacular.  One of the benefits of living in eternal spring is that something like this is always in season.

Of course if there's fiber art to be found, I was the one who was going to find it and I did.  Since I wasn't able to use my flash in any of the museums, I had a very hard time holding the camera still enough to get a steady shot but it still looks good from a distance.  It's amazingly well-preserved.

On to the wax museum.  These fellows were the ones who determined where zero latitude was.  Considering the tools they had, it's pretty amazing how close they got to being right.  You can measure the difference in yards, not miles.

I have absolutely no memory of who all the people below are but the craftsmanship is fabulous.

My favorite--if you were just walking past and not really paying attention, it might not strike you that two of these people aren't actually people but models.

In the gift shop, on the way out, this woman was doing something that reminded me of something we did when I was in grade school.  You color lots of colors of crayon on a piece of paper and then cover it very heavily with black.  Then take a sharp stick of some kind and draw on it so the colors can be seen as the black crayon is scraped away.  This very intricate piece of art started with the blue waxy substance over the beautiful gold and this woman is making amazing designs by removing the blue to show the gold under it.  I could have watched her for ages but I was getting pretty tired by then.

On the way out I managed to capture a shot of two of the guards at this museum.  Pretty impressive, aren't they?  I think they may actually be military or something since this one was a cultural museum owned by the government.

Another lovely day in Quito.  More to come.