Last night in Loja

Friday was our last night in Loja.  To celebrate we went to Mama Lola's restaurant, and then went to a free symphony concert with a guest cellist.  More on that later.

Mama Lola's serves traditional Ecuadorian food, including cuy (which Maija refused), various fried pork, chicken, etc.



We ordered two large plates for the family, both starting with soup, with the second course including chicken, pork, rice, salad and yuca.  The soup was a chicken broth that everyone felt was superb.  I think a big part of the flavour was due to the inclusion of chicken feet in the broth.  Maija was not a fan of the feet, but still ate around them and finished off the soup.

Chicken foot... or cursed monkey paw?
The main course, including chicken, pork, rice, yuca, and salad

The restaurant itself has a very nice atmosphere, with beautiful paintings and a great view of the mountains.






A Loja sunset, with a view of the wind turbines on the mountains.  The phone picture does not do it justice!

After dinner we walked to a nearby church where the Loja symphony was performing with a guest cellist Jose Romero Ottonello.  This highlights one of the best features of Loja, in my opinion - the fact that music is so encouraged by the municipality.  There are free concerts almost every night somewhere in the city, and the concerts are almost without fail very good.

For this particular concert, we got a front row seat, and were within 3 feet of Jose!  The only downside was that there was a political rally going on outside (in South America there always seems to be a political rally going on!), so during the quieter parts of the music you could hear the loud speakers and drums going on outside, but luckily we only heard it a couple of times over the course of the hour-long concert.


The music was amazing - I don't know if it was just the experience of basically sitting on the performer's laps, but I feel that this was one of my favourite concerts ever.  Jose is wonderfully talented, and the conductor is world renowned, and has conducted symphonies all over the world.  I could go on for ages singing the praises of this concert specifically, and Loja in general, but for the sake of brevity I will leave it at this.  I recorded the first song - Concierto para violinchelo y orquestra en La menor op. 129 by Robert Schumann.  It is a bit long at ~22 minutes, but is well worth it my opinion.


This evening was a great conclusion to what I feel was my favourite location so far.  Loja, we will miss you!


Comments

  1. Very cool!! I think my favourite sound is when an orchestra or a symphony or just instruments tuning :)

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