Goodbye to the Old Year!

These people lit their año viejo on fire a little early, so I got to capture the whole scene. I took this picture from the west side of the bridge across the Ambato River on Montalvo Street in Ambato. The people were below me on Mirabeles Street. I was farther away than it appears.

The group of people on the far right were dancing in a circle to some really loud music on a boom box. If you enlarge the picture you can see that they were all smiling and having a great time.

The men on the left were more serious. They seemed to be in charge of the burning.

Crossing the Montalvo Street bridge on foot always made me nervous--it was some combination of being really high over the river, a low guardrail (just a thigh-high cement barrier), and knowing in the back of my mind that Ambato had suffered several severe earthquakes. I guess I figured that when the next big one came, I was sure to be crossing the bridge and would get shaken off into the river! When Flor and I crossed this bridge a couple of hours after taking this picture, it was worse than usual, because there were so many other people on the bridge, trying to get to the festivities downtown. Flor and I were getting jostled from side to side as we tried to move forward. One teenage girl had a wonderful solution to all the foot traffic. She hopped up on the guardrail and half-hopped half-skipped across the bridge, while all of the people were in a logjam to her left. She was out of sight before I could think to take a picture. It was too dark anyway at that point.

Flor and I hope that everyone had a wonderful 2011, and that 2012 is a peaceful and prosperous year for you.

Silver

Silver and I didn't know our picture was being taken

Silver, our cat, is everywhere in our Ecuador photo albums. Am I the only one who takes more pictures of their cat than anything else? Silver passed away this year, so this is an appropriate time to remember him.

Silver came to us late in his life, when Flor's Aunt Flor (one of Flor's two Aunt Flors!) died in 2004 in New York. We picked Silver up at her house. He had only been receiving minimal care since her death and was very sick. Flor's surviving relatives told us that they weren't sure how old Silver was, either 12, 14, or 19. We decided that 14 looked about right. He would not eat for the first week that he was with us, and was bleeding from places where he shouldn't have been bleeding. He was also deaf, and was beginning to get cataracts. We tried everything to tempt him to eat, but he just got thinner and sicker. Finally Flor hit upon the idea of grinding up hamburger and rice in a blender and feeding it to him with a syringe. That worked to get him eating and soon he was feeling better, but we still didn't think that he had more than a couple of months to live.

There were other issues. Our cat Merry didn't like Silver. She hissed at him every chance she got. And Flor didn't like Silver trying to sleep on her pillow. She pushed him away, but Silver always returned to her pillow. He probably slept on Aunt Flor's pillow, and just substituted Flor when he moved to our house. Flor eventually adjusted to Silver's advances, but Merry never did.

Our niece, Maria de Lourdes, with Silver

With a lot of care and a lot of love, Silver recuperated and sort of took over our house. He needed so much attention that we were always interacting with him, talking to him (even though he couldn't hear us), and grumbling about the problems that he got into and the work that he caused for us.

in 2008 We took Silver with us to Ecuador. He was a big hit. We wanted to show off Merry, but everybody cooed over Silver. Everybody knew that he had been Aunt Flor's cat, and everybody knew his difficult history and that he was not feeling well. He got lots of attention and stole the show whenever we took him out for visits. He was very friendly and loved to get up into everybody's lap. Flor and I lived for a while in an apartment below Flor's sister Alexandra, so Alexandra and her daughters took care of Silver for us when we were out of town, sometimes for up to a week. Everybody in the family got chances to play with him and to get to know him.

Silver's plates of uneaten food in Quito

While we were in Ecuador, Silver started to get sick again. We knew that it would happen some day. He was really old, 18 by our calculations. He wouldn't eat. Some days he would jump up on my lap and eat bread off the breakfast table. But most days he wouldn't eat at all. We tried everything in the world again to tempt him, cooking bacon, chicken, opening cans of tuna and fresh milk, but he was in too much pain too eat.

Silver and Merry liked to see what was for breakfast

We took him to a veterinarian in Quito, Dr. Billy Bones (this is the name of the business, not the veterinarian, I've forgotten the name of the veterinarian, but he is still in business as Dr. Billy Bones; he used to be off La Gasca in Quito, but I'm told he's moved, he's probably not far away now), who pulled a couple of teeth that were troubling Silver, and Flor fed Silver Pediasure (infant formula sold in Ecuador) with a syringe for a week until he was well enough to eat again. Silver recuperated enough to fly back to the United States with us, but he was still not truly well.

In 2010 Silver refused to eat at all and we had all of his teeth removed, hoping to prolong his life. He had become very important to us by then. What we thought would be a short-term act of charity, taking care of Silver for the last couple months of his life, had turned into 6+ years. We were astounded at Silver's will to live, and maybe we were more surprised at how much we had fallen in love with him.

Silver always snuck up on Flor when she was asleep.

He made it another year, into 2011, and then this spring he really started to go downhill. We knew it was time to let him go, but we went to the vet one last time to see if there was anything that we could do to. We learned that Silver's kidneys were gone, but that sometimes cats could live longer if their fluids were replaced artificially.

So we bought fluids and learned how to administer them to him twice a day through intravenous drip. We were aware at this point that we probably being selfish and might be prolonging his life unnecessarily, so we watched Silver very carefully for signs that he was unhappy or uncomfortable. The fluids really did work for a time. He had interest in life again, and jumped into our laps for attention and up on the bed to sleep. But after about a month it was clear that he was not going to get any better, and that he was no longer enjoying life. We made the decision to put him to sleep.

Flor finally accepted Silver

I don't imagine that I have to tell other pet owners how difficult an experience that was for us. We were exhausted emotionally and physically from our intense efforts to keep Silver alive. Stupidly I went to work the next day, thinking it would get my mind off things, but the stress of the job only made things worse.

With time, I started to look at the bright side of our relationship with Silver. We were able to provide him a nice end-of-life experience. Silver got to see Florida, and Ecuador. How many cats can say that? And he was always loved while he was with us.

Flor says I have to move on, and sharing these memories is part of moving on, I guess. Silver was sort of "my" cat, and I defended him for a time against Flor and Merry, who were both down on him. Flor says now that Silver taught her a very important lesson about persistence and love. Flor rejected Silver again and again, but Silver wouldn't accept her rejections and kept returning to Flor until she finally learned to love him. Of course, all the time that Flor was complaining about Silver in the beginning she was also nursing him back to health. Merry never did learn to love Silver. Silver snuck up on Merry too when she was sleeping, but if Merry saw him she hissed and moved away. Silver learned to judge just how close he could get to Merry without waking her up, and he would lie down at that distance, happy to be at least that close to her.

We had Silver cremated and we are going to wait to put him in the ground until we are sure that we know where we are going to spend the rest of our lives. We want to be sure that nobody will disturb him.

Madagascar, People, and Chuckie on New Year's Eve

I thought that these años viejos looked pretty cool. The people who made them put a lot of work into them. I am guessing these are the cartoon characters from the Madagascar movies. The giraffe in particular was nicely done.

When people saw that I was taking pictures of años viejos, they were very interested in having me photograph their own particular año viejo. At least a few groups of people waved me over to where their año viejo was, and shooed kids out of the way, that sort of thing, just so that I could get a good picture of their año viejo.

Here is Cevallos Street, the main drag in Ambato, about an hour before it got dark on New Year's Eve. I posted this picture just to give an idea of how many people it is possible to cram into a single street. What amazes me is that cars were still driving down the street. It seemed like they would have had to drive over and through people to go forward, but they didn't. Flor and I ended up walking in the street too, because the sidewalk was impassable.

