Glenn’s nephew, Duncan and his wife Sandra, of Alberta, Canada receive the award of “First North Americans to Visit the Ganos”. Their prize was deluxe accommodations in Edificio La Glorieta (our apartment building) which included a private room, en suite bathroom, and INTERNET! Duncan and Sandra had already been in Ecuador for more than two weeks by the time they reached our swanky digs. The majority of that time had been spent in the beach community of Montañita at Spanish school and living with a local family with six kids. No wonder they gave our little hostel 5 stars!
While the Canadian Ganos were in Cuenca, summer seemed to have put itself on hold and we experienced heavier than usual rains during the entire week they were here. But that didn’t stop us from eating at a variety of restaurants, shopping for produce at the market, seeing the sights in El Centro and Turi, and having lots of great conversations. After all, we had never met Sandra and the last time we saw Duncan was, at best guess, 28 years ago!
Midweek, Duncan, Sandra and Mara took a daytrip up to view Ingapirca, the archaeological site about two hours north of Cuenca. Avid and attentive readers might remember that Los Gano de Cuenca already visited Ingapirca back in December of 2014. Click on the December archives and go to the post entitled “Doctor, Doctor, Gimmee the News” (half way down the post) to refresh your memory about Ingapirca, or just ‘fresh’ it if you haven’t ever read it.
Our two and a half hour bus ride cost $2.50 each way and it rained a bit along the route. But by the time we reached Ingapirca, the rain had stopped and we had an enjoyable walk through the ruins. Back in December, we were unable to take the two kilometer hike behind the ruins due to two approaching thunderstorms. Our luck was better this time. In addition to walking through the peaceful, bucolic valley, we were able to see four rather unusual rocks connected to the site, the most impressive being “La Cara de Inca”.
The Face of the Inca. Pretty cool, huh?Intiwatana (or Intichunka) – “Place where the sun is bound”. This was thought to be used for various rituals and astronomical observations.La Tortuga or the turtle rock. Other than looking like a turtle, I don’t know what its purpose was.Intinawi or “Face of the Sun”
As interesting as these rocks and rock formations are, the views of the farms, fields and animals were the best part to me. Ingapirca is an important archaeological site and is visited by many tourists each year. But it is home to the Cañari people whose families have most likely lived there for generations. Here are some of the views we enjoyed.
The Cow Whisperers. Duncan and Sandra were cattle ranchers in Manitoba for several years so they have a special affinity to the many cows in Ecuador.
And just in case you didn’t get enough pictures of the actual ruins from our previous post, here are some more.
As we waited for our bus, we enjoyed a $2 almuerzo while the rain poured down. Thanks, Duncan and Sandra, for letting me tag along on your trip to Ingapirca so I could take that hike! The Canadian Ganos have now moved on to explore other parts of Ecuador.
And Los Gano de Cuenca stay busy with Spanish class twice a week, Cuenca International Chorale rehearsals, helping lead music at Cuenca Christian Church, eating out with friends, and living the retired life. It’s pretty awesome.
Picture from Gringotree.com posted January 19, 2015.
Here’s What We’ve Learned: Good weather doesn’t last forever! We had enjoyed several weeks with very little rain and beautiful sunny days during December and most of January. That all ended on Saturday, January 18 when we had the most intense rain we had ever experienced. The rain came down, or should we say sideways, in sheets causing our four rivers to rise near to the tops of their banks, flash flooding on many city streets, and the need to mop up water entering our closed windows. Since then, rain and thunderstorms have been the norm each day.
Here’s What We Need to Learn: Past tense Spanish verbs. Living in the present only goes so far.
So who is going to be our second guest from North America? Second place prize is just as good as first.
One of our frequent fliers! Thanks to Duncan’s patience, he got this shot of one of our four colibris (hummingbirds) that visit our feeder many times a day.
If you like our blog, and we hope you do, please “follow” us if you haven’t already done so. You will receive an automatic email every time a new post is published. You can also “like” our blog and “share” it with friends who you think might enjoy reading about our retirement to Cuenca, Ecuador. And of course, please feel free to comment, ask questions, or offer suggestions of what we topics we should cover in our posts. Here’s a little bonus picture for reading all the way to the end of the post!
