Amor Brujo

 

Well my journey home has officially begun… I am currently on a bus heading to the coast for a midnight flight to Miami. This week has been filled with tons of work, finishing up all of our projects and presenting all of our work from the past eight weeks to our bosses. Putting eight weeks of work into two days of presentations really makes you realize how much you’ve done. My biggest project was to make a stove cost analysis and payment plan and after dozens of hours of work I am proud to say my Miami education was put to good use.

Besides work, it has been wonderful to be back in Cuenca. My host family and I have become very close and they did all they could to make my last few days in Ecuador as memorable as possible, starting with the day they found out that I like ice cream. We were in the middle of dinner and I was professing my love for helado and my family insisted that we immediately leave dinner to go get some. The tricky thing was that it was 9:00pm and no stores were open… but, they were determined to find me ice cream so, after an hour of searching, we found some. The “factory produced ice cream” (as my host family called it) was not up to par though, so as soon as I got home from work the next day we headed out again in search of the good stuff. In our search for the “real” ice cream, my family discovered that I had yet to try their favorite Cuencan delicacy:-pigskin. So of course before we could get ice cream we had to go find pigskin. Now I love meat, but when an entire pig is sitting on the street staring at you and they literally just cut off a piece of its skin and hand it to you… that tests how true of a carnivore you are. Luckily though, the pigskin actually turned out to be quite delicious and then we were able to finally get our Ecuadorian ice cream. (If you are wondering right now what the title of this blog means, it refers to a flavor of ice cream that is special to Cuenca called Amor Brujo…it has caramel and strawberries and may even be worth a trip to Ecuador just to try it…

If pigskin and ice cream weren’t enough, my family threw me a huge dinner party later that evening and invited all of their family and friends. With another four course meal, by the end of the night I came to understand why my clothes are all fitting tighter.

The family dynamics in my home were quite confusing…I still don’t know who my host mother was specifically because I had seven different mothers that took care of me in the house. But, when our mothers were invited to our graduation from Spanish school and I brought a posse of six people I could not complain about all the love! In the end I could not have asked for a more loving family and saying goodbye to all 10 of my family members was more difficult than ever.

I really grew to love Cuenca, from my beautiful house, to my beautiful view on my walk to work every morning, to my wonderful lunches with old KC friends. I could not ask for a better city to end my Ecuadorian journey in. And I have a very good feeling that I will be back…

Lots of love from Ecuador,

Jen

P.S. be on the lookout for one more blog post to close out my experience!