if it were not for chifa restaurants i might be dead

perhaps that is a little drastic - this keyboard is configured weird and i cannot find the punctuation keys... can-t is spelled this way for instance... just bear with me - but really, if i had not found a place to eat pretty soon i might have given in to temptation and bashed in my neighbour s head to feast on the delicious goo inside. what is chifa you ask? why that is what they call chinese food here. a little odd yes but who am i to interject. cuenca in a move vaguely similar to loja, decided to basically close shop today and hand the city over to roving gangs of kids with water balloons and fake ak-47s. yes during carnaval the entire sierra - except for ambato which i saw on tv yesterday and is festooned with parades and throngs of people, and probably vilcabamba because of all the signs in loja saying how much stuff was happening there - shuts down so people can taunt the two or three gringos who did not get the message and roam the streets looking for a place to sit down to a bite to eat. and, as mentioned earlier, during carnaval there is this silly tradition wherein gangs of water toting crazy-people try to get each other and whoever else comes within 50 feet soaking wet. they also sell this foam that is ingeniously called carnaval foam - i think i mentioned this already...

so everything is closed. the women at the desk in the hotel where i am staying, a very beautiful but cheap place that is so quiet i could hear the reverberating echo of thoughts lost in george bush s brain. she warned me that most things are closed and that, ironically enough during a celebration to mark the beginning of the lead up to easter, even the churches are closed. so i wandered the streets for a while, dodging the hoodlums with their balloons, although at times not dodging them enough, looking for anyplace that might be selling something that resembles food. this was hard to do. after coming across hundreds of wonderful looking cafes and restaurants with bars firmly locked across their doors and windows i found a bakery and picked up some nice bread. but, then on the way back to the hostel i saw it, the chifa place, and intrigued because it appeared open, i decided to try it out.

and it was open, and there was already a gringo seated in the front window eating. that is another story. there are about 20 or so older gringos wandering the streets, like me mouths agape at the lack of life cept for those banditos. half way through dinner i heard some drums and trumpets and so paid my bill and headed outside where there were a bunch of guys gathered around one of the churches - there are about a 100 in cuenca it seems - and this one was open with people, many of them middle aged and gringo ish wandering in and out. the band was very nice and i stayed for about a half hour bopping to the music.

so tomorrow i head back to guayaquil and the oppressive heat. sigh.