Well it’s Semana Santa this week, or Holy week and according to the posters stuck up all over the place there’s supposed to be a bunch of stuff going on but there really isn't., so we haven’t done an awful lot the first part of this week, just Spanish lesson, yoga, and eating. After our Spanish lesson today we decided to go to El Maiz and try Fanesca, which is soup that people here only make for Holy Week, so if we didn't try it today or tomorrow we’d have to wait until next year. We had asked the server at El Maiz last week if the soup was vegetarian and we were informed that it was, so off we went to try some. The soup is made with a bunch of different ingredients including 12 different kinds of grains that all have to be cooked separately; it’s not something that I’m going to be attempting anytime soon that’s for sure. It can also sometimes have salted cod in it but since this one was vegetarian we figured it would be fish free. Turns out the server doesn't seem to know what vegetarian means as the soup was super fishy; actually it was gross. I tried to eat it but really couldn't as it just tasted like fish – not the best Fanesca experience ever.



To make up for having nasty soup we went for ice-cream after lunch and finally got to try Taxo flavour. Taxo is a fruit, I think, that looks a lot like a cucumber; I haven’t actually tried the fruit but I can definitely vote for the ice cream, very nice.
When we got home this afternoon noon, Javier who owns the apartments we are living in called and asked if we wanted to have Fanesca at his house tonight. Both Mike and I were not very excited about having to eat it again but Javier assured us that this one would definitely be fish free. We were supposed to arrive at seven but since Ecuadorians are notoriously late to everything we arrived at 5 minutes after (I didn't want to be any later as that’s just rude right?). There were 9 of us for dinner, and off the 5 men three of them were called David – weird. Anyway, we had a much better experience tonight. The soup and appetizer were both wonderful, homemade by Javier's wife and Sarah, who also works here. They added the fish after the soup was cooked so we didn't have to have any and the evening was just lovely; although I think I had a little much ginger sugar alcohol and wine as when we got home tonight I was a gorgeous shade of red.

Mike: I almost had to tie you down so we would be fashionably late!!!