Otavalo gifts, Fiery new year, Ishcayhuaranga canchis

So I lied... even though it´s two comments, they say the family reads it, so the blog is redeemed...Three topics today...

Otavalo

Saturday I went to the world famous Otavalo market two hours north of Quito (en route to Colombia). I heard it was incredibly touristy and a bit overpriced... but I was pleasantly surprised. The Quichua indigenous market was incredibly diverse and despite my best intentions, I spent a whole ton of money... But you will be happy to know that grandparents can expect a big gift, parents a big gift, mark two gifts, and jessica and ashley each make off with three! I just couldn´t help it... and everyone is absolutely going to LOVE their souvenirs. Especially jessica and ashley... you girls got something really cool coming to you! I can´t say anymore about the market because I´d have to tell you what I got... But I used my mad bargaining skills and with my fluent spanish with a few little quichua-isms thrown in they realized I knew what I was doing :)

The New Year

The New Year in Ecuador is CRAZY!!! I met this family while I was visiting Quito´s Teleferiqo, a cable car that takes you up the Pichincha mountain to overlook the whole city and surrounding mountains. They were American, but the parents lived in Phillipines, the one son and his girlfriend in Santa Fe, and the other son, Ben, in Maui. They were incredibly nice, and we spent the whole day together. They made off with a few crafts from the local market that I bargained for them, since they didn´t speak Spanish. And I made off with an official invitation to Maui!!! Fair trade, I´d say.

In Ecuador, everyone makes these effigies, or life size dolls, of figures of the past year. They are called Old Years. At midnight, they set the Old Years on fire and set off rockets. There are also the Widows of the Old Year. They are men who crossdress as old ladies, who are supposed to be mourning for the death of their husband, the Old Year. The Widows stop cars, dance like women, and won´t let traffic pass until someone pays them a tip. Then they use their collected change to get drunk all night. The Widows are part of the spectacle, so no one minds stopping their car and paying the hilarious revelers. Ecuadorians also think you should be wearing yellow underwear by midnight if you want good luck in the coming year. They eat 12 huge grapes. They crack an egg and leave it in a glass of water. In the morning, supposedly, it has the shape of something that foresees how your year will be.

So at midnight, we were surrounded by burning dolls. It´s illegal to put fireworks inside the dolls, but people do anyway, and they explode and fly wherever as the effigies burn. A guy I was with got hit in the back with a wayward firework that shot out of the belly of an Old Year. Luckily, it didn´t really explode so he was just covered in ash and pretty spooked! The night turned dangerous quickly. We saw a fight break out as two small kids tried to steal a guy´s cell phone. The police started closing the streets. And it took me an hour to find a taxi! But finally I went safely home. Most people stayed out until daybreak salsaing the night away, but I had a huge blister on my toe and the night was getting pretty dangerous.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo! Abrazos. And they hug everyone instead of kiss like we do in the States.

Quichua --- the Latin of South America

In other news, I am teaching myself Quichua. And it´s freaking complicated! They decline their nouns! Like in Latin. And one verb can be made about forty verbs by adding syllables. And they can´t have prefixes or suffixes like normal people... they have what I would call intra-fixes! where they plop a surprise syllable in the MIDDLE of the word. And they just keep adding syllables to one word instead of splitting them up. For example ¨of the boys¨ would be churicunacapag, churi is boy, cuna makes it plural, ca is ¨the¨, and pag is ¨of¨... but one word. Very complex language. They have words to mean red, redder, even more red, even more than more red, and reddest... not just red, redder, reddest, for example. They have the subjunctive. They have ways of forming verbs I can´t even explain...

For those of you who want to impress your friends, though, here is the most basic Quichua lesson I can give you... how to count to ten!

one shug
two ishcay
three quimsa
four chuscu
five pichca
six sogta
seven canchis
eight pusag
nine iscun
ten chunga

hundred pasag
thousand huaranga

So, I wish you all a very happy ishcayhuaranga canchis (2007)