my weekend in riobamba

this weekend i went to riobamba. janae says the name is cool, but not as good as jipijapa. i don't know...take your pick, really. here's what some of it looks like from the hotel.




on saturday i walked around the town. pretty much the entire place becomes a street market on saturday...they sell EVERYTHING. it's like wal-mart, but even cheaper! and nobody gets hurt. this guy sells car parts, electronics, kitchen appliances, and toilet seat covers. there is probably also very literally a kitchen sink in there somewhere. see if you can find it!
here's a lady selling bananas. want some bananas?










this kid sells chickens. i asked if i could take his picture, but you can tell he wasn't so excited about it.









while i was walking i stumbled across a wedding in the cathedral, so naturally i sat in the back with my dirty jeans and took pictures. in ecuadorean weddings, the bride and groom get chairs. if you've ever been to one of mike's weddings, you see where they're coming from. hiyoh!






but the real reason for the trip was the train ride to "el nariz del diablo", which for those of you who don't habla español means the....nariz del diablo!!! no, i'm just kidding, it means the devil's nose. which is a pretty appropriate name for a big craggly mountain peak when you think about it, because noses are really pretty precipitous anatomical features anyway, but this is the DEVIL'S nose, so it'd be...way worse. this picture illustrates that i rode on the roof with all these people. it also illustrates how hard it is for me to take a level picture. i suggest tilting your computer screen.
mr. doug martsch, will you sing us this caption? "my new friend jens looks / just like david bowie / but he hates david bowie / i think bowie's cool..." thanks, but i don't actually know if jens hates david bowie. i do know he's german, and i do know he thinks ecuadorean beer tastes like water. i know quite a bit about jens, really. we met at the hotel and had dinner together before we took the train ride together.
this is what the andes look like. being on the roof made the scenery more accessible, but it sort of made me hate that my camera couldn't take a picture of everything all at once, preferably in 3-D. ultimately i decided that i prefer windows limiting my view.


here is the devil's nose. a guy next to me suggested the devil get surgery. i can only assume the people who named it thus have actually seen lucifer's proboscis, and this is the closest any geographical feature on earth comes to approximating its craggly....ness. and now you know!






so that was my trip. or some of it. i took too many pictures to show you all of it.