Cuenca

December 22
We woke up and took it pretty easy our first morning in Cuenca. Manimal sleeping fully through the night let us relax a little bit. We got him a warm bath pretty early on (first time we'd seen a bathtub on our trip, all showers thus far), and he seemed happy thereafter. I believe for breakfast, the kids were happy with Clif bars and applesauce that we'd carried with and hadn't run through yet.

I made a run out to the grocery store to ensure we had stuff like saltines and bananas, should Manimal need to stick to that kind of diet. I was too early for the grocery to open (9:30 a.m. open), but a market at an even closer gas station had a pretty good selection of things. Peanut butter--mantequilla de mani--was hard to find. "Pasta de mani" was the best I could do. Ingredients listed: peanuts. Yet somehow it was very salty. hmm. I picked up some bread and yogurt and a few other little things.

Before too long we headed out to explore a little bit.

So, this was the home exchange portion of our trip... in some respects you might consider it the main factor that made the trip happen. We had a free place to stay here in Cuenca; we could build around it. Perhaps unfortunately, the allure of all the other things Ecuador has to offer kept us from just simply enjoying the free stay. We had to see the rain forest, and we had a few more intentions for side trips that we minimized after our jungle visit. Also, needing to get that one extra flight to get all the way to Cuenca made Quito a must-do.

Anyway, our place was lovely--3 bedrooms, a nice fully stocked kitchen, a bathtub with good hot water that didn't run out, and it was situated right by the Rio Tomebamba, a pretty small river, at least at the beginning of our trip, more of what I'd consider a wide creek, but a nice little place to walk by or to listen to the water running through. 

Along the river, Hamish was pleased to find "screw nuts" to collect as treasure. They came in Phillips head, pentalobe, and the rare tri-point:

Bad development: Hamish put her hand down on a rock at random and received the first bee sting of her life from probably the only bee we saw in Ecuador. Thankfully, no anaphylactic responses kicked in, and we only had some mild complaints that her hand hurt from then on (I got the stinger out pretty easily).

As in previous situations, we set out walking by the river without a fully determined goal, but then we just kept on walking. It was about 1 mile to the edge of downtown.

We passed a few rocks with either scripture or Biblical indications on them:

(Jesus es mi salvador). We also saw "Cristo vendra pronto (Christ come quickly)" and "El señor vendrá como ladron en la noche 1 Thessalonians 5:2" (my translation says "you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night"). So that's kind of neat. I don't know if these "graffitis" were a regular event or had something to do with the Christmas season and the upcoming parade.

Anyway it was a nice walk. When we reached town, we did was find a local market-- not the kind that sells a bunch of tourist souvenirs, as in Quito, but the real local food market. I love these.

There's lots of memories of Singapore here. There's just something really nice about these markets to me, so much fresh fruit and vegetables. And as seen above, huge bags of different pastas, hadn't seen that before. Here I am picking out one of everything I didn't recognize:

The nice lady gave the kids strawberries... sorta before we could do anything... should we be washing these?! too late, eaten.

I guess they'll survive.

There was also a huge section of meat and seafood and more. In Singapore, in all our time there, I bought fresh fish from the wet market one time I believe. It was fine, but the whole experience wasn't terribly appealing. For some reason I felt like things looked/smelled better/cleaner here, by comparison. I remember seeing a big display of shrimp and thinking if I lived there I'd be up for trying it out. But not on vacation.

In the back there was a section with more home goods and clothing. We didn't venture far, but there were a couple of stalls piled high with shoes. Figuring we could score a little deal and it would be fun, we ended up buying both kids a pair of new shoes. We only haggled a little, but we were happy enough with the price.

On the edges of the market and through town there were a number of stores that again seem like weird economics. Here is an example. I stopped at a couple of "pharmacy" stores to see if I could find something simple like an aloe to apply to Hamish's bee sting (it wasn't swelling or anything, I really just think the thought that I put something on it would have appeased her). I didn't find what I was looking for-- the one place that I explained things to suggested some tylenol and something else, and I knew it didn't warrant anything internal. In this picture, we're standing by a small store that had almost exclusively baby stuff. The baby oil drew me in, but again, no aloe or similar. But, I don't know, in that environment, the idea of a stall that carried only diapers and baby oil and wipes and the like just seemed kind of weird. There were other stalls that seemed to have only cooking oil. There were many with little candy/cracker Christmas gift assortments, as can be seen to the right of me:

And here's just another view of the street.

We wandered around a little while. It didn't take long to realize that we liked Cuenca a lot. It just felt like a breath of fresh air after all of the prior. We were walking distance to some interesting but peaceful/relaxed stuff, we had a nice place to stay right by a calm river, we were pretty happy.
We grabbed lunch at a little Persian restaurant called Algeria. They also had a fixed-price set lunch that was very good. Not the first time we'd seen it, but popcorn as an appetizer is a nice touch:

There was an interesting looking shop across the street advertising alpaca wares, so I hopped up and visited on my own. It was run by a woman who said she and some other women raised the alpaca, sheared them, and created the products she had for sale. There was some lovely stuff but it was no longer Quito street market prices. She didn't speak English completely either, but was very pleasant. After shopping a bit, I got Alli and the kids to come and check it out. It wasn't long before Hamish was modeling clothes:

Despite all this, we only purchased one gift for Aunt Jenn, and no discount was offered for our modeling. 

We grabbed a taxi home (yes it's walkable, but a $2 taxi with sleepy kids is way way worth it) for our rest time.

Then I could photograph our market score. Shoes for each,  custard apple, tuna (cactus-associated fruit), melon pear (or sweet cucumber), some yellow plums of some sort, dragon fruit, and of course mango. Cherries in the bag and smooth-skinned avocado on top. 

