Hour 1: “Still cannot believe we fit everything in the back of the pick-up truck” -Gail

Hour 2: “are we there yet?” -Julia

Hour 3: “Mimi get off of me, you’re the worst” -Lena 

Hour 4: “I can’t see the road- we are driving through a cloud” -Andrew

Hour 5: everyone (except our fantastic chauffeur  Andrew) is asleep *peacefully*

Hour 6: Everyone awakes suddenly to Mimi’s blasting rap music

Hour 7: Gail finds the aux chord…turns out Andrew knows all the words to every Britney song ever 

Well after eight hours smushed in the back of our beloved pick-up truck, this city better be REALLY good. Cuenca, Ecuador certainly lived up to our expectations. Originally a Cañari settlement, later conquered by the Incas, and ultimately by the Spanish Conquistadors, this city is rich in history. In fact, the Spanish commissioned the founding and naming of the city after their hometown, Cuenca, Spain (yes, mom almost booked the AirBnB house in Spain, sorry Mimi false alarm we aren’t headed to Europe you can stop asking any day now). 

Cuenca is fairly isolated, surrounded by mountains in all directions, but home to 400,000, including 3,000 American Ex-Pats. The “gringo-tree” newspaper is a favorite among the ex-pat community and the tourist driven city is full of business managers and cafe owners eager to practice their English. 

We lived in a traditional adobe-walled, intricately painted, creaking wooden staired home in the historical center of the city. Just a few blocks from the main Plaza Calderon, each morning started with a walk to a new cafe. So yes, for those of you who have asked, this is a “relax” city, not a “working” city, before we head to Peru for three intense weeks of medicine in the Sacred Incan Valley and the Iquitos jungle area. 

We certainly took advantage of the beautiful architecture, the diverse restaurants, the shopping in the artisanal and flower markets, and the plethora of Spanish Immersion Schools. We enrolled in daily Spanish classes at the Simon Bolivar School, priced at just $6-9 dollars an hour for private instruction, followed by complimentary salsa dancing lessons and traditional cocktail making and cooking classes. By the end of the week, Dad was ordering dinner and asking for directions in Spanish and Mom was eager to tell a “throwback” story in the preterite tense. Though I spent my afternoons working on my online AP Spanish course instead, I made sure to show up for salsa dancing in the school’s lobby. 

The women (Cholas Cuencanas) wear traditional pleated velvet colorful skirts and carry overflowing baskets of fresh fruit from the day market. The men wear straw hats, hand woven near the coast of Ecuador and transported, washed, dyed, stamped, pressed, and decorated here in Cuenca. They are commonly (and mistakenly) known as Panama hats (The men from Ecuador brought the hats with them when they traveled to Panama to build the Canal. They protected the men from the sun and they quickly became the most popular trend among all of the laborers. After the canal’s completion, Roosevelt wrongly named them “Panama” hats.) But, the people here reassure us that you can only find them handmade here and they take pride in the workmanship involved in the lengthy hat weaving process. Depending on the weave style and the intricacy, the hats can take between 3 days and 8 months to complete and range between $15-600. 

Though Dad can tell you himself, flying back home to DC for a week of work, which seemed like a good idea back in July, was not as great as it once sounded. We were very sad to see him go, (except Mimi who almost flew home in the suitcase with him) but he promised to look for our “missing” jean shorts, pick up the care packages that our best friends had generously prepared for us (thnx @mal and @aen), and bring back all the Halloween candy and DevaCurl conditioner we “need”. There was a trade-off of course, and we said goodbye to 3 duffel bags full of our clothes and my various pairs of high heels and sandals that were deemed “unnecessary”. WE ARE OFFICIALLY DOWN TO 1 SUITCASE EACH!