Photo Roundup, Nov. 15, 2012

Enjoy some of the fun sights from the last little while.

You really need to click on this one to enlarge it so you can truly see the details of this ladder.  It's one of the "best" I've seen yet.  Ladders are almost always hand made here.  My landlord makes his out of bamboo, which seems to be the most popular material but salvaged wood comes in a very close second.

 "Waiting for the bus." The owner of these birds was waiting to catch the bus back to his home in Otavalo.  The cages go under the bus in the luggage compartment.  If you haven't seen one of my photos of the buses here, they look like an old Greyhound bus with lots of luggage space underneath.  Just about anything can be luggage.  I didn't see it but someone told me about a piglet that was tucked into a cloth sack to be carried along in the baggage compartment.

This adorable little girl is outside of her family's leather store with her bottle of window cleaner and rag just working her little heart out.  When her mother would come to the window on the inside and point at a spot she missed, she would laugh loud enough for me to hear her across the street and diligently spray and wipe that spot.  Children spend lots of time with their parents in their stores and sometimes work there as well.  It's not a violation of a child labor law--it's more like it is in the States (and I'm sure many other places in the world) where children who grow up on a farm start working as soon as they're old enough to carry the basket out to the hen house to gather eggs.  It's just what you do.  There's also lots and lots of play time and time with family and friends as well.

One of the more ecologically sound taxis in town.  This will hold a lot of goods and/or people.  The propulsion method is the back 2/3 of a bicycle.  This fellow isn't exactly a youngster and we have quite a few hills but he seems to do just fine. People here seem to be very strong overall.  Perhaps it's the same thing as growing up on a farm where you just automatically get strong from doing lots of manual labor from a young age.

This is one of the large baskets I bought from the basket man in one of my posts from last week.  They can roll all the way down to make something more like a tray than a basket.  Once I get something different I can use for my fruits and vegetables, I'll unroll this one and put it to use holding something else.  By the way, the oranges in there were purchased for 80 cents for 20 juice oranges.  The avocados and chirimoya are from the trees in my back yard.  Does it get much better than that?  Oh, and those cute little potatoes are absolutely fabulous.  The potatoes here have such flavor.  I love them.

If you look closely you'll see a motorcycle to the right of the white truck.  They are both parked in front of the cable/internet/cell phone company.  The cab is the only vehicle moving in this photo.  The funny thing about this is that there was plenty of room right behind the motorcycle.  If I had only seen this once it would just be one of those things but I see it fairly frequently.  It's just one of those things, I guess.

The truck on the left is delivering propane gas tanks.  It will drive up and down the streets with it's alarm blaring.  Car alarms here are used for all kinds of things besides letting you know if someone is trying to steal your car.  In this case, when I hear the car alarm heading this way, I know I could go out and flag him down and get a fresh tank of propane if I need it.  I'm fortunate and my landlord takes care of it for me but that's how most people get theirs.  You can actually call them and ask them to come to your house if you live in a part of the building where running down to the front door before the truck has already gone past gets a little challenging or if your schedule doesn't coincide with the truck's route that day but I see people out flagging down the truck quite often.

So there you are--a bunch of unrelated photos that have very little to do with anything other than just being something I found interesting enough to me to want to take a photo.