Otovalo

Yo,all! Yang again with a quick update. We´ve had a great time. Arriving on Wednesday we thought the marketplace (fabrics, leather, musical instruments, clothing, weaving, art, music CDs, all hand-made from the area ... OK, maybe not the CDs) was pretty full. But today, Saturday, saw virtually every street closed for more vendors. And this in a town of 50,000. We´ve made some friends of the locals and took a small tour of the area on Friday (Hope & I being the only ones in the tour). Saw a Condor Park and bird recovery sanctuary, a lake in a volcano cone, a musical instrument ´factory´ where pan flutes and other flutes of various kinds are made by hand, a sacred waterfall (sacred back to the Incas), much beautiful scenery, and a town that supplies leather goods mostly to the US (that $300-$400 jacket you want? ... $45 here ... same one).

We´ve learned a couple of things: first is that gringos don´t know how to sell. Everyone here in Otovalo is an expert. Second, we´re wondering if now that we´ve gotten in a habit of asking for a discount or making a counter offer whether we´ll be able to control ourselves and not make a counter offer to the cashier at the grocery store.

We´ll be back on the boat tomorrow night (Sunday). Hope has lots of pictures to organize and she´ll be getting to you about that later this week. And sometime we´ll let you know where we´re going.

nuff for now, love from us both.

yang

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