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*STREETPHOTOS
of the
WEEK A several-year private Email Exhibition by G. Mark Smith -- now also available to the public at WWW.StreetPhoto.Com ...
*Streetphoto
of the Week #51/ Guamote Blue Woman/
Guamote, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #52/ Armed for Another Work Cycle/
Banos, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #53a/ Guamote Red Line Pipe Walker/
Guamote, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #54/ Bush & Crossbones:
The Whole World is Watching/ Quito, Ecuador
Dear
Jan, Janet and I were both sick that day, she with a fever and me with the dysentery that typically slows me down on day #4, anywhere I ever go. So we woke up slow and decided before breakfast that we wouldn't leave the hotel all day -- just be happily sick and tired and worthless there. The Hotel San Francisco de Quito (at $16 per night) has a sauna and cool second floor balconies that wrap around a corner overlooking two busy streets, so we knew it wasn't going to be too bad. One of the streets (the hotel entry street paved in brick) ran uphill east to west and was a heavily-used pedestrian boulevard with shops and street vendors and with only one or two cabs or delivery trucks or motorbikes going up or down it per minute. The other street running north to south was a very busy one-way paved thoroughfare squeezing its two narrow lanes through the large nearly-500-year-old colonial district of Quito leaving very little room on either side for pedestrians, the sidewalks not wide enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder. During a typical day, electric trolleys and busses (barely fitting inside one of the lanes) race cars and motorcycles and yellow cabs down that street with horns and loudspeakers blaring and with pedestrians on both sidewalks leaning away from the traffic to avoid being clipped by a bus. We didn't know it was May 1, but at about 10:30 a.m. as we lay in bed watching an Ecuador soap opera on TV, we began hearing a commotion from the street wafting through the open air Spanish-style courtyards just outside our door. Bands playing and people chanting and such... Quito always seems to have a festive noise to it, regular explosions of music blaring out from one square or another. And wedding parties in that part of the world crowd into the backs of flatbed delivery trucks and to celebrate they drive around town singing songs and announcing the new couple to the old city. So we laid there watching the TV and ignored the noise for ten or fifteen minutes until I finally got up and went downstairs to the lobby to see what was up. It turned out that the annual Quito May Day Parade was streaming down that main thoroughfare (now closed to traffic) and now watching it myself from the second floor balcony I found out that the new president of Ecuador had just gone by in a convertible, waving to and wishing his people a happy May Day. I went back to the room to get Janet and for the next several hours we (sick, but hardly put out in the least) watched about 300,000 politically active locals stream past just below us as we gawked and I made a few photos (See tonight's SPotWEEK #55 when it comes in). We were sick and had made ourselves hotel bound, but despite never leaving the place, we'd gotten the opportunity to people-watch all those people in costume and all those people carrying signs supporting politicians or protesting local, regional, and global issues. Most curious to me was that I only saw about 65-75 Che Guevara references (I would have expected more) and there was only one block (they'd obviously all been put together by parade organizers) of anti-American protests (I'd have also guessed prior to seeing the parade that there'd be more of that too). And then near the end of the parade I witnessed several men with covered faces spray painting graffiti and stenciling the Bush&Crossbones art and such on every blank wall they could find. Looking off the balcony you could see it vandalizing every wall along the parade route for more than two kilometers. A classically regal Spanish colonial old town, its white walls now marked up in blacks and reds and sullied with political slogans and angry graffiti barbs. And Jan, what's most interesting about this story (and bringing us back to your question) is that by the time I left the Hotel San Francisco de Quito to take my regular early morning streetphoto round at about 7:30 a.m., every bit of graffiti that had been painted along those kilometers of that main parade route thoroughfare the day before had already been painted over (disappeared) by Quito and Ecuador authorities. ALL OF IT! Leaving it up for more than a few hours, I reckoned, would be bad for eco-tourism... But the government did not bother to repair the May Day damage done along the cross streets, leaving that up to pissed-off business owners -- one of which you noticed was in the process in the SPotWEEK Bonus shot of repairing the exterior of his shoe shop.
*Streetphoto
of the Week #55/ May Day Street Dance/ Quito, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #56/ Quito Shoe Shine Boy/
Crossing Police Lines/ Quito, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #57/ Latacunga Marionette Runner/ Latacunga, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #58/ Sleep Walk Aware/ Quito, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #59/
According to God.../ Quito, Ecuador
*Streetphoto
of the Week #60/
Quito Accordion Blowby #1/ Quito, Ecuador
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