The Market in Otavalo

We saved our shopping for the last weekend so we didn't have to cart our purchases all over Ecuador. We also wanted to wait for Otavalo, a city north of Quito, which was towards the end of our trip and the home to the largest market in South America. Booths, as far as the eye can see, sell everything from toothpaste to pigs to alpaca sweaters with little images of alpacas sown into them. For those of you who don't know, here's what an alpaca looks like:

Who knew something so fluffy existed in the wild. Next, notice the Alpaca sown in the front of the sweater made from of alpaca wool. Brillant. This may or may not have been the exact sweater I bought Bridget, my younger sister.

The purchase that was my personal favorite was the 17 finger puppets (if you know Margaret's job you'll understand), nearly one for each animal in the animal kingdom.

To accomodate all our purchases, we had to buy a separate bag, which after a little recommended negotiation, cost only 50 cents. We filled her to the brim. Here's an example of the chaos that forced us to shop for hours. This picture only shows about 1/100th of the merchants and goods in the lively market on any given Saturday.

Now we go back to Quito for a few more days, then again to Guayaquil to fly home for four days for my older sister´s wedding. Congrats Britt and Theo!