At the town’s weekly Saturday fair, I should find some small decorations for my downstairs room, I figured. ![]() Besides visiting the Galápagos Islands on the cheap and having four nights in Quito (the first cultural UN World Heritage site, so designated for its striking and well-preserved colonial architecture), we would spend all the rest of our available time in Ecuador (three nights) in the town of Otavalo, renowned for having one of the largest and most famous craft markets in South America. Her suggestion wound up profoundly influencing our plans. Why not spend a little time in Ecuador on our way home from the eclipse, and buy a rug from one of those guys? Others created striking objects using more traditional hand looms. A few were still working with “backstrap” looms, an ancient art once practiced in various places around the world, using sticks, rope, and a strap worn around the weaver’s waist. In the Andean highlands, she and her partner Louis had just been dazzled by the beautiful textiles still being produced by master weavers. The toughest thing, I confided in email to my friend Doris, traveling in Ecuador at the time, would be to find a rug to replace the aging one in the room, handed down to us by some friends. It had a few Latin touches (a papier-mâché parrot I picked up in Tijuana ages ago a couple of tango posters from Buenos Aires.) When planning our trip for the eclipse in Chile and Argentina, I started toying with the idea of jazzing up this room by further South Americanizing it. But it was pretty dumpy (having previously been incarnated as a home office and then a kids’ playroom). So I suppose it was inevitable a Latin-American decorational fever eventually might seize me.Ī room on a lower level from the main floor of our house is the closest thing we have to a living room. Decades ago Steve and I fell in love with Japan and built a Japanese-style master bed, along with sliding Japanese-style window coverings. And I had an instant home for the other African souvenirs I had picked up in spite of myself. Online I found a mosquito net and installed that over the bed. It gave me a place to print and hang some of our many photos from Africa. The room-renovation thus turned into a Project. A friend suggested I use the cloth as a wall hanging, and add additional African details. Coincidentally, our youngest son had recently moved out, and I wanted to transform the battered bedroom of his boyhood into a guest room. I found a partial answer to the last question a few years go, when I was puzzling over what to do with a beautiful piece of cloth I couldn’t resist buying for a few dollars in Senegal, a country renowned for its striking fabrics. Then when you get home, you have to decide what to do with those quirky knick-knacks. ![]() If the purchase requires bargaining, that adds to the stress. Anything you buy has to be transported home, which is tough if you limit yourself to carry-ones (as we do). I don’t buy much on the road, and Steve loathes shopping. ![]() I’m afraid anyone who reads it will think I’m the sort of airhead who travels in order to buy stuff, when almost the opposite is true.
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