Cuenca

This past weekend I went with two of my friends to a city in Southern Ecuador, Cuenca. It was pretty fun--we got to take a plane and everything. Cuenca is the third largest city in the country with 400.000 people. It has a well-preserved colonial part of town with many nice churches. Here is a street in Cuenca. You can kind of see the two blue domes on the left. Those are the trademark of Cuenca.




















Cuenca was nice because it was kind of low-key compared to Quito. Much more relaxed. We walked around and looked at all the churches and streets and everything. And we had some delicious milkshakes! Cuenca was made even better by the fact that it is where I found my second stick-your-head-in-it thing. Success!!!




















This is me as a Chola Cuencana. That is the name of an indigenous group that lives in and around Cuenca. This is their traditional dress. We found this at a place that sells Panama Hats. Panama hats are actually from Ecuador. They are called sombreros de paja toquilla. They are associated with Panama because when people were working on the Panama Canal they wore the hats, but they originally come from Ecuador. The hats come in various quality levels, depending on how fine the weave is.
Almost better than a stick-your-head-in-it thing is getting to dress up. There was a place where we got to dress up like the Chola Cuencana. The guy laughed at us because we don't look like them--we are way too white. But all that dressing up gets pretty exhausting.















In the actual city of Cuenca they have some ruins leftover from the Incas. These were more impressive than Rumicucho. And attached to the ruins was a park with llamas and a variety of exotic birds. There was also a museum there which had some shrunken heads on display. Pretty cool. Here are the ruins.















About two hours from Cuenca is another site where there are really good ruins. The place is called Ingapirca. We got a tour of the place, and it's quite fascinating. Here is a picture of the temple of the sun. The Incas worshipped the sun, Inti. You can't see it that well in this picture, but the stones are almost exactly the same height. The Incas didn't use cement, they just made the stones the same height and stacked them on top of each other.















From Cuenca we went to Loja, another town about 5 hours south of Cuenca by bus. They don't like emos there. (This says "No more emos").














We saw other things about emos around town. It was kind of weird. They were definitely very pro si on the consitution though. And in case you were wondering, the constitution passed with about 70% yes. Since this past weekend was the weekend they voted, the "ley seca" (dry law) was in place. Liquor stores and bars closed, and no restaurants served alchohol. It was pretty quiet in town on Friday and Saturday since the clubs were all closed.

Also in Loja we went to the zoo. It was interesting. You could get really close to the animals. Here's the giraffe.




















One of the main reasons we went to Loja was to try some cuy, a delicacy here. Cuy is guinea pig. We each got a half cuy. It came with potatoes and salad. I liked it. It's just a lot of work.















It was a successful trip. We definitely got to see a lot.

On another note, last night I was at a cafe in town, and on the tv was an ad for visiting Colombia. There were beautiful pictures of the country and all of that like a regular tourism commercial thing. At the end there was a sort of slogan, and it translates to: The only risk is that you will want to stay. I found that quite humorous. Anyway, I will leave you with that. Have a wonderful day!!