People were selling everything under the sun on the sidewalk, not just New Year's related items like grapes and yellow panties, but every type of clothing, pots and pans, food--anything you can think of. This happens at pretty much any kind of public get-together of people in Ecuador, large or small, somebody will show up to sell something. The normal markets in Ambato are markets of food and household goods, not artesanal goods like you see in Otovalo or Cotocachi, and I was always fascinated by the systems of distribution for what I ended up seeing in the street or inside the enclosed markets. Who made the stuff? How did it get here? Some of it may be cheap imports from China, but my understanding is that textile imports from China are not as cheap in Ecuador as they are in the U.S., because Ecuadorian customs hits them up for quite a bit to protect the domestic clothing and shoe industries. (Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about this.) I did explore wholesale markets in Ecuador to some extent, but I'm still not sure I understand very well how the whole system works.

When it got a little darker, this Chuckie doll came out. All of the Chuckie movies have been over-dubbed in Spanish, and are shown not infrequently on late night Ecuadorian T.V. After I had lived in Ecuador for a while, I realized that I had seen every Chuckie movie in Spanish except one, "Bride of Chuckie". So of course I made it my mission to find "Bride of Chuckie" in the video store. It didn't take long. Flor and I lived in Tumbaco, Ecuador at the time, and we walked into this tiny video store off the main plaza, that couldn't have had more than 100 tapes, but among them was "Bride of Chuckie".

The woman who was holding Chuckie in the photo wanted to make sure I saw him as she was driving by. I took a picture and it didn't come out, so I yelled "Wait!" The driver braked the car and the woman let me take another shot, but this time she hid behind Chuckie.

To me it is interesting how we sometimes have a negative view of the mixing together of different cultures, in the case of Chuckie the American and Ecuadorian cultures, which happens more than ever before, given the Internet, other forms of mass media, and worldwide systems of distribution of goods. I don't think it's a bad thing, as long as it is not the result of aggression or war. I remember living in Arizona, and reading about a parrot bone that was found in an Anasazi dwelling. Parrots were not found in Arizona, so the parrot bone was taken as evidence of trade with the Mayans in Mexico, and the mixing of the Mayan and Anasazi cultures. The presence of the parrot bone in an Anasazi dwelling was portrayed in a positive way, or at least it was not cited as evidence of the corruption and decline of the Anasazi culture. But contemporaneously, when the same thing happens, we point fingers and say that cultures are being lost, corrupted, and so on.  I guess the problem is that what we are all afraid of turns out to be true sometimes--we all know examples of one culture aggressively dominating and wiping out another, and I think that bothers most of us. But Chuckie on late night T.V. in Ecuador I can live with, the same as I can live with a bottle of Coke in the refrigerator in the corner market in Ambato. Chuckie is not the proverbial camel's nose in the tent, more like a parrot that was traded.

More New Years Eve Traditions

Some people in Ecuador believe that if a woman wears yellow panties on New Year's Eve, she will get married in the next year. Flor does not remember this tradition from when she was a kid, and thinks it may have started about fifteen to twenty years ago, as a way for clothing manufacturers to sell more goods. Who knows? 

I saw some information online that different color panties mean different things in Ecuador, with red meaning love, yellow wealth, and so on. So I checked again with Flor, and she said no, wearing yellow panties on New Year's Eve definitely mean that you are going to get married in the next year. She also said that there was a joker at one of her jobs who always reminded the single women not to wear more than one pair. 

There were several people selling yellow panties like this on Cevallos, and a fair amount of interest among passersby.

Another belief in Ecuador is that eating one grape for each month of the year on New Year's Eve will bring you good fortune in the next year. We saw several trucks full of grapes like this on Cevallos Street in Ambato. This is what I call optimism--thinking that you are going to sell a whole truck full of grapes, twelve at a time. Notice the little bullhorn on the front of the truck. In Ecuador trucks like this slowly pass through neighborhoods and call out what they have for sale and the price. You have time to run out the door and buy what you need if you are interested. These trucks not only sell produce, but also milk, gas, eggs, pretty much anything you can think of that is a daily necessity that they think they can sell.

Homemade Años Viejos

This young lady is choosing a head to put on an  año viejo. A lot of the heads sort of look like people that she or any of us might know, so it was probably not too hard for her to find a reasonable match if she had somebody specific in mind. Some of the heads are obviously not of real people, but of monsters and so on.

In this año viejo I think the man on a mule is taking a dig at a rival soccer team. The sign says "I'm a Macaran and the cup is my obsession." The head is one of the prefabricated año viejo heads for sale in the street.

Macará is a soccer club in Ambato. It doesn't look like the person who made this año viejo is a fan of Macará, since there is a circle and a slash through the cup, and the image of the man on the donkey is not very flattering. The poncho the man was wearing says red devil.

There was a contest in Ambato for the best año viejo, and this was one of the entries. There was a cash prize, and a lot of very creative entries.

Soccer is taken very seriously in Ambato, as it is in most Ecuadorian cities. There is a big stadium and the most important games between rival teams draw large and raucous crowds.

These last two años viejos are supposed to be radio personalities. The signs give their names. The sign next to the man boxing says "I'm Rocky Balboa's trainer." These guys are also sporting the prefab heads that you can buy anywhere on the street, but the signs make it very clear who they're supposed to be. It looks like the gray hair on the small man on the right was an add-on after purchase.

These two años viejos and the soccer fan on a mule were made by the same people and were all part of the same picture, but I cut them out separately because in the back of the kiosk a woman was breast-feeding her baby, which I didn't notice until I saw the pictures on the computer. She evidently didn't mind having her picture taken, she looked up and was smiling at the camera (I took two pictures and she was smiling in both), but I didn't think that it was the kind of thing that should go out over the Internet.

Guaguas (pronounced wa-was) are kids in Ecuador, so the name of this business was "Kid's Kiosk". Lalama and Cevallos are cross streets. Stuff like that used to drive me crazy when I first moved to Ecuador, and would look at a sign and only one or two words were in my Spanish dictionary, and the rest seemed to be made up.

Widows of the Old Year

These three men are viudas, or widows, of the Old Year. What they are doing is hitting up motorists for spare change. This happens only on New Year's Eve, and there are a few different variations of the custom.

The viudas are always men, and they nearly always dress up as women. They stop traffic in a variety of ways. These three guys just walked in front of cars and stopped them. Then they did a dance for the benefit of the drivers, and collected their money. They stopped everybody who came down the street, including motorcycles and even a man on a bicycle.

In other areas viudas string a rope across the street, and only let it down after motorists pay. It would be easy to drive through the rope, but nobody does. If you are out driving on New Year's Eve in Ecuador and there is a rope strung across the street and men approach your car, they are not robbing you. They are viudas looking for coins.

Everybody in Ecuador knows about this custom, and most people expect to deal with it if they want to drive on New Year's Eve. We saw a few motorists at this intersection who didn't want to play along, but only a very few. Most people were laughing and smiling, and clearly enjoying what was going on. There was a contest in Ambato on New Year's Eve, so there was a concentration of people and a concentration of viudas. I have seen viudas in Quito, but not as many as in Ambato. The degree to which it is practiced probably varies by region of Ecuador.

Not all viudas dress up this elaborately. Sometimes the viudas don't dress up at all, but that is rare. There is a sort of pecking order of streets, with the high traffic streets having experienced viudas who have dressed the part and know how to work the traffic as a team, and who make quite a bit of money in the course of the night.

On the side streets without a lot of cars you see a few kids who are not very organized, maybe it is their first New Year's Eve as a viuda, but who are going through the motions anyway and learning.

