Cynthia Goes To Ecuador: Fiesta de la Jora International Encounter Food Festival

Welcome back to "Cynthia Goes To Ecuador." It's been a while since I've written--so much is happening here! I got over my flu and I'm almost over my cold. I've had my furniture delivered (part 1 of 2). New friends have come from the States. I've been shopping for my house in Ibarra. In general, I've been running around like crazy.

I have been trying to decide whether to go back and catch you up with all those photos I took for various occasions or just go forward from here. I decided on a combination of the two.

I'll include some of my favorite events that have some fun photos and the rest I'll either fill in on the odd and sundry photo post or not share them. I could go for a couple of months with absolutely nothing new otherwise.

The fellow in this photo was around at the Jora Food Festival and how could I not share him with you? Well, there's more, too, of course.
In mid-September we celebrated Fiesta de la Jora. It's the harvest festival and if you were reading my blog back then you may have seen some photos of the parade. Well, on one day they had an international food festival and we expats were invited to have a table. It was quite a day. Bolivia was the most dramatically represented. All they had for food was a local bean soup that was interesting (yes, that was a bit sarcastic) but I'm certain many people truly enjoyed it.

What they had that was pretty amazing were the entertainers. Since my Spanish still isn't adequate to actually have a conversation, I don't know the cultural significance of the costumes but it was fun to see them.

What a lovely variety of costumes!

Here we are at the beginning of the fiesta. We still didn't have all the food there but we had the ever-popular corn dogs. All of the foods were to be made with some kind of corn product in them. We thought corn dogs pretty well epitomized the U.S. and its relationship to corn (other than corn on the cob and there's plenty of that in Ecuador). The fellow in the white shirt down there at the end of the table is the mayor to Cotacachi. We gave him one of the corn dogs and it was long before one of his aids came back and asked if he could have another one. Of course he could.

There were more costumed folks but then there was a performance with a group of people, including two little ones. This little girl almost never turned her face toward the camera so I just had to settle for her cute, little back.

Ah, there's her face.

Everybody take a bow.

We also had an uninvited guest. He looked around for any food anyone might have dropped. He discovered that if he stayed under the tablecloth he had the best chance of not getting shooed away.

Things picked up rather nicely after a little while and we had more people coming to eat than we had food. We ran out of food entirely, two full hours before the event was over. Oh my! We were collecting money for Project Hope. All the money went to help improve a school that was in nearly unusable condition a year ago. Project Hope has done much to improve things. We were thrilled to be able to help.

The newly crowned Queen of Jora. This was her first official duty and I think she was enjoying herself. What he has in her hands are rubber stamps. Last year someone had thought to bring them and stamp the kids hands with them. They loved it! Well, actually, the adults loved it almost as much. Even the mayor had one.