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!

Pretty women and a new friend

We walked quite a bit around Cuenca today while our laundry was being done ($5 for a huge bag, 10 days worth of clothes). Every third block it seemed we came across a park like the one in the picture. And notice the people in the park. Each one of them had people sitting on the benches or walking around enjoying the day. We came to one park that was decorated by the following:

How Phillip got them to pose, I do not know..... Actually, we walked up on some type of photo shoot involving very pretty young women. The one in the white dress was absolutely georgeous. I laughed when a bunch of construction workers from nearby noticed this and decided to take a break in this park. They were polite and just watched, as did everyone in the park. Especially Phillip.

And of course, lunch! We went to the market. On the upstairs level, food stalls tempted us, but one lady saw us and gave us a sample of her pork. Excellent sales tactic as we ate there. This plate has mote (a version of hominy but better and bigger) on the bottom, two potato patties (the yellowish things), chunks of tender, juicy pork, topped with a vegetable slaw-salsa type mixture. Plenty to eat... $2. Wnd while we were eating, a family came up and sat at our table. Hernan and Rosa are the older couple on the ends in the picture.

She is an English translator and he is hilarious. He spoke a heavily accented English, and very slow Spanish for us. He made jokes and he and Phillip just died laughing as I talked with Rosa. We exchanged emails and they invited us to stay with them if we get back to Guayacil. The pork lady was giving us dirty looks for staying at her table for so long!

One final scenery picture for today... This is the view from our balcony. At night, the blue domes and the smaller square white ones are lit up. Unfortunately for the camera, there is a streetlight just to the right of this scene, so the day pictures are better than the night pictures.

The Canari Market and Ingapirca

We went on a group tour today to the Canari market and to Ingapirca, the best preserved Inca ruins in Ecuador. Fifteen passengers were on the van, including 2 Ecuadorians (an accountant from Quito and her mother, who were very nice), two young people from France, an American woman who was studying Spanish at a local school, and a bunch of old Americans (not us!) who were kind of snooty. As you can tell, we interacted with the younger people and the nonAmericans.

The Canari people have been in Ecuador for over 5000 years, they are the indigenous people of the region. They have a particular form of dress, as seen in the picture of the little Canari girl at the market. I have other pictures, but they need cropping, somthing I can´t yet do. This market we went to had all manner of fruits and vegetables and was even larger than the one we visited yesterday.

This is just one stall of fruits. Multiply this by 200, include vegetables, raw meat and fish, and you will have the market. I bought a bag of about 10 fruit, one of the yellow green ones... I´ll have a picture of it and a review of the flavor tomorrow as I haven´t eaten one yet.

From the market, we went to Ingapirca. The Incas came to Ecuador from Peru as conquerors. However, their dominion over Ecuador lasted onñy about 200 years because the Spanish came in the 1500s and conquered the Incas. The Spanish built their churches over the sites of Inca buildings, so very few Inca ruins are left in Peru. That´s why Ingapirca is so important.

OK, so I´m blocking your view of some of the ruins. Our tour guide told us all kinds of history about the Inca Trail and the Inca religion compared to the Canari. The views from the area are spectacular. This next picture was taken by the Ecuadorian lady for us.

Yes, that´s a new shirt I´m wearing... we haven´t done laudry in 10 days and we ran out of shirts, so we just bought some, at $3 each... why not...
Before I finish the blog... one more picture... The ruins are populated.... by llamas! About 10 of them on the grounds. They aren´t afraid of people and none of them spit on us. We did have to be careful where we walked, but at least their droppings resemble big piles of goat droppings, i.e. not messy or stinky.

Edited! The most famous orchid farm in Latin America

First, for mi familia, we are staying at a different hostel than the one we had reservations at, a better one. We are at Confradia del Monje here in Cuenca. It´s part of a monastery. I thought it was no longer a monastery, but part of the building must still be as we heard chanting or singing yesterday evening when we can back from dinner. Either that, or the place is haunted! Our room is quite nice, overlooking the street (which means we did have the ubiquitous car alarm sound in the middle of the night) with a small balcony. I FOUND A COMPUTER THAT READ THE SD CARD! PICTURES!

First, we went to San Bartelom, where the famous guitar makers are. We saw some beautiful guitars, including some made out of armadillo shells. Then, we went to Chordeleg, which is famous for its jewelry making. We saw a jewelry maker at work, putting very small stones into a silver setting, fascinating. We also saw the pottery area, but the potter wasn´t there. Then we went to a famous fruit and vegetable market, seeing all manner of different potatoes, learning the difference between varieties of papaya, and what a tree tomato is. Our next stop was to see ikat weavers at work, creating a pattern from naturally dyed fibers, then using a wood device to weave the patterned threads into material.

Our final stop was at the most famous orchid farm in Latin America. We first saw the orchid seedlings in bottles, where the seeds have germinated. They grow very slowly and spend about 2 years in the bottle before the seedlings are big enough to plant in flats. Another 1 to 3 years and they go into small pots. And the end results, after many years are the most lovely flowers. Orchids, including the "monkey faced" orchid!

Tomorrow, we have a tour of Incapirca, the most complete Incan ruins in Ecuador....

Mudslides... glad to finally be in Cuenca!

We finally made it to Cuenca yesterday, a day late. Thank you for the offer to help us get another netbook. We could buy one here...maybe. The hardware is not actually the issue, rather it is all the software for editing that I had loaded on it. We stayed an extra day in Guayacil, the big city, hoping they would have a place to repair the fan and recover the files if they had fried.... a totally wasted day! And, we will never go back to Guayacil. Too much big city and you add the language issue... it was frustrating!

So, yesterday, we caught the 10:20 am executivo (read: express bus, not a local) bus for the 4 hour trip to Cuenca. Very comfortable, clean, not crowded, with a bathroom in the back (toilet paper dispenser at the front of the bus?). A beautiful trip as the bus went past rice fields, banana orchards, cacao crops, then started into the mountains. I do mean mountains.... The western range of the Andes. Since we were going uphill, the bus was fairly slow navigating the curves. We went into the clouds... Because of the mist of the clouds, the pictures wouldn´t do the view justice even if I could post them.

We passed cascades of water, small waterfalls, coming down from as high as we could see thru the bus window. That actually should have been a clue for us of our next "adventure." The bus had just reached the summit and begun it descent, when we came to stopped traffic.... We couldn´t see beyond the curve ahead of us, and as we sat, the bus driver´s helper walked around the curve to find out the problem. A mudslide had blocked the road just around the corner. So, we waited. The driver shut off the bus, and he and his helper went to see what they could do. We waited some more. It started raining, not just misting. Two military guys from somewhere behind us walked `past us to the mudslide.

Remember, we are in a huge bus on what is basically a 2 and a half lane road. We cannot turn around. After about 2 hours, the drivers all came back and said one lane was passable. We began to see trucks coming from the Cuenca direction that had made it past the mudslide. For almost 30 minutes, the other direction of traffic was moving, but not our direction. The bus driver got really mad, and sent his helper walking back up to the slide area. Apparently, this helper talked to the 6 or so truck drivers ahead of us, because in a few minutes, our bus driver just took off into the oncoming lane of traffic, passing the waiting cars. As we rounded the bend, we saw that the trucks in our lane had done the same thing, effectively blocking the lane that was moving and forcing the incompetent military guys who we not letting us thru to let us thru... or else we had a stalemate with no one moving. We could see that those two military guys were angry, but our bus driver was laughing as we drove over the mudslide. Cars would have still gotten stuck, as the left side of the roadway was completely impassable, and the right side was about 6 inches deep in mud in the tracks that had already been made when we went thru. No further incident and after six and a half hours on the bus, we finally made it to Cuenca...

Cuenca is a beautiful city and we will be walking around today. Yesterday, we just had time for dinner before it got dark. Ah yes, dinner. A four course meal... French onion soup, salad, an entree of beef medallions and rice, then a dessert of a fruit compote. By candlelight. $4.50 each. Every bit of it delicious.

Sorry no pictures! I´ll keep trying. This computer is almost modern... it has a DVD drive. No SD card slot or USB port....Of course, even then, the pictures may not post because I´ve been compressing them with software.... Que sera, sera. (can you hear Doris Day singing in the background? OK, you kids won´t get that one....)

Computer Crash! No netbook! The world is ending!

I´m typing this on a computer at the hostal. I had been getting a cooling fan error message and hoped that it wasn´t spelling DOOM for the netbook. Alas, the computer gods saw fit to crash the thing. It won´t turn on. So, no Skype, and no pictures until we can get it fixed or find a computer that isn´t so ancient...since you have to have a way to transfer the pictures from the camera to the computer... and a CD driver doesn´t do it.

Sorry, I hope you will at least see pictures again soon.

Lizards and cigars and pirates, oh my!

After a good nights sleep, air conditioning and no car alarms, we spent the whole day in the downtown area. Our first stop was at must-see for us, the iguana park. Actually, its name is Parque Boliver, but the cab driver did know it as the lizard park. When we got there, we just saw these guys on a monument, but it didn’t take long to see the ones in the trees, on the grass away from the entrance, and around like squirrels in our parks. Each tree had about 25 iguanas laying on the branches. I was shooting my camera up, so I’ll need better editing software to get the color right, but these pictures should show you the lizard haven we saw.

There were turtles in this park also, but my family knows what I think of turtles…

Just as we finished taking pictures of the lizards, two things happened. It started to rain and Phillip decided to find a cigar store. We walked first, then we started asking people. I brought 2 umbrellas and 4 ponchos since I knew it was the rainy season here, but of course, since we hadn’t needed them yet, all the rain gear was in our suitcase back at the hostal on the other side of the city! After about 3 hours of walking in the rain, following directions of people who weren’t really sure, but thought a cigar store was just a few blocks that way…. no cigars. We gave up and just walked the Malecon… a very nicely done, pedestrian-only area along the water, with different sections such as a kid play area, a botanical garden, shops, restaurants, monuments. It is about 2 miles long, and we walked from the center north, then back all the way to the south end.

At the south end, we left the Malecon because we saw a market area. Acres of vendor stalls, selling shoes, clothes, electronics, pharmacy items, anything you can think of, and low and behold, at the end of one row of vendors, cigars! Phillip’s quest was over and he was happy as a pig in guano. He bought a box of Ecuadorian cigars for a very reasonable price. And it stopped raining.

We walked back on the Malecon because we saw the advertisement for Pirate Ship Morgan, which sailed at 4 pm. OK, it may have had a mast, but it ran on an engine and the “pirates” sold us a beer and bowl of popcorn. We went on the hour-long cruise in the bay/river area. It was a good way to see the city and the waterway. When I first saw the water from a distance this morning, I thought it was full of trash… but no. The stuff you see in the water is water lilies. Hundred of them that come in and go out with the tide.

We’re back at the hostal, and as I slave over the computer, saving and compressing the photos, writing the blog post, Phillip enjoys his cigar…..