Like just about everything else that we have experienced in the little more than three months since we moved to Cuenca, cooking is at times an adventure. My cooking style is not fancy but I try to make things taste good. Efficiency is another characteristic of my cooking, I believe, as I try to use what I have and limit the number of shopping trips I need to take to put food on the table each week.
When I lived in Anchorage, I would become really irritated with myself if I had to go to the grocery store more than once per week. Poor planning I would call it. But all that’s changed here in Cuenca!
First of all, we don’t have (nor want) a car so we don’t do anything resembling the “big haul” Costco run shopping anymore. You can read more about where we shop in the post called “Cuenca v. Anchorage” in our archives. Secondly, not everything we are used to buying and using on a regular basis in the States is readily available in Cuenca.
For instance, baking soda is a controlled substance! What? Yep. Apparently it is used in illegal drug production. You can buy it in small quantities from the pharmacy but there are no big orange boxes tucked in the back of our refrigerator absorbing food odors. Fortunately, there is plenty of baking powder and it can be used perfectly well in most recipes. You need a little more baking powder than baking soda and you have to be careful not to put so much in as to make your recipe taste metallic but, hey, that’s all a part of the adventure!
To Horno or to Grill (bake or broil), this is the question.
I usually don’t measure ingredients UNLESS I’m baking and then I am dealing with measuring cups and spoons that are not necessarily 1/4, 1/2, 1 cup, etc. And of course, my oven temperature is celcius rather than farenheit. Good thing there are conversion charts online! I manage okay with the measurements and conversions. What’s a little tougher is that my gas oven can either have flame above or flame below – but not both! No worries, though. I just turn the dial from “horno” to “grill” for the last few minutes so that the food gets a little browner on top.
The warming oven under my stove.
At Christmas, I was very successful in my pirogi (Latvian bacon and onion filled rolls) baking. Because of the higher elevation, yeast rises more quickly. I countered that by letting my dough rise in the refrigerator. It takes longer but you have more control over when you want to bake. I used a hotter oven (200 C) and for the final browning, I put the pan under my oven in the warming oven. Pretty nifty!
I’m just bursting to tell you about my most recent cooking adventure! I MADE MOLASSES! If molasses is in some store in Cuenca, I have yet to find it. But truthfully, I haven’t looked very hard. I just figured I wouldn’t make anything that required it. However, I really did miss Molasses Crinkle Cookies. One day, we were having almuerzo (lunch) at one of our favorite places “El Tunel” and for dessert we were served Higo con Melaza. Well, we knew the word higo (figs) but we didn’t know melaza until we tasted it. MOLASSES! With a mixture of English and Spanish, we learned that the all we needed was panela (a brick of brown sugar), water , and heat.
I also found a Youtube video in Spanish of someone demonstrating making melaza out of panela. So I bought a small brick of panela for 41 cents and gave it a go.
Half a kilo of Panela (about a pound) for 41 cents.I filled the pan with water about half way up the brick.I brought it to a boil and stirred frequently until the panela began to dissolve in the water.It was very liquid and carmel colored. It thickened as it cooled but never got any darker. I will experiment more with cooking time and amount of water.When I tasted the re-solidified sugar, it tasted just like molasses! So I will heat this up to the consistency needed and use it until it is gone.The whole reason for making molasses was to bake these cookies. Even though these are a bit lighter in color than Molasses Crinkles made with “real” molasses, everyone who was offered one scarfed it up with no problem!
Although we both strive to accept new foods, flavors and textures in our adopted home, at times there are just some things we wish were different. Like oatmeal. We all know oatmeal is good for lowering cholesterol levels and we’ve been eating it for years. But we have not been able to make good oatmeal here in Cuenca. Water boils at a lower temperature at our altitude (don’t ask me what that temperature is – look it up if it’s important to you!) So you have to cook oatmeal here for a longer time and it tastes like nothing and sticks together like paste! Glenn still makes and eats it but not Mara. Lots of walking, fresh fruits and vegetables and better living by pharmacy is going to have to do it for her.
Red Mango
We have made some great fruit discoveries while living in Cuenca. Of course, you all know bananas, pineapples and mangos. Those are readily available in the US even though pineapples and mangos are a bit pricey in Alaska even when in season for the rest of the US. In Ecuador, they are grown year round so those are the three musketeers of our fruit basket. By the way, we enjoy the red mangos the most as they are just a little firmer than the yellow and not quite as sweet.
