What to buy? Cookbooks and coffee!

This is our last full day in Cuenca. Before I get to today, a few pictures about our dinner last night. We were still pretty full from the pork meal at lunch, and hot bread snacks, and ice cream, so we decided on just fruit. We went to the market and bought the following:

From left to right... a papaya, two mangos, a brown fruit, a peach (I only bought it because I accidently knocked it on the floor at the vendor stall) and a yellow fruit. The peach was actually the one that didn´t taste as good. The brown fruit tasted lke a mango/papaya cross, but it had 5 big seeds, so I made quite a mess getting it out, and we ended up just biting the fruit off the seeds. That's why it isn´t in the next picture:

This was our dinner last night. The peach, one mango, and the yellow fruit are on the left plate. About 1/4 of the papaya is on the right plate. The yellow fruit (which now looks light-colored with black seeds) was very tasty, with a kiwi-ish flavor. The seeds gave a slight pop when you bit down, but it was fun eating it.

Today, we walked around, finding things to do. I hadn´t washed my hair since we got to Cuenca, mainly because the hot water at the hostal is unreliable, hot one second, cold the next, and I didn´t relish a cold shampoo. First thing this morning (OK, that sounds like it was early... but the shops don´t open till 10 am), we walked to a hair salon. I paid $5 for a shampoo and blow dry of my hair. The stylist did a great job, as my hair has never been this shiny. The picture is to illustate the good work she did, not the beauty of my hair... but it's OK if you think my hair is beautiful ;)

Our hostal uses real coffee, not the instant stuff we´ve had at some of the hostals. We like it, so we went to a store that sells the good coffee. I bought 4 pounds of it to bring home. Since I was in a shopping mood, we hit three bookstores and I bought 4 Ecuadorian cookbooks. Yesterday, you saw the picture of the young women in the park, so we´ll call that Phillip´s day. Today, you get a picture of coffee and cookbooks, aka Pat´s day:

And for some better pictures - since I can put pictures in - the following are actually from Saturday, when we went to the orchid farm. They had these birds. The boy showing us around picked some Mandarin oranges off the nearby tree and gave them to the birds.

He gave us one, too - they were delicious fresh off the tree! What amazed us was how the birds peeled the fruit with their beaks.

I didn´t get a picture, but a funny story from today... we were walking around the market, enroute to eat the pork meal for lunch again, when a candy vendor offered us a taste of her chocolate. I knew something Phillip didn´t, so I broke off a very small piece, and he took a bigger piece. When he popped the big chunk in his mouth, he soon realized what I knew... the chocolate had no sugar in it. Imagine eating a big spoonful of plain cooking cocoa. He didn´t want to offend her by spitting it out, so he swallowed it, then bought a bag of candy, after we made sure with the vendor that the candy we were buying was ¨dulce¨ (sweet).

Tomorrow we change towns, to Riobamba. I´ll have to find an Internet cafe there for my blog posting. I hope we don´t encounter another mudslide on the highway! It´s a 6 hour bus ride, without mudslide delays. Since it rains in the afternoon, we plan to leave in the morning, hoping to beat the mudslides!