Ecuador takes Easter seriously.  This morning Paty and I went to the Good Friday Procession, a tradition here and in many countries in Latin America.  What we saw was a half-hour long parade consisting of bands, Jesuses carrying crosses (some of them VERY big), and about 2,000 cucuruchos which marched through the old town.  I had seen pictures of these in movies before, but never in real life.  The cucurucho costume comes from traditional Spain where people who were condemned to death or were accused of religious crimes were forced to don them as a form of public humiliation.  In this procession the costume represents the penitent souls of the church who march with Jesus to the cross.  People walked barefoot through the streets, wearing crowns of thorns, carrying religious icons and performing various forms of self-flagellation (whipping themselves with lashes made of leather or poisonous plants, wrapping their bodies in barbed wire, chaining their feet and, as we saw, even wearing crosses made of cactus against their bare skins.  To someone not from this culture, it all seemed medieval and barbaric on the one hand and somehow strangely beautiful (or at least powerfully significant) on the other.  Thousands of people lined the streets of downtown Quito to watch.  After the procession, Paty and I met up with her cousins, aunts and grandparents to eat the traditional Easter dish “fanesca,” a thick soup with 13 different grains which is now my favorite Ecuadorian food.  Too bad they only have it once a year!