The viudas seriously affect traffic flow as the evening wears on. A bus ride that normally takes ten minutes can take a half an hour or more, as the driver has to stop and repeatedly give coins to the viudas. Flor and I were relying on public transportation to get home on this particular New Year's Eve, and we had to leave earlier than we would have liked, because we were afraid that we wouldn't be able to make it from the center of Ambato back to our house. We decided that in future years we would just rent a hotel room in the center of town on New Year's Eve, and not have to worry about getting home.

Town Band and Julio Jaramillo

This band was marching with the Christmas procession near Atocha.

Many small towns in Ecuador have a town band (or "banda del pueblo" in Spanish). You see them playing on holidays, or other special events. This town band is small. I have seen them with up to 30 instruments. This town band is also very serious. On other occasions I have seen town band members much looser and involved with whatever merry-making is going on.

What fascinates me about these town bands are the brass instruments. You don't see brass instruments that often in Ecuador, although they are present in orchestras and large, formal bands. And brass instruments are rarely heard in popular recorded music in Ecuador, as they are in Mexico, for example. But whenever the town band is asked to play, out come a dozen men with brass instruments, able to march and play in time.

I have asked Flor several times why town bands in Ecuador use brass instruments. Her answer is always the same, that it's because brass instruments are band instruments. Ask a silly question...

I'm going to change directions here, to Ecuadorian popular music, the recorded kind. For those who might be interested in Ecuadorian popular music, a good place to start is with Julio Jaramillo. Julio Jaramillo is a sort of demigod in Ecuador, where he is still referred to, more than 30 years after his death, simply as J.J. (pronounced "hota hota" in Spanish). There is no chance of confusing the two initials J.J. with anybody or anything else in Ecuador.

Julio Jaramillo was born in Guayaquil and worked his way up from the bottom of the music business to achieve fame in Ecuador and then internationally. His popularity worldwide would be hard to over-exaggerate. I just looked at some of his songs on YouTube, and one of them had more than 7,000,000 views. Many other songs on the first page of hits that come up for Julio Jaramillo had more than 1,000,000 views. Some of the comments in Spanish on YouTube take pride in Julio Jaramillo as a product of all Latin America, not just Ecuador. This for a singer who has been dead since 1978 (he died at age 42). Many people who listen to his music now were not even born until after Julio Jaramillo died.

When I was in Yasuni National Park in 1998, and the young Ecuadorian men pulled out the inevitable guitars to play songs to impress the girls with, they played Julio Jaramillo songs. I have experienced the same phenomenon a number of times in Quito and elsewhere. Ecuadorians are extremely proud of Julio Jaramillo. I have listened to a lot of Julio Jaramillo's music. His voice is unique; I don't know that I've heard another male voice as beautiful as his anywhere else in popular music. The musical arrangements are tasteful, relying on classical guitar, acoustic bass, and a simple rhythm section. Here is a YouTube video of one of Julio Jaramillo's most famous songs, Nuestro Juramento. I believe this video is taken from a movie and the visual of the singer is an actor, although the voice is definitely Julio Jaramillo. "Nuestro Juramento" means Our Pledge. It is a love song about what each lover pledges to do if the other should die first.

If you are interested in buying some of Julio Jaramillo's music, here is a 30 song .mp3 download that you can put on your ipod. Or if you prefer CDs, this two-CD set has a number of his most famous songs on it.

There are all sorts of stories in Ecuador about how many children Julio Jaramillo fathered (more than 100 by some accounts) and about the manner of his death (he lived a Bohemian lifestyle, and one story I've heard is that he died laughing at a joke).

Christmas Procession and Años Viejos

This Christmas-themed procession took place on December 31, 2009. Flor and I ran into by accident on our way into Ambato for New Year's Eve. It was across the Juan León Mera bridge from the center of Ambato, and a little bit north, on the road to Izamba. The marchers are probably worshippers either on their way to or leaving a "Misa del Niño", or Mass of the Christ Child. The Catholic church holds these masses all through the holiday season, so that everybody has a chance to go.

There was a small band in this procession, and dancers. If I had to guess, I would say that the procession started in Atocha, a neighborhood that is close to where we saw the marchers. Atocha had a strong sense of identity for a neighborhood (it may have once been a small town and residents may still think of it that way, although it is now more or less joined at the hip to Ambato), and regularly had their own fiestas, parades, beauty contests, etc. apart from what was going on in the center of Ambato.

You have to look closely, but most of the figures that appear to be leaning against the back wall and watching the parade are not people, but dolls. In Ecuador they are called años viejos, or old years, and they are burned on New Year's Eve. These años viejos were for sale, although most people who were planning on burning an año viejo had probably already made their own, so most of these would have ended up getting put back in storage until the next year's New Year's Eve.

Burning años viejos is a kind of catharsis, to purge the old and leave room for the new, and since there are all kinds of things that people want to leave behind them as they move into a new year, there are a tremendous variety of años viejos. Politicians, top players on rival soccer teams, radio hosts, old girlfriends, old boyfriends--all of these are fashioned into años viejos, as you might expect. But there is a pop culture aspect to the custom as well, and años viejos are constructed to resemble cartoon characters, pop singers, characters from fairy tales, and anything else that you can think of under the sun. There was a contest in the center of Ambato for the best año viejo. I took pictures of some of the entries which I will share in coming days. Most of the años viejos that I have seen in Ambato and elsewhere in Ecuador were homemade, although there are always plenty of pre-fabricated ones like in the picture on sale too. Sometimes people make the body of an año viejo at home and buy a head or a mask as a finishing touch.

Where are the años viejos burned? Why, on the sidewalk, of course. Early in the morning of January 1 there were still piles of smoldering sawdust (and whatever else people used to stuff the dolls) as we went about on our morning rounds. This was cleaned up by the city though, fairly early in the day. Most años viejos are burned at midnight. I've seen them burned earlier, even before it gets dark sometimes. Sometimes people dance around the fires.

Getting back to Christmas, this evening, December 24, is the traditional time of Christmas gift exchange in Ecuador, at least that has been my experience. Ecuadorians don't overdo Christmas gifts. Usually it is just one small gift per person, within the family. Some families don't exchange gifts at all.

Your Ecuadorian employer may be more enthusiastic about gifts. I was teaching English in a private high school one year, just a small private school on the outskirts of Quito, nothing fancy, and I was invited to the employees-only school Christmas party. The party lasted all day long, with singing, stories, dancing, etc. At the end of the day everybody got a basket to take home with a whole frozen turkey, a bottle of rum, about eight or ten other delicacies that I've forgotten, and a personal gift, in my case a set of handmade ceramic dinner dishes. Wow! I hadn't planned on staying the whole day, nor on receiving gifts, but there was a lot of pressure not to leave. Flor says that it is not unheard of for somebody to even lock the doors at parties like that so that nobody can get out. There is a saying in Ecuador, "No se gana, pero se goza," which translates to "We don't earn much, but we enjoy ourselves."

Flor and I hope that all is well in your family wherever you are, and whatever you do or don't celebrate at this time of year, and that your home is filled with love and peace.

Statue in Montalvo Park

This statue is at one of the entrances to Juan Montalvo Park in Ambato. Each side of the park has its own statue. They are similar in style, but each statue is different. I don't know what the statues represent.

This is how I remember Montalvo Park. It is almost always peaceful, with just a few people strolling through it here and there. At certain times of day the benches fill up, but it never feels like there are too many people around.

This view is either south or west, because the view north is towards the Cathedral, and the view east towards the library and Casa de Montal. I can't remember which direction this is though.

On the far left you can see a bush that is sculptured. There is interest in topiary gardening in Ambato, and in the eastern part of Ambato, high above the elevation of Juan Montalvo Park, there is a large park filled with topiary figures.

