Today was an absolutely wonderful day. After a festive New Year’s celebration last night, I woke up to a bowl of fresh papaya and yogurt prepared by Elena. At noon, we went back to her sister’s house to eat lunch with the extended family. We had a vegetable soup, chicken, and rice. I spent a lot of time playing Spiderman with Santi, and he is definitely helping me practice my Spanish. After a while, the entire family split up into different cars to go to a small town about an hour outside of Cuenca. Emily and I were in a car with 3 of our cousins who are about our age. When we got to the town, we went to an indoor food market. There were all kinds of food there, and we had this hot milk drink with tortillas. These tortillas are made out of corn and they have cheese in the middle. They were absolutely delicious. The cousins, Emily and I left and went to walk through a beautiful park by a river. We had a wonderful time bonding with our cousins, and there was a lot of laughing. We made one more stop at another small town even higher up in the mountain, and it was a beautiful plaza with a huge garden in the middle. There was a large church, and there were dozens of jewelry shops. As we made our way back to Cuenca, we got stuck in traffic for quite a while. This made for lots of bonding with our cousins. We talked about culture, movies, stereotypes, food, and quite a few other topics. When we arrived back at our house, I felt like I had known them forever. We were laughing and joking. I absolutely love my host family, and I couldn’t have asked for a better first day to a new year.
