One of my favorite things in Boston is the produce market at Haymarket, where vendors resell what was left at the grocery warehouses that week. Buy it quick and cheap before it rots.
For a fairly conservative culture, Ecuador has some awesome graffiti.
Traditional Inti Raymi mask.
"We don't want development. We want to be free."
No love
"Don't see whores where there are just women."
In much of Asia and Africa, people carry heavy things on their heads. In Latin America women use a rebozo instead. It's a rectangle of cloth that can serve as a garment, sunshade, or carrier:
And of course, it's the classic method for carrying kids. You see a lot of kids with their parents in Quito. A lot of people can't afford daycare or stay-at-home parents, so they take their kids to work with them. You see people, especially indigenous women, selling things in the street with kids tied on their backs.
While the rebozo is traditionally hand-woven wool, modern Ecuadorian mothers favor other materials. The one above has Strawberry Shortcake characters printed on it. A lot of women just use polarfleece blankets.
Unlike US parents, who have heard about SIDS a million times and are always checking that their child is still breathing, Ecuadorian parents often cover their children entirely with a polarfleece blanket. You'll see a woman walking along with a large bundle in her rebozo, with perhaps a little foot dangling out the bottom. Ultraviolet radiation is very strong at this altitude, so the blanket is probably keeping the kid from getting burnt.
I'm pretty sure there's a kid in there
While Americans tend to buy special baby carriers, even if they're going with a simple rectangle, Ecuadoran women seem to use any convenient piece of cloth. The babies are all very chill about it.
One does see the occasional child in a stroller or a storebought baby carrier. Most young children are carried in arms, which seems inconvenient but maybe doesn't have the negative connotation of being an "indio". And while I see plenty of men carrying children, I've never seen one use a rebozo.
I'm not entirely sure if Jeff and I should have kids. I've seen the evidence that parents are less happy than non-parents. I understand that I'm the product of many, many generations of mammals that successfully reproduced, and that we are all selected to be good at parenting. And I understand that evolution does not have my personal interests at heart, and that it may have bred me to want something that will not actually make me happy.
But boy, do I want it.
Any actual babies need to wait until I've finished school and have had a job long enough to get medical leave. So in the mean time, I'm sewing stuff.
A mouse in an Altoid tin bed, from this idea.
A marble maze, from this idea.
And a Waldorf-style weighted doll.
(Watching a woman and her 10-year-old grandson at the bus stop the other day gave me food for thought. They were cursing at each other, threatening to knock each other into traffic. At one point she rounded on me and said, "You have kids? Don't have none!" I gave her a half-smile and thought, "I bet the findings on parental happiness are dragged down by people with terrible parenting skills. I'm sure I can do better than this.")
I recently heard the residents of my neighborhood described as "houseproud", a word I didn't know was still in use.
At least on the exterior, houseproud manifests as a lot of rosebushes and saints. These are some statues near my house. I think they're kind of sweet.
One of the things I love about living in a city is the sidewalks. I can actually walk places. I come from the suburbs of Virginia, where there are no sidewalks, crosswalks, or bike lanes. Here, I understand when people say they "ran into someone on the street". I actually see people I know on the sidewalk. Because we're not inside cars.
In a city, it's worthwhile to have shop windows that will make people stop and look. These are some of my favorites from Harvard and Porter squares.
juliawise07(at)gmail.com