Christmas

We finished our trek of Quilotoa Loop on Christmas Eve we spent it in a little town called Isinlivi. We enjoyed cold beer and a nice supper at the Lulu Llama hostel and got ready to go out to the town square in the evening to enjoy the local celebration and festivities as Christmas Eve is a bigger celebration in South America than Christmas Day.

Greg took Ben and Levi to a little corner store and they bought a big bag of small bouncy balls and a jar of sour candy. The boys were so excited to distribute these things to the local kids at the town square celebration.

We showed up around 8:00 pm to find a mini-fair environment complete with dozens of foosball tables, a couple of bouncy tents for kids, a band and dance floor, and several gambling tables. All the women and girls were dressed up in their traditional clothes which included their felt hats, wrap around skirts and multiple layers of fake gold necklaces.

At 10 pm the fireworks started. It was quite an impressive display of fireworks for this town ...... but it ended up being completely stressful for all of us. Fireworks here mean lighting large racks of sparklers and then having local men basically run through crowds of people with the sparklers showering over our heads.

The men lit the fireworks with their cigarettes and many of the helpers were drinking alcohol while they were setting the fireworks off. When the sparkler display was over, the real fireworks were lit. The shocking thing for all of us was that the fireworks were lit just meters away from the crowd from the rooftop of a building the height of a garage. The fellows in charge used empty wine bottles to launch the works.

After several minutes of dodging flying embers and choking on the gunsmoke, we looked at each other and agreed that we best head back to our hotel.

Christmas morning we were up at 5 am to catch a ride in a pick-up truck to get us 14 kilometres away to a nearby town so that we could catch another local bus to a place called Saquisili which had a reputation for having a great local market. We only bought a couple of wooden spoons, some shelled peas, fresh carrots, blackberries and strawberries but enjoyed taking pictures of the roasted pig heads and grilled animal intestines for the throngs of locals.

We had to keep reminding ourselves that it was Christmas.... there was no snow, no Christmas concerts, no fancy baking, and our Christmas meals could generally be described as being pretty darned awful in comparison to what we have grown to love about Christmas back home. Of course we spent a long time all talking about what we wish we could eat and what we miss, not sure if that made it better or worse but we had some good laughs.