Christmas visit

We hope that all of you had a very merry Christmas. Ours was great. We invited a couple that we met here when we first arrived, Ken and Carole Ann Rand, over for Christmas dinner this afternoon, and they stayed until almost 7:00 this evening, having showed up at 1:00.

Here is their picture, taken in our kitchen just before they left. [Hmm... The blog doesn't seem to be accepting pictures right now. I click on the button, but nothing happens. Maybe I'll try to add it later, so I can go ahead and post now.]

They told us of their trip down to the coast of Ecuador, stopping in various places, and then up to Cotacachi, north of Quito, before coming back here for their last week of their trip. They are here from Atlanta, and plan to return for a three-month visit, much as Susan and I are doing, a few months from now.

We also shared some of our experiences, and then the conversation veered to a number of other topics, all of which we enjoyed. We baked a chicken and a fish for dinner, and discovered that our oven doesn't bake as hot as the dial would indicate. Of course, it is calibrated in Celsius, rather than Fahrenheit, but I calculated that 350 F is equivalent to about 177 C, so I set the oven to about 180. However, two hours after I put the chicken in, I took it out and tested it, and it wasn't even close to done. So I put it back, turned up the oven to about 210 C, and cooked it for another hour. At that point I checked it again, and it was done, although not overdone. So we finally ate at about 3:30.

The Rands brought dessert, a couple of pastries from a bakery here in Cuenca, so we saved them until about 6:00, when we felt like eating again, and they were really wonderful. It really worked out well for all of us. The Rands said that it was the first home-cooked meal they had had in the last month, since they arrived in Cuenca, and for all of us it was a wonderful opportunity to visit and enjoy each others' company. Certainly, if they had not come, it would have been a less interesting day for us, and they apparently felt the same.