Cuenca, Ecuador - Our official Moment of Arrival arrived long after we did. The blame is bound up among any number of things: the confusion inherent in Spanish sharing as much phonetic territory as it does with Italian, the unavoidable bubble of traveling as a couple, the unsettling ease of our arrival in Cuenca, or our seven hour stint in the Quito International Airport, which happened to take place within the acoustic reach of a Johnny Rockets burger joint. Four hundred and twenty minutes of nonsleep while a ceaseless loop of golden oldies boomed and bounced out across an ocean of white tile and glass. We hadn't arrived, but we certainly had left.

Worst of all, the trip from the airport had been a breeze, the hostel was precisely where we'd expected to find it, the room clean, well kept. On our first wander through town all the little shops we passed had looked precisely like the little shops in the guidebook. It was a little as if we had flown not to a foreign country but a carefully staged safe zone for people who wanted to travel without the noise or strange energy that travel brings with it. (In retrospect, this is exactly what tourist districts are all about, but I hadn't quite processed that, given our sustained assault at Johnny Rockets.)

Anyway, halfway to the curiously distant Gran Aki appeared. Forty minutes of walking though the parts of Cuenca not featured in Lonely Planet got us to what appeared at first to just be a cluster of vegetable stands. However, upon closer inspection, those vegetable stands were merely the gatekeepers (the forward guard!) of an enormous, hanger-sized market. Four-story ceilings and crumbling brick walls, a huge warren of butcher stands, spice stands, vegetable stands, pasta stands, home supply stands and a lonely looking lady at the back entrance selling warm beer. Pigeons fighting over spilled grain and kids hiding under benches with purple fistfulls of bleeding berries dripping on the floor. It was like wandering through a barn door and in to the Taj Mahal. Gasts properly flabbered, we set about finding some lunch.

Now, if we're mincing half-seconds here, I'm going to say touchdown was the moment my rear end touched down on the pale plastic pillow that covered the concrete bench of our chosen stall, but let's stretch that second back to give it some context. Now we're walking past a row of food vendors feeding the grocery vendors who are taking quick breaks from their tables to grab a mid-afternoon bite from this guy, ladle in hand. He smiles. I smile back. He's my age, standing in his stall maybe halfway down a line of ten, wearing a grey sweater and the look of a man about to make a sale. A quick conference with Lauryl confirms that there is no way I am not going to sit down on that bench, and I point at Other Guy's plate : "un piatto come questo?" and smile hopefully. Italian? Eh? No matter, this guy knows a hungry customer when he sees one. "¡Por supuesto!".

I know, it's cliché to the point of offensive for the white guy to breathlessly describe that one meal of fresh vegetables, spooned off the chipped plate and washed down with the mysteriously speckled juice of a fruit he'd never heard of (that was yes ladled from a plastic bucket) as the best meal of his not-so-young-anymore life, but I'm not here to break new ground. How a pile of curried potatoes and beets nestled in a mountain of fried rice could register so high on the magic scale is beyond my gustatory vocabulary. And it wasn't just spoonfuls of spice. The blue painted Jesus staring down above the sink was delicious too. As was the teensy TV someone had stashed on the third floor of a spice shelf, playing a Spanish language episode of Futurama that flickered back and forth between color and not. Or the huge leafy plants between stalls that dangled low enough to touch the fedoras of our fellow patrons. It all melted in to that first bite. The scratched bumper stickers of bygone soccer stars; the bubbling pots of broth-softened bones; the sheer dollhouse scale of the whole operation (1 cook, 4 patrons); the drying rack of dinged up pans or the smiles that emerged after a few minutes from under those fedoras. All of it, heaped on and mixed in to my plate of potatoes.

We had arrived.