Saturday 31 March 2012

I got up a bit late-ish, having gone to bed late (had the cable TV on loud to try and drown out the party downstairs, even if I was doing my Spanish "homework"), even though I was tired well before I actually lay down to sleep.

I had breakfast in a nearby cafe and had a fairly easy conversation with the lady there about how difficult it was to learn Spanish, to which I had said yes and no: pronunciation was easy but the conjugations of the verbs was difficult because we didn´t have as many in English. She then asked whether your native tongue made a difference in learning it and I said yes, that French, Italian people would find it easier. She then told me that she has been learning German for six years and she didn´t find it too difficult to learn, but learning the "slang" of different languages was hard, to which I heartily agreed! It felt very natural and easy, and I was pleased that I wasn´t struggling to either find the words (any pauses I had were more to do with what I wanted to say than how to say it).

I pretty much re-trod the same ground as yesterday afternoon but in more detail, including the cathedral, and a tiny bit more, like the monastery and market.

The cathedral has a stone façade which is the only survivor of an earthquake in 1797; there was some information about it displayed at the front and I was very pleased that I actually understood it, without one word causing me confusion. The museo del ciudad was closed, but it too had an information board in front of it, of which I had difficulty with only one word, so I still felt really pleased that my Spanish was improving (I've already read my first Spanish-English parallel short story on the way to Alausi, and started doing the Spanish Verb tenses in Alausi, in the evening and in Riobamba Friday evening).

I continued to explore the rest of the town. Today is market day for Riobamba, and a bit like Otavalo, the stalls overflow into the surrounding streets and not just in one plaza. I saw ducks and ducklings on the pavement and heard one guy asking for $1 for two ducklings; there was someone weaving the fronds of a palm leaf into decorative leaves at intervals of its "stem." I felt very tempted to take a photograph but thought perhaps not, I might offend (indigena people are supposed to be sensitive to having their photos taken).

I also wandered into another of the mercados and it was here that I finally understood about the roadside stalls with the pig, I had seen on the way to Alausi. There was an information panel hanging from the ceiling where it talked about how popular pig consumption was massive in Ecuador, in particularly, in the Andes. Alongside this, was the typical food adverts of what the stalls were selling, and which included picantes. From what I could see of the number of roasted whole (or virtually so) pigs there, I would say that this was definitely true!

There was even a sign for visceras (or similar spelling, I can't remember exactly), where there were massive hearts on display (cow hearts?) and livers. I watched one woman cutting bits of something unidentifiable but which was whitish-grey (intestines??) and putting it out for sale.

However, I soon tired of sightseeing (or taking photos) and made my way back to the hotel in the late afternoon and swotted up on my irregular verbs from the Spanish Verb Tenses book. Whilst I was able to do this, it wasn't too easy as below, the nearby (associated?) restaurant had a party with very loud music and a DJ that all too easily could be heard in my room (the hallway being a perfect acoustic amplifier). I was not best pleased…