A Week in Cuenca

So this week has been sleeping in, walking up and down cobbled streets, cooking for myself for the first time in two months, and generally getting settled in. I do have the same feeling like I sometimes have on vacation, where although I am in a new and interesting place, I still have the feeling that a thousand things are going on under the surface that I can´t see or detect by virtue of being an outsider, the difference being that I plan on sticking around for awhile, so hopefully that feeling will abate.

Tonight my friend Paul and I were walking down the street when we smelled this wonderful smell, and we were both so overwhelmed by it we stopped to figure out where it was coming from. It smelled like how your house should smell on Christmas morning, or the best raisin bread you have ever eaten. In front of a little tienda, there was this huge pot of bubbling, caramel colored fruit, and we asked the woman in the shop what it was. Was it bread we said, and she threw over her shoulder one word - higas or figs. Because we continued to stand there and look longingly at the pot, she came over and offered us one and we agreed it was the most delicious thing we had ever had.