Lo to the ja and Cuenca

So the second part of spring break I flew to Loja to meet up with my friends Mark and Gaby in the south of Ecuador because they had been traveling Peru the previous week. When I got to Loja, which was only a 30 minute $80 plane ride, I didn't know that the airport was actually 3o minutes from the actual town of Loja.. I also didn't realize that Loja is a province so I was flying into the province, not the town. I actually hitched a ride with my airplane buddy, some older Ecuadorian woman who lived in Loja, in her daughter's truck! ha Then with all my decision making skills (sike!) I had to look around and find a hostal/hotel for the 3 of us. That took like an hour cause I couldn't decide and there weren't that many great ones, so I had to call my friend Taylor to help me! haha I ended up hanging out for almost 5 hours by myself waiting for them, because apparently something happened with their bus and all different transportation to get there (which definitely isn't uncommon). We walked around and saw a bunch of churches and bought a few things at a small market and headed out to Cuenca (a little farther north and the 3rd largest city in Ecuador) in the late afternoon.

In Cuenca, we stayed at this ridiculous hostal.. Hostal Orquidea.. because we lived in a suite for a few days. It had a spiral staircase leading up to our suite, a kitchen, stocked with everything but food and the blade to the blender, a dining table, a living room with a bar and tv in it, and 2 bedrooms with 2 beds in each and a full bath in each! It was crazy amazing. We attempted to make mora juice, boiling them and trying to strain them with many different devices (including a salt shaker, a bag with holes punches with a fork, a thin thin strainer, and maybe something else.. then decided we'd just drink it with the seeds (which really sucked)) and that didn't turn out so well. We also bought a ton of fruit, so we made a platter one evening to go along with some bread and it had cut up pinapple and grapes and we had strawberries as well. And 2 of the mornings Mark cooked some tortillas (which are pretty much omelets) and I made some strawberry batidos! It was lovely. While in Cuenca we walked around also to see the gorgeous churches and parks, bought some really good icecream a few times, and found some nice jewelry stores. One night we met up with a friend of Mark's, who was studying in Cuenca, from home in Cali!, and went dancing and I got to dance with a band member of the live band that had played earlier! It was fun. I've found that live music here is the best. We took a side trip the next day to a place called Ingapirca which was pretty cool. There were 3 sets of ruins and a bunch of llamas! ha And when we were at the highest one, I just so happened to drop my camera about 30 feet without knowing. Luckily, and not with my luck obviously, it landed in a patch of grass and didn't hit all the rocky steps it could have hit. Jeez. We wanted to go to either some markets about an hour away the next day or go to a gigantic park, but we did neither! ha I actually don't even remember what we did, but I feel like we just found a market or 2 and looked around Cuenca some more.

We decided on that Friday that we'd fly back on Sunday, so our last minute tickets only cost $63 or something which was glorious and were for row 9 which we thought was lovely because it wasn't in the front nor the back.. Deceivingly so, row 9 was the LAST row. This was, by far, the smallest plane I'd ever been on. I sat in a middle seat, the only one on the plane, with my legs propped up on my bag and 2 people on either side of me. It was glorious. I'm pretty sure though that the empanadas they gave me started my sickness, because my stomach has hurt for the past 3 weeks off and on since that Sunday afternoon! Ridiculous. Lovely trip though.