Las Fiestas

Quito, Ecuador

What's up everyone? Well, well it's been a long time. Once again, I've been totally slacking on my group emails. I think that I left you guys back in November. So, again, I will try to catch y'all up. So the final few weeks of the quarter were quite exciting for us, after the trip to the Amazon, we had the fiestas de Quito to return to back in the big city. For an entire week the city erupted in drininking, dancing, bullfighting, and revelery. We had our final on Monday, and besides a day of review, and a day of playing cards (at which our professors made us drink canelazo, a fruity drink spiked with aguardiente, a local alchol, at 9am), we were left to our own devices. We partied in the streets with the locals, partied in the clubs with the gringos, attended a bullfight, and best of all rented a chiva. What is a chiva? you might be asking. A chiva is a double decker truck-bus thing that has a live band on top. About 30-40 people cram in on top next to the band, or on the platform hanging off the back. They are givin whistles, and little cups to hang around the neck. The cups are routinely filled with canelazo (the drink I mentioned earlier, and the official drink of the fiestas de Quito). The chiva then tools around through the crowds of the fiestas, the chiva honking, the passengers whistling, yelling and dancing to the music being played next to their ears. The crowds on the street whistle yell and dance back and general merriment ensues. After the chiva, some of us went to an all-night party featuring some of the famous local pop bands and continued fiestaing.

After the fiestas de Quito, the quarter was finally over, and we had a month off to do what we pleased. Most people went home, but I was lucky as my girlfriend Vicky came down from New Orleans for 2 weeks. We first went to Banos a little town a couple of hours south of Quito where we got to visit waterfalls, and soak in the hotsprings. The first morning we were there, we awoke to a marching band marching through our room...well ok not through, but right outside our room. I looked out the window through bleary eyes to see thirty or forty ten year old's banging away on drums with fierce abandon, and twenty or thirty ten year old girls dressed in short skirts, tights, and six pounds of make-up throwing batons recklessly close to our open window. Once a marching band, troops by your window in the morning there's no going back to sleep. So we stumbled down the stairs, and on the way to breakfast, I asked a local what was going on and they said - Oh their practicing for the fiestas tomorrow. Hey, what do you know more fiestas. That night, we heard some fireworks going off, so we went to check it out, and I saw one of the craziest things that I've seen in all my travels. The locals had built large towers made out of bamboo about twenty or thirty feet high. Each tower was wrapped in pounds of fireworks. Some brave soul would walk up under the tower, light the fuse and run back. There was then a chain reaction of random rockets, bombs, and pinwheels. The tower would shake back in forth spewing sparks, fire balls, and fireworks in every direction, and there was about fifteen towers that were lit off one at a time, each in danger of being set off by a random spark from the one next to it. The crazy thing was, was that there was no crowd control what-so-ever. People could stand as close as they dared. Every tower showered the crowd with clothes melting, skin burning balls of fire. Every so often, a firework would be shot up in the air upside-down and would propel straight down into the crowd. A guy standing right next to me got nailed right in the head and blood gushed out of the burn in his forehead, much to the delight of the surrounding crowd. Nobody seemed to be too concerned. In all my travels I have never seen something so dangerous to so many people, I wish I could fully convey the absurdity of it all. I, of course, loved it. You'll have to wait for the pictures. Well, durn it, this is getting to be a bit long, so let me just tell you that for the rest of the time Vicky was down we hung out at the beach learning to surf and laying on the sand soaking up the sun. I'd like to wish everyone a belated happy New Year. I hope everything is going well for y'all. Feel free to give me an email, and I'll try to get back to ya'. Hasta, Moe.