Market Awesomeness!

*Disclaimer: This post is not for the weak hearted or PETA activists


As y’all know by now, some things in Ecuador are a little umm… different… by US standards. Well, this past week I took a trip to Ecuador’s largest indigenous market in Guamote and boy did that reinforce the differences between the two countries.


I’ve heard from other volunteers that the Guamote’s Thursday Market isn’t your typical food market, but I really didn’t know what to expect as I was climbing up the hill to see what it was all about. Upon arriving at the outskirts I knew something wasn’t right by the general disorder of the whole event. There were people walking around selling the weirdest variety of stuff i.e. one man was selling TV remote controls and blender parts. Now this kind of randomness isn’t too unusual, but after fighting our way through the crowd we finally made it to the livestock section.


So imagine a football field filled with pigs, sheep, cows and indigenous people. And I don’t mean spaced out like a state fair. The livestock section was packed from fence to fence with animals tied down to stakes, up to fences, around each other or bound at their feet. It was entirely too packed with people and beasts that I didn’t dare to try and make it to the center of the field. So with all this chaos, you might ask, “How do the vendors keep their animals separate?” Well the answer to that is simple: all you have to do is spray paint their heads and voila, no confusion! In this same area there were also baskets FULL of guinea pigs mixed with rabbits, ducks and in one there were 2 sad puppies. Yes, puppies mixed in with ducks and guinea pigs. Needless to say the ducks weren’t happy and spent the morning trying their hardest to eat the puppies (to no avail).


After leaving the animal section, I decided to see what becomes of those animals and made my way to the meat section of the market. The meat is kept in a separate building (thank goodness!) from the fruits and veggies. The gory stalls outside should have been enough to keep me from wanting to go in since roasted sheep heads, random innards and viscera littered the entrance to the building. However, curiosity got the best of me and I had to see what went on inside. It’s really hard to describe what the meat section looks like if you’ve never been to war, seen one of the Saw movies, or actually puked your guts out. I know what it looks like to kill a deer or pig, but this was an entirely different animal (no pun intended). There were guts, heads, legs, hearts, eyes (with lashes), lungs, and whatever other pulpy, bloody stuff comes out of disemboweled creatures strewn all over the floor. Literally, I had to watch my step or I would have tripped on animal parts. And notice I say “animal” because I don’t really know what animals they were from the way they were slaughtered. So with grisly body parts everywhere, and blood dripping down their counters, the vendors were happily sawing apart their carcasses shouting at us to “buy, buy, buy!”


The thing is, I really didn’t see one piece of meat that looked remotely edible… And that wasn’t because I’m a snob (see sheep soup post), but because they didn’t actually appear to be selling meat. All they had on their counters were random organs, like plates of brains, bowls of hoofs, or heads and spinal cords hanging from hooks on the ceiling. But actual parts of the animal that people eat didn’t seem to really exist there. So without purchasing anything, we left the market, leaving a trail of bloody footprints back home.