Playing Carnaval

We had scheduled a tour of the surrounding craft villages for today.  Efrain was there waiting to pick us up at our hotel a few minutes before the scheduled time.  We have noticed that everyone is on time, and even restaurant service is fast in Cuenca — not at all what we have come to expect in a Latin American country.  Makes for a nice surprise…

We were barely out of town when a bucket of water was thrown on the car’s windshield.  Efrain laughed and said “everyone in Cuenca plays Carnaval — the kids play it in the streets with the water, and the adults play it behind closed doors with the drink.”  For the remainder of the day, we always drove with the windows rolled up, so the kids with buckets and hoses just washed down the car, and not the passengers.

Our first stop was in Gualaceo, a traditional weaving town.  Because of Carnaval, most places were closed, but Efrain had arranged for one family to stay open just for us.  Anna, a grandmother with no English showed us how she wove shawls the same way as has been done for the past 800 years.  It takes her 3 days to make a shawl, which is then sold for $15.


She also showed us how the cloth was dyed.  Black is produced by volcanic rock. Flowers from Peru produce indigo blue, while a pea-pod kind of plant produces brown.  She then showed the body of a tiny spider, which she crushed in her palm to create red.  Mixing in a little lemon juice turned the ink orange, while baking soda made it purple.  In all, she can 7 different permanent dye colors from the spider body, by combining various other materials.  We ended up buying one small runner. How could we not buy something from this woman?

As we left Anna’s workshop, Efrain spotted a BBQ cuy stand nearby and asked if we wanted to try it.  Cuy is an Ecuadorian specialty, better known as guinea pig to Americans.  Sure!  It has an interesting taste that I am still trying to find the right words to describe.  I guess you will just have to come down and try it for yourself. Then maybe you can give me the right words (it is good though — I can at least attest to that much).

Next stop was Chordeleg for silver shops.  We browsed a few open silver jewelry stores, but nothing caught our eye enough to want to buy, and we moved on.

Sigsig is the home of Panama hats.  The hats have always been made in Ecuador, but in the 19th century they were shipped to Panama for export, and Europeans started calling them Panama hats, since that was the origin of the ships bringing them over.

We saw how the hats were made, which was rather interesting.  They had 3 hat molding machines — one over 100 years old and two more modern ones.  It was the 100 year-old machine they used though, because it was the most reliable!  The showroom was not very impressive, and no hat really looked good on either of us, so we moved on.

We passed through Paute, with its numerous fields of flowers, and San Bartolome with all the guitar workshops.  Both towns were effectively shut down due to Carnaval.

On the way back, Efrain drove by some apartments for rent at half the prices we had been shown Friday.  The primary difference is that these were not going through a real estate agent, and in a couple cases were also a bit further out of town.

After Efrain dropped us off, we went looking for lunch.  Not much in the town was open, and we ended up at Carbon.  A large, delicious chicken soup, large lemonade and a bottle of water set up back $7.

On our way home, we stopped by a tiny grocery store a block from our apartment for some supplies.  The store was completely barricaded with a small window to tell the merchant what we wanted.  I tried to say we wanted some toilet paper, and was getting nowhere until a woman came up, saw I was having trouble and asked what I needed.  Turns out it is called “papel higienico”.  Add a new (important!) word to my vocabulary…

And of course, there was one more military band playing in the park, as we turn towards home.

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