Two new fruits for us are the pitahaya and the cherimoya. They are a bit more expensive and not available at every fruit vendor’s booth but they are worth the price and search. Pitahayas can have green or red skins. The red skinned ones are super pretty but we found the green ones taste sweeter. The inside is white with black edible seeds. To eat a pitahaya , cut it in half and scoop out the pulp with a spoon. The texture of the flesh is similar to a kiwi.
Red skinned pitahaya. Isn’t it pretty? This cost about a $2.00. Definitely not the most economical fruit to eat.Just eat with a spoon. Yum! Yum!
Cherimoyas were described by Mark Twain as “the most delicious fruit known to man.” We tend to agree! They have a lizard skin look to the exterior and like the pitahaya, cutting it in half and scooping and eating the flesh with a spoon works best. The flesh is a creamy white but is chock-full of fairly large but toxic black seeds so you don’t eat them. But it’s really not hard to spit them out into your bowl as you eat the sweet, custardy interior. The flavor is hard to describe but it’s kind of a cross between a banana, pineapple, papaya, peach and strawberry. This fruit is sometimes called a custard apple.
Don’t judge a fruit by it’s cover! While this cherimoya is not all that attractive, it’s flavor is amazing.Although the cherimoya has numerous black toxic seeds, they are relatively easy to spit out as you enjoy the custardy goodness of this fruit. This fruit is expensive – about $2.50 to $3.00 each.
Well, that’s all the time we have for the cooking segment of our blog but how about some pictures of some smaller towns around Cuenca? Back in December, we had the opportunity to travel to the Yungilla Valley, Chordeleg, Sig Sig, and San Bartolome.
The Yungilla Valley is south and a little west of Cuenca and about 3,000 feet lower in elevation so the weather is a warmer and dryer. We spent a beautiful sunny day in the valley with our friends Gary and Sue Gaither and Brenda and Greg Angstrom, highlighted by a nice hike up to El Chorro waterfall near Giron.
After our hike, we headed further down the valley and found this great little resort to have lunch poolside.Gary and Sue GaitherGreg and Brenda Angstrom
Chordeleg, Sig Sig, and San Bartolome are three small towns east and a bit south of Cuenca. What they lack in size they make up for in talented artisans. Chordeleg is known for it’s gold and silver jewelry; Sig Sig for it Ecuadorian hats; and San Bartolome (way up on the side of a mountain) for its guitars.
Photos from Chordeleg
Our new wedding rings!We got a great deal in Chordeleg!
Photos from Sig Sig
Sig Sig has a beautiful gateway to welcome its visitors.Yes, that’s a beetle!
El Sombrero Grande at the Ecuadorian Hat factory in Sig Sig.
Photos from San Bartolome
Here’s a little slide show I made with an app called Magisto. It’s the free version so there are definite limitations but it was pretty fun.
What We’ve Learned: That for 3 months we have had incorrect grammar in the title of our blog! Apparently even though we need to use the plural masculine article Los (the) because Gano ends with an ‘o’, we don’t need the ‘s’ at the end (Ganos) like we would in English. So take a look at our new, improved, and corrected banner at the top of the page.
What We Need to Learn: Not to take so long to write a post about a trip. It gets a little difficult to remember all the details!
Don’t forget to comment or ask questions below.
Next post’s topic: You’re guess is as good as mine! But I’m sure I’ll come up with something.
The post Christmas lull did not last long here in Cuenca. Although the Pase del Niño parades continue, immediately after Christmas, Cuencanos turn their minds and preparations to the next big celebration: Año Viejo (Old Year) or New Year’s Eve to the northern folk. Vendors set up booths and rotate their stock from Christmas cards, decorations, and sweets to fireworks, yellow and red underwear, grapes, masks and Año Viejo dummies, also called monigotes. All of Ecuador celebrates Año Viejo but rumor has it Cuenca has developed the practice into a pyrotechnic, incendiary, cacophonous art form.
Hundreds of bodies and masks to mix and match your perfect monigote!Recognize anyone?
