Cuenca

Cuenca was incredibly beautiful! It's about 9.5 hours by bus (if the bus driver doesn't stop for a 1-hour dinner at 1am during the drive), and I went with some friends from the hostel where I had stayed before. We left Sunday evening, and arrived Monday morning at 4:45am and were unfortunately greeted by rain! Even more unfortunately, the hostel where we had called ahead to make reservations only had four beds for the six of us, so despite being extremely tired from not sleeping well on the bus, I had to share a tiny twin bunk bed with one of my travel companions! Also, the bathrooms smelled bad and there was a cat that was constantly jumping into bed with us, so we left the hostel when we woke up on Monday morning, and treated ourselves to an incredibly delicious breakfast- delicious, warm bred, cheese, butter and marmelade, fruit salad, eggs, juice, and coffee- all for $3.50- and that's an expensive breakfast!

We had specifically come down to Cuenca for the Festivales de Cuenca that celebrate the city's independence- the official independence day was Wednesday, 3 November, but there were exciting things going on all over the city on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and I'm sure Thursday and Friday too, although we left on Wednesday evening.

Monday we spent walking around the city, seeing the beautiful cathedrals, the fancy buildings with ornate façades, and going to the events set up in the plazas. There were tons of ferias de artesanía, and we ate lunch in the plaza. I lucked out because it's usually hard for me to find street food that I can eat (it's usually all meat and french fries with hot dogs- salchipapas), but I found this woman selling comida natural- natural food. I got a plate of fried rice with veggies and limited soy meat, potatoes with some sort of sauce on top, and a cup of hierba luisa with panela- an herb drink sweetened with panela, a non-refined, popular sweetener. Loyal readers may remember when I went to the coast of Manabí the last time I was in Ecuador to visit and organic farm, and I watched as one man cut down the cane and went through the entire process of making panela. Anyway, the food was overflowing on my plate and it cost $1- wow. Then we listened to a concert in the plaza, including a Chilean group called Illapu- they sing música folklorica- and I'd never heard them in Chile, although I liked them a lot. Rach, you have a sweet gift to look forward to that I picked up for you at one of the local ferias.

The six of us from the hostal had all met up with our friend Emma, who had previously been in the hostel in Quito with a few of us, but had moved to Cuenca to finish some research. Emma took us to this bar that she'd heard about, but never tried. As we walked in, we realized why it was so note worthy- the bar was kind of like a cave, and there were skeletons and other deathly/metallica things painted on the walls and displayed in some of the display windows, all while heavy metal music played. Definitely an interesting experience! I ate some locro de papa, which aside from llapingachos (fried potato pancakes with cheese!), is one of my favorite comida típicas- typical foods. It's a potato soup usually served with a slice of avocado and some cheese. I've already mentioned that the nights were filled with hazardously delightful fireworks shows, and on the first night (1 November) we also visited the Municipal Cementery to see the Día de los Muertos action.

Día de los Muertos isn't a solemn day to remember your deceased family members. Instead, most people brought candles and flowers to the cementery at night to light up the graves, and the family comes to sit around and talk, and have a good time with the family. People drink colada morada and guaguas de pan (pronounced wawas de pan- it literally means babies made of bread), and some people even hire musicians to come and play their family member's favorite music in front of their crypt. Because rather than tombstones for every person buried, this cementery was typical of most large Latin American cities that I've seen- it's all above ground in stacked crypts. The night when I visited, there were ladders everywhere so people could climb up to another level and walk around to visit their ancestor's crypt. The whole cementery was really a joyous place, with light and flowers everywhere.

On Tuesday I separated from my hostel group to meet up with a friend of mine from the University who was also in Cuenca, but heading to the Parque Nacional Las Cajas. Getting out to Las Cajas was kind of a disaster because we had to spend the 1.5 hours standing in the bus because they had sold out of tickets when we wanted to board, but when we finally got there, it was immediately worth it. It was significantly colder, but we did a 4.5 hour trek in a loop through the National Park- WOW. Beautiful sierra, pristine lakes, we passed through a totally unique forest portion that reminded us all of the scene in The Princess Bride where they battle the ROUS, but was impossible to capture on the camera. There were llamas a few birds, and jumping fish, but not much other wildlife.

Wednesday we went to a viewpoint to see the city from a distance, checked out the Modern Art Museum and the Museum of Popular Art, as well as various ferias de artesanía again. We ate in the market, which proved to be much harder for me this time- I literally had a woman tell me that she wouldn't take my money because she didn't want to replace the meat in the set almuerzo (lunch) with more of the salads. Another woman told my friend Emma who was trying to explain that she wanted to eat everything BUT the meat that she was racist and that she wouldn't talk to her more. Eventually we found a woman who sold us yucca, beans, salad, and mote instead of the meat, so that was good.

All in all, Cuenca is HERMOSA. My pictures don't do it justice, especially because I didn't take many because all of my friends were taking pictures and generally had better cameras. But enjoy what I managed to take.







Here we have a glimse of the beautiful blue cathedral domes, a view of just some of the beautiful buildings, most of our group in a café, a meat vender in the plaza, and the ridiculous fact that the festival organizers were handing out this orange paper visors and a large portion of the people at the Illapu concert wore them! I even saw one guy with an orange visor on top of his baseball cap- WHAT?!







Lovely buildings, a flower market before the Day of the Dead, and a semi-aerial view of the downstairs portion of the market.

Pictures of Parque Nacional Las Cajas to come soon!