After a first reconnaissance trip through town (and what a town ... with a very pleasant atmosphere, beautiful squares and churches and of course a volcano nearby!), we had almuerzo in a small place in the company of an elderly woman who - just like my grandmother - kept on telling us we had to eat well! In the afternoon, we planned to visit a museum, but all of Ibarra’s museums as well as its tourist office appear to be closed in the weekends ... (so much for being a tourist destination for your compatriots! :-s) So, we couldn’t do much else to do than go for an ice cream in Ecuador’s oldest and most renowned ice salon ;-), take a nap, explore Ibarra’s outskirts on foot, witness a wedding at night and then go for pizza!
On Sunday, we saw everyone in town running around with small bouquets made out of strips of stem of a type of palm tree. We correctly supposed that people took these “palms” to church to be blessed, because - after all - it was Palm Sunday. Their bouquets did look a bit funny, but hey, in
It was only after we had read some posters in church that we found out that with the usual type of palm (wanted for its wax and the manufacture of jewelry, but especially to be used on Palm Sunday, when their leaves decorate churches and bless people’s houses) going extinct, the parrots that live and nest only in this type of tree go extinct as well (read more and more, in Spanish though!).
Read here for a cool article on the new 7 deadly sins. These were frequently mentioned (and interpreted to the advantage of both palm and parrot) on El noticiero (the news) that week preceding Palm Sunday. Probably just in case people needed extra arguments to replace their palm leaves by an alternative ...
That Sunday, Will and I actually wanted to visit Cayambe (famous for it’s cheese and biscuits), but stranded in Otavalo, where I (oops, deadly sin??) went shopping and where we had a delicious fruit salad (greed!)!
Some pictures
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