goodbye cuenca

it's been a fun final week in cuenca, where the festival has attracted crowds from around the country and the world, and i've been exercising a healthy balance of study, fun, and food...perhaps with the exception of one night in which i was sucked across youtube's event horizon and only emerged 6 hours later, my mind blank, but a smile on my face. after yesterday's cultural parade in the centre of town, i discovered an open-top double-decker festival-bus ready to take people on a cruise through the city. i hopped on for a ride, but soon realised that cuenca was not made for double-decker buses, as children's faces were lashed by low-hanging foliage, and we all had to duck for cover to avoid being decapitated by tree branches. one poor man allowed his attention to wander and was clothes-lined by a cable. after the inital panicked concern in which we found that only his pride had been hurt, i allowed myself to scream with laughter.

in the evening i went out with some friends to a nightclub for a final boogie session. as always, i was the only gringo in a jam-packed club. it's less the fact of being a gringo and more the fact that i'm about a foot taller than everyone else that makes me stand out. at any given moment, i can see every single other person in the club, and they can see me. but hey, if they can't avoid watching me tearing up the dancefloor, it's not my problem ;) there were two odd things that occurred that i thought i'd write home about. the first was that the djs had flamethrowers. that's right: flamethrowers. not massive military ones, but solid contraptions that were shooting 2 metre flame jets over the crowd and around their little dj cockpit (or whatever you call it). the crowd appeared completely blasé, as in "oh there's that flamethrower again, can you get me another drink?", but i was beside myself. WTF!?!?!? a flamethrower!? the dj's got a flamethrower!!! and in a wooden building with only one tiny exit no less. once they'd put those away and i'd recovered from the shock, i noticed two of the djs walking around the club with massive alice-in-wonderland hats and shooting liquid into people's mouths with a pipe attached to a pressurised reservoir that one of them was carrying on his back. i rushed down to be part of it, and when they saw me (like i said, it's impossible not to see me in these places) the dj barked "open your mouth!" which i did, and received a high-pressure blast of vodka from his jet-pack right into the back of my throat. wonders never cease in ecuador.

after a few hours' sleep i though i'd head back into town this morning to see what was happening. there were throngs of people on the street, so i just followed everyone up the hill and soon found myself in the midst of preparations for a military parade. unlike parades in the west (ie bastille day), here there is so much human industry, with people hawking everything you could possibly want, and streetstalls filled with everything from pig's heads to pancakes to (my new favourite) the ecuadorian slurpee: crushed ice drenched in three flavours of cordial and topped with a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk. yum!

street stalls are one of my life's great loves. as we all know, the sensible traveller's approach to food is: boil it, peel it, cook it or forget it. my approach is slightly different but much more simple: eat it, eat it, eat it or eat it! has that rice been sitting in that pig's lard for days now? give me two servings. did i just see you pick up that ice from the ground before you crushed it to make my slurpee? i'll be back for more. i drink tap water wherever i go, i don't boil, cook or peel anything, and the fact of the matter is, i feel fantastic. (famous last words before ondrej dies of haemorrhagic colitis).

one thing really affected me during the military parade. i saw a young boy hawking colouring/activity books for children, and i realised that he was probably the same age as the children the books were aimed for. something started expanding inside me. let's call it a bubble of emotion. and i though - as i often do - about what it means to lead a good life, and about how to define a good life at all. we all want to lead a good life, but sometimes i feel stuck between the twin desires to do good for other people, and to follow my passions and be true to my nature. whilst there is overlap, these things are not the same, and living a good life is about finding a balance in whatever subjective values you have projected onto the world around you, and these need to be constantly questioned and reassessed. but what i feel is also true is that there is nothing as exquisite as the complexity of the human situation, and though we focus on the evil of which we are capable, what we often ignore - perhaps because we fear the power of it - is that almost all of our interactions with each other are filled with respect, and with a love that is almost blinding. we are not inhumane - we are wonderful, amazing, loving creatures, and our nature is so beautiful that being alive and sharing the experience of being human with every other one of the 6 billion + people on this planet is an intense, dream-like ecstasy. and then my bubble surfaced and burst, and i started bawling my little eyes out. everywhere i turned, all i could see was human goodness. in the fat lady next to me who bought the child a toy monkey, in the old woman who turned up her husband's collar so that his neck wouldn't be burnt, in the girl with down syndrome and the pretty hat who was distributing tissues to people eating messy snacks. everyone was exploding with love for each other, and behind my dark glasses, i was whipping myself into a silent, weeping frenzy of love for humanity.

or perhaps it was sleep deprivation. after about an hour i was well and truly bored with the parade and came home eating my obligatory big-bar icecream with nuts and caramel covered in crisp, delicious chocolate. a very wonderful weekend to you all.