Incan Ruins on Strike

It feels like deja vu. Exactly twenty-four hours after I sent my last e-mail, I am back in the same internet cafe, pounding away at another one.

By the way: Way to go, Wings. A magical season, no doubt.

On another (much more somber) note, Boca Juniors (my soccer team) lost in the semifinals of the Copa Libertadores. It was a tough 3-1 loss to a Brazilian squad. Last night, the entire country was glued to this game because the winner would face Qutio in the tournament finals. Asking them to change the channel from the soccer to a hockey game would have been met with the ¨what is hockey?¨ question.

I regress.

Even the tourist sites go on strike

So the day after my adventure in the jungle, we visited the most important Incan ruins in Ecuador. Calling Inca Pirca the Macchu Picchu of Ecaudaor would be like saying the Argonauts are the Patriots of the CFL. While they might win championships, they are no comparison with the English squad.

Either way, we arrived at the entrance to the tourist site after a four hour bus ride and were ready to see some ruins. The entrance gate to the site is in a town a kilometer away. As Ari and I approached the entrance, some locals sitting at the gate told us the site was closed and that we should turn around. They had a rope going across the street, preventing us from going forward. Confused, we walked to the local police station to ask what was going. We walked to the precinct to find it abandoned and empty.

Reasoning that we would´ve heard about this being closed, we decided to walk to the side of the fence and continue along the path. Once we reached the ruins (about a kilometer uphill from the gate), our guide told us that the locals decided to go on strike, asking for money from the tourist site to fix a road leading into town. She said that the tourist site didn´t even make enough money to support itself, let alone share the money with the community. It was the eighth day of the strike, and nobody seemed to be giving an inch.

(Because of the strike, we didn´t have to pay the $6 entrance fee)

On the bus back to the city from the ruins. the locals would not allow the bus to pass through the gate. They refused to lift the rope, and our driver and bus official spent a few minutes arguing with the locals before they finally relinquished.

A scarlet Michigan hat?

As we walked up to the police station in Incapirca, we passed a both selling bootleg movies and apparel. One of the items on the rack was a red hat with a maize Michigan across the front. Pretty weird.

A horrible misnomer

Before I go into this story, I want to clarify a pretty common misconception. The headware commonly referred to as the Panama Hat actually comes from Ecuador. When Ecuador began exporting the hats to the rest of the world, they would have to travel through the Panama Canal. From there, people began to associate them with Panama, and the name stuck. But in Cuenca, the third largest city in Ecuador and probably the country´s most picturesque, there are numerous Panama Hat Haberdasheries. There is even the Sombrero Museum.

As soon as we arrived in Cuenca, we went to a Panama Hat factory to see how the headware is made. It is a pretty extensive process of weaving straw, bleaching, ironing, and folding. They can make them in different colors and have different bends on the brims. After the tour, we went into the store, where they sell hats a fraction of the price you would pay in the United States and bought some. They also have photos of famous people who have come through their store (Columbo, Jeff Goldblum, and all the Miss Universe contestants from a few years ago (these were actually in another Sombrero factory but I didn´t want to make another bullet point just for this one fact).

Oneg? No, confirmation

That night in Cuenca was a Friday night, so Ari and I went to a nice restaurant across the street from the central square (it also happened to be underneath the main cathedral in town). While we were eating dinner, we heard a windpipe version of ¨Shalom Haverim¨ play over the restaurant´s stereo. Before dinner, we saw people in the streets preparing for some sort of festival that would occur that night, but we had no idea what the occasion was.

We ate dinner in the window seat and saw people dressed in their Sunday best walk down the street. This seemed weird for a Friday night, so something special must´ve been going down. While we were eating dinner, we also heard fireworks and loud music coming from the central square. There was a massive party happening. When we left the restaurant, we found out that it was a mass confirmation ceremony for the kids in the town.

There were fireworks, sparklers, and flaming paper mache cows in the street. It was insane. On one side of the plaza there was a guy encouraging people to dance as he played some random music. He kept it up with traditional dance music all night but for one of the last songs of the night, he played ¨Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.¨ I didn´t really think this fit with the whole Confirmation theme, but it definitely fit with the shabbat theme (except the fireworks and flaming cow didn´t).