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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I try not to let a decade pass without renewing my assault on Spanish, which I keep hearing described as an easy language to learn. In the nineties, in preparation for a trip to northern Spain, I bought myself a videotape Spanish course in the form of a sixteen-episode soap opera--what Latin Americans call a telenovela--about a young lawyer who finds love while investigating what happened to her client's first wife. I got so that I could understand the actors fairly well, but when I arrived in Santiago de Compostela I was less successful at understanding people who did not keep repeating, slowly and very clearly, sentences like "Rosario did not die in the war; she escaped that tragedy, thank God." When I decided last winter to regroup my forces, it occurred to me that Ecuador might be a good place to study Spanish this go-around. I had in mind Cuenca, around Holy Week. From what I'd gathered during a previous trip to Ecuador, Holy Week is the only time of year you can get fanesca--an exceedingly thick and hearty soup, heavy on the beans. I adore fanesca, and, given my record in trying to solve the mysteries of a foreign tongue, I figured that having a particularly appealing fallback made a lot of sense.
Cuenca is a graceful colonial city in the part of the Andes that Ecuadorans call the Southern Highlands. Although it's Ecuador's third-largest city, it wasn't connected by paved road to the rest of the country until the sixties. Among Ecuador's urban-dwellers, Cuencans are thought of as the most traditionalist in matters of religion and culture. I'm a traditionalist myself, at least when it comes to the food associated with various holidays. When Hanukkah arrives, I expect potato latkes. I favor candy corn on Halloween. I am perfectly willing to forgo Christmas fruitcake, but that is about the extent of my flexibility. (The campaign I carried on some years ago to change the national Thanksgiving dish from turkey to spaghetti carbonara was a matter not of straying from a holiday tradition but of attempting to build a stronger holiday tradition around a more historically appropriate and, if I may say so, considerably tastier dish.) For years, I went to Brooklyn every New Year's Day to join some friends from North Carolina in eating Hoppin' John, the dish that many Southerners serve for good luck every January 1st. Eventually, my North Carolina friends moved away, and I haven't felt entirely comfortable with a fresh January since. I knew there was every reason to believe that during Holy Week I could have expected to find fanesca not just in Cuenca but also in Quito, or even in comparatively secular and cosmopolitan Guayaquil, the port city that serves as the commercial center of Ecuador. Still, it never hurts to be certain.
If I'd had any doubts about my choice of cities, they were erased as soon as I arrived, ten days or so before Easter. Right down...
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