Getting Lost

The tourists have got back on their busses to Quito. The vendors have packed up their stalls. I saw them walking through the square, literally bent double under the weight of the enormous bundles of wool tied to their backs. The sun goes down, and the crisp Andean air turns cold; summer doesn’t mean long, balmy nights when you live four thousand meters above the sea. Even the dogs have gone to find other sources of refuse from which to scrounge their evening meal.
Just as the last shadows of the sunset disappear, the square begins to fill again. What during the day is a bustling market full of shrewd businesswomen with shy smiles is now populated with carts selling empanadas dripping in oil and coated in fine white sugar, roughly hewn wooden tables at which entire families treat themselves to a hot bowl of soup, and gangs of young men look for groups of girls with whom they can exchange flirtatious glances.
I walk to the main street. The parade is already underway; files of indigenous people wearing their strings of traditional golden necklaces with pride go past. Their black braids - a vestige of the old days maintained by both the men and women - fly as they jump from foot to foot. Their songs involve repetitive pattern of calls and responses that are overwhelmingly eerie.
I buy a bottle of scalding juice from a lady standing over a steaming pot. $2 for a bottle. What size bottle? She really doesn’t care. For an extra dollar, she gives me a generous top-up of the cheap, strong spirits that help cut the cold night air. The fiesta popular begins in a whir of blaring trumpets, pounding drums, and sultry cumbia rhythms. The night smells of sawdust, gunpowder, and frying oil.
Just outside the main plaza, I meet a group of old men. Clearly they have been enjoying some spirits of their own. They take out instruments and begin to play songs from their childhood. The Andean sanjuanito music rises and falls delicately, a sharp contrast to the modern salsa I left at the main stage. I know that this music has been played in this town for thousands of years, and I am enveloped in a nostalgia for a way of life that I have never experienced.
I don’t know how I got here. It feels like I’m the only person in this pulsing town with light hair and fair eyes. But tonight is a night where everyone is in costume, where everyone is living in both the past and the present, and where anyone willing to share a swig from their bottle is allowed to join the dance.