Wow March 1st Already

Life in Cuenca has been slow and busy at the same time.  There has been much to celebrate and Carnival is not even here yet.  Since the last post we celebrated Valentines Day with a BBQ at a friends, had torrential down pours, celebrated a 10 year olds birthday, had beautiful warms days, and made a trip to Guayaquil.

So let's see, pictures always make it more interesting:



Birthday Boy on the left. 
Party at the newly remodeld Pizza Hut



Intersting insect on the wall in our sun room

Find the bright orange bill of a momma Chiguanco Thrush nesting in our front hedge

The biggest adventure of the month was a trip to the US Consulate in Guayaquil to submit our passport renewal applications. We completed the forms on-line, made an appointment on-line, got new mug shots taken, arranged for our favorite cab driver to pick us up Monday at 8AM and we were set to go. We should have guessed that things would not go as we had planned when the cab driver had car trouble with his ususal cab and had to arrange Monday morning for a different car... he was 45 minutes late but that was OK, we had allowed a magin of error for the trip down. The drive was beautiful...

We head off through the Cajas National Park

The stark terrain of the Andes in the Park

With beautiful lakes

Decending into the clouds



Overlooking the lowlands outside Guayaquil




The US Consulate

We arrived in plenty of time for our 2PM appointment so we enjoyed the beautiful buffet lunch at the OroVerde Hotel.  What a spread. . . .sorry no pictures.

The experience at the conuslate was not what we excpected.  Should only be a few minutes to turn in paper work pay the $110 each and be on our way.  Wrong.  Secutity check that included surrendering all cell phones and cameras, batteries removed first, bottle of Advil, and hard candy.  Go upstairs and wait for our name to be called.  Turn in application and mug shot and passports, get ticket to take back downstairs to pay the fee.  Turn in receipt.  Wait and wait and wait and then go to window #2.  Swear that the info is correct, get your old passorts back stamped "CANCELED" and holes punched in it, guess we are not going anywhere for a while, and then go across the street, around the corner to DHL, take a number wait 45 minutes, pay $11 to have the new passports shipped to home in Cuenca.  All in all it took over 2 hours.

The traffic was so bad it took 45 minutes to clear Guayaquil and that included about 15 minutes of complete grid-lock in downtown.  As we started back up the Andes the fog and rain hit and we had to crawl at about 25 km/hr in the dark arriving safely in Cuenca at 9:15.  Oh well, at least our new passports should arrive in 10-12 days... yeh right, we will see!

Today I took a cooking class that Noshy has started.  Had a great time and made Maraquia Ice Cream and Tres Leches cake . . . had such a good time forgot to take a piucture!!  Oh well, the taste was fabulous!!!

Tour of rose production near Paute tomorrow . . should have lots of picture to share.  Until then...hasta luego!