A Very Cuencan Christmas

It's been another week passed here in Cuenca taking a break from our constant travels. We managed to do some stuff this week which was a slight change of pace. We finished our Christmas shopping, both for each other and for our families. The packages we sent home should arrive sometime before next year's Christmas. We also stopped in at the local bowling alley and arcade just to have some normal, nothing to do with travel fun.

Before we get to Christmas, we should mention our other highly anticipated activity this week: our feast upon the local Andean delicacy, Guinea Pig. Now, before you judge us for eating your childhood pet, we have been adventurous eaters on this trip, and we had been excited to give this a try. Cuy is a delicacy here and you see them being bought live at the markets and roasted on spickets.

Some things are easy to figure out, but we will never understand why Guinea Pig is considered remotely edible. Of all the crazy things we've eaten, this was the one that pushed the mercury straight out of the grossness meter! After getting over the site of the still intact eyes, teeth, and claws, you battle through a salty crunchy skin to the layer of thick fat before finding a thin layer of very dark meat. The taste wasn't the worst thing, but the grease and fat doomed us to stay in bed for the rest of the day. Never again!

After purging our bodies of rodent meat, we focused on having a great Christmas. The big tradition here in Cuenca is the procession that takes place for a big chunk of the day on Christmas Eve. It was an interesting parade that was focused primarily on children, who dressed in all sorts of fun costumes and walked the streets with their families. Some rode horses or donkeys or sat inside makeshift cars decorated with hanging fruit and other items. Floats carried singers and dancers and people dressed as angels or biblical characters. There's always a lot of dancing and music here in Latin America when there's a festival on.

Our Christmas Day was definitely different than normal, but we really enjoyed it. First off, it was like 80 degrees out and as much as we don't miss the cold weather, it just didn't feel too Christmasy! We also missed our families a lot. But we made a huge breakfast, pancakes with honey and bananas, bacon and scrambled eggs. We opened some small gifts that we bought for each other, Rich got a Budweiser and Kendra a pen! So exciting! We spent the rest of the day drinking mimosas, gorging on chocolate, and just relaxing.

All in all it turned out to be a great day and not a bad way to spend the holidays in our own apartment before we hit the road again this week to head south... FAR south.