Carnaval!

The festivities started Thursday with pig-butchering. Never knew that could involve a blowtorch.


Me scraping hair off
Cleaning the pig.
This big gap is where my hands were too dirty to take pictures do to being involved in the removal of intestines, etc.


Maria Elena is rendering lard, I'm turning the intestines inside out and cleaning them to make sausage.

So that was the beginning, Thursday night. Friday Maria Elena, her sister Lola, and I made chihuiles using the pig's lard and corn flour--Chihuiles are one of a number of steamed, corn-based products, this one traditional at Carnaval, made of corn flour, and wrapped in the leaves of the corn which at this time of year are just big enough and still soft. We also made 2 kinds of sausage--one stuffed with grated green plantain mixed with sauteed onion and garlic and herbs, the other blood, rice, and herbs. The plantain kind was delicious, the blood one...well, it was okay.

Cutting up pork chops, with machete. The hunk of metal got used after Gerardo broke my hammer


Cutting up the San Lorenzo pig.

Cooking

The top two pictures are Gerardo, one of Maria Elena's brothers, the last is her sister Lola, on Saturday, when everyone started showing up. Maria Elena has 10 brothers and sisters, and all but two of them showed up. She's also the next-to-youngest, so her oldest siblings have their own grown kids and grandkids. All in all, there were probably about 40 members of the Flores family in town. Luckily, not all of them were in the same house, but since this is the family home, they were all in and out and a lot of them ate here.

Gerardo also brought another pig, already killed and gutted, conveniently enough. He and Mario (a cousin, I think) went in together on it, because Mario didn't want one of those San Lorenzo black hairy pigs, he wanted a blond-haired-blue-eyed pig. So they got one. Now, even with 40 people, 2 entire pigs is a LOT of meat, and a lot of work, and nobody in San Lorenzo (that I know of) has a deep freeze, so there was a lot of scrambling around on Saturday to get things cut up and either fried, marinated, or into one of several small freezers. Also, as it turns out, the "gringo" pig, or "chancho lite" as it was referred to, does not have enough fat on it to be fried in its own fat, which was what Gerardo wanted to do with it. This is the standard way of cooking pork here, and so he figured that'd be the way to do it. Well, yeah, carefully raised American breed pigs don't have enough fat, so the women (who took over when Gerardo got bored or something and ran off to do something else) had to add a whole bunch of the lard from the other pig to get it to cook. At that point we vetoed Gerardo's plan to fry up the whole pig and sent the legs of to get roasted in Miguel Angel's big oven. The back and ribs, seen above, Gerardo cut up for pork chops, along with the back of the Sanlorenceño pig. That pig's legs went into the freezer and everything else got fried up (including the head), and this time it worked fine.

Saturday night was the election of the "Reina", something like Miss San Lorenzo. It was quite an event, though I thought it was interesting that the most european-looking girl won. And I know, I'm the only person in the world who takes pictures of pig butchering, but not the beauty pageant. Afterwards there was dancing, which the whole family stayed around for. Much fun.

Sunday we made pigs-feet soup, which is much tastier than it sounds. Although the feet themselves don't make for much food, they're good for flavoring. In the afternoon we set up on the dining room table for a speed-sewing bee to make costumes for the parade. We were all going to be monsters: vampires, witches, Gerardo was Freddy Kruger, the whole thing. So a couple people had brought bunches of black cloth, and we were sewing dresses for little kids and all sorts of stuff all evening. Then that night was something called "coplas", where family bands sing--usually making up new verses to the Carnaval song, sometimes making fun of people, etc.

Monday morning was the parade. I was a little worried when we weren't ready at 10 AM when the parade was supposed to start, but then I realized that while we were definitely running on Ecuadorian time, so was the parade, so it all worked out.

One of the floats

all dressed up

Maria Elena's family, me (the tall one) and Gerardo. This is probably the only day ever where people didn't recognize me immediately.

The professors and students of one of the schools I work with.

After the parade was more dancing, which was complicated by several things. One being that traditionally you don't celebrate Carnaval, you PLAY Carnaval. By throwing water balloons, shooting people with water guns, throwing buckets of water, spraying shaving cream, dousing people with talc powder or flour. Which was happening all over the square. So "please don't get the musicians wet" was a little tricky. Then, there wasn't a good enough extension cord for the amps, mixing boxes etc. so some guy went up a ladder with two copper wires, bare on the ends with hooks, and hooked them onto the power lines. To my great suprise, he was not electricuted, and the setup worked. Or it would have, except since those electronic boxes were in the line of fire and nobody had been smart enough to shield them with plastic, they got wet. But finally everything was connected, and dry, and there was dancing and throwing of water, till I got way too cold and went home.

And that, more or less, was Carnaval.