Cuenca: Week 1

Over the past seven days we have settled into our new short-term apartment in Cuenca and made our temporary home for the holiday season. Cuenca is the third largest city in Ecuador with 267,000 people in the city proper and another 200,000 in the metro area. Located in the southern end of the country, in the Andean foothills, the city was built around four rivers that all flow toward the Amazon jungle, which adds to the charm of the city when you cross the frequent pedestrian bridges that pass over a handful local residents washing laundry in the gentle rolling water.

We were lucky enough to find a fully furnished, all included, apartment right outside of the historic downtown center. Most importantly, we were lucky enough to secure a place with a working oven! While we are here through the end of December, we wanted to provide weekly updates, instead of just posting on particular experiences.

We moved into our apartment last Friday, missing Thanksgiving by one day. We decided to hold off on celebrating Thanksgiving until we had full access to our kitchen. So Saturday, we spent 3 hours shopping for our food at the local market and the supermarket (two separate trips) and 7 hours baking the biggest feast of our trip yet. To our dismay the only turkey you can find in Cuenca is 20lbs and frozen solid, a little much for the two of us and our friend Andy. So we opted to by a 5lb fresh chicken instead. Another noteworthy substitution was the mango bread pudding for pumpkin pie. Rich and Kendra battled it out over peas vs. corn and the fresh peas won. The star of the show was the homemade stuffing, which was absolutely amazing (how could it not be with the slab of butter that was holding it together)! We thankfully did not have to move after such an overwhelming meal as on Sunday the entire country was ordered to remain at home for the national census, when local students visit every household in one day. A little different from home for sure.

We took the extra time we had on Sunday to research and book our next destination on our permacation adventure: Patagonia! More on that to come in January.

However, in the meantime before we can play with the penguins, Rich has signed up for another round of Spanish classes and Kendra has already begun more weaving classes (check out the pictures of her half finished wall hanging).

We look forward to sharing our more “normal” life with everyone in the weekly posts to come...but just to give you a hint, it is like waking up to a sunny Saturday morning every day. Tough life.