In the next couple of days I'm going to start posting photographs of the holiday season, but especially New Year's Eve, because there are so many interesting traditions around New Year's Eve in Ecuador. I wanted to wait until after Christmas to start showing New Year's photos, but I don't think I'll be able to squeeze in all of the photos if I do.

Flor and I both hope that you and yours are enjoying a peaceful holiday season.

Another Special House

Here is another special house. It was Flor's family's house, where Flor lived through eighth grade in school, which is early high school in Ecuador. When Flor lived in this house, it was divided up into apartments. When we took this picture, it had become a hostal. Flor is standing on Miraflores Avenue in Ambato. The house is located on a side street off of Miraflores, but neither of us can remember the name. It looks like it may be Gladiolos Street on Google maps, but I'm not sure.

The line of trees in the background is along the Ambato River, and was part of the area that we walked to look at flowers and trees.

In the far background is the area of Ficoa. Some of the newer construction (very nice houses in some cases) is visible on the hillsides in the distance if you enlarge the picture. As I mentioned in an earlier post though, it is going to take the trees a while to grow back in some of the newer Ficoa neighborhoods.

If you follow Miraflores Avenue south from here, you pass Colegio La Inmaculada (Flor's all-girls high school, it's still there, Flor has some legendary stories about the nuns, and her classmates were apparently quite a handful too, Flor remembers once they were making fun of a young English teacher, causing him to slam his book on the desk in an attempt to restore order, except that the spine of the book was old and the book broke in two, causing the girls to laugh at him even louder, so he walked out the door in the middle of class, never to return), then some nice older houses with beautiful landscaping, some of them hidden behind walls and fences, but you can peek in, and finally where Miraflores ends you run right into the mural of the three Juans that I posted about two days ago.

From there you turn right to cross the river and get into the Ficoa area, or you can turn left to get into some of the more suburban Ambato neighborhoods in the southeastern part of town. If you choose to go to Ficoa, the main drag has some interesting places to eat, including a row of restaurants that serve cuy, and one place that serves a really yummy fruit salad topped by ice cream. All the places to eat in Ficoa are bunched together and hard to miss.

The Cathedral of Ambato

This building is the Cathedral (la Catedral), a large church in the center of Ambato, next to Juan Montalvo Park. Montalvo Park is where people were feeding pigeons in my post of two weeks ago. They feed them on the side of the park right in front of the Cathedral. I took this picture at a funny angle to get all of the building and the street sign included, and it is hard to tell how tall the spires are. If you enlarge this picture of the center of Ambato you can better see the height of the spires of the Cathedral. They are to the right of Flor's head, in the background.

The street sign says, "Ambato is yours. Take care of her."

This cathedral was built to replace a previous cathedral that was destroyed in the earthquake of 1949. Actually, I don't know if destroyed is the right word. There are pictures of the 1949 earthquake damage in the Ambato library, and if I remember correctly, the pictures show that the previous cathedral was severely damaged by the 1949 earthquake, but did not fall to the ground. It had to be taken down though. Then again, maybe I don't remember correctly  (was it the cathedral that I saw left standing, or another building?), so if you're in Ecuador, go to the Ambato library and look at the pictures. The library is right in front of the cathedral, to the left side of the Cathedral if you were standing in front of the Cathedral and facing out, or just out of view on the right side of this picture. The library is housed in a beautiful new building. The pictures go on display during the week of Carnaval in Ecuador.

There are so many other activities going on in Ambato during Carnaval that you will not regret a trip to see the earthquake pictures, especially if you choose a day when one of the parades happens. Another nice bonus of visiting Ambato during Carnaval is that throwing water during Carnaval is prohibited in Ambato. This can get out of hand elsewhere in Ecuador. I've been soaked many times during Carnaval, and once ended up having white flour rubbed into my hair and shaken all over my clothes after being soaked. The flour incident happened with people I knew, and I was willfully playing along, but still, it gives you an idea of what can happen. Every other time I've had water thrown on me during Carnaval, it was by strangers. In some areas of the coast, Carnaval celebrants jump on buses and shoot water at you out of water cannons that they have made out of pipes, so you get wet even if you are just passing through. Some people understandably like to avoid that kind of thing. People in Ambato are very good about observing the no water rule.

I've read online that the Cathedral is one of the principal attractions of Ambato, but I haven't found it to be so, at least in the sense of there being a lot of people milling about and activity around the building. Ambato is such a busy city, with people moving and buying and selling and running around from place to place, that sometimes you want to get out of the mix, and the area in and around the Cathedral always seemed like a quiet backwater to me, a good place to relax. Unless there was a special event going on in front of the church, as happens during the week of Carnaval, there was almost always less activity going on in Montalvo Park and around the Cathedral than there was elsewhere in the downtown area. Montalvo Park directly in front of the Cathedral is the kind of place where you can usually have a park bench to yourself, and sit and think.

[Edit: I have been informed that the earthquake pictures I describe may actually be on display in Casa de Portal, which is a sort of museum right next to the library. I thought they were part of the same complex. At any rate, if you head to the library/Casa de Portal and ask around, I'm sure you will find them.]

Three Juans

Here is a portion of a mural in Ambato. The mural is not painted, but made of something like ceramic tile. The three men depicted are Juan Montalvo, Juan Leon Mera, and Juan Benigno Vela. They were contemporary writers in the mid to late nineteenth century, all from Ambato. Ambato is sometimes called the "City of Three Juans" after them. Their names are everywhere, attached to streets, parks, schools, statues, etc.

I am not qualified to say much about these three men, but I will share what little I know, since it may add some interest to the picture. Please take what I say with a grain of salt.

The female figure in the mural is Cumandá, the protagonist in a novel of the same name by Juan Leon Mera. The novel is well-known in Ecuador and deals with issues of race, class, and indigenous versus westernized society. Most high school students in Ecuador are assigned this book. (Flor says that everyone has to read it, but I don't have enough faith in the organization of either school systems or ideologies to think that everyone actually does.) Think "Huckleberry Finn" if you're an American--not the same themes, but the same stature of the book.  Juan Leon Mera also wrote the words to the Ecuadorian national anthem.

Juan Montalvo was a political liberal who was opposed to Mera on many issues of national importance. Two of Montalvo's more famous works were Siete Tratados (Seven Treatises) and Capítulos que se le Olvidaron a Cervantes (Chapters that Cervantes Forgot). The Seven Treatises were On Nobility, On Beauty in Humankind, Reply to a Pseudocatholic Sophist, Of Genius, Heroes of the Emancipation of the HispanoAmerican Race, Banquets of the Philosophers, and The Explanation. Siete Tratados was banned in Ecuador. Montalvo was exiled to Colombia and then to France. Flor told me a story about Montalvo, maybe apocryphal, that when in France near the end of his life Montalvo needed to attend a meeting with dignitaries of some kind, but was very poor and only had one suit, which was torn. On the way in to the meeting a domestic worker or maid saw him and offered to sew his coat. He said, "No, it's better that they think I just didn't notice than that I am poor."

Juan Benigno Vela was also a political liberal. He wrote a famous political discourse in his paper El Espectador (The Spectator) in 1878, part of which reads (assuming I haven't mistranslated), "I command that, with part of my small resources, rise up, in the hall where the Constitutional Congress meets, four statues that represent Wisdom, Justice, Decency, and Liberty, goddesses that were outraged and trampled by the vile people who betrayed the will of Ecuadorians." Vela was imprisoned several times during his lifetime. Interestingly, Vela is depicted here with sight, although he was blind for much of his life.

