FRIDAY, 4 November 2016

An active day. The boys are out of school for Cuenca week so they were gone all day, except for Kevin who misbehaved and chose not to go with the rest.

We took a bus to El Centro and went to Mercedes's shop to say hello. I told her I was looking for short sleeved shirts for the cruise; she had some!  I bought three very nice ones for a total of $28; they even have pockets so I can enjoy wearing them when we get back to the States.  I told her we were also looking for Ecuador futbol atletic shirts, which she does not have, so she showed me a store a couple doors down from hers that has them. We went there and, lo and behold, there was a lady from Church! She recognized us immediately and we recognized her; think her name is Bianca but I'll confirm on Sunday.  Jenny also bought an alpaca poncho @ the plaza.  We walked to Gran Columbia to look at some more jewelry but all of them were closed - I guess they took time off for Cuenca Week.  I hope they'll be open tomorrow because we need to get a couple of things that our other jewelry source doesn't have.  If not open tomorrow, we'll go later. While waiting for the bus to take us from El Centro, we "met" another person from the Church who lives only a few blocks from church. He paid our bus fare! He spoke sufficient English that we carried on a viable conversation, with his English and my Spanish, until we got back to Ricardo Duran near the church. We actually missed our stop but got off with him at the next one and walked back to near ours then to the church.  His name is Rórulo Flores, he's almost 41 and married.  Interesting thing though; he likes our church because it's friendly and people greet him; his wife, however, goes to another church because she doesn't like that! That surprises me because of the overall friendliness of the Ecuadorian people.

After a brief stay at the apartment to leave our purchases, we got back on the bus and back to the special Cuenca week area that I talked about yesterday, or day before.  Jenny got some more jewelry; one piece, which will be part of her Christmas present, was a little long so the owner is going to shorten it and I'll pick it up tomorrow. She also bought an alpaca throw to put on our bed here and at home; it is hand made and very lightweight. The lady gave Jenny an alpaca scarf as a gift!  She also got a multi-colored lamb's wool sweater.

Enough shopping! We came back to the apartment, I had supper (Jenny had already snacked on other foods so didn't want any), we watched a couple of episodes of Supernatural, then Jenny went to bed.  Just a note here: I usually always stay up awhile after she goes to bed to check Facebook and my email accounts, and read some news accounts.