After a lazy morning, we went into town for a $2.50 Almuerzos at Grecia, which consisted of vegetable soup, rice, fried banana, chicken and noodles.  Evelyn liked it, though I found it a bit dry for my taste.

After lunch, we went to the Rotary Centro Commercial market.  Every Tuesday and Friday, healers come to the market and you can see the Old Ways of healing being practiced. There were about a dozen old women healers under one long tent.  Parents would bring their infants to their preferred healer, who would then swat the child repeatedly with a hand-held bunch of herbs and flowers.  Most of the children just sat and accepted it, and clearly had been through the ritual before, though one tiny infant cried throughout.  After a couple minutes of this “beating”, the woman would take an egg and rub it over the child’s body and head.  When that was done, she would take a swig of (what appeared to be) water from a bottle, then spit it over the child.

Definitely not a standard medical practice back home…

One thing that is very common around Cuenca are young children with their parents.  Strollers are almost never seen, as parents carry children on their backs or in sacks held in front.

We walked around the rest of the market, and found they were mostly selling dry goods that were handmade.

Shortly after I took that picture, my camera died with a message “battery is exhausted.”  Seems that my charger was not working the way I thought it had been, and I did not have a backup battery with me.  So much for photographic preparedness…

We were planning on going to Sofy’s Orchard for another modelling session next.  (Check out the post on “Vampire’s Bite” from late October for our first foray there).  With my camera dead, I opted to bypass it and head back home.  Evelyn went on alone for her drawing session.  She also used her pocket camera for a couple of photographs of the models, so not all was lost… 🙂