Friday Night Dinner

I can start writing again since I finally have photos!

As you recall, the gringos started walking to the restaurant from the hotel around 6:45PM.  We arrived at the restaurant at about 7:15PM.  Almost everything was set up.  We chose this restaurant, El Maiz, for the rehearsal dinner because my parents really liked the food and the place was nice.  However, as with everything here, it wasn't perfect.  We had reserved the whole restaurant, but there was a table in the back with two people sitting there eating dinner.  The owner told us that these were friends of her daughter and she couldn't turn them away.  I was so annoyed.  We reminded her that we had reserved the entire place and that there was barely enough room for our group, let alone some strangers.  I mean come on, she could have told them to return the next night.

But we dealt with it.  We all gathered in the back courtyard for a nice dose of religion.  Friday, December 18th, was not only Shabbat, but also the last night of Hanukkah.  So there were prayers and candles and little chocolate coins.  My dad is an organizer, so he had printed out all the prayers in Hebrew, English, and Spanish and distributed them to some friends, as well as one prayer for me to read that was in Ladino!  For those of you who aren't familiar with Ladino, it's apparently the language that the Jews in Spain spoke before the Inquisition, so it's basically a mix of Spanish and Hebrew.  Carlos kept on saying that I wasn't pronouncing the Spanish correctly :)

I don't know if everyone was able to hear everything well, but the 15 minute ceremony was a nice touch.

Then we all sat down for dinner.  Well, everyone sat down expect for Carlos and me, who spent most of the night hopping from table to table to chat with our guests (did I mention that we had about 60 people for dinner?).  The food we served was a twist on Ecuadorian food - a tamale made of squash (rather than corn), grilled trout (very local), chicken with naranjilla (a type of citrus), and a type of doughnut in panela for dessert (typical around Christmas time and actually appropriate for Hannukah as well).

There were a few welcome speeches, but the dinner was relatively quiet since most of the guests had arrived the day before or that afternoon.  After dinner we returned to the hotels.  Carlos and I spent the night at the hostel where are friends were staying and were able to spend a few minutes catching up with our IHE friends.

But we didn't stay up too late because both of us were going our separate ways at 7:30AM the next morning...