Super Mercado

Not for the faint of heart

In the US we have pretty much all material wants at our fingertips. You want it bigger, faster, stronger, no problem. But at some point during our industrialization we lost our community markets. SF is trying to recoup this loss with our overpriced ferry building market, but Otavalo puts SF and most of the rest of the world to shame.

Brianna and I were two of 7 tourists that were in Otavalo for the week, come Friday you could barely walk a block before running into some light weight pants and hiking boots. The reason for the seething masses was the world famous market that starts at 7:00am.

Things start tame. Discounts coming at you left and right, everyone is your new friend. Weavings, oversized spoons, seed jewelry, every vendor has different variations on the same theme. Its for tourists and I am a tourist so I oggle at the craftsmanship and take a bunch of pictures.

The reason people come to Otavalo is for this sort of stuff. They want the scarf, the dreamcatchers etc... and they have good reason, the volume of dreamcatchers at this market is astounding. Many good dreams to be had. The tourist market is about 6 blocks of hammocks and wall hangings.

But being the kind of tourist I am, I want to know what is on the other 45 blocks and although we hadn´t eaten and Brianna is squimish we pushed forth.

Things started to look more like things you would think twice about before lugging thousands of miles. And that was cool, at least I wasn´t everyones new best friend. But the real action came when we came upon the food market. This was where the real action was at.

But the fun was still to come! Animals, lots of them, not living, or living but in bags, which is a code for fresh meat. (this is my warning that the animals you are about to see aren´t cute)

Brianna is afraid of birds.

In the end we didn´t make it to the best part, the live animal market. Just another reason to return.