Both Evelyn and I have worn pedometers every day for the past couple years, egging each other to get out and walk for exercise. It has helped my weight (though less than I would have liked), my blood pressure and my cholesterol. It has cost me nothing but a few bucks for the meter and time every day.
And it is HARD to reach 8000 steps in a day. I walk daily as far as a reasonable lunch hour will allow, and still often come up short of that goal. Evelyn walks the golf course once or twice a week, and though she easily hits the targets those days, the rest of the week I get to compare pedometers and gloat as hers is lower than mine.
Now, we come to Cuenca, and suddenly we are hitting over 12,000+ every single day, without any specific effort in doing so at all! We have no car, and rather than hailing a cab several times a day, we simply walk. At the end of the day our feet are tired, and our pedometers look like they are broken!
Well, it turns out that it is a really good thing that we are now walking so much, because we have discovered one of the Cuenca delights that never seems to be mentioned in lesser blogs. I am talking about:
Strawberry Milk Shakes!
Yep, it turns out that Cuenca has a ton of ice cream shops, and they all make excellent strawberry shakes!
Tutto Freddo is a local chain of ice cream shops, and is the first one we visited back in February. At the time, we had found ourselves stranded during Carnival with no nearby restaurants open except this one near the central Park Calderon, so went in and had a banana split for dinner. We hadn’t eaten one of those since shortly after college, and it was a decadent treat!
We dropped in last week for a strawberry milkshake ($2.20), and found it thick, creamy and just sweet enough. We knew we had to come back. A couple days ago we found ourselves down by the river at the other end of town, and noticed another ice cream shop. Well, of course we had to check out the competition!
The ChocoCrema shop only charges $1.80 for essentially the same shake. With a blind taste test, I doubt I could tell the difference. This quickly rose our ‘favorites’ list, though being so far away, we will probably not make it there as often as the chain Tutto Freddo.
Today we were in downtown Cuenca, and Evelyn noticed an ice cream shop that her Spanish instructor said was popular with the locals, so we had to do our homework and test it out…
We were a bit surprised to find that this was the most expensive strawberry shake of those tried so far ($2.80), and wasn’t as rich or sweet as the others. It is not likely we will return to this particular ice cream shop again.
You can bet we will continue to do the hard research for you all over town though, as we
Walk Off Those (Strawberry Milk)Shakes! 🙂
