Car Shopping

We did some intense car shopping on Friday, seeing mostly old run-down cars whose buttons didnt work or whose engines were about to fall out of the hood, but, we did come across a nice one by chance while walking back to town. It is the Toyota Crown... which is 1 year older than me but is really well kept and really cheap. It even has spiffy electric windows!

We didnt do much other than that except for see an Andy Warhol exhibition in the evening complete with a campbell's soup disco.

Oh, and I almost forgot... we met up with Natasha, who apparently went to school with me & SM in vnam (uuuh...) and it was her going away party to China (uuuh...) so she rented an open-top bus and we drove around the city blowing our whistles and waving our Ecuadorian flags. We then went out clubbing with the Ecuadorian elite (Everybody was as white as we were) where some apparently famous Puerto Rican reggaeton singers put an end to our dancing with their baggy-panted efforts at singing.

This morning we woke up in our white hospital beds to the calling of a fruit truck that sent nostalgic memories through my brain of the Spotornese fruit trucks (meloni...meloni belli...) and we took the bus to Otavalo, the mountain town with the biggest Saturday market in Latin America.

Today the whole town was taken over by the flamboyant market, with it spilling over the sidewalks and into side streets. We walked around the market for most of the afternoon outfitting ourselves with ponchos, bowler hats, striped pants woven bags. We're now more local than the locals who, ironically have another section of the market catering to their interests in nike sweaters and puma caps.