Mitad del Mundo

This Friday, our field trip was to Mitad del Mundo, the middle of the earth. In the morning, we checked out an awesome volcano-created valley:

Then we headed to Fiambre´s for some cuye (roast guinea pig). This restaurant was featured on that Travel Channel show where the guy goes all over the world and eats weird food. There was an option to pick out your own guinea pig, but I felt a lot less hungry after looking at the furry little guys.

The pigs get killed, skinned, marinated and then roasted like this:


And then they come out on a plate, where it´s still very clear that they are guinea pigs (what I like about chicken fingers, etc., is that you can´t tell while you´re eating them where they came from. But when an entire animal comes out on your plate? That inspires vegetarian vows.)

But while I was a little (or a lot) disgusted by the thought of eating the kin of our childhood pets Anne and Gilbert, I did try some cuye. It tasted like turkey. I probably don´t need to ever try it again. Nor did I feel the need to suck the brains out of the skull, like Ashley and Shantel did.

After eating/picking, we headed over to the Inti-ñan museum, which was way, way cool! Elsewhere in Mitad del Mundo, there is a huge monument that marks where the Incas thought the Equator was, but according to GPS, it´s about 240 m. off the mark. Not bad for the technology they were using (feeling the chakra of the place, mostly.) The Museum, though, is right on the Equator and so gives the delightful pleasure of hopping between hemispheres and doing some very cool experiments.
Here´s our group at 00´00´:

The thumbs-up, we found out, comes from the Incas who believed that the thumb is the most energy-containing point of the body. They would stand outside with their thumbs up to gather more energy from the sun.
And here I am, in both halves at once:

Around the museum (which is outdoors), there are totem poles from tons of ancient cultures that worshipped the sun. Here I am, sun-worshipping with a Mexican totem:

This was the Ecuadorian totem, featuring ancient Incans during ¨business time¨ at the top, and lower down, in the process of birthing. It was a very skanky pole.


This is a bad picture of a shrunken head (it´s blurry because I had to keep the shutter speed low because I couldn´t use a flash because it was in a glass case.) The head belonged to a 12-year-old who died of some illness and whose father wanted a piece of him preserved. So his capa was detated. I think shrinking heads is not quite as gross as embalming.
How to Make A Shrunken Head:
1. Acquire said head (the most virile and hardcore way to do it is to kill a mortal enemy and chop off his cabeza.)
2. Cut a slit up the back and remove skull. Leave cartilage - this is very important.
3. Boil head in plant mixture that shrinks everything down, while retaining the exact shape.
4. Dry in the sun.
5. Don´t get caught doing this. Shrinking heads was outlawed in Ecuador in the 1950s because they were going for about $50,000 on the black market, which was a very good incentive for Amazonian natives to decapitate whomever they could.

There are lots of cool experiments to do on the Equator. I balanced an egg on the head of a nail, for instance, something I would no way be able to do except if the Earth´s gravitational pull was on my side. We put a sink right on the line with a bucket under it and drained it; the water went straight down. When we moved it just a few feet into the southern or northern hemispheres, it went clockwise and counterclockwise, respectively. It was way cool. Another cool thing about the Equator? You weigh several pounds less because there´s not as much gravity.
Our tour guide had us walk the line with arms outstretched, thumbs up and eyes closed. You can actually feel gravity pulling you to one side or the other. They say you get pulled to where you belong. If this is true, I belong in the southern hemisphere. Thank goodness I´m already here.

We also practiced shooting blow guns. I look a fright in the picture, but I hit my target and the guide said I would survive in the jungle. Good to know.


Here we are, looking intensely creepy and mystical. For this experiment, 3 of us girls stood around our director, Angel, who sat right on the Equator. We then each put 2 fingers under him and tried to lift him. We could not. Then we stacked our hands on his head (see below) and tried to gather the energy of the sun. It sounds hokey, but I´ll be darned if we didn´t lift him right up. It was very, very weird stuff.