Otavalo, Ecuador

The Market

January 12, 2008

- U2

Arriving from Colombia it was certainly a big change being in Otavalo. The look of the people was different and unique, as there are many more indigenous people living in the area. Many are very short, some barely over four feet tall, and they were often hunched over carrying something on their backs, be it a baby wrapped up in a sheet, or large sacks of wool goods or other crafts. Perhaps it is due to the environmental conditions but many looked so old, like gnarled bundles of durable humanity, covered in wrinkles forged over the years. I arrived on a Tuesday night and this allowed for plenty of time to see the town during the mid-week gaps between the popular Saturday markets, renowned to be one among the best in South America. These weekdays revealed the real Otavalo, authentic and less tarnished by tourism.

During the week, two components of the Saturday market still operate, though to a smaller extent. The artisans bring their goods to the main plaza and there are still daily produce and food markets. To me the selection seemed similar for many items, but others were only found on Saturdays. There is a large selection of wool goods, made from alpaca, as well as colorful hats, rugs, and others trinkets. I bought a few things and during the week it was a very relaxed atmosphere, which was nice. On Friday when I walked through the artisan market toward the end of the day, I talked to one of the women selling things and we had this exchange, translated from Spanish:

Look at this scarf!

It´s very nice, but I´m going to come back tomorrow.

It will be more expensive tomorrow.

Why will it be more expensive tomorrow?

Because tomorrow there will be many tourists.

But I am a tourist.

Yes, but today is not tomorrow.

Very clever I thought, although I still didn´t buy the scarf; I had already bought another one anyways. She was right, all the vendors did raise their prices on Saturday, although there was plenty of room for bargaining, especially since there were so many stalls selling similar things.

The produce market was a entirely different. There were stalls with all sorts of fruits and vegetables along the one entranceway to the market, including a few strange fruits like the long thin green fruit, that I had never seen before. I asked the vendor how you eat the fruit, and so he got out his knife and showed me, to some laughter from the few locals standing around. You have to split the fruit open on the narrow side and then there are these series of fleshy white pods that surround a black pit, a pretty mild tasting fruit, but quite good, and the unopened fruit can double as a weapon too. Upon further research, this fruit appears to be called guaba and is entirely different from the similarly sounding guava (in English).

Another amazing part of this market was the large number of different soups that were being made and served. One woman was making a massive pot of soup that was big enough for me to fit inside, I asked her if I could try some and she pulled out the large ladle and gave me a spoon. It tasted good, perhaps some type of a type of chicken soup, so I ordered a bowl; there were definitely a few chicken hearts floating around in my soup. I had another soup that was made from potatoes and cheese with some finely diced pieces of chicken heart, liver, stomach, and intestines.

The most impressive feature of the market was the meat section; impressive and nauseating. There were tables with freshly decapitated goat heads, skinned pig heads, and many large bins of an assortment of organs: intestines, livers, stomach linings, kidneys; you name it and it was there. Unfortunately I wasn´t able to a picture of the big bucket of cow hearts, because they whisked them away when I took out my camera and said that I needed to buy them if I wanted to take a picture. I really didn´t know what to do with $5 worth of cow hearts so I was forced to pass on this offer. There were also these big bowls of jellied fat as well as loosely folded up bundles of animal skin, with the fatty tissue side up. The worst part was probably the cumulative smell, a mixture of wet dead animals, meat, organs, and fat, all of which had come to rest at room temperature with persistent flies in the air. Not an environment for vegetarians or the faint of heart.

On Saturday, the town transforms into a massive marketplace, with artisan vendors filling most of the streets and straining the town´s transportation system. In addition to the two previously mentioned markets there is also a livestock market and a small animal market. The livestock market is held slightly outside of town and people bring their cows, pigs, horses, and goats to sell. For me, the livestock market wasn´t nearly as interesting as the small animal market. The small animal market featured people selling guinea pigs, a local delicacy, as well as ducks, lots of chickens, geese, turkeys, snails, rabbits, and dogs and cats (as pets I presume). It was really the sheer variety of animals in such close proximity that made it interesting; there were puppies briefly escaping only to run into baby chickens or ducks with equal looks of bewilderment. One vendor might be selling something like one duck, four chickens, a turkey, and some guinea pigs, all together in the same pen. There were definitely lots of chickens bought and sold with the birds being toted around upside down by their legs or thrown into sacks along with other small creatures.

The market day was at least colorful and varied, but the downside was the massive tourist presence. This had totally transformed the town, now I could see why there were at least a dozen pizza places, which for some reason is like a gourmet food. For me, it was just as interesting to watch the vendors break down their make-shift stalls at the end of the day and pack up all their stuff, folding items intricately and re-packing them into large sacks or bins, then pulling apart the metal supports and wooden benches before loading it all into trucks. As the day wore on, the crowds thinned out and many people left town the same day they arrived, leaving behind trash strewn streets and a much more tranquil Otavalo, setting the stage for one of the town´s Saturday night activities, the cock fight.