The mural is located just to the east and uphill of the southernmost bridge across the Ambato River. The mural continues along the wall downhill to the right, towards the river, and shows other important figures in the history of Ambato and Ecuador.

North of Lloa, Guagua Pichincha

This view is to the north of Lloa.

Jacinto (the man in the hat) is looking at the same angle as yesterday's camera angle of Lloa. I took yesterday's picture from exactly where he is standing.

This valley is just north of Lloa. Guagua Pichincha is in the background. The highest peak is the farthest to the right. Quito is behind the picture taker (me).

The green of Pichincha's flanks and the Lloa region are impressive, but green means that there is a lot of rainfall. Most days start out sunny like this picture though. The rain comes in the afternoon.

People climb Guagua Pichincha. I never have. Jacinto's son David has. He says there is one passage where you have to walk a very narrow knife-edge of rock, or fall to your doom. I am a little afraid of heights, so I don't know if he told me this for effect or if it is really true.

Guagua Pichincha is an active volcano. I was in Quito for one eruption. The cloud of volcanic ash was massive, and pictures were shown on news all over the world. Apart from the cloud, we got a fairly heavy ash fall, but that was it. The television news had been warning of a possible eruption for days. I was hurrying down the sidewalk on my way to work in La Carcélen, a neighborhood in the far north of Quito, when I saw an old man pointing towards Guagua Pichincha. I knew right away there wouldn't be any work that day. The volcano looked like a gargantuan smokestack on a freight train, pumping unbelievable amounts of volcanic ash into the air. The ash started to fall later in the day. It was like tiny splinters of broken glass that stung. The next morning I scooped up some ash and saved it in a bottle, as a momento. I think I still have it. The ash lingered for months in the streets, because it was rock and didn't wash away. It was gray, and when I see material like that in the street now, I know where it came from.

A Secret Town--Lloa

Here is the tiny town of Lloa, outside Quito. Lloa feels like a secret town to me. Even though it is very close to Quito, I didn't discover it for many years. It isn't on the road to anywhere. You have to want to go to Lloa to end up there.

Lloa is located in a valley at the base of Guagua Pichincha, the volcano that overlooks Quito. Lloa is separated from Quito by a low ridge, so you can't see Quito from Lloa and vice versa. But Lloa is very close to Quito. I have included a Google map at the end of this post that shows the relation of Quito, Lloa, and Guagua Pichincha to each other.

You can get to Lloa by bus or taxi. The bus leaves about a block away from the street Mariscal Sucre in the south of Quito, on a side street that heads west to Lloa. I forget the name of the side street. You can ask around for it. The bus is not really a bus, at least it wasn't the few times that we took it. It was more like a van, and you had to know where it was parked to catch it. The same van waits in an appointed spot in Lloa to take you back to Quito.

Flor and I went to Lloa one day and there wasn't much going on in town. We were curious about what was farther on down the road. If you look at the picture, the road in the foreground winds back up the hill to where this picture was taken from and from there to Quito. In the other direction it skirts the left side of town, and continues down into the hills. That's where we wanted to go. We hired a pickup truck to take us there.

The first thing we noticed was the incredibly beautiful scenery. There are some big landholders left in that valley, and it looked like the days of the haciendas never ended. The fields stretched away into the distance, like some idyllic photo in a country living magazine.

The next thing we saw was a steady stream of heavy machinery coming up the road. It turned out there was a mine of some sort down the road. Eventually we passed it and didn't see any more trucks or frontloaders. We never did find out what the mine was for.

The road went down and down and down, (for the better part of an hour? it was a dirt road, and we couldn't go too fast), and finally we ended up at the last house, which we never saw. There was a gate there. If I remember correctly, the property belonged to some sort of a nature foundation. Our driver told us that past the house was a trail that could be hiked for a day or two along a riverbank to arrive at Mindo. Mindo is a small town on the other side of Guagua Pichincha that is popular with tourists, birders in particular, and has a few people living there who want to get away from it all. I looked at maps afterwards and they do seem to show a trail leading from Lloa to Mindo.

Our driver also told us that high up in the hills, not along the trail to Mindo but around where we were at that moment and along our drive, ranchers raised "ganado bravo", or angry cattle, to be used in bullfights. I'm not sure if the idea was to raise the bulls in an area where they would never see people, so that they would never become accustomed to people and would react to them as a threat in the ring, or if it was just a precaution to cut down on human-bull interactions. At any rate, our driver wanted to impress on us that it probably wasn't a good idea to just go wandering off across a random pasture, and we took his advice.

We were also told that Lloa lay directly in the path of any lava flows that might come off Pichincha; however, in looking at the satellite map on google, it looks like the caldera of Pichincha opens up in a different direction. Still, if there were any activity in Pichincha, and I were in Lloa, I would leave town temporarily.

I have thought about Lloa ever afterwards as maybe being a nice place to live. I really like Quito, there is so much to do there, but I have trouble with the air pollution, and Lloa had really nice, clean air. And Lloa is so close to Quito. The only misgivings I would have would be the climate, and maybe that Lloa is a little too small of a town. I'll bet it rains a lot in Lloa. I always saw clouds over that way from Quito. And the beautiful green pastures are a dead giveaway. As far as the size of the town goes, there is a saying in Spanish, "Pueblo chico, infierno grande", or "Small town, big hell." I think we can all relate to that saying. But a small town can be your own personal heaven too. It all depends on what you're looking for, and the connections that you make. People in Lloa were really nice.

copyright Google Maps, 2011

Thank you Mary! and Anniversary

Thank you very much to Mary of South of Zero for adding my blog to her blog list yesterday. I had a lot of new readers.

In this picture Flor is exiting the Ambato flower garden that I have written about the past week or so. This exit is on the east side of the river, but I don't remember exactly where. It should be easy to find for anybody who pokes around by the Ambato River. Note that the city is high above the river. Flor is already a considerable distance above the river here.

Today is also Flor's and my wedding anniversary. Actually, Flor and I have two wedding anniversaries. We were married in a civil ceremony in Quito on December 17, 1999, then in a religious ceremony in Guapulo on February 26, 2000. We celebrate both dates.

In late 1999 we took classes to prepare for the religious ceremony in the Curia of the Catholic church in Quito. (I would guess that Curia translates as Curate. It is where the church keeps records, has classes, etc.) The Curia is located on Independence Plaza in Quito, near Carondolet, the presidential palace.

There was considerable political pressure on President Jamil Mahuad to step down at the time, and he had surrounded Independence Plaza with tanks and military personnel. Every week Flor and I had to talk our way past the soldiers to get to the Curia. It was a little disconcerting but thankfully not a tense situation from our point of view. One time a soldier gave us a big smile, said, "You're getting married? Go, go!" and waved us in. Behind the tanks Independence Plaza was deserted. I have never seen it that way before or since. It was like being on the set of a movie in a future world with no people.

Our marriage in the civil ceremony took place in an anonymous room in an anonymous hallway in an anonymous gray building filled with anonymous bureaucrats, but it meant a lot to us. We had worked so hard to get a marriage license and see our marriage through. Everyone has to get married in a civil ceremony in Ecuador. The religious ceremony is optional. The church will only marry you if it is your first marriage.

Yucca or Cabuya

Here is Flor standing beside a yucca which is large enough to throw shade. This was a little ways away from the Ambato River, on the Ficoa side.

I'm probably wrong to call this a yucca plant. I learned that name in Arizona, where people call plants this shape a yucca. Or maybe I just heard them wrong. It might be more correct to call this an agave plant. This plant was much smaller in Arizona, though.

Ecuadorians call this plant cabuya. The leaves are stiff and sharp, like swords. They can hurt you if you run or fall into them.

