The girls finished their 3 weeks of half-day Spanish classes. I’m really impressed and proud of how much they learned. I took two years in high school, spent three months in Mexico ten years ago, and have tried to pick up what I can along the way. Zoe is already almost caught up to me, and it makes me a proud papa to see her speaking with the locals.
To celebrate, we went for the traditional Ecuadorian delicacy of cuy, also known as guinea pig. I thought it would just be a novelty of “oh look how cool and weird of us,” but I was really surprised at how tasty it was.
We found an awesome leather shop in town that made me some custom-fit classic wingtips ($50!), a wallet, and I bought a sweet leather jacket with just enough tough-guy edge to it to make it an obvious mid-life crisis purchase. I’m 40, so I have to do stuff like that.
I’m really going to miss the fresh fruit here. We bought a bag of 20 oranges for $1, a bag of 20 limes for $1, and made some orange limeade.
Over the past two weeks, for better and worse, we’ve reached that point that we were kind of hoping we would; we feel a tiny bit less like tourists and a tiny bit more like long term visitors. Members at the local church congregation invite us over for dinners. I can cruise around el centro from the mercado to the leather store to the ice cream shop to the bank without ever checking Google maps. We’re as comfortable taking the city buses as we are taxis. I say for worse because as we’ve slipped out of tourist mode and into “just living,” a dozen could-do building tours and side trips vanished from the punch list. That said, one of the benefits of longer slower travel is that you can have a few downtime days and not feel so much guilt and pressure about maximizing your sightseeing time.
There goes our month in Cuenca. Tomorrow we head for the coast!