I had a free day before my town's big festival started, so I spent the day doing laundry and working in my garden. I had to weed and fertilize the whole thing and I also tried an experiment. I was reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (the follow up to "Guns, Germs, and Steel"). It was an interesting book, and briefly mentioned a thing called "Lithic Mulch". This is where you sow small rocks around your plants and put a layer of rocks on top of the soil. Supposedly it helps in dry/cold areas with water retention and frost prevention. We'll see how it works, and if I get good results, I'll try it with my next round of plants and teaching it to the locals.
I found out right before the town's festival was to begin that the old PCV from my site couldn't make it, but a girl from my training group was going to visit with a friend. They weren't coming until Saturday, so I had Friday night at the party to myself. first, I went to the Ladie's house who was hosting the party. There were a bunch of people coking a ton of food in the addition to her house that they built especially for the fiesta. I helped moving the bathtub sized pots of food around. Apparently, I have the reputation in town for being strong, because whenever anyone has something heavy to move, they always ask for me to help. Anyway, they fed me before and after helping out. Around sunset, there was a procession from the house to the church. They had 12 kids in traditional outfits dancing, music, and they carried a statue of John the Baptist along and threw rose petals on it. My job was to carry a feed sack full of rose petals for them to throw. Not a hard task, except they kept hitting my in the face with the roses.
At the church, we had a long prayer service and the went outside to watch the kids do some traditional dances. Everybody was drinking and starting to get drunk, so I decided to call it a night.
The next day my friend showed up around 8:00AM w/ her friend from home. We walked around and then had lunch at the hosts house. After lunch we went to mass and then to the town's soccer field. There they had "Juegos de Gallinas" or "Hen Games". [For more info on this, see my post, "Hen Games, Exploding Toilets, and Pork Roulette] It was pretty much the same thing as when I saw it before, but smaller. After all the chickens had been caught, the kids did another dance and then asked me to come out in the middle of the field with them. They had a 24 oz. bottle of beer with a bunch of long colored ribbons tied to the top. They explained that they were going to o a dance and needed me to hold the bottle over my head. They were doing a Maypole dance, except I was the pole!
It was pretty funny and they danced until I was wrapped to the shoulders in ribbon. Then the undid me and I got to spray the beer all over them. 
After that we all went to the center of town to eat, drink, and dance. We could only take about 10 hours of this, so we went back to my house at around 11:30, but I could hear people up until 6:00Am.One funny thing happened at the party while we were eating. We just had bowls of potatoes to eat with a little meat. I was talking to a guy who was three sheets to the wind. He told me that he loved potatoes and I said that if that was so, then he should be able to eat one in one bite. He tried, but couldn't. I said that it was easy, and popped one in. His friends were impressed and to to do it, but couldn't. We ended up getting more people involved and jokingly yelled at each other. I just kept thinking how ridiculous this was and that I spent 4 1/2 years in a fraternity, but had to come to Ecuador to haze people(and with potatoes no less).
Sunday night they were at it again, but I had had enough.
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