Holidays

Cuenca has the reputation of having a holiday, festival or parade occur almost every week. Every dawn there are a series of airborne salutes fired into the air by one church or the other. Five minutes later, another three explosions go off. No one seems to know why.  Huge nighttime fireworks displays happen many evenings each week. We asked why they fire off expensive pyrotechnics and someone said, “They shoot them off because they have them!” It seems like as good a reason as any. A recent celebration was a four day weekend holiday which was the city of Cuenca’s Independence Day. Each big city has an Independence Day, though no one seems to know why. More learned Ecuadorians might say each city experienced a revolution that freed the city from something oppressive but it is not information that is easy to come by. At the fireworks displays there is very little concern for safety and they seem quite dangerous because people crowd around the ground displays and get awfully close to stray rockets shooting out in all directions. During the Independence Day celebrations there were hundreds of art exhibits all over town.  At one of them, a Romanian friend exhibited extraordinary portraits of angels made of thousands of pieces of tinted glass. We bought one that is called “Seven Tears.” It was made of 14,000 tiny glass pieces all painted, fired and assembled into an almost life-like portrait. The rest of the gallery’s exhibit was of angels - paintings, statues, sculptures, Christmas decorations, etc. The holiday of Corpus Christi is another big event where there are hundreds of booths up and down the streets selling sugary confections that attract bees by the thousands but the bees don’t seem to deter anyone.  Most American kids here are disappointed about Halloween as it is only celebrated in a small way. Trick or treating doesn’t seem to have caught on yet.   We let Thanksgiving and Fourth of July slide by with little fanfare though we celebrated them with other American expatriates. Thanksgiving actually turned out to be a great day as friends threw a party for 25 Americans with all the trimmings. It kept a little bit of the US alive on such a special day for Americans. The Christmas season is a big deal in Ecuador.  We made a big mistake giving away or selling all our Christmas decorations and wonderful big tree before we came to Ecuador so we had to buy all new decorations but that was actually fun as there are some wonderfully creative and interesting things to buy. Lighted trees and decorations popped up everywhere weeks prior to our Thanksgiving. Then there are the many other Ecuadorian holidays that we are totally unfamiliar with. It will take some time to accustom ourselves with them yet they add to our very full calendar. Holidays and noisy celebrations are a way of life in Cuenca to which we have added our American holidays. All in all, they add up to an almost weekly occurrence.