All Saints Day, Nov. 1st and All Souls Day on the 2nd and these two combined are Day of The Dead. The ancient belief is that the soul visits its relatives within these days and should have plenty of food to be fed to continue further on its journey to the after life. Present day the locals visit the cemetery and adorning their tombs with flowers and gifts of food. There is a candle light parade to the cemetery for the locals but many of the Expats will follow them.
Also, on Nov. 3rd Cuenca celebrates it's Independence Day. Now for a tiny bit of history of the city. The Spanish settlement, Cuenca (full name Santa Ana de los cuatro rios de Cuenca), was founded April 12, 1557 by the explorer Gil Ramirez Davalos. The town was named after a city in Spain by the then Viceroy of Peru, Andres Hurtado de Mendoza. Cuenca achieved its independence from Spain on Nov. 3, 1820.
So, all the events roll into a week long celebration for the city. There are all sorts of other festivals around the town to celebrate these special days. There are concerts, dancers showing the local customs, handicrafts, a big rodeo on Saturday night, and even carnival rides (but they didn't pass inspection by the city but are still running).
Yesterday afternoon, we went to a small local arts fair. I had heard there were more than one location for these fairs. Our taxi knew of this one and it is where we were dropped off. It really was small and only had about 50 vendors selling their hand made items.
Small covered vendor tables
A vendor selling their ceramic & wooden items
A roof tile that is hand painted
A wooden clock decorated with leather flowers
Wooden plate hand painted $20
Everyone was in the mood of the festivities!
One vendor selling beautiful potted plants
These were straw type flowers & hand made
This young beauty was having her picture done in charcoal by an artist but she wasn't very happy sitting there. She had one single tear on her right cheek. Her mother was a vendor selling music CDs.
It didn't take Ed and I long to walk around the whole "art festival" and see all the vendors. There were also vendors selling leather handbags, belts, all sorts of knitted items and some stuff I think my youngest grandchildren could have done better at making.
Ed had the name of a restaurant he wanted to try in the Old Town. We grabbed a taxi and headed into old part of town (about a mile away). It turned out the restaurant wasn't opened so now we just walked around looking for a nice place for dinner.
There are more beautiful churches in the city then I can count
Typical street scene in the Old Town area.
We decided to try dinner at the San Juan Hotel in their Rosa Bella Restaurant
You had to walk all the way through the lobby of the hotel to an outdoor courtyard for the restaurant.
The courtyard for the restaurant was all under cover of a wide wooden roof & they had patio gas heaters.
The walls around the courtyard was all hand painted in beautiful scenes.
We were started off with nice rolls and butter
Ed tried their French Onion soup - it wasn't at hot as it should have been if it had been served in a ceramic deep dish. There were tons of their sweet onions & cheese.
Ed liked the Merlot they served by the glass.
Neither of us had any room for dessert, so it was time to head back to the condo. With all the festivities going on in town, it wasn't easy getting a taxi. We had to walk a couple of blocks to a bigger cross street before we were successful.
When we arrive at the condo entrance into our building, this is what greeted us.
There was a party for the children that lived in the building from 6:00 until 8:00 with magic, music, games and treats. Then, the few children that live in the building, went door to door for candy from the residents. I think we had about 10 kids total. It was fun to see them all dressed up in their costumes. Everything was quiet by 8:30PM so it was back to watching a movie for us.
Happy Days in Cuenca,
Peggy
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