Tradition has it that burning masked papier mâché dummies depicting famous, infamous or anonymous characters on New Year’s Eve gives good luck to the one burned in effigy. But it is also a way for the ones doing the burning to symbolically leave behind the regrets, bad relationships, and mistakes of the past year as one looks forward to the new.
We found these guys everywhere! This one was in the Coral department store being constructed by employees.
Whatever. . .it’s fire, explosions, and noise and Ecuadorians love those things! Monigotes are filled with highly flammable materials such as paper, straw or hay, cardboard, manure (eeewww!) and sometimes fireworks. Whole neighborhoods get together to shoot off fireworks, play music and dance and of course, burn their monigotes. Extra luck to a participant is possible if s/he jumps over the burning effigy three times. We think it would be lucky if said participant does not have an imbedded firecracker go off mid-jump!
Let’s go get marshmallows!Never mind! Let’s get the fire extinguisher.
As it was past midnight and a little cool, we enjoyed the monigote burning in our neighborhood from the comfort of our bedroom window. Our bedroom view encompasses 180 degrees and we are up on the 4th floor, so watching the largest fireworks display we’d ever seen was quite pleasant. A question was posed in The GringoPost, an expat online newsletter, about whether there would be any public displays of fireworks on New Year’s Eve. One response was “You’re joking, right?” Another was “There is NO part of Cuenca that will NOT have fireworks going off on New Year’s Eve!” And we will attest that is true.
The wearing of yellow and red underwear on New Year’s Eve is a tradition meant to bring love in the new year. Since we both have the loves of our lives already, we forewent the buying and wearing of these special garments.
Eating twelve grapes at midnight, one at each of the 12 clock chimes, is also supposed to bring good luck. We were too busy gawking and taking pictures of the fireworks and monigotes to pay attention to the time. So a few minutes after midnight, we nibbled on our twelve grapes. It would have been our luck to choke on one of those twelve grapes by eating them so fast during the first 12 seconds of the new year.
The festivities in our neighborhood died down around 1 am but we’re sure the partying went on long after that in other parts of the city. We walked to our friends’ apartment midafternoon on New Year’s Day and it was like a ghost town. All we saw were a few cars, a single taxi, and the charred remains of a few Año Viejos.
No regrets here.
Many other expat bloggers have posted much better pictures and different perspectives of their Año Viejo celebrations so we would like to refer you to their sites if you would like more information.
Now for the bonus section of our blog. If you recall, we performed in the debut concert of the Cuenca International Chorale in the Old Cathedral of Cuenca back on December 22. For those of you who want to hear and see any of the music we performed, we have the Vimeo link (excerpts of all the songs in the concert) https://vimeo.com/115463314
and Youtube links to all the songs in their entirety.
If you don’t plan to watch all the videos, we totally understand. But you might want to check out Riu Riu Chiu (Glenn’s big solo all in Spanish) and Cherry Tree Carol and Gaudete (songs in which Mara had solos).
We have some travel plans to announce: Los Ganos de Cuenca are traveling to Spain in February. We are going to spend a week at a resort near the university town of Salamanca helping Spaniards improve their English. Room and Board is free for the English speakers as our payment for spending 12 or more hours a day in conversation! Airfare is on our dime. We will do some sightseeing on our own for a few days afterward. Some folks we have told this news to were curious about the program so we have two websites to share of the two companies (that we know of) who conduct these kinds of programs.
Pueblo Ingles (the program we are attending): www.diverbo.com Diverbo has programs in several locations in Spain and in Germany.
Next time, we’ll get some of the pictures posted from our road trips to Chordeleg, Sig Sig, San Bartoleme, and the Yungilla Valley unless something super exciting happens to pre-empt that. You never know – we do live in Ecuador after all!
What we’ve learned: Unregulated fireworks can be fun!
What we need to learn: How to eat grapes very quickly.
Midweek, Duncan, Sandra and Mara took a daytrip up to view Ingapirca, the archaeological site about two hours north of Cuenca. Avid and attentive readers might remember that Los Gano de Cuenca already visited Ingapirca back in December of 2014. Click on the December archives and go to the post entitled “Doctor, Doctor, Gimmee the News” (half way down the post) to refresh your memory about Ingapirca, or just ‘fresh’ it if you haven’t ever read it.
Los Gano de Cuenca 
