Retorno a Quito

Carnaval was a blast! Lots of bus/pickup truck travel and lots of spraying of things- foam, water balloons, flour, eggs (lucky I missed that one!), but now I'm back in Quito and all cleaned up.

Hopefully I'll get a better update up soon, but things went well! Salinas de Guaranda was an interesting experience- culturally, economically, and ecologically! We bought lots of products from the producers there, including a kilo of cheese (with oregano!), a rosemary-based shampoo, a bunch of loose leaf tea (12 herbs, called té la vida), some dried mushrooms (guess who won't be preparing or consuming them unless they're chopped finely onto a pizza and then covered with the oregano cheese), chocolates galore, and even some macaroni noodles made out of spinach and soy. Hopefully I'll be able to explain more about the economic cooperatives in Salinas in a forecoming blog post.

view from my hostel window in Salinas de Guaranda

view of the town from the salt mines it's named after- we went hiking in the ravine there that you see between a cliff and a hill with a cross on it (probably not visible from the pic)

Alvi and me on top of the hill, overlooking the city

Guaranda is a more traditional city, and we were bombarded with all sorts of carnaval festivities when we got there. We didn't stay long, but I'm glad we bought and brought cans of spray foam in Quito before we got there! (Not like you can't buy it on the street though...)

Foamed

Ambato was the big punch, with their Festival of Fruits and Flowers. It was an early morning parade, and we got lucky because we paid a family $1 each to climb up and watch the parade in the back of their big truck that they had specifically parked near the parade route the night before. Other people camped out to protect the best parade viewing spots the night before! The parade was mostly beauty queens followed by high school dance troupes performing mildly inappropriate sexual dances. The cool thing was that when I checked out the floats up close later, they had been decorated with fresh flowers and produce.

cute little kids leading a salsa troupe
check out all of the ambulant sellers! here you can see cotton candy sellers, and a guy selling stools, but there were tons more- water, potato chips, ceviche de choco, etc. look at all of the people on the truck across the way! that's about what our truck looked like where we paid to watch
apparently, Ecuadorians hate sun exposure at popular events
the green in the back is broccoli, and there are some spray-painted mandarins too!

I wish Caranval lasted a bit longer- I don't want to go back to classes yet! I want more fruits, more foaming, and more forgetting about schoolwork! (nice alliteration there, right? I didn't even plan it!)

More details about Salinas de Guaranda soon hopefully!