Yucca to Ecuadorians is the root of the manioc plant, which is edible and served in soups and as a side dish. That kind of yucca is available in supermarkets even here in the United States, and we eat it from time to time.

Uphill from this plant (behind Flor and to her left) is Ficoa. Ficoa is a new neighborhood, or maybe it's old, but most of what you see is new, in the west of Ambato, on the other side of the river from the center of the city. We saw a lot of nice new houses in Ficoa. There were also some older houses, and some small houses, a nice mix. Like new neighborhoods everywhere, the landscaping hasn't matured in the newer parts of Ficoa, and it felt very open to the sun. The other neighborhood with money in this area of Ambato is Miraflores, across the river to Flor's right. MIraflores is filled with beautiful shade trees and flowers, and feels dignified. Flor and I didn't find a single house for rent in Miraflores during the week or so we looked for a place, but there were a number of houses for rent in Ficoa. People have lived in the same homes in Miraflores forever. We probably couldn't have afforded to rent in Miraflores anyway. We were hoping for a guest house. We ended up renting in Izamba.

Tree Across the Ambato River

This picture turned out nicer than I had a right to expect. I discovered the small spray of pink flowers above Flor's head when I looked at the picture on the computer. The flowers were on the far side of the river. I didn't see them when I was taking the picture.

The log Flor is sitting on is a eucalyptus trunk. The long leaves hanging down to Flor's right (left side of picture) are eucalyptus leaves.

The Ambato River is polluted and dewatered by the time it reaches Ambato. Nevertheless, if it rains a lot upstream, the river really roars through town for a day or two. This picture was taken not far from where the river enters town, across from the old and moneyed Miraflores neighborhood. The water level in the picture is normal, not high and not low. From here the river circles Ambato in the shape of a horseshoe, then runs roughly east to join the Pastaza and eventually drain to the Amazon River.

The headwaters of the river are on the flanks of Carihuairazo, a nevado (snow-covered mountain) just north of Mount Chimborazo, and a high paramo north of Carihuairazo. The river's watershed is agricultural. Cattle trample the watershed and riparian zone of the river in a number of places. Since the artesanal agriculture of Ecuador depends on pesticides, the river must also receive a heavy load of chemicals every time it rains.

I never saw any fish in the river, not even juvenile fish in the shallows or backwaters, and there didn't even seem to be much larval insect life in the water.

The Ambato River is an integral part of the life and folklore of Ambato, but the height of the slopes along the river tends to distance people from the riverbanks. Drivers peer down at the river from the automobile bridges without being able to hear, touch, or smell the water. Flor and I rarely saw other people walking along the riverbanks.

After spending time on the Ambato River, it is a shock to travel east of Baños to Rio Verde, which is both a river (Green River) and a town of the same name. The trip takes about an hour by bus, less in car. Rio Verde spills out of Llanganates National Park and runs crystal clear. It is a trout stream, with wild fish. The best fishing is supposed to be a four or five hour hike upstream, but when it rains the fish wash down into town. There is little agriculture upstream of the town of Rio Verde, mostly a forested watershed. Two rivers, two fates.

Orchid in Ambato Flower Gardens

Here is an orchid in the Ambato flower gardens.

I have hundreds of pictures from this flower garden, and I will stop posting them soon, I promise, but there are a few like this one in particular that I really like.

This was not one of the more beautiful flowers that we saw, but it was hidden, off the trail, and I had to go into the woods a little bit and work myself into an awkward position to photograph it. So this picture feels like a reward.

Is this really an orchid? Darned if I know. I call any flower that opens upside down like this an orchid, especially if I find it in a warm, humid environment. (Ambato was dry, but the climate along the river had more moisture in the air than elsewhere in town.)

If you like to look at pictures in detail, enlarge this picture and see if you can see the profile of an ant on the tree. I never see anything like that when I'm taking a picture, but I like to look at everything in detail afterwards. My first experience in digital photography was through a microscope in a laboratory, and the goal was to gather data. I still have that mindset to some extent.

Eucalyptus Trunks

Here is Flor standing on the knee of a eucalyptus tree. Two trunks have fused together here, which makes the whole structure more impressive.

This photo is from a different day from yesterday's picture. You can see that Flor is wearing different clothes. We really loved the Ambato flower gardens, and went back again and again. Only once did we ever see anybody else using the trails.

Flor and I often talk about how Ecuadorians and Americans have different ideas about recreation. In Ecuador, not as many people look for trails to walk along, with the idea that it is an interesting way to spend free time. There are not as many well-developed (and safe) systems of trails in Ecuador as there are in the U.S. Also, many people in Ecuador spend a lot of time walking from place to place anyway, so why would they want to keep walking when they could do something else, like play soccer with a group of friends?

There are exceptions to this rule. We always saw a lot of people walking around Quito's Parque Metropolitano, a park with a large system of well-developed trails in the northeast of Quito.

When Flor and I first moved to the United States after getting married, we lived in Alhambra, a Los Angeles suburb, and Flor was constantly asking, "Where are all the people?" The reason is that we never saw anybody walking on the sidewalks, even in downtown Los Angeles. In Ecuador, the streets are filled with people walking around from place to place.

At any rate, for whatever reason, we loved having the flower gardens in Ambato to ourselves.

Eucalyptus in Ambato Flower Garden

There were lots of eucalyptus trees in the flower gardens along the Ambato River.

Eucalyptus are not native to Ecuador. They were introduced from Australia. However, now eucalyptus are perhaps the most typical trees of the hoyas, or interandine mountain valleys of Ecuador.

The Andes mountains run north to south through Ecuador along two parallel ranges, the Cordillera Occidental and the Cordillera Oriental. Between the two ranges are the hoyas, the high mountain valleys that have historically been the center of population in Ecuador, even back to the time of the Incas. Through this long human occupation of the hoyas and the effects of deforestation, most of the native trees have disappeared in the hoyas, and the eucalyptus have taken over. Wherever you see trees in the hoyas (which sadly, is not in too many places anymore) there are sure to be eucalyptus in the mix.

At first I didn't like the eucalyptus. Often they are spindly and scraggly, and always they are invasive. But I'm used to the Eucalyptus now, and think they're beautiful. In the Ambato flower gardens some of the Eucalyptus trees were enormous. I took some pictures of Flor standing against the trunks of the biggest trees (California redwood-type shots), but I can't seem to find those pictures on the computer now. I'll keep looking.

The hoyas are not the whole story of Ecuador. To the east the Andes drop down into tropical rainforest, and to the west into a hot coastal plain. Some of the densest forests in Ecuador, with many native species, are on the flanks of the Andes. Those areas receive very high amounts of rainfall and also have steep terrain which makes human habitation and logging difficult (but not impossible). There are also dense forests in the rainforest region, which are increasingly disturbed by logging and other human activity.

In 1998 I visited Yasuni National Park, in the eastern rainforest region, but didn't take a camera with me. I was at a scientific station. One of the people there was from the Smithsonian, and he was counting the number of tree species in a plot of a certain size, one hectare if I remember correctly. He said there were a greater variety of tree species in his plot than there were anywhere else on the face of the earth in a similar-sized plot. Maybe the ideas of scientists have changed slightly since then, but you get the idea. 

In the hoyas though, it is eucalyptus, especially along riverbeds and along fencerows, but mostly there are no trees, only cleared fields in which the incredible patchwork agriculture of the Andes mountains takes place.

Odd Flowers and Fruit

Here is one of the more unusual flowers that I saw in the flower gardens along the Ambato River.

Actually, though I thought these were flowers when I first looked at them, most of what is in the picture is fruit, not flowers. There is only one flower, near the bottom of the picture.

