Halloween yapingachos

El treinta de uno de Octubre...

...otherwise known as Halloween for us gringos. To celebrate I had a delicious plate of chancho and yapingachos for lunch in between taking in the eye candy of the market diaspora. Whole pigs skewered and roasted staring back at you and yapingachos simmering on the griddle, kind of like fried mash pototoe balls. This is what you call Andean homecooking...

Many festivals, parades, events of all kinds. Cuenca days, a three day holiday celebrating the history, culture, people, all things Cuencano. After all there is much to celebrate here and I like Cuenca. It is a very livable place close to the mountains, laid back, and full of history. The whole city is in fact a world heritage site. Taking in this atmosphere and arriving home early with some of the students to carve up a pumpkin we bought on the coast and drug all the way back up into the Sierra. It turned out to be a melon though....hmmm. I carved it up anyways into a jack-o-lantern along with a grinning pineapple and there you go Halloween in Ecuador!

Most fittingly we attended the cemetery later in the night for a play put on for the festivities on this coincidentally fortuitous night. The play put on by candlelight tempting the audience to search and follow the act from one character to another finding there graves throughout the cemetary. In celebration of real people buried there. Image the crowd slowly surging through the above ground catacombs and crypts holding candles following this ghastly beautiful procession ending in a valley of the dead in their walled city. Beautiful and severe in so many candle lights flickering off the shadows, the slow bugling of the band, and moonlight raining down on rose petals on alabaster tomb stones...

An amazing night, a Halloween I want to always remember.