A farewell to Cuenca

It´s almost time for us to say goodbe to Cuenca- it´s hard to believe almost a month has gone by already. It´s been a good one- Ace´s Spanish has improved a ton (mine too, I hope), I loved my volunteer work, and we´ve met a lot of really lovely people.

Ace has plowed through ALL the Spanish tenses in four weeks- something that took me, oh, I don´t know, about five years. I’ve been taking a few hours of classes a week, too, and have done some good reviewing of all the grammar I’ve forgotten.

My schedule of wild animal refuge two days a week, street dog rescue shelter/vet clinic two days a week has been great, too. Some highlights of the wild animal refuge were getting to hang out in cages with monkeys (and hold little baby Jacobo) and hand feed baby deer and ostriches. And, of course, watching Ace get charged by an enraged llama! As hard as he tried, Felipe (the llama) wasn’t all that threatening. The clinic was amazing, too. On my first day, I went with one of the vets to pick up a dog that had been called in by a neighbor. It was a tiny little puppy living in a home where he had been horribly abused. I have never seen anything as wild or as angry as that tiny little abused puppy- we had to tie his mouth shut to keep him from biting us, and I was still afraid to pick him up. For the past three weeks, he’s continued to be extremely aggressive, but yesterday when I visited the shelter I saw him snuggling other dogs, and he was even jumping up on my legs wanting to play! It makes me want to cry just thinking about it. I’ve also been able to observe surgeries and lots of other vet stuff. I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’m thining seriously about trying to get into vet school when we return home, which is pretty huge for me! I’ve pretty much spent my whole life wondering what I should do as a career without any leads whatsoever. Yay for direction! Thank you Cuenca!

Since we were staying here for a while, I decided to contact some of the people living in Cuenca on Couchsurfing and see if anyone wanted to hang out. I sent out a ton of messages, since I hadn’t gotten a lot of replies in the past. Surprise! Pretty much everyone wrote back. People are so warm here. We had 10 or so Couchsurfers over to our hostel for a Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, which was really fun. Ace and I spent the whole day cooking as close to a traditional feast as we could- two whole chickens (they have turkey here, but it’s really expensive), mashed potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, apple cider, empanadas (a little touch of Ecuador), Mom’s yummy candied walnut salad, and an apple berry cobbler. The gravy was the only thing that totally bombed, which I was ok with. Plus, our guests were all from different countries (five Ecuadorians, two Spaniards, two Belgians,and a Brazilian), so they didn’t know what they were missing ! We’ve gotten to hang out with Roos and Kathleen, the two lovely Belgian girls, quite a bit. We went to Baños (a nearby village with really nice hot springs) two weekends ago, and on a waterfall hike last weekend. We also have gotten to hang out with Claire-Marie and Pepo a few times. Claire-Marie is a French girl working in a charitable foundation here, and Pepo is a rad Ecuadorian guy who is working on making Ace a thumb harp  Lots of good people here.

We´re looking to keep pretty busy our last week- going salsa dancing with Kathleen , Pepo, and Claire-Marie tonight, going to Pepo´s family´s property to help with the house-building effort on Friday, going to my Spanish teacher´s family barbecue on Saturday, and going to Cajas national park on Sunday. Enshallah-ojala. Oh yeah, and studying and working too :)

We haven´t really plotted out exactly what´s next, but after seeing Roos´photos of climbing Cotopaxi, we decided we can´t leave Ecuador without doing it. So after here it´s back north to prepare and acclimatize to the elevation, hiking a rad glacier-covered volcano (with professional guides and good gear, no worries!), then baaackkk south (again) towards Vilcabamba and on to Peru. We´re thinking we should be in Iquitos, Peru by Christmas so we can either enjoy a magical hippy Christmas on the Rainbow Community farm or be out in the jungle spearing pirahnas and cooking them over the fire for our Christmas dinner. Or something like that.

Lots of love to all of you back home. We love and miss you, as always.