These were tiny plants that hugged the ground, and were growing in a mat over rocks and against a wall on the trail. They fascinated me as soon as I saw them. I got down on my hands and knees to photograph them. This was not the best picture I took, but it was the only picture that showed a flower. All of the other flowers were already turned into fruit.

What I found so interesting was that the leaves, stems, and fruits of these plants were covered with tiny bubbles that glistened in the sun. The plants looked like they were made of candy.  If you enlarge the photo, you'll get a better idea of what I mean. I haven't seen anything like this plant before or since. This plant was in only one spot along the trail, whereas some of the more conventional flowers were planted in several places.

Purple Flowers in Ambato

The first thing we noticed in the flower gardens along the Ambato River were (drum roll please...) lots of flowers.

This picture does a good job of showing what the trail looked like. It was cool, shaded, and with an abundance of flowers everywhere. Behind the purple flowers you can see other varieties. There were hundreds of types of flowers, and I have the pictures to prove it. I am not going to post all of them on this blog. Maybe I'll post one or two more pictures of flowers in the next week or so, if they look particularly beautiful or exotic to me.  

Ambato Footbridge

This beautiful footbridge was the start of a long walk through a forest and flower garden along the Ambato River.

The view in this picture is uphill towards the center of Ambato. You can see this footbridge from the heavily used bridge (that serves motor vehicles) where Calle Montalvo crosses the river. From the Ambato side of Calle Montalvo there is a pedestrian walkway that you use to work your way down towards the river. Then you follow the paths that it looks like you should follow to get to this footbridge.

Over the next couple of days I will blog more pictures of the sights along the river trail park that begins here. We were surprised at the beauty and isolation that we found along this trail system in the middle of an urban area.

We were warned by locals to be careful, with the usual caution about ladrones (robbers), but in four or five visits to this park by day the only other people we saw were two policemen on bicycles, which was reassuring. The rest was trees, flowers, fields, and a well-maintained system of footpaths, benches, and bridges. At the far end of the trail from this footpath was a popular outdoor recreational area, with picnic tables and sporting fields, but few people seemed to want to leave the recreational area to explore the trails along the river.

This picture gives a good idea of what the climate is like in Ambato, dry and warm. It rains less in Ambato than it does in Quito and some other cities in the Ecuadorian sierra. Often it clouds over in Ambato, but with no rain at all or only a sprinkle or two. After living here for a while, I found that I longed for a good soaking rain, to wash the dust off the streets and cleanse the air. Once in a while it happened.

Pigeons in Ambato

Ambatans like to feed the pigeons in Juan Montalvo Park. This is near the entrance to the park that faces la Catedral. We saw people feeding pigeons here every day.

Do you see the man's hand near the ground, on the right? He is waiting for the pigeons to come eat out of his hand. And check out the sunglasses on the boy in the background. (You have to enlarge the photo to do this. Right click and choose "Open link in new tab" or "Open link in new window". That will enlarge the photo a little bit. Now click on it again to enlarge it even further. The same trick works to enlarge every photo on this blog.)

I think the star of this picture was supposed to be the boy that is hunched over in the middle of the picture, but the brown and white pigeon flew in front of him, just as the shutter released.

I've always been told that you can not feed rice to birds. Supposedly rice can swell in birds' stomachs and cause gastro-intestinal problems, and even kill them. But rice is exactly what everybody feeds the pigeons in Ambato.

Flor and I are the kind of people who like to throw bread to ducks for entertainment. And let's not even talk about squirrels. I think that Flor would fill our house with domesticated squirrels, if it were allowed. So we thought it was cool that people took care of the pigeons in Montalvo Park. In so many other cities pigeons are treated as a nuisance.

Center of Ambato

Here is Flor looking over the center of Ambato.

Ambato is the capital of Tungurahua province. It is a very industrious city. Ambato is known throughout Ecuador for its busy markets and its commerce. The weekly market in Ambato used to be the biggest market in Ecuador, until it was broken up into several smaller markets. There is still a tremendous amount of commercial activity that takes place in Ambato on market days.

Much of this activity originates in surrounding towns such as Quizapincha and Píllaro. Residents of these small towns arrive in Ambato early in the morning on market day, and return home at night.

Ambato has a modern mall, with a movie theater. Flor and I really liked that. Once in a while it's just nice to take a break and go to the movies.

Ambato also has numerous festivities and parades, the most prominent of which is the Festival of Fruits and Flowers, which takes place over a week during Carnaval in Ecuador. I have blogged a few pictures from this festival in the past, and I will blog more in the future.

The food in Ambato is very traditional. One regional specialty is llapingachos, which are tortillas (hamburger-shaped patties) of potatoes, served with eggs, a reddish sausage, and a small salad. All of the central food markets in Ambato serve llapingachos. Another specialty which you see not only in Ambato but also elsewhere in Ecuador, but which is especially popular in Ambato, is morocho, which is a sort of drink made of corn and milk, lightly sweetened and served hot. On Cevallos, which is the main drag in Ambato, there are a couple of places which have huge metal pots (we are talking witch-cauldron sized) of morocho out on the sidewalk as an attraction in the evening. Inside you see people unwinding around dinner time with a glass of morocho and a half sandwich, or maybe a humita, which is ground corn and a couple of raisins made into a dough and steamed inside leaves.

Flor and I lived in Ambato for the better part of a year together. Flor went to grade school in Ambato, so she was able to show me pretty much the whole city. I have more to say about Ambato, but I'll save it for future posts.

Pablo

Here is a picture of my brother-in-law Pablo.

Flor's and my niece Paulina took this picture in Paulina's mother's apartment in Quito, using the first digital camera Flor and I ever owned, a 2 megapixel Kodak that we bought in 2001.

Pablo is an accomplished musician and composer. His style is avant-garde, very modern, although he has classical training. He has done a lot of work traveling and recording the music of different indigenous groups in Ecuador, and produced a few CDs of these recordings, with funding from various sources.

Flor's other brothers also have careers in music. Her oldest brother Jacinto is an accomplished classical guitarist. He performed a song that he wrote for Flor at our wedding. Her middle brother Vicente is also a classical guitarist, who works as a music teacher at the Music Conservatory in Quito. Pablo is the youngest.

Flor grew up listening to classical music, and helps me with the names of songs.

Terminal Terrestre 2, or Where to find the Most Beautiful Women in the World

Here is another shot of the now defunct terminal terrestre in Quito, this time in color.

The area at the bottom of the stairs is where tickets were sold. The ticket windows were in the wall to the right. Also, there were turnstiles in that wall to head out to the buses.

No shortage of junk food for sale!

I was going to straighten out the lines in the photo, but the terminal really did look like this in real life, like a jumble of blocks that were not quite square with one another. The funny angles always made me feel slightly disoriented.

Terminal terrestre is a generic term for the main bus terminal of a city, and is not unique to Quito's bus terminal. There are plenty of other "terminales terrestres" in Ecuador.

My least favorite bus terminals in Ecuador are those in Guayaquil, Machala, and Chone, unless any of those cities have recently updated their terminal. [Edit: Guayaquil has indeed updated their bus terminal! Please read retired_poppi's comment below.]

My favorite bus terminal is (was? It might be aging now...) Loja. It is new and clean. In fact, I like almost everything about Loja, not only the bus terminal. I'll write more about Loja in future posts.

The new terminals in Quito are supposed to be fantastic, clean and beautiful.

I also like the terminal in Santo Domingo de los Colorados. A whole army of women in blue aprons with white trim approach each bus that pulls into the terminal there at night, trying to sell secos de pollo through the bus windows. Secos de pollo are chicken with rice and a tomato-based sauce. They are delicious.

