The Links

to scale map of the main building of El Arenal, AKA Feria Libre             El Arenal is a big smelly market.   It is about 390 feet deep and 390 feet wide.   It’s smelly because there’s a lot of dead fish and butchers doing stuff with meat.        It is usually packed with people and has: fruit, ice cream, pork, beef, chicken, juice, burgers, salchipapas, vegetables, herbs, clothes, toys, grain, shoes, kitchen stuff, hardware, yarn, pets, barbers, and a lot more that i’m not gonna go into.         There’s fruit stall after fruit stall, and rows and rows of potatoes, a whole aisle dedicated to herbs, oh and there’s a quarter of the building that has shoes in it, but only two buildings that have toys in them!!!!!   The ice cream is usually just in vendors but I’ve seen it in stores too sometimes, in the aisle of herbs they rub the herbs onto people to give them good luck, only then do they give the herbs to them.         The toys mostly consist of pretend Chinese knives, pretend anime c

  Hello!!! its Robin here and I would like to tell how many things in Ecuador cost one dollar. There are so many things in the market that cost exactly one dollar.  Me and my mom just went on a trip to the market to see all of the things that we could buy for exactly one dollar. This is what we found:   4 eggplants A lot of green beans About 13 peppers 6 maduros 11 small mangos 11 onions 1 large zucchini  A lot of tomatoes  7 peaches 40 limes! That means each lime costs 2.5 cents, Some cherries 10 maracuya  A bunch of parsley and cilantro 4 avocados  6 choclo (Ecuadorian corn) 14 carrots 6  cucumbers There are also a lot of other things that you can get for one dollar that is not fruit or vegetables.   Like… plastic junk, a bracelet, ten masks, 20 pages printed for you, jugo de coco, empanadas de viento,  and one high quality alfajor, the most delicious cookies on earth. I got this “Robin” bracelet and this jugo de coco each for $1.      So why do all of these things cost exactly one

  Dollarization Intro The funny thing about currency is that it’s only worth something if someone says so. Say you’ve been stockpiling the national currency of your country for many years, then one day the president says: “This currency means nothing now. Go go to the bank and cash in your currency for dollars.” This is a process called dollarization. It has happened in a handful of countries, but today I’m going to focus on one in particular: Ecuador.  There are a lot of things to discuss on this topic, however I’m going to talk about just three things: why Ecuador dollarized, how Ecuador dollarized, and the aftermath.  Why Around 1998-1999 the Ecuadorian economy started to decline in value, and inflation rates started to rise. One of the factors for this declining economy was “El Niño” which destroyed the roads out of banana plantations and shrimp farms. This meant that their only source of income was oil. Oil costs dropped down to 7 dollars per barrel, and citizens' salaries st

       When we left off, on this blog anyway, we were working through expected difficulties fitting in and navigating language barriers.  All of us were a bit slumped, in a bit of a hole.  Since then we’ve slowly but surely been building an earthen staircase out of these holes and climbing back up into the sunshine.      For one, the weather has changed.  For a solid 2 months it rained every afternoon.  Thunder announced three o’clock as reliably as the bells of a church.  Sam’s soccer is in the afternoons in an open field.  His commute to the fields on the hill above our house almost always involved getting very wet either while waiting for the bus on the way up, the way down, or while practicing with his team.  Someone always made the joke when we heard the first thunder rumbling through Cuenca, “Sam, I think it’s time for soccer!”       But gradually afternoons have dried and we’re now more confident leaving the house without umbrellas.  In the rainy months the river across the stre