Fiesta

When you are adjusting to a new place, especially when its foreign and strange, you are often so precoccupied with the details that you can´t really turn your attention to everything going on around you. The little questions and preoccupations of getting settled take away from the larger ability to soak up every thing happening around you.

Today is the festival of San Pedro here and indigenous groups from cities surrounding Cayambe have come to dance in a parade and attend the fiesta. I´m sitting in the internet cafe listening to Andean music playing outside and watching the groups go by in their brightly colored outfits. (Yes, I realize the this is the place where normal, enterprising North Americans would post a beautiful photo, but I´m a dinosaur apparently and didn´t bother with a digital camera. Whatever.)

The PC volunteers in Cayambe move through the city like a big amoeba with lots of little parts floating through the city. When the little amoebas run into each other, they become a large one, moving together tables in restaurants, congregating on the corners, comparing notes.