Along those line, I once made the mistake once of buying and eating a seco de pollo in the Chone bus terminal. I was traveling with a member of my host family, who couldn't believe what I had just eaten. She told and retold the story, "Bob ate seco de pollo in the bus terminal of Chone." She would snort in disgust every time she told the story. Eventually, her brother approached me and explained, "It's not because you're a foreigner. There are some things that not even we eat."

But I lived to tell the tale, and even blog about it.

This same young lady had no problem with the secos de pollo in Santo Domingo de los Colorados. It was the bus terminal of Chone that she didn't like.

If you can get past their bus terminal though, Chone has an interesting secret. The most beautiful women in the world live there. I have not verified this, but I have heard it over and over again in Ecuador. I don't know where the idea started.

When I passed through Chone, I didn't see the best side of the city, much less the most beautiful women in the world. It was 1998, and there was severe flooding from the rains associated with El Niño. Deposits of mud were everywhere, and there was no electricity. I was there with the father and daughter of my host family. We arrived at night and had nowhere to stay. The air was hot, humid, and oppressive. We couldn't see anything as we tried to walk around the mud and debris in the city. There were gunshots in the distance. Finally we found a friend of a friend of a friend, in a storefront illuminated with candles. They knew of an unoccupied apartment, but it was padlocked. Somebody found a hacksaw blade, not the whole saw, just the blade, and we took turns over the next hour sawing through the padlock by candlelight. Our reward was something like an abandoned attic, with no glass in the windows and lots of mosquitoes, lots of spider webs, and lots of other creepy crawlies, but at least it was dry. The next morning we woke up and took the bus to Bahia de Caraquez (where the father of my host family lived, and which had just experienced a severe earthquake) and I didn't see much of Chone on our way out. I have since passed through once or twice, but never really explored the city.

Terminal Terrestre Quito

Here is a look inside Quito's old bus terminal, or "terminal terrestre". This was the terminal for buses with destinations outside of the metropolitan area. This picture only shows a small part of the building; the entire terminal was much larger than this.

This terminal was still functional in early 2009 when I was last in Ecuador. It closed soon thereafter. Two new terminals have replaced it, one in the north and one in the south of the city.

There are other terminals that serve destinations within metropolitan Quito. There is also an excellent (and crowded) system of trolleys in Quito. The trolley is what ties everything together. It goes to all of the terminals (or passes near them at least) and it is easy to catch from almost anywhere within the city.

I found the old terminal terrestre to be a confusing building. Flor, who is from Quito, says that she never completely knew her way around the terminal terrestre. My system was to head downstairs. That's where most of the tickets were for sale. If I was in the wrong spot, somebody knew where to direct me. Sometimes at night I waited outside the terminal for buses to exit, and then flagged them down. Flagging down a bus used to be the way to catch any kind of bus in Quito, but they changed the laws, and drivers on city routes are not permitted to stop anymore where there is not a bus stop. It may be that long-distance drivers still stop for customers near the terminal though.

If you bought a ticket inside the terminal, you paid a dime to pass through a turnstile to the "andenes", or zone of departures. Many cooperatives (the companies that ran the different bus lines) let customers get on their buses early. I always took advantage of this to get the seat that I wanted. Luggage went underneath the bus.

There were lots of chips/candy/soda type goodies for sale inside the terminal. Vendors also boarded the buses with ice cream and sometimes more substantial food. I was never wild about the food choices at Quito's terminal terrestre. Some of the other bus terminals in Ecuador have better hot food. There were a lot of good places to eat not far away from Quito's bus terminal, though.

In the photo you can see the bottom floor of the terminal, where people are purchasing tickets from the different cooperatives. On the second floor is a restaurant, and you can see some other businesses on the second and third floors of the terminal. I never explored all of the nooks and crannies of the terminal to know where the good places to eat were. I got lost once or twice, and some of the hallways were not well lit and a little spooky. So maybe there was great food at the terminal terrestre that I never found.

The buses dropped customers off upstairs when they arrived from another city. I always worked my way outside right away to a line of taxis, or sometimes I walked to the historic center of Quito, which was not far away.

The comments I've read in online travel forums hint that this terminal was closed for safety reasons, but I would guess that it was more to route the large number of buses that it served away from the center of the city. Quito has long had a problem with air pollution, and the trolley was built to lessen the number of buses operating in the city, which formerly was much, much higher than it is now. Closing this terminal and forcing travelers to take the trolley to the north and south of the city would be another logical step in that direction. Unfortunately, automobile traffic has greatly increased from what it was ten or more years ago, which has offset some of the gains that were made in reducing bus emissions.

It makes me sad to see the old terminal terrestre (and bus travel in general in Ecuador) criticized in online comments. I never had a problem at the terminal terrestre in Quito, and I took many, many trips there, including trips where I had to wait outside at night for buses to Guayaquil. Never once was I assaulted, ripped off, pickpocketed, nor did I ever have a problem with my luggage. I regularly put my luggage underneath the bus and just forgot about it until I arrived at my destination. I also regularly put my small backpack in the luggage rack above me inside the bus or underneath my seat and just forgot about it until I arrived at my destination. Nor have I ever seen anybody else in this terminal or on a bus out of this terminal pickpocketed, have their luggage ransacked, etc. I found the attendants at the terminal and on the buses courteous and professional, without exception. In all my time in Ecuador, which adds up to several years over five or six visits or so, I have seen only one minor robbery on a city bus in Quito, and another on the city trolley. That's it. And I rode the bus or trolley every single day I was in Ecuador.

R.I.P. terminal terrestre, I'll miss you.

Flag Bearer in Riobamba

Here is the flag bearer who reminded me of the statue of the flag bearer in Latacunga. This is a parade in Riobamba.

The colors in this flag bearer's uniform are different from the colors painted on the statue, but the type of uniform and hat are the same, and of course the flag is unmistakeable.

There was a boy marching in this parade who was dressed even more like the statue of the flag bearer in Latacunga, if I remember correctly, right down to the powder blue uniform.

I wish I knew what the flag symbolized.

I love the big smiles on everybody's faces. This was very much a small town, participatory parade (with some silly antics by the marchers here and there) and the crowd was involved in all of it.

The flag bearer took his job very seriously.

Flag Bearer in Latacunga

I don't know who the man carrying the colored flag is (I probably should have read the inscription at the base of the statue), but he appears to be important here in Latacunga.

When Flor and I saw a parade in Riobamba, a few hours south of Latacunga on the Pan-American highway, some of the marchers were dressed like this man, flag and all. I suspect they were part of a contingent from Latacunga. I snapped a few pictures. I'll post one tomorrow.

The businesses on the far side of this street include a lawyer, a gas store, a feed store, a bank, and a mobile phone store.

In Ecuador gas for cooking is sold in tanks. You go to the gas store and exchange your old empty tank for a new full one. In some neighborhoods trucks will pass by at a certain time of day, and you flag them down if you are out of gas. Obviously it is not a lot of fun to run out of gas. You can't even make a cup of coffee. The gas tank is heavy when it's full, and as it empties, you heft it each day, trying to judge how much you have left.

The way to beat the system is to have two tanks of gas. That's what we did in Ambato. We had one tank for cooking, and another for our hot water heater. When the cooking tank ran out, we'd just unhook the tank from the hot water heater and cook with it until we had time to go to the gas store, and vice versa.

Latacunga Church

Here is another beautiful old church in Latacunga.

I like the line of pigeons along the roof to the right.

As a bonus, this post teaches you how to say "stop" in Spanish.

That can be good to know when you're riding in a taxi.