After nap, we stayed true to our promise of more playgrounds. We'd noticed one right across the river. Of course, there was a bridge a little ways away, but the water was so low, Hamish and I had to try...

We gave up, however, before crossing all the way. I was pretty confident I could make some of the jumps but ensuring Hamish also did without getting all wet was more than I was ultimately up for. Now, you'll also notice several other people in the river here. They are not here for play, though. They've come to do the laundry. They were really beating and scrubbing some clothes on those rocks.
We made it to the playground:

Hamish complained a bit that "everything was broken", which was not true, but it definitely wasn't a shiny new setup. There's a piece of wood missing from that suspension bridge, for instance. But, I figure it's good for her just to see that not everyone has the same quality stuff. There were local kids running about, mostly attached to those washing in the river. Ours didn't really mingle, but nobody seemed to mind the others' presence.

It turns out a tree stump and a few surrounding rocks worked better for our kids anyway, who took to pretending, e.g.,"Hey manimal, pretend that we were cats and there are bears chasing us and we have to run across the rocks to get to the other side, ok?"

We let the kids play for a good while until it was time to come in and get dinner together. We'd brought mac and cheese all the way from home and not used it up to that point. Combined with the fresh exotic fruits, we made ourselves quite a little spread.

After dinner, we had a movie night and watched Holiday Inn. We got the kids to bed, and then neighbors (Americans who'd lived in Cuenca for 5 years) dropped in with a bottle of wine. We stayed up past midnight chatting about all manner of things and finally got ourselves to bed.

December 23

We started off in the morning and ran into Shiloh and his owners.

We'd already met her before, but the neighbors with the wine let us in on her fame, so we had to get pictures. She (we're talking the dog here) was trained to recognize when a previous owner stopped breathing... maybe even when his heart stopped beating, and jump on his chest and alert him. That owner eventually got a pacemaker and her working days were over, but she came along to Ecuador when the owner moved there. Though retired, she needed something more fulfilling and took to visiting sick children at a cancer hospital. There was a tear-jerking story of a boy with terminal cancer who only wanted Shiloh and her spending his last night with him. She apparently has a room at the children's hospital named after her now, maybe she got a medal. She also once rode from Quito to Cuenca in the president's lap when the airline wouldn't accept her "papers" that were in English. Anyway, of course the kids enjoyed getting to give her snacks and make her do tricks. We finally left and grabbed a cab into the city

to Parque Calderon, where there were many hats on display

Regrettably, we purchased none of these. Extra regrettably, that blue hat to the right stayed there also. We thought we'd get another chance after fully surveying our options, but the holidays and weather ultimately meant we never saw these particular hats again. travesty. We grabbed some sandwiches for lunch right on the edge of the square and chased those with ice cream (frozen yogurt for the manimal).

We left here and walked

-to the sombrero museum, which has a wide variety of hats in different qualities and colors. They also had a great view out back.

The Sombrero museum also had a lot of information about the making of the hats, and on certain days, apparently, one side would be filled with craftsmen making hats.

The Panama hat, it should be said, originated in Ecuador (recall the Panama hat palm in the Quechua village). It was only in the 1850s that the economy of Ecuador led sellers to the bustling port of Panama where they sold many more, and the name Panama hat took. They come in many different levels of quality, having mostly to do with the tightness of the weave. The ones on the street were $15-$30. Most of the ones in the museum were more in the $50-$70 range, but the really good ones go for $1000 and are so tightly woven they can hold water. 

We took our taxi home after the museum, had our rest time, and then headed back downtown to try and catch the tour bus. It was kind of funny- we pulled up in our taxi, having a vague idea when the next bus would leave (and which one we wanted to be on to maximize a view of the city lit up at night). We got out, and the tour bus was pulling up. I said something about what we were supposed to do about tickets (had read online that there wasn't much of a booth or anything, just find them on the square), and the nearest street vendors, selling chewing gum and candy and odds and ends whipped out an official-looking ticket book. 

I was skeptical, but I inspected them a little and paid cash (all while the bus is pulling around past us). She spent a decent amount of time filling in information on the tickets. Once in hand, we kind of jogged over to the other side of the square as the bus was pulling up. Most everyone else was getting on and paying as they got on. I handed the person taking money the tickets, and at first she responded with "No!.... something else I didn't understand..." (I'm thinking it's not going to be hard to walk back to the same vendor and demand my money back)... but then she gets the attention of another woman who speaks English, who says we just need to keep the tickets with us, and we boarded. Off we went!

It's not a terribly long tour, but we enjoyed riding on top of the double decker and ducking when we went under low-hanging power lines. Guidance was given in Spanish and English, and the tour highlight is climbing a hill to the Mirador de Turi, a church, for the view of Cuenca. We were too early for the lit city view from the hill, but it was still pretty.

As a nice bonus, they served us a small sample of warm canelazo (it was fairly chilly), and on the ride back we got to see a bit more lighting.

For dinner, we'd made reservations at the Jazz Society Cafe. It sounded like a nice little place with the combination of jazz music and Italian food, and we were happy.

December 23 was Joanie's birthday, and so Alli was extra happy that the jazz trio played Santa Claus is Coming to Town, a favorite of hers. 

We would have been happy to stay longer, but the kids called curfew on us. I had another fun moment when I donated some cash (part of the cafe focus is supporting a program for students) and then realized the restaurant did not accept credit cards. I had to leave and find an ATM. The first one I was directed to would only accept a 4-digit PIN--which mine is not--and also only spoke Spanish. It took me a couple runs through to figure out what the problem was. Then I ran a couple blocks to find one that would work. In the end, Alli and kids were only unaware of my whereabouts for about 10 minutes, and the kids remained entertained with their food, music, and eventually their little Dover activity books.

We took our taxi home and made plans for